Tag Archives: anti-semitism

Gaza: The End of the Jewish Joy Ride?

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By Michael Lesher

Source: Off-Guardian

You almost want to feel sorry for Israel’s professional apologists in mainstream media these days. Their job, a fetid one at best, has been especially trying lately.

First they assure us that Israel has no intention of committing a genocide – and right away they’re refuted by Israel’s own prime minister, who loudly demands the extermination of every man, woman and child in Gaza, not to mention its president’s equally public insistence that Palestinian civilians are legitimate military targets.

Then they struggle to excuse Israel’s bloody attack on one Gaza hospital, only to end up watching Israel’s killing machine obliterate literally all of them. (Not to mention making a mockery of the excuses by providing no evidence that there was ever a “Hamas command center” under al-Shifa, the first of those destroyed hospitals, to begin with.)

Then they try to divert attention from Israeli atrocities by yelping about “mass rape” supposedly committed by the Palestinian fighters who burst from the Gaza concentration camp on October 7. But the ink is hardly dry on their indignant op-eds before their masters in the Chosen State confess that they have no victim testimonies, no forensic evidence and no reliable witnesses to back up any of the claims.

What’s an apologist to do?

Well, if you’re a staff writer at the Atlantic – where rationalizing Israeli crime is a specialty of the house – you can fall back on the lamest canard of all: that the public disgust stirred by Israel’s worst-yet mass murder campaign against Palestinians is really a product of rising “anti-Semitism.”

And sure enough, Atlantic’s April number sports a feature story to that effect by one Franklin Foer with the lachrymose title “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending” – because, don’t you see, Americans couldn’t possibly have a respectable motive for getting worked up over a genocide.

Mind you, it takes some high-octane chutzpah to pretend that today’s Big Story is the end of an era for American Jews, at the very moment when American-made bombs and artillery shells are pulverizing Gaza and exterminating its population (half of which consists of children), to the applause of virtually every Jewish communal organization the world over, including inside the US.

But Foer doesn’t lack chutzpah. He’s not only prepared to claim victimhood for Jewish genocide supporters on the grounds that their sachems haven’t been able to stifle all public dissent. He also wants you to believe that the decline of American Jewish power isn’t due to public backlash against bullying by Jewish organizations (think AIPAC, or the sadly misnamed Anti-Defamation League); nor to the exposure of illegal spending sprees with government funds by various Hasidic institutions; nor even to the racist blood lust expressed by almost every prominent Orthodox rabbi in the US since Israel’s genocidal campaign began last October.

No, according to Foer, the real trouble is what he calls “anti-Semitism on the right and the left” – which I guess means “everywhere,” in the US at least. And he’s even prepared to insist that this “anti-Semitism” is not only bad for the Jews; it threatens the American republic, too.

“Over the course of the 20th century, Jews invested their faith in a distinct strain of liberalism that combined robust civil liberties, the protection of minority rights, and an ethos of cultural pluralism,” Foer claims. But now, “that era is drawing to a close. America’s ascendant political movements – MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other – would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish.” Ah, the unaccountable ingratitude of those goyim! I mean – what’s a little genocide between friends?

Setting to one side Foer’s self-righteous reading of American political history, any claim that today’s United States is awash in anti-Semitism is obviously silly. Quite apart from opinion polls – which tell a tale very different from Foer’s – popular culture is a convenient point of reference in such matters, and it’s hard to see how a society permeated with Jew-hatred would have showered no fewer than twenty Oscar nominations last year on films that celebrate already-famous American Jews. And then there’s the large number of American Jews who have participated in the anti-genocide protests that so trouble Foer – a datum that, standing alone, suffices to refute his imputation of anti-Jewish bigotry to the protesters.

But Foer is right about one thing. A privileged chapter in diaspora Jewish history is coming to an end – though not for the reason he gives. The simple truth (though Foer cannot admit it) is that the American public is getting tired of being bullied by a greedy and hypersensitive Jewish elite that, like a spoiled child, has insisted on having its way for years in everything from Mideast policy to the distribution of government benefits, and is now finally overplaying its hand.

And if that Jewish “leadership” really has squandered its measure of imperially-funded impunity by embracing a genocide – at a moment when the fabric of US politics is too strained for an ultra-divisive issue and too cash-poor to give away the extra billions that Israel is demanding to finance its crimes – it is quite possible that Foer has stumbled onto another truth as well: that the wreckage from the fall of the Jewish elite will doom whatever is left of American democracy.

To make sense of these claims, a short summary of recent history is in order. It is well known that since the end of World War II Jews in the West have come to enjoy a degree of freedom, prosperity and political influence that is without precedent in the Jewish diaspora.

Unsurprisingly, American Jews have generally welcomed this development. And given the horrors that preceded it, culminating in the genocide of Europe’s Jewish population in the 1940s, it’s not hard to understand why Jewish elites in the US focused at first on securing their hard-won position in any way they could, taking advantage of new opportunities and assimilating themselves to preexisting power structures.

But after 1967, as Israel settled into a new role as one of Washington’s key client states, what had been prudence morphed into braggadocio. Norman Podhoretz set the tone, vowing that henceforth American Jews would “resist any who would in any way and to any degree and for any reason whatsoever attempt to do us harm” – a boast that meant in practice (to quote the superb scholar Norman Finkelstein) that “American Jewish elites could strike heroic poses as they indulged in cowardly bullying.”

Less privileged constituencies may be forgiven for not seeing that period as a “golden age,” as Foer does, but you can reject his twisted perspective and still agree that the postwar joy ride of Jewish “leadership” is probably coming to an end.

After all, why shouldn’t it?

Today’s United States is not the United States of 1945, nor even the United States of 1967. The American public now is as deeply divided as in the last decades of the 18th century, when armed rebellions and secession plots were recurring realities. The presidential election scheduled for this November – assuming it happens at all (the Democratic Party seems to be trying to convert the balloting system into a prearranged election-by-lawfare) – is likely to exacerbate differences rather than resolve them, with potentially disastrous results. Worse, given the massive attack on civil rights that was launched four years ago on the pretext of a COVID-19 “medical emergency” – an attack that included the deliberate undermining of the electoral process in many states – it is not even clear whether the necessary conditions for democracy exist any longer in the US.

Meanwhile, consumer prices have skyrocketed, workers are suffering massive layoffs, and the small business economy, crippled by the COVID coup, has been unable to compensate for the damage.

Why should a citizenry in such straits continue to give preferential treatment to an overbearing Jewish elite that 1) clearly doesn’t need it, and 2) flaunts its allegiance to a foreign power even as it demands favors from American institutions at every opportunity? (Anyone who needs an introduction to the fraudulent practices this elite will resort to, and the extent to which it has entangled US government in its chicanery, need only read Norman Finkelstein’s copiously documented The Holocaust Industry for some useful details.) By any standard, American Jews have enjoyed an extraordinary run over the last fifty years; it’s about time we were treated just like everybody else – no worse, but no better either.

The (mis)behavior of Jewish “leadership” is exacerbating the problem. Instead of absorbing the message of the writing on the wall and prudently lowering its profile, it is going for broke, intensifying its financial and political demands in support of Israel’s genocidal slaughter – the worst possible issue seized at the worst possible moment. Not even warning growls from old allies like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have had any noticeable effect. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, Jewish “leaders” seem intent on plunging ahead toward their own inevitable destruction.

And I fear that they will not fall alone. Gaza is far from being Joe Biden’s only problem this year. But as the Palestinian death toll soars, and the pictures of shredded or starving children become ever more numerous and intolerable, the Gaza genocide could end up being the last straw that breaks the back of Biden’s reelection propaganda.

Genocide Joe’s problem with Gaza is that there is no real escape from it: Biden cannot ignore the issue but also cannot afford to resolve it. If he grows an embryonic conscience and finally brings Israel to heel (at least temporarily), he will pay a heavy price with Jewish voting blocs in November. If he doesn’t, a regional Mideast war could be in the offing, and I doubt that any American administration could survive the fallout from such a debacle.

I am not about to shed any tears for Joe Biden or for the Democratic Party. But if the current government collapses, what will replace it? An ad hoc coalition around the former Narcissist-in-Chief? A caretaker administration effectively under the sway of US intelligence agencies? A COVID coup-inspired government by executive fiat? The prospects are not encouraging.

