John Chuckman

EXPANSION OF COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY YOSSI GURVITZ IN MONDOWEISS

 

“Tom Friedman’s belief in an ‘ancestral homeland’ is a toxic myth and not history”

 

Yes, and there’s a whole lot more that could be said.

The Ashkenazi – who make up most of Israel’s population and the bulk of early Zionist writers and, indeed, provide the very model for what most Americans think of as being Jewish – are simply a Germanic people, a European people, not a Middle Eastern people.

What’s Middle Eastern about Deli food? It’s Germanic and Eastern European. And what’s Middle eastern about the attire of ultra-Orthodox Jews? It’s from rural 18^th or 19^th century Eastern Europe.

The native language is Yiddish, a derivative of German. Hebrew is adopted and related to religious study, just as many non-Arabic Muslims study Arabic to be able to read the Koran in the original.

An historic period saw Jews, at least some, become evangelistic – perhaps envying the immense success of Christians who, after all, started as a small Jewish sect – and saw Jewish religious colonies founded in a number of places, as in Africa and in the Caucasus. Later, there was undoubtedly movement and travel among these diverse places, with the search for suitable mates in a relatively small population playing a role.

There likely are, then, bits of the Hebrew people’s DNA in many of the Ashkenazi, but that doesn’t make them the Hebrew people.

The Ashkenazi share the Hebrews’ religion, although even that is vastly changed from 2,000 years ago.

The Palestinians are almost certainly the nearest we have to the direct descendants of the Hebrews. And what a bitter irony that is. Of course, two thousand years of history and intermarriage and conquests have changed their culture and religion.

The Roman did not remove local populations from their conquests. They expected people to keep farming and working and paying taxes to Rome. And those great record-keepers left no record of having done so to the Hebrews. Rome typically didn’t even interfere in local religious practices. The entire story of wandering Jews kicked out of the Holy land is just that, a story, perhaps another way to bind a distinct modern people to the ancients whose religion they practice. It has no more historical validity than Noah’s ark or Jonah and the whale.

In any event, nothing could be more of an invitation for trouble than basing modern national boundaries and identities on ancient texts. If, for example, the Greeks were to do that, they would claim part of Turkey, where ancient Troy was defeated and sacked 3,000 years ago. And there are innumerable such cases in the world offering possibilities for endless conflict.

Apart from his focus on Israel, Friedman in his writing is one of America’s greatest living apologists for the Pentagon and the use of American military power, an association which goes to my often-stated view of modern Israel being an American colony in the Middle East, a very special kind of colony, but a colony nonetheless. As for Friedman’s absurdities over the years, and there have been a great many, readers might enjoy:

 

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/the-dumbest-story-ever-written/

 

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/thomas-friedmans-life-as-a-pet-hamster/

 

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/thomas-friedman-spokesman-for-enlightenment/

 

John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JONATHAN COOK IN INTIFADA PALESTINE

 

There is little doubt that Arafat was murdered, and by the agency of Mossad.

About that time, Israel had reached a huge head of steam over Arafat. He wasn’t permitted to attend even Christmas services, and then his compound was partly wrecked by Israeli tanks in the clearest personal threat.

Sharon had a meeting with George Bush, and he was reported by a few sources as asking Bush if he could be released from Israel’s promise to not harm Arafat.

Bush, always the insipid and obsequious fool with Sharon, was reported as having readily agreed. It wasn’t a great deal of time after that that Arafat died.

The Israelis may well have employed a dissident Palestinian to do the actual job, something which is a common practice with outfits like the CIA, who for example once used a reputed Castro insider to try killing Castro.

But please, there are only a tiny number of sources on the planet for radioactive Polonium, and one of them is Israel’s nuclear industry.

I think it more than likely here with his suggestions about who killed Arafat that the unelected Abbas wants to point the finger at a political rival rather than reveal any truth.

Abbas is pretty much a sad creature of Israel’s. He is allowed, every once in a while, to do or say some seemingly challenging thing to reinforce his “creds” with his own people, but, in the end, Israel is quietly happy with him.

Of course, Israel would prefer there were no Palestinian government at all and, indeed, no Palestinians, but so long as it must keep up pretenses, Abbas is their man.