Meanwhile, the 1,000 American troops now being sent to Israel/Palestine – ostensibly to build a “humanitarian port” for Gaza – may end up, for all I know, as a striking force behind a coup designed to oust Netanyahu and to put the US directly in control of a client state gone rogue. No one familiar with the CIA’s record can rule out such a possibility. But how will an American working class that already resents the billions of dollars annually thrown away on “aid” to Israel (while average American families can’t pay the rent and the heating bill at the same time) react to the idea of turning the Jewish State into an expensive US protectorate? What if those American troops start dying in new wars in Lebanon or Iran? How much can Americans be expected to pay for Israel’s rapaciousness?

I certainly do not know where any of this will lead. But I’m finding it very hard to imagine a happy ending to the story. I’ve already mentioned my doubts about whether the presuppositions required of a democracy exist in today’s United States. One of those presuppositions is the assumption of shared goals (Lessing, following Aristotle, went so far as to describe this as “friendship”) between the members of differing political factions. But can I really acknowledge any sort of common cause with a supporter of genocide? To be honest, I’m still not sure I can use a word like “friendship” to describe my relationship to someone who, just a few years ago, denied my right of movement, my right to be governed by democratic processes, my right to speak my mind without being censored, my right not to be a human guinea pig, and even my right to breathe freely. And I can’t forget that there were many, many such people.

What I’m finding really ominous is that so many enemies of American freedom over the last four years are now quietly cozying up to Israel’s genocide lest they upset the Democratic Party applecart – and are demanding that the American public do the same. Rebecca Solnit, one of those “progressive feminists” who helped to publicize every democracy-destroying lie of the COVID coup, from masks to coerced human medical experimentation, doesn’t mince words about the dangers of Republican politicians: according to her, they have “abandoned all ethics and standards, and will happily violate the oaths they took to uphold the constitution”; in fact, she claims that “[v]iral Trumpism has already merged with conspiracy theories such as QAnon, with anti-vaccine cults, with white supremacists and neo-fascists.” But the prolific Ms. Solnit has gone strangely tongue-tied about the slaughter-plus-systematic-starvation of more than a million children in Gaza.

Gloria Steinem, another “progressive” who bailed on the “my body, my choice” principle as soon as a Democratic Party administration demanded the injection of federal employees with untested drugs, was quick to denounce Palestinians over charges of sexual violence that were probably fabricated. But she too has been practically silent about the slaughter in Gaza, not to mention the well-documented sexual violence committed by Israelis against female Palestinian prisoners. And so on, and so on, and so on.

I mention these examples because I think they expose, like a lantern in a shadowy room, the cruel emptiness belied by all the liberal gesturing. The tragic truth is that the Democratic Party and its mouthpieces are not offering us an alternative to Donald Trump. They are using Trump’s name as hunters use beaters, to induce frightened prey to stampede into their nets. They are not, as some critics believe, political ideologues; they are really more like political parasites, forced to feed on the vital energies and principles of others because they have none themselves.

That is where Democratic Party apologists meet the crime-rationalizing rhetoricians of American Jewish “leadership.” Even genocide, the most heinous of all crimes against humanity, doesn’t move such people, because where they should have hearts capable of empathy with suffering or of anger at injustice, all they’ve really got is a craving for power and a dread of losing it.

And so it turns out that the Jewish elites who are hell-bent on maintaining their undeserved privileges – so much so that they’ll embrace Nazi crimes to do it – are forcing the pitiful hollowness of America’s political elites into public view. That is the real disaster that Franklin Foer, who wants to keep both elites in power, cannot see. His pastiche of anodyne falsehoods is intended to divert public attention from the horror of Israel’s intensifying crimes in occupied Palestine. But he is really laying the groundwork for the radical disillusionment of the American public – a disillusionment that could bring down the entire political process when a generation of its victims realizes how recklessly and how cynically it has been deceived.

Yes, the American Jewish joy ride is probably about to end – and with a bang, not a whimper. The real questions are all about what happens next. How many Americans (and others) are going to be hurt in the crash? How many will get out of the way in time? How many will be ready with aid for the victims when the debris finally settles?

And what will be left – after so much cruel and needless damage – of what we used to call “the land of the free, the home of the brave”?

Israel Is Now the Greatest Source of Anti-Semitism

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Dissident Voice

On October 28, Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva (and I here, in boldface, add a few links for documentation of some of his assertions):

This will be my last official communication to you. …

The current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions, are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms [against Arabs] are accompanied by Israeli military units.

Across the land, Apartheid rules.

This is a text-book case of genocide. The European, ethno-nationalist, [Jewish] settler colonial project in Palestine has entered its final phase, toward the expedited destruction of the last remnants of indigenous Palestinian life in Palestine. What’s more, the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities. …

We must begin now or surrender to unspeakable horror. I see ten essential points: 1. Legitimate action: First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution, its impotent and complicit Quartet, and its subjugation of international law to the dictates of presumed political expediency. Our positions must be unapologetically based on international human rights and international law. 2. Clarity of Vision: We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity. 3. One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land. …

Israelis learned well from Hitler: they elected governments that did (or else condoned doing) to the non-Jewish natives in their land (who before 1948 were 61% Muslim, 30% Jewish, and 8% Christian), what Hitler had done to Jews in Christian Europe — and now they are being supported by the U.S. and its allies to deliver Israel’s final solution to the Palestinian problem: extermination.

The self-defense by Israel and its apologists, for this reality that drove Mokhiber to quit and to condemn them, is for them to ignore all of that reality, and to focus instead upon the responses to it by the Palestinians. The self-defense, in other words, is to condemn not the side that started this war (themselves) beginning in 1948, but the side that then, and even earlier (in the late 1930s), were trying to prevent or avoid it (the Palestinians). The evil in this deception by the perpetrators — by the Israelis and their apologists — is obvious, and here is how it is driving a surge in anti-Semitism:

Israel and its apologists say that anti-Israelism is the same thing as anti-Semitism (so that to condemn Israel is to condemn all Jews), but here they lie yet again because outside of Israel are many Jews who loathe what Israel has been doing in their names. The very idea that all Jews are Israelis, or even support the Israelis and oppose the Palestinians in this war between the aggressor (Israelis) and the defender (the Palestinians), is stupid. That idea simply is not the case; but yet many Jews are being targeted by AUTHENTIC anti-Semites as-if it WERE the case.

Comments by many readers and viewers online are rife with such anti-Semitism, and the global community of that authentic anti-Semitism grows ever-larger, the closer that Israel and the U.S. get to delivering their final solution to the Palestinian problem. A great many of these anti-Semitic comments are coming from individuals who condemn all Jews on the basis of anti-Semitic lines from the New Testament (such as John 8:44, Matthew 23:31-38, and the earliest-written one of them all, 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16 — all of which lines I have discussed here). However, many come instead from the Old Testament, which historians consider to be mythical but theologians and preachers believe instead to be “the Word of God”; and, so, scholars cannot agree with one-another on what is history and what in the Old Testament is instead merely myth (religious propaganda, for spreading the Jewish faith).

According to Wikipedia’s article on the “Kingdom of Judah“:

Centered in the highlands of Judea, the kingdom’s capital was Jerusalem.[3] Jews are named after Judah and are primarily descended from it.[4][5] The Hebrew Bible depicts the Kingdom of Judah as a successor to the United Kingdom of Israel, a term denoting the united monarchy under biblical kings Saul, David and Solomon and covering the territory of Judah and Israel. However, during the 1980s, some biblical scholars began to argue that the archaeological evidence for an extensive kingdom before the late-8th century BCE is too weak, and that the methodology used to obtain the evidence is flawed.[6][7] In the 10th and early 9th centuries BCE, the territory of Judah appears to have been sparsely populated, limited to small rural settlements, most of them unfortified.[8]

and Wikipedia’s “Davidic line” says that,

as for David and his immediate descendants themselves, the position of some scholars, as described by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, authors of The Bible Unearthed, espouses that David and Solomon may well be based on “certain historical kernels”, and probably did exist in their own right, but their historical counterparts simply could not have ruled over a wealthy lavish empire as described in the Bible, and were more likely chieftains of a comparatively modest Israelite society in Judah and not regents over a kingdom proper.[27]

If the actual historical nation of Israel was ONLY what is shown on the map as constituting the Kingdom of Judah, then neither Gaza nor the northern two-thirds of the West Bank had ever been in any ancient Israel; and, so, anyone who says that the Jews in 1948 were ‘coming home’ to ‘Israel’ is historically wrong. However, those Jews were ethnically cleansing the land. It’s well-documented, such as here, here, here, and here. And even if ancient Israel had included all of the land that now is Israel, it wasn’t so at all in recent centuries, when virtually all of the residents there were Muslims and Christians — though Jews were demanding to control it while being only a tiny percentage of the population there. Their supremacism was clearly not only fascist but racist; it was Jewish Nazism. Furthermore, during the 1930s, Zionists considered themselves to be fascists; and fascists in both Germany and Italy considered Zionists to be Jewish fascists, ideological brothers of both Italy’s and Germany’s fascists (Christianity’s fascists). And Albert Einstein and other prominent progressive Jews in the U.S. after World War II described as “fascists” Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom subsequently became elected by Israel’s Jews to lead Israel. And yet the U.S. Government backed them, not only when Begin and Shamir were leading massacres of Arab villages in the 1940s, but when both men became Israel’s leaders in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s — and afterward, under their political follower Benjamin Netanyahu: clearly, a racist-supremacist apartheid regime ever since its founding, a regime which defines the supreme group, “Jew,” not only by religion, but by descent; that is, racially. Under U.S. President Harry S. Truman, the America and the world that his predecessor Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who was against the formation of a Jewish state and even resisted his aides who backed Churchill’s strong support for the creation of Israel, and who also was opposed to Winston Churchill’s and Dwight Eisenhower’s urgings for a war against the Soviet Union) had sought and carefully planned — the world that FDR had been intensively working to build — abruptly ended. And, more than anything else, this is the reason why, on 28 October 2023, the Director of the New York Office of the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote to the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) in Geneva, to resign his post. He resigned his post because now the final solution to the Palestinian problem — the problem that Truman and his successors enabled fascist Jews to create — is about to come to a head. And decent Jews everywhere will be experiencing the backlash from what the indecent ones — who are the majority in Israel — are doing. The decent Jews will be getting the backlash for what the indecent ones are doing, but the blame really should go ONLY to the Israelis, and to the UK and U.S. billionaires (and their politicians and ‘news’-media) who have been constantly propagandizing for them.

Justin and the Nazis

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His former PM father granted safe haven to Nazi war criminals.

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo on Geopolitics

Poor Justin Trudeau. The Canadian PM has egg on his face after it was revealed his government gave former Waffen-SS Nazi Yaroslav Hunka a standing ovation in Canada’s House of Commons.

It looks like Canada’s “House of Commons” (where there are few real commoners) is all gaa-gaa over Ukrainian Nazis. Of course, this is a major faux pas, as slavering over unrepentant Nazis is, to say the least, in bad taste, especially for “woke” leaders such as Trudeau.

How is it possible Canada’s “leaders” are unaware the SS Galicia Division where Hunka “served” was involved in the 1943 mass murder of Poles, Jews, Roma, and communists? How is possible for a man involved in genocide (directed primarily against women and children) to receive a standing ovation?

It’s rather amusing, in a sardonic sort of way, to watch as the Canadian government melts down over this embarrassing incident.

It looks like House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota will be thrown under the bus. He called Hunka a “hero” during the staged event that revealed the Canadian government’s apparent affinity for SS Waffen Nazis.

The pathetic face-saving blame game was dropped on Rota like 900 pounds of manure. There are demands he resign his post immediately. No doubt he will spend the rest of his now miserable life in shame.

Meanwhile, Trudeau declared his innocence. He insisted it was “extremely upsetting that this happened… This is something that is deeply embarrassing to the parliament of Canada and by extension to all Canadians.”

Justin’s father, Pierre Trudeau, the former Canadian PM (it’s a family affair), “was complicit in the granting of safe haven to thousands of known Nazis who had ‘killed Jews with their own hands,’” tweets Chay Bowes.

I know it’s popular now to consider just about everything posted on Elon Musk’s X-Twitter as a far-right conspiracy theory. However, Mr. Bowes includes a clip from a 1997 episode of Sixty Minutes. Needless to say, CBS ain’t what it used to be.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service revealed in 2019 that a secret file on the scandalous dealings of the elder Trudeau was dispatched to the memory hole. His “fascination with communism, fascism, socialism and religion drove Trudeau to the far reaches of the political world,” writes Robert Morley for The Trumpet.

According to a Free Republic book review of the biography Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919-1944, authored by Max and Monique Nemni, Trudeau was “not in the usual iconographic way… the sacrosanct icon of the progressive new Canada but as an anti-Semitic admirer of Hitler and Mussolini.”

Like father, like son?

It should also be noted that Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Chrystia Freeland, who arranged a Canadian training mission with Ukraine’s “integral nationalists” in 2017, has a rather ugly skeleton in her closet. Freeland’s Ukrainian grandfather Michael Chomiak (Mykhailo Khomiak) was a Nazi collaborator. He edited Krakivs’ki Visti, a “vehemently antisemitic” newspaper.

Before the insanity of Ukraine, the corporate media on occasion told the truth about Nazis. Now, according to the state and its corporate media megaphone, the real Nazis are in America—no, not the Operation Paperclip imports by the CIA, but a tiny marginalized homegrown fringe of skinheads and other deluded racist miscreants.

Canada’s “conservatives” are exploiting this incident to the hilt. In this regard, they are little different than their American counterparts, the supposed “conservatives” that want endless war with Russia, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and China. These are the “conservatives” that want to kill Julian Assange and run a former Gitmo JAG officer as president, they are colleagues of neocon “conservatives” like the psychopaths Lindsey Graham and Nikki Haley.

Finally, to demonstrate the rank historical ignorance of Canada’s parliament, Hunka was described as fighting against the Soviets in World War 2.

I’m not sure what history books these ignoramuses are reading (if any at all). The Soviet Union, the UK, and the US were allies during the war.

I’ll bet Trudeau, Freeland, and at least a few MPs understand Ukraine’s Nazis were on the side of the real Nazis, not the Allies. However, it appears Canada, the US, and Germany required the ideology of authoritarian fascism in order to control their respective countries, and that’s why war criminal Nazis were shipped in under the wire.

Did neocon cancel queen Bari Weiss stage her NY Times resignation to fuel her career?

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A closer look at the events surrounding Bari Weiss’ resignation suggests she omitted some critical details about her toxic presence inside the paper, and may have staged her resignation to drum up publicity for her next move.

By Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton

Source: The Grayzone

Neoconservative New York Times columnist Bari Weiss quit the newspaper on July 14. In a resignation letter published on her personal website, the pundit lamented a supposed “illiberal environment” at the publication in which Weiss’ colleagues mocked her right-wing views, supposedly called her “a Nazi and a racist,” and branded her a “liar and a bigot.”

Weiss’ unexpected departure came days after the hawkish columnist signed a letter in Harper’s Magazine lamenting an “intolerance of opposing views” and demanding an “open debate” in the US media.

The signatories complaining of a “censoriousness” environment included architects of disastrous US military interventions, anti-Palestinian fanatics, and some of the most powerful people in the media, including many who have spent decades censoring anyone to the left of them – and even attempting to cancel entire countries.

But there may have been more to Weiss’ dramatic resignation than her revulsion with the “illiberal” culture of a paper that had recruited her and several neocon allies. A closer look at the events surrounding her departure suggests she likely omitted some critical details about her toxic presence inside the paper, and may have staged her resignation to drum up publicity for her next move.

A neocon network rises inside the Times, embarrassment and outrage ensues

Back on June 3, neoconservative Sen. Tom Cotton published an op-ed in the New York Times calling for the US military to crack down on Americans protesting lethal police violence. The decision to publish the editorial touched off outrage among Times staff, with many demanding to know how such a fascistic piece made it into print.

It turned out that the staffer who edited the piece, Adam Rubenstein, was a card-carrying neocon hired by the Times in early 2019. Rubenstein was a former editor for the now-defunct Weekly Standard founded by William Kristol – the neocon leader responsible for rustling up pro-Israel money to support Cotton’s electoral ambitions.

New York Times staff claimed that the Cotton op-ed “was edited” by Rubenstein and other staffers “had not been aware of the article before it was published.”

The editorial disaster prompted the dismissal of op-ed page editor James Bennet, who had initially defended running Cotton’s screed.

Before joining the Weekly Standard, Rubenstein was a pro-Israel activist at Kenyon College who once attempted to cancel an appearance by the Palestian poet Remi Kanazi on the grounds that Kanazi was “part of a focus-grouped and incubated hatred.”