Readers may just have noticed that Israel never likes democratic leaders in its neighborhood. It likes unelected strongmen, while pretending otherwise, Arab “irrationality” and penchant for dictatorship being great propaganda phony talking points with the outside world for “the Mideast’s only democracy.”

That is why it hates Hamas. That was why it hated the elected Morsi government in Egypt and undoubtedly had it put on a CIA list for restorative action, restorative of military dictatorship.

And that is why it such great secret ally of the Saudi Princes, with whom it shares so many interests, especially an aversion to human rights and genuine democracy as well as a preference for only one kind of people living in each country.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Hanan Ashrawi is a brilliant and articulate spokesperson for the Palestinians.

I wish her well, but I fear she has against her very powerful and devious foes.

The logic and fairness of Palestinian statehood should be apparent to everyone.

But Israel is interested in neither logic nor fairness.

It is interested in more land, and it wants that land minus its owners and occupants.

And the United States in matters of policy in this part of the world takes its direction from Israel.

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“On a separate note – since the Holy Ramadan started, 121 people have been killed in 50 separate terrorist attacks committed by Muslims.”

That is just uninformed trash.

Please note the reader quotes no details at all even as to location.

Just lets readers assume.

This trash is straight from the Israeli Ministry of Truth.

But if you want a documented fact – not a vague assertion – Israel has killed 1335 children in the occupied territories since the year 2000.

And that number is just the children.

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“The U.S has failed the Palestinians for more than 60 years…”

The U.S. administrations have been over a barrel since the beginning.

Harry Truman did not want to recognize Israel when the gangs of thugs like the Irgun and Stern seized a portion of the land and declared a state with no legitimate basis whatsoever, beyond a vague promise from a British Foreign Secretary decades before.

But Truman was facing an election, and his popularity was sagging.

He faced a literal onslaught of American Jewish leaders pleading and arguing and cajoling for Israel’s quick recognition.

He is quoted himself as saying he never experienced anything quite like it. It was intense.

And, in the end, he gave in.

Of course, with his surrender came generous financial contributions to his campaign plus a good press that built him up as a true statesman.

That is how it was in 1948, and that is how it still is more than sixty years later.

Obama’s polls have slipped. He needs big money for the 2012 campaign, and he needs the kind of press the major networks and papers liker The New York Times can give him.

Not only that but Israel runs a literal machine for influencing American congressmen. About eighty of them, largely freshmen, are going on paid junket to Israel. They will be well indoctrinated and made to understand the benefits of blindly supporting Israel.

This happens all the time.

One could argue that the endless foreign aid America sends Israel – the largest such amount given to any country on the planet – every year enables Israel to organize its elaborate and costly lobbying organization.

Thus the U.S. itself indirectly pays the bills for this massive effort at influence by special interests.

__________________________

“I see injustice in the Palestinians still embracing terrorism.”

What kind of thinking is this?

Who just recently murdered 400 Palestinian children, plus a thousand others, in Operation Cast Lead?

Who pirated a fleet of boats on the high seas, killing nine unarmed people?

Who regularly assassinates people it does not like?

Who fakes passports from New Zealand or Canada to commit its assassinations?

Who regularly steals homes and farms others have owned for centuries?

Who has 150 nuclear weapons, against all international laws and treaties?

Who traded nuclear weapons technology to apartheid South Africa?

Who maintains a literal garrison state, spending an unbelievable part of its wealth on weapons?

Who dropped tens of thousands of cluster bombs on Southern Lebanon to kill and maim for years?

Who killed about 1400 people invading Lebanon?

Who killed four UN Observers, including a brave Canadian officer, while it invaded Southern Lebanon?

Who almost daily flies warplanes over Southern Lebanon?

Who previously invaded Lebanon, killing thousands and occupying parts of it for 18 years?

Whose state started with a concerted terror attack on innocent civilians in 1948, killing and raping and brutalizing hundreds?

Who keeps a million and a half people imprisoned in Gaza?

Yes, Palestinians have at times used terror, but what is their example?

And can anyone reasonably argue that anything Palestinians have done even begins to compare to the endless war and brutal occupation and apartheid for which Israel is responsible?

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“There already is a Palestinian state.
It is called Jordan.”

Oh please, that is a tiresome refrain heard a thousand times.

It is not for Israel to decide such matters. The very repetition of this slogan is arrogant.

Jordan is Jordan.

It is not Palestine.

It does not want the Palestinians.

The Palestinians do not want to live in Jordan.

The Palestinians have a history as old as the Hebrew people.

Indeed, some academic authorities in Israel maintain that the Palestinians are at least in part the descendants of the Hebrews.

When Rome conquered a territory, as it did Israel/Palestine in the first century CE, it typically did not remove inhabitants, unless they were recalcitrant against Roman rule.

Thus, what we likely have in Israel today, are immigrants – most of them hybrid with Germans or Spanish or Russian over centuries – pushing out some direct descendants of the people who lived in Israel in Biblical times.

A dark irony indeed.

No matter what the case, if Israel wants to be regarded as a country like any other country, it must behave as we expect others to behave.

And that doesn’t include apartheid or the regularly stealing of the property of others or torture and assassinations and bloody invasions without pause.

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“Islamic supremacists can never conceal their hatred for the Jews as the worst enemies of the Muslims (cf. Qur’an 5:82) .”

What garbage you write.

The Prophet honored the Jews and called them “the people of the Book.”

Jewish prophets are honored by Islam.

Originally Muhammad had Muslims pray towards Jerusalem.

It was changed to Mecca for various reasons.

I think what this writer is demonstrating is the old idea in psychology called projection.

That is a state of mind in which a person attributes to those he does not like the very feelings he or she exhibits.

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‘”Don’t you ever tire of pitching propaganda? The partial and carefully selected facts here are the sure sign of a non-thinking ideologue” writes the poster in reference to my five point approach, below, to the way Israel should, and in all probability will, act upon the PLO’s move at the UN.’

Hard to believe someone can be so lacking in understanding.

First, anyone who writes of “Eretz Israel” has left the conversation of rational people.

“Eretz Israel” is modern made-up concept, and it is a concept that guarantees endless future troubles.

There are no maps in the Tanakh.

And even if there were, the claim to what temporarily existed in ancient times is a bad joke more than two thousand years later.

The concept also flies in the face of UN resolutions and even American policy.

You use the term “nation-state of the Jewish people” What is that? In fact, it is another made-up concept intended to sound reasonable but actually incorporating dark and dangerous dreams.

Israel is nearly 20% non-Jewish, but those non-Jewish people hold Israeli citizenship and Israeli passports.

It wasn’t that Israel planned it that way. It just happened because a lot of Palestinians refused to be terrorized by Lehi, Stern, and Irgun in 1948.

So Israel made up the concept you mention, a concept which is a legalistic construct above what all nations regard as normal definitions of citizenship, effectively excluding these million people by definition.

Unfortunately, a lot of people do not understand the implications of this construct, just passing over it as a phrase with no special meaning, but they are greatly mistaken in doing so.

But were the world to accept this artificial construct, Israel would without question expel these million souls, despite their passports, to God knows where. Many prominent Israelis have in the past actually advocated this, and they include the current foreign minister, the appalling Avigdor Lieberman.

Of course, the biggest fallacy of your words has to do with the concept of Israel itself. Where is Israel? What are its borders? What defines a citizen?

Good and reasonable answers to none of these can be given beyond Israel is what’s inside the Green Line, and its people are those who live there.

Such a simple concept, really, but one unreasonable apologists for Israel flatly refuse as they go on with dreams of an Israeli Empire  – aka, “Eretz Israel.”

Israel is to close all borders with Gaza? Surely even you know that is impossible. Israel must allow people to move between the West Bank and Jerusalem. That is part of past international understandings and it is a required human need.

“As for the “Palestinians”, they’ll have to fend for themselves, in all respects, including financial!!”

Putting the word Palestinians in quotes and using a triple exclamation mark demonstrates the angry-child tone of your entire words.

Angry children do not make foreign policy, or, if they do, their work proves the despair of the world.

Of course, the last thing your pompous words leave out is the occupation. The 1967 War was deliberately engineered by Israel in an effort to gain the “Eretz Israel” which the Israeli terrorists of the Irgun and Stern and Lehi failed to grab.

Israel must surrender this land or a traded-equivalent to the Palestinians in the end. There is no alternative unless the world agrees that open aggression should be rewarded with expanded borders.

And I doubt even for Israel, with all its lobbying and inordinate influence, that that is going to happen: that would be a formula for chaos in world affairs.