Rubenstein’s hiring by the Times complimented its hiring of Bari Weiss and fellow anti-Palestinian bigot Bret Stephens in 2017. In her resignation letter, Weiss acknowledged, “I was hired with the goal of bringing in voices that would not otherwise appear in [the Times’] pages: first-time writers, centrists, conservatives.”

In 2018, Weiss and Stephens responded to a critic who had called them “Zionist fanatics of near-unhinged proportions.” The two retorted: “The word ‘near’ should not have been a part of the sentence. Otherwise, we happily plead guilty as charged.”

When Rubenstein joined them at the paper, he became Weiss’s personal editor. Both Weiss and Stephens had risen to prominence at the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal, where Rubenstein had also worked as a Robert Bartley Fellow.

In August 2019, Stephens provoked embarrassment for himself and his employers when he fired off an angry email to the employer of a George Washington University professor, David Karpf, who had compared him on Twitter to a bedbug. As Twitter users bombarded Stephens with a wave of ridicule, the NY Times apparently compelled Stephens to delete his Twitter account – but not before he staged a public meltdown in which he compared Karpf to “totalitarian regimes” and Nazis seeking to exterminate Jews.

When the Cotton column calling for a military crackdown on Black Lives Matter ran less than a year later, the Times’ neocon problem finally came to a head.

This June 5, as 300 non-editorial staffers planned a virtual walkout, Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger convened an all-hands meeting. During the question-and-answer session, according to a report by Vice, employees demanded to know “whether Opinion staff editor and writer Bari Weiss would be fired for ‘openly bad mouth[ing] younger news colleagues on a platform where they, because of strict company policy, could not defend themselves’; whether the opinion section had suggested the topic of the op-ed to Cotton; and what the Times would do to help retain and support Black employees.”

Times staff seemed to be pointing a finger at Weiss and her neocon network for soliciting the Cotton op-ed.

When Weiss resigned on July 14, she complained that colleagues “have called me a Nazi and a racist… Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers.” Yet she failed to acknowledge her apparent role in the Cotton op-ed affair, which was clearly the source of her colleagues’ outrage, painting herself instead as a blameless victim of “illiberal” cancel culture.

On the day that Weiss staged her dramatic self-expulsion, Andrew Sullivan – a center-right political ally of Weiss who has vigorously supported her – resigned from New York Magazine.

Sullivan eventually revealed that he was moving to another publication, and possibly one that had not yet launched.

While Sullivan does not share the Likudnik politics of Weiss, he enjoys some notable institutional and personal links to her political network. As the former editor of The New Republic, Sullivan worked under the direction of the magazine’s fanatically pro-Israel former publisher, Marty Peretz, who has since relocated to Tel Aviv. Peretz’s daughter, Evgenia, published a fawning profile of Weiss in Vanity Fair in April 2019, portraying her as an inspiring new talent who was “genuinely fueled by curiosity, the desire to connect, to cross boundaries and try out new things.”

During the time Sullivan and Peretz ran The New Republic, the magazine was funded by the pro-Israel businessman Roger Hertog. Hertog also plowed his fortune into the Shalem Center to launch a training institute for young pro-Israel pundits in 2002.

Among the first interns to pass through the Shalem training school was a Columbia University student named Bari Weiss. (Weiss’ editor at the NY Times, Rubenstein, had also been involved in the Hertog Foundation).

Whether or not Weiss plans to join Sullivan at a new outlet for disgruntled anti-SJW centrists, the circumstances surrounding her self-expulsion reveal her resignation letter as an insincere whitewash.

Besides the possibility that Weiss’ departure was a PR stunt, there is the fact that she has spent a large portion of her adult life working to cancel Palestinian academics and left-wing politicians while howling about the rise of a totalitarian “cancel culture.”

A self-styled free thinker campaigns to silence left-wing dissenters

Before Bari Weiss branded herself as an avatar of free thought, she established herself as the queen of a particular kind of cancel culture. The 36-year-old pundit has dedicated a significant portion of her adult life to destroying the careers of critics of Israel, tarring them as anti-Semites, and carrying out the kind of defamation campaigns that would result in her targets losing their jobs.

The pundit has shown a particular obsession with Palestinian-American scholar Joseph Massad and the New York City-based Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour. Other targets have included Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Attorney General who was the first Muslim elected to Congress, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, an ardent opponent of US regime change wars.

There is also ample evidence that while at Columbia University, Weiss helped bring down the dean of Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Lisa Anderson, for inviting Iran’s then-President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad to speak on campus. Anderson’s son has pointed to Weiss as a key factor in her resignation:

https://twitter.com/finds_you_well/status/971771300879458304

In her resignation letter, Weiss found space to castigate the Times for publishing an interview with renowned African-American author Alice Walker, whom she casually defamed as “a proud anti-Semite who believes in lizard Illuminati.”

Weiss also flexed her bona fides as a proud neoconservative activist, saying she was “honored” to have given the world’s most prestigious media platform to a slew of regime-change activists from countries targeted by the US national security for overthrow, including Venezuela, Iran, and Hong Kong, along with notorious Islamophobe Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Chloe Valdary – a fellow Israel lobby product who previously worked as an intern for Bret Stephens.

In her three-year career as an editor of the opinion section of the newspaper of record, Weiss devoted a significant chunk of her columns to attacking her left-wing critics, while complaining endlessly of the haters in her Twitter mentions (which is risible given her lamentation in her resignation letter that “Twitter has become [the Times’] ultimate editor”).

In her 2019 book, Weiss condemned the pro-Palestine left as a whole. She insisted the idea that Zionism is a colonialist and racist movement is an anti-Semitic “Soviet conspiracy;” that the UK Labour Party under leader Jeremy Corbyn was a “hub of Jew hatred,” and that “leftist anti-Semites” are “more insidious and perhaps existentially dangerous” than far-right “Hitlerian anti-Semites.”

It is worth reviewing this historical record to show how Cancel Queen Bari Weiss’ apparent change of heart on cancel culture might more appropriately be described as an opportunist career choice.

Bari Weiss’ campaigns to cancel Palestinians Joseph Massad and Linda Sarsour, and Muslim American politician Keith Ellison

In her 2019 book “How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” Weiss revived her condemnations of Massad, whom she first targeted at Columbia University after interning at the Hertog-funded Shalem Center.

Weiss also argued that New York University (NYU) was rife with anti-Semitism. Her proof? An individual student was told some stupid anti-Semitic comments, and — much more disconcertingly for Weiss – “In December 2018, the student government successfully passed a BDS resolution,” and “NYU gave the President’s Service Award, the school’s highest honor, to Students for Justice in Palestine.”

Massad was hardly the only victim of Bari Weiss’ compulsive cancel culture campaigns. The neoconservative pundit wrote an entire New York Times column in 2017 dedicated to trying to cancel Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour.

Rapping progressives over the knuckles for purportedly “embracing hate,” Weiss characterized Sarsour as an unhinged anti-Semite because of her criticism of the colonialist Zionist movement, and worked to disrupt the Women’s March, which Sarsour helped to found.

Then in a tag-team cancel campaign with feverishly pro-war CNN host Jake Tapper (who has his own questionable history with racial issues), they portrayed Sarsour as an extremist for expressing support for former Black Panther leader Assata Shakur, whom they jointly demonized as a “cop-killer fugitive in Cuba.”

Next, Weiss turned her sights on the Democratic Attorney General of Minnesota Keith Ellison, claiming in a 2017 column that he had a “long history of defending and working with anti-Semites.”

Bari Weiss attempts to cancel Tulsi Gabbard

Bari Weiss’ cancelation rampage continued without a moment of self-reflection.

In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan in January 2019, the pundit tried to cancel Hawaii Representative Tulsi Gabbard because of her work advocating against the international proxy war on Syria.

When Rogan mentioned Gabbard’s name, Weiss scoffed that the congresswoman is “monstrous,” smearing her an “Assad toady,” in reference to the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad. Confused, Rogan asked Weiss what exactly that meant. The bumbling New York Times pundit could not answer, unable to define or even spell the insult.

Bari Weiss claims “leftist anti-Semitism” is worse than “Hitlerian anti-Semitism”

Bari Weiss’ most extreme views on Israel-Palestine and the left can be seen in her 2019 book How to Fight Anti-Semitism. In this tome, the neoconservative writer set out to cancel the pro-Palestinian anti-racist left as a whole by arguing that supposed “leftist anti-Semitism” is more dangerous than “Hitlerian anti-Semitism.”

Weiss wrote:

“Hitlerian anti-Semitism announces its intentions unequivocally. But leftist anti-Semitism, like communism itself, pretends to be the opposition of what it actually is.

“Because of the easy way it can be smuggled into the mainstream and manipulate us – who doesn’t seek justice and progress? who doesn’t want a universal brotherhood of man? – anti-Semitism that originates on the political left is more insidious and perhaps existentially dangerous [than on the right].”

When she says “leftist anti-Semitism,” Weiss almost invariably means progressive criticism of Israeli apartheid, racism, and brutality against the indigenous Palestinian population.

If that wasn’t already obvious, Weiss spelled it out:

“If you want to see the stakes, just look across the pond, where Jeremy Corbyn, an anti-Semite, has successfully transformed one of the country’s great parties into a hub of Jew hatred.

“Corbynism is not confided to the U.K. Right now in America, leftists who share Corbyn’s worldview are building grassroots movements and establishing factions with the Democratic Party that are suspiciously unskeptical of genocidal terrorist groups like Hamas and actively hostile to Jewish power and the state of Israel.”

In her book, Weiss insisted the idea that Zionism is a colonialist and racist movement is the product of a “Soviet conspiracy” spread by USSR in order to destroy Israel. She expressly ignored the words of the father of Zionism himself, Theodor Herzl, who wrote that Zionism “is a colonial idea” and requested help from British colonialists, including colonial master Cecil Rhodes.

“Progressives have, knowingly or unknowingly, embraced the Soviet lie that Israel is a colonialist outpost that should be opposed,” Weiss lamented.

“In the most elite spaces across the country, people declare, unthinkingly, that Israel is a racist state and that Zionism is racism, without realizing that they are participating in a Soviet conspiracy, without realizing that they are aligning themselves with the greatest mass murderers in modern history,” she bemoaned.

Not mincing her words, Weiss concluded, “When anti-Zionism becomes a normative political position, active anti-Semitism becomes the norm.”

With these passages, it became clear that her How to Fight Anti-Semitism was a book-length attempt to cancel anti-Zionists as a whole, by conflating their opposition to Israeli apartheid as anti-Semitism.

Anyone who disputes that Israel is “a political and historical miracle” is secretly a Jew hater, Weiss has argued. She effused, “That I can walk the streets of Tel Aviv today as a feminist woman in a tank top,” she marveled, “that it is a free and liberated society in the middle of the Middle East, is an achievement so great that it is often hard for many people to grasp.”

As with much of the content Weiss produces, her gushing praise for Israel’s supposedly “liberated society” could have been lifted from a propaganda pamphlet distributed on campus by a pro-Israel lobbying outfit. But it was never quality writing or original ideas that won Weiss the attention she sought, and which has virtually ensured she will be “cancelled” into a new, high-profile position in the mainstream commentariat.

 

 

The Year of Manufactured Hysteria

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By CJ Hopkins

Source: Consent Factory, Inc.

Well, it looks like we’ve somehow managed to survive another year of diabolical Putin-Nazi attacks on democracy. It was touch-and-go there for a while, especially coming down the home stretch, what with Jeremy Corbyn’s desperate attempt to overthrow the UK government, construct a British version of Auschwitz, and start rounding up and mass-murdering the Jews.

That was certainly pretty scary … but then, the whole year was pretty scary.

The horror began promptly in early January, when Rachel Maddow revealed that Putin was projecting words out of Trump’s mouth in real-time, i.e., literally using Trump’s head like a puppet, or one of those Mission Impossible masks. And that was just the tip of the iceberg, as, despite the best efforts of Integrity Initiative, Bellingcat, and other such establishment psyops, Internet-censoring sites like NewsGuard, and an army of mass hysteria generators, Putin’s legion of Russian “influencers” was continuing to maliciously influence Americans, who were probably also still under attack by brain-eating Russian-Cubano crickets!

While Resistance members were still wrapping their heads in anti-cricket aluminum foil, Putin (i.e., Russian Hitler) ordered Trump (i.e., Russian-asset Hitler) to launch a coup in Venezuela (i.e., Russian Hitler’s South American ally), probably to distract us from “Smirkboy Hitler” and his acne-faced gang of MAGA cap-wearing Catholic high-school Hitler Youth, who were trying to invade and Hitlerize the capital. Or maybe the coup was meant to distract us from the un-American activities of Bernie Sanders, who had also been deemed a Russian asset, or a devious “Kremlin-Trump operation,” or was working with Tulsi Gabbard to build an army of blood-drinking Hindu nationalists, genocidal Assadists, and American fascists to help the Iranians (and the Russians, of course, and presumably also Jeremy Corbyn) frontally assault the State of Israel and drive the Jews into the sea.

As if all that wasn’t horrifying enough (and ridiculous and confusing enough), by early Spring there was mounting evidence that Putin had somehow gotten to Mueller, possibly with one of those FSB pee-tapes, and was sabotaging the “Russiagate” coup the Intelligence Community, the Democratic Party, the corporate media, and the rest of the Resistance had been methodically preparing since 2016. Liberals’ anuses began puckering and unpuckering as it gradually became clear that the “Mueller Report” was not going to prove that Donald Trump had colluded with Putin and Julian Assange to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton and transform the United States of America into a genocidal Putin-Nazi Reich.

Meanwhile, the anti-Semitism pandemic that had mysteriously erupted in 2016 (i.e., right around the time Trump won the nomination) was raging unchecked throughout the West. Jews in Great Britain were on the brink of panic because approximately 0.08 percent of Labour Party members were anti-Semitic, as opposed to the rest of the British public, who have never shown any signs of anti-Semitism (or any other kind of racism or bigotry), and are practically a nation of Shabbos goys. Clearly, Corbyn had turned the party into his personal neo-Nazi death cult and was planning to carry out a second Holocaust just as soon as he renationalized the British railways!

And it wasn’t just the United Kingdom. According to corporate media virologists, idiopathic anti-Semitism was breaking out everywhere. In France, the “Yellow Vests” were also anti-Semites. In the U.S.A., Jews were facing “a perfect storm of anti-Semitism,” some of it stemming from the neo-fascist fringe (which has been a part of the American landscape forever, but which the corporate media has elevated into an international Nazi movement), but much of it whipped up by Ilhan Omar, who had apparently entered into a “Red-Brown” pact with Richard Spencer, or Gavin McInnes, or some other formerly insignificant idiot.

Things got very confusing for a while, as Republicans united with Democrats to denounce Ilhan Omar as an anti-Semite (and possibly a full-fledged Islamic terrorist) and to condemn the existence of “hate,” or whatever. The corporate media, Facebook, and Twitter were suddenly swarming with hordes of angry anti-Semites accusing other anti-Semites of anti-Semitism. Meghan McCain couldn’t take it anymore, and she broke down on the Joy Behar Show and begged to be converted to Judaism, or Zionism, right there on the air. This unseemly display of anti-anti-Semitism was savagely skewered by Eli Valley, an “anti-Semitic” Jewish cartoonist, according to McCain and other morons.

Then it happened … perhaps the loudest popcorn fart in political history. The Mueller Report was finally delivered. And just like that, Russiagate was over. After three long years of manufactured mass hysteria, corporate media propaganda, books, T-shirts, marches, etc., Robert Mueller had come up with squat. Zip. Zero. Nichts. Nada. No collusion. No pee-tape. No secret servers. No Russian contacts. Nothing. Zilch.

Cognitive dissonance gripped the nation. There was beaucoup wailing and gnashing of teeth. Resistance members doubled their anti-depressant dosages and went into mourning. Shell-shocked liberals did their best to pretend they hadn’t been duped, again, by authoritative sources like The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN, MSNBC, et al., which had disseminated completely fabricated stories about secret meetings which never took place, power grid hackings that never happened, Russian servers that never existed, imaginary Russian propaganda peddlers, and the list goes on, and on, and on … and hadn’t otherwise behaved like a bunch of mindless, shrieking neo-McCarthyites.

Except that Russiagate wasn’t over. It immediately morphed into “Obstructiongate.” As the corporate media spooks explained, Mueller’s investigation of Trump was never about collusion with Russia. No, it was always about Trump obstructing the investigation of the collusion with Russia that the investigation was not about, and that everyone knew had never happened. In other words, Mueller’s investigation was launched in order to investigate the obstruction of his investigation.

Or whatever. It didn’t really matter, because, by this time, Assange had been arrested for treason, or for jumping bail, or for smearing poo all over the walls of the Ecuadorean embassy, and The New York Times was reporting that a veritable “constellation” of social media accounts “linked to Russia and far-right groups” was disseminating extremist “disinformation,” and Putin had unleashed the Russian spywhale, and “Jews were not safe in Germany again,” because the Putin-Nazis had formed an alliance with the Iranian Nazis and the Syrian Nazis, who were backing the Palestinian Nazis that Antifa was fighting on behalf of Israel, and Jews were not safe in the UK either, because of Jeremy Corbyn, who Donald Trump (who, let’s all remember, is literally Hitler) was conspiring with a group of “unnamed Jewish leaders” to prevent from becoming prime minister, and Iran was conspiring with Hezbollah and al Qaeda to amass an arsenal of WMDs to launch at Israel and Saudi Arabia, and other peaceful Middle Eastern democracies, and Trump was finally going to go full-Hitler and declare martial law on the Fourth of July, and he was operating literal “concentration camps” where immigrants were being forced to drink out of toilets, which looked almost exactly the same as the “detention facilities” Obama had operated, except for … well, you know, the “fascism.” So who had time to worry about the corporate media colluding with an attempted Intelligence Community coup?

Then, in August, right on cue, some racist whack job murdered a bunch of people, and so now, as if the mass hysteria hadn’t already been jacked up to the max, America had “a white nationalist terrorist problem,” or was in the throes of a “white nationalist terrorism crisis.” Trump was now officially our “Nihilist-in-Chief,” and “a white supremacist who inspires terrorism” and was basically no different than Anwar al-Awlaki. It was time to take some extraordinary measures along the lines of the Patriot Act, except focused on potential white supremacist terrorists, or anyone the Editorial Board of The New York Times might deem a “threat.”

This sudden outbreak of “Trump-inspired terrorism” and the manufactured “fascism” hysteria that followed got the Resistance through end of the Summer and into the Autumn, which was always when the main event was scheduled to begin. See, these last three years have basically been a warm-up for what is about to happen … the impeachment, sure, but that’s only one part of it.

If you thought the global capitalist ruling classes and the corporate media’s methodical crushing of Jeremy Corbyn was depressing to watch … well, prepare yourself for 2020. The Year of Manufactured Mass Hysteria was not just the Intelligence Community and the corporate media getting their kicks by whipping the public up into an endless series of baseless panics over imaginary Russians and Nazis. It was the final phase of cementing the official “Putin-Nazi” narrative in people’s minds.

For the sake of anyone new to my columns, here’s how the Putin-Nazi narrative works …

The Putin-Nazi narrative has two basic parts, or messages, which are constantly repeated: (1) “Russia is attacking our democracy!; and (2) “fascism is spreading like wildfire!,” both of which parts are essentially fictions. This official Putin-Nazi narrative was introduced in the Summer of 2016, and replaced the official “War on Terrorism” narrative, which had run for fifteen years, and which was just as fictional. It has been methodically reinforced and repeated by the neoliberal establishment, the corporate media (and, more recently, the alternative media, and even by extremely intelligent anarchist anthropologists like David Graeber) for the last three years on a daily basis. At this point it has become our “reality,” just as the War on Terror became our “reality” … as the Cold War had previously been our “reality.”

When I say that this narrative has become our “reality,” I mean that it is now virtually impossible to refute it in any mainstream forum without being dismissed as a “conspiracy theorist,” or an “anti-Semite,” or a “Russian asset.” It has become axiomatic and is taken for granted that we are experiencing an explosion of anti-Semitism, and fascism, and that Russia is out to get us (so axiomatic that someone like Graeber falls into the trap of defending Corbyn by relying on, and thus reifying, the very “fascism” hysteria that was used to destroy him).

Never mind that the entire planet continues to be ruled by global capitalism, transnational corporations, and supra-governmental bodies, and that most of it is occupied by the U.S. military, NATO, and other GloboCap allies, and assorted corporate military contractors. Never mind that Russia isn’t “attacking” anyone, and that the “Nazis” haven’t taken over anything, and that no one is rounding up and murdering the Jews, or the Mexicans, or anyone else for that matter … because when have facts had anything to do with maintaining an official narrative?

The answer, in case you were wondering, is “never.” We are, all of us, living in a fiction. A fiction authored by those in power to serve the interests of those in power. That’s what an official narrative is. It makes no difference whether we believe it or not. It functions as “reality” regardless. If you doubt that … well, just ask Jeremy Corbyn. Or watch as the Labour “anti-Semitism crisis” evaporates into thin air, as the War on Terror did in 2016, once it no longer served a useful purpose.

As for 2020, I’m afraid the manufactured mass hysteria is only going to get worse. The global capitalist ruling classes are determined to snuff out this populist rebellion, and to make sure it never happens again, or at the very least not on this scale. Anyone who gets in the way is going to be branded an “anti-Semite,” or a “fascist,” or a “Russian asset.” Politicians who do not toe the line are going to have their political careers and personal reputations destroyed. (Did you notice how it took less than two days after the crushing of Jeremy Corbyn for the smearing of Sanders as an anti-Semite or “soft on anti-Semitism” to begin?)

Mainstream journalists who dare to question the official Putin-Nazi narrative, even in the most respectful way, are going to come under increasing pressure to tone it down or suffer the consequences. Putin-Nazi paranoia will metastasize. Dissident websites will be deplatformed and demonitized. The Internet will be increasingly monitored for any and all forms of non-conformity. Dissent will be increasingly stigmatized. “Reality” will be increasingly policed. It’s all going to get extremely unpleasant, and that’s assuming that civil war doesn’t break out.

And as for me, I’m just a political satirist with a barely respectable cult-sized following, so they’ll probably let me get away with continuing to cover the whole ugly show (as long as no one starts to take me seriously). I’ll try to find the humor in it, but honestly, just between you and me, what’s coming may not be all that funny.

Israel Lobby Rebuts Omar’s Claims About Its Immense Influence By Exerting Its Immense Influence

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

In response to criticisms made by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar that US political leaders have too much allegiance to Israel and its lobbying groups, House Democrats have put forward an entire House resolution in accordance with demands made by AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League.

“The backlash [over Omar’s comments] continued on Monday, as the Anti-Defamation League wrote a letter to Pelosi calling for a House resolution to specifically reject what the organization calls Omar’s ‘latest slur,’” Politico reports. “‘We urge you and your colleagues to send the unambiguous message that the United States Congress is no place for hate,’ the group’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt, wrote in a letter.”

“The charge of dual loyalty not only raises the ominous specter of classic anti-Semitism, but it is also deeply insulting to the millions upon millions of patriotic Americans, Jewish and non-Jewish, who stand by our democratic ally, Israel,” tweeted the Israel lobbying group AIPAC on Friday in response to Omar’s comments.

“I hope @AIPAC isn’t too angry that it took Democratic House leaders almost 48 whole hours to do what they’re told to condemn their own member and will instead be understanding that it was a weekend and that’s what caused the delay,” snarked journalist Glenn Greenwald in response to the news of the House resolution.

US politicians of all faiths and in both parties have indeed been falling all over themselves in a mad scramble to tell the freshman congresswoman that she is wrong and evil for suggesting that there is undue loyalty to Israel among US politicians.

“It is disturbing that Rep. Omar continues to perpetuate hurtful anti-Semitic stereotypes that misrepresent our Jewish community,” tweeted California Congressman Juan Vargas, who is not Jewish. “Additionally, questioning support for the U.S.-Israel relationship is unacceptable,” Vargas continued, inadvertently re-stating Omar’s original argument.

“But serious question: How is it anti-Semitic to question Christian Republican allegiance to Israel?” asked journalist Rania Khalek in response to the controversy. “Because it’s people like Rep. Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Marco Rubio who Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib were initially called anti-Semitic for challenging on loyalty to Israel.”

It is indeed interesting that the label “antisemitism” is being pinned on an argument directed at mostly non-Jewish lawmakers and not at Jews at all. It is also interesting that the House resolution’s current text twists that reality on its head by falsely implying that the comments were directed at Jewish politicians. The most Omar-specific parts of the resolution read as follows:

Whereas the definition further includes ‘‘accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations’’;

Whereas the myth of dual loyalty, including allegations that Jews should be suspected of being disloyal neighbors or citizens, has been used to marginalize and persecute the Jewish people for centuries for being a stateless minority;

Whereas accusing Jews of dual loyalty because they support Israel, whether out of a religious connection, a commitment to Jewish self-determination after millennia of persecution, or an appreciation for shared values and interests, suggests that Jews cannot be patriotic Americans and trusted neighbors, when Jews have served our Nation since its founding, whether in public life or military service;

Whereas accusations of dual loyalty generally have an insidious, bigoted history, including (1) the discriminatory internment of Americans of Japanese descent during World War II on the basis of race; (2) the Dreyfuss affair; when Alfred Dreyfuss, a Jewish French artillery captain was falsely convicted of passing secrets to Germany based on his Jewish background; (3) when the loyalty of President John F. Kennedy was questioned because of his Catholic faith; and (4) the post-9/11 conditions faced by Muslim-Americans in the United States, including unfounded, vicious attacks on and threats to Muslim-American Members of Congress;

Omar’s comments have nothing to do with Jews, Judaism or Jewishness, but with the geopolitical entanglements between the US and a nation which currently serves as an outpost for US military agendas in the Middle East. It’s a basic, unassailable fact that the agenda to maintain this relationship holds immense sway in America’s capitol, which is why the only arguments you see against it are fallacious, dishonest, irrelevant, or even prove it to be true.

“It is so disingenuous of some of these members of Congress who are lining up to condemn these questioning voices as if they have no campaign finance interest in the outcome,” former congressman Brian Baird told the New York Times today. “If one dares to criticize Israel or dares to criticize AIPAC, one gets branded anti-Semitic, and that’s a danger to a democratic republic.”

Ilhan Omar has sparked one of the most interesting conversations happening in America today, and the smear campaign against her has nothing to do with fighting antisemitism, but with silencing that conversation. The social engineers are not interested in fighting religious bigotry, they are interested in shutting her up.

In an increasingly neoliberalism-weary world, the old smear tactics of labeling a dissident voice a “communist” or a “socialist” don’t pack the kind of punching power they used to, so new ones are needed. The propagandists have been field testing them for a while now, and whenever a successful prototype rolls off the conveyor belt you quickly see it shipped around the world. Smears of Kremlin servitude found purchase in the US, and it wasn’t long before we saw the BBC posing an image of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn against the backdrop of the Kremlin wearing what was made to resemble a Soviet-era hat. Antisemitism smears found purchase against Corbyn in the UK, and it wasn’t long before we saw those same smear tactics used across the pond against Ilhan Omar. If an imperial smear field tests well in our new political climate, you can be certain you’ll see it used elsewhere within the empire before long.

https://twitter.com/PrettyBadLefty/status/1102748288309231618

This bogus concern trolling about antisemitism has always been about smearing, and the smearing has always been about narrative control. If they can manipulate the public into distrusting someone who voices a dissenting narrative, they can keep that dissenting narrative from entering the bloodstream of mainstream consciousness. The need to keep a nuclear-armed branch of the US-centralized empire in the heart of the most crucial strategic location on earth is too important for our rulers to allow its fate to be left in the hands of the democratic process, so they control the narrative about it with extreme aggression and smear anyone who questions it. That’s all this has ever been.

Time to Wake Up: the Neoliberal Order is Dying

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By Jonathan Cook

Source: CounterPunch

In my recent essay, I argued that power in our societies resides in structure, ideology and narratives – supporting what we might loosely term our current “neoliberal order” – rather than in individuals. Significantly, our political and media classes, who are of course deeply embedded in this neoliberal structure, are key promoters of the very opposite idea: that individuals or like-minded groups of people hold power; that they should, at least in theory, be held accountable for the use and misuse of that power; and that meaningful change involves replacing these individuals rather than fundamentally altering the power-structure they operate within.

In other words, our political and media debates reduce to who should be held to account for problems in the economy, the health and education systems, or the conduct of a war. What is never discussed is whether flawed policies are the fleeting responsibility of individuals and political parties or symptoms of the current neoliberal malaise – manifestations of an ideology that necessarily has goals, such as the pursuit of maximised profit and endless economic growth, that are indifferent to other considerations, such as the damage being done to life on our planet.

The focus on individuals happens for a reason. It is designed to ensure that the structure and ideological foundations of our societies remain invisible to us, the public. The neoliberal order goes unquestioned – presumed, against the evidence of history, to be permanent, fixed, unchallengeable.

So deep is this misdirection that even efforts to talk about real power become treacherous. My words above and below might suggest that power is rather like a person, that it has intention and will, that maybe it likes to deceive or play tricks. But none of that is true either.

Big and little power

My difficulty conveying precisely what I mean, my need to resort to metaphor, reveals the limitations of language and the necessarily narrow ideological horizons it imposes on anyone who uses it. Intelligible language is not designed adequately to describe structure or power. It prefers to particularise, to humanise, to specify, to individualise in ways that make thinking in bigger, more critical ways near-impossible.

Language is on the side of those, like politicians and corporate journalists, who conceal structure, who deal in narratives of the small-power of individuals rather than of the big-power of structure and ideology. In what passes for news, the media offer a large stage for powerful individuals to fight elections, pass legislation, take over businesses, start wars, and a small stage for these same individuals to get their come-uppance, caught committing crimes, lying, having affairs, getting drunk, and more generally embarrassing themselves.

These minor narratives conceal the fact that such individuals are groomed before they ever gain access to power. Business leaders, senior politicians and agenda-setting journalists reach their positions after proving themselves over and over again – not consciously but through their unthinking compliance to the power-structure of our societies. They are selected through their performances in exams at school and university, through training programmes and indentures. They rise to the top because they are the most talented examples of those who are blind or submissive to power, those who can think most cleverly without thinking critically. Those who reliably deploy their skills where they are directed to do so.

Their large and small dramas constitute what we call public life, whether politics, world affairs or entertainment. To suggest that there are deeper processes at work, that the largest of these dramas is not really large enough for us to gain insight into how power operates, is to instantly be dismissed as paranoid, a fantasist, and – most damningly of all – a conspiracy theorist.

These terms also serve the deception. They are intended to stop all thought about real power. They are scare words used to prevent us, in a metaphor used in my previous post, from stepping back from the screen. They are there to force us to stand so close we see only the pixels, not the bigger picture.

Media makeover

The story of Britain’s Labour party is a case in point, and was illustrated even before Jeremy Corbyn became leader. Back in the 1990s Tony Blair reinvented the party as New Labour, jettisoning ideas of socialism and class war, and inventing instead a “Third Way”.

The idea that gained him access to power – personified in the media narrative of the time as his meeting with Rupert Murdoch on the mogul’s Hayman Island – was that New Labour would triangulate, find a middle way between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent. The fact that the meeting took place with Murdoch rather than anyone else signalled something significant: that the power-structure needed a media makeover. It needed to be dressed in new garb.

In reality, Blair made Labour useful to power by re-styling the turbo-charged neoliberalism Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party of the rich had unleashed. He made it look compatible with social democracy. Blair put a gentler, kinder mask on neoliberalism’s aggressive pursuit of planet-destroying power – much as Barack Obama would do in the United States a decade later, after the horrors of the Iraq invasion. Neither Blair nor Obama changed the substance of our economic and political systems, but they did make them look deceptively attractive by tinkering with social policy.

Were the neoliberal order laid bare – were the emperor to allow himself to be stripped of his clothes – no one apart from a small psychopathic elite would vote for neoliberalism’s maintenance. So power is forced to repeatedly reinvent itself. It is like the shape-shifting Mystique of the X-Men films, constantly altering its appearance to lull us into a false sense of security. Power’s goal is to keep looking like it has become something new, something innovative. Because the power-structure does not want change, it has to find front-men and women who can personify a transformation that is, in truth, entirely hollow.

Power can perform this stunt, as Blair did, by repackaging the same product – neoliberalism – in prettier ideological wrapping. Or it can, as has happened in the US of late, try a baser approach by adding a dash of identity politics. A black presidential candidate (Obama) can offer hope, and a woman candidate (Hillary Clinton) can cast herself as mother-saviour.

With this model in place, elections become an illusory contest between more transparent and more opaque iterations of neoliberal power. In failing the 99 per cent, Obama so woefully voided this strategy that large sections of voters turned their back on his intended successor, the new makeover candidate Hillary Clinton. They saw through the role-playing. They preferred, even if only reluctantly, the honest vulgarity of naked power represented by Trump over the pretensions of Clinton’s fakely compassionate politics.

Unstable politics

Despite its best efforts, neoliberalism is increasingly discredited in the eyes of large sections of the electorate in the US and UK. Its attempts at concealment have grown jaded, its strategy exhausted. It has reached the end-game, and that is why politics now looks so unstable. “Insurgency” candidates in different guises are prospering.

Neoliberal power is distinctive because it seeks absolute power, and can achieve that end only through global domination. Globalisation, the world as a plaything for a tiny elite to asset-strip, is both its means and its end. Insurgents are therefore those who seek to reverse the trend towards globalisation – or at least claim to. There are insurgents on both the left and right.

If neoliberalism has to choose, it typically prefers an insurgent on the right to the left. A Trump figure can usefully serve power too, because he dons the clothes of an insurgent while doing little to actually change the structure.

Nonetheless, Trump is a potential problem for the neoliberal order for two reasons.

First, unlike an Obama or a Clinton, he too clearly illuminates what is really at stake for power – wealth maximisation at any cost – and thereby risks unmasking the deception. And second, he is a retrograde step for the globalising power-structure.

Neoliberalism has dragged capitalism out its nineteenth-century dependency on nation-states into a twenty-first ideology that demands a global reach. Trump and other nativist leaders seek a return to a supposed golden era of state-based capitalism, one that prefers to send our children up chimneys if it prevents children from far-off lands arriving on our shores to do the same.

The neoliberal order prefers a Trump to a Bernie Sanders because the nativist insurgents are so much easier to tame. A Trump can be allowed to strut on his Twitter stage while the global power-structure constrains and undermines any promised moves that might threaten it. Trump the candidate was indifferent to Israel and wanted the US out of Syria. Trump the president has become Israel’s biggest cheerleader and has launched US missiles at Syria.

Faustian pacts

The current power-structure is much more frightened of a left insurgency of the kind represented by Corbyn in the UK. He and his supporters are trying to reverse the accommodations with power made by Blair. And that is why he finds himself relentlessly assaulted from every direction – from his political opponents; from his supposed political allies, including most of his own parliamentary party; and most especially from the state-corporate media, including its bogus left-liberal elements like the Guardian and the BBC.

The past three years of attacks on Corbyn are how power manifests itself, shows its hand, when it is losing. It is a strategy of last resort. A Blair or an Obama arrive in power having already made so many compromises behind the scenes that their original policies are largely toothless. They have made Faustian pacts as a condition for being granted access to power. This is variously described as pragmatism, moderation, realism. More accurately, it should be characterised as betrayal.

It does not stop when they reach high office. Obama made a series of early errors, thinking he would have room to manoeuvre in the Middle East. He made a speech in Cairo about a “New Beginning” for the region. A short time later he would help to snuff out the Egyptian Arab Spring that erupted close by, in Tahrir Square. Egypt’s military, long subsidised by Washington, were allowed to take back power.

Obama won the 2009 Nobel peace prize, before he had time to do anything, for his international diplomacy. And yet he stepped up the war on terror, oversaw the rapid expansion of a policy of extrajudicial assassinations by drone, and presided over the extension of the Iraq regime-change operation to Libya and Syria.

And he threatened penalties for Israel over its illegal settlements policy – a five-decade war crime that has gone completely unpunished by the international community. But in practice his inaction allowed Israel to entrench its settlements to the point where annexation of parts of the West Bank is now imminent.

Tame or destroy

Neoliberalism is now so entrenched, so rapacious that even a moderate socialist like Corbyn is seen as a major threat. And unlike a Blair, Obama or Trump, Corbyn is much harder to tame because he has a grassroots movement behind him and to which he is ultimately accountable.

In the US, the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party prevented the left-insurgent candidate, Bernie Sanders, from contesting the presidency by rigging the system to keep him off the ballot paper. In the UK, Corbyn got past those structural defences by accident. He scraped into the leadership race as the token “loony-left” candidate, indulged by the Labour party bureaucracy as a way to demonstrate that the election was inclusive and fair. He was never expected to win.

Once he was installed as leader, the power-structure had two choices: to tame him like Blair, or destroy him before he stood a chance of reaching high office. For those with short memories, it is worth recalling how those alternatives were weighed in Corbyn’s first months.

On the one hand, he was derided across the media for being shabbily dressed, for being unpatriotic, for threatening national security, for being sexist. This was the campaign to tame him. On the other, the Murdoch-owned Times newspaper, the house journal of the neoliberal elite, gave a platform to an anonymous army general to warn that the British military would never allow Corbyn to reach office. There would be an army-led coup before he ever got near 10 Downing Street.

In a sign of how ineffectual these power-structures now are, none of this made much difference to Corbyn’s fortunes with the public. A truly insurgent candidate cannot be damaged by attacks from the power-elite. That’s why he is where he is, after all.

So those wedded to the power-structure among his own MPs tried to wage a second leadership contest to unseat him. As a wave of new members signed up to bolster his ranks of supporters, and thereby turned the party into the largest in Europe, Labour party bureaucrats stripped as many as possible of their right to vote in the hope Corbyn could be made to lose. They failed again. He won with an even bigger majority.

Redefining words

It was in this context that the neoliberal order has had to play its most high-stakes card of all. It has accused Corbyn, a lifelong anti-racism activist, of being an anti-semite for supporting the Palestinian cause, for preferring Palestinian rights over brutal Israeli occupation. To make this charge plausible, words have had to be redefined: “anti-semitism” no longer means simply a hatred of Jews, but includes criticism of Israel; “Zionist” no longer refers to a political movement that prioritises the rights of Jews over the native Palestinian population, but supposedly stands as sinister code for all Jews. Corbyn’s own party has been forced under relentless pressure to adopt these malicious reformulations of meaning.

How anti-semitism is being weaponised, not to protect Jews but to protect the neoliberal order, was made starkly clear this week when Corbyn criticised the financial elite that brought the west to the brink of economic ruin a decade ago, and will soon do so again unless stringent new regulations are introduced. Useful idiots like Stephen Pollard, editor of the rightwing Jewish Chronicle, saw a chance to revive the anti-semitism canard once again, accusing Corbyn of secretly meaning “Jews” when he actually spoke of bankers. It is a logic intended to make the neoliberal elite untouchable, cloaking them in a security blanket relying on the anti-semitism taboo.

Almost the entire Westminister political class and the entire corporate media class, including the most prominent journalists in the left-liberal media, have reached the same preposterous conclusion about Corbyn. Whatever the evidence in front of their and our eyes, he is now roundly declared an anti-semite. Up is now down, and day is night.

High-stakes strategy

This strategy is high stakes and dangerous for two reasons.

First, it risks creating the very problem it claims to be defending against. By crying wolf continuously about Corbyn’s supposed anti-semitism without any tangible evidence for it, and by making an unfounded charge of anti-semitism the yardstick for judging Corbyn’s competence for office rather than any of his stated policies, the real anti-semite’s argument begins to sound more plausible.

In what could become self-fulfilling prophecy, the anti-semitic right’s long-standing ideas about Jewish cabals controlling the media and pulling levers behind the scenes could start to resonate with an increasingly disillusioned and frustrated public. The weaponising of anti-semitism by the neoliberal order to protect its power risks turning Jews into collateral damage. It makes them another small or bigger drama in the increasingly desperate attempt to create a narrative that deflects attention from the real power-structure.

And second, the effort to stitch together a narrative of Corbyn’s anti-semitism out of non-existent cloth is likely to encourage more and more people to take a step back from the screen so that those unintelligible pixels can more easily be discerned as a smoking gun. The very preposterousness of the allegations, and the fact that they are taken so seriously by a political and media class selected for their submissiveness to the neoliberal order, accelerates the process by which these opinion-formers discredit themselves. Their authority wanes by the day, and as a result their usefulness to the power-structure rapidly diminishes.

This is where we are now: in the final stages of a busted system that is clinging on to credibility by its fingernails. Sooner or later, its grip will be lost and it will plunge into the abyss. We will wonder how we ever fell for any of its deceptions.

In the meantime, we must get on with the urgent task of liberating our minds, of undoing the toxic mental and emotional training we were subjected to, of critiquing and deriding those whose job is to enforce the corrupt orthodoxy, and of replotting a course towards a future that saves the human species from impending extinction.

Comedian Dieudonné Censored Throughout France

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France Controversial Comic

Last week, French comedian, actor and activist Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala gained international attention when, in a move backed by French President Francois Hollande and the country’s highest court, his comedy tour was banned in several French cities. The bannings followed a January 6 announcement from France’s interior minister Manuel Valls that he considered Dieudonné’s performances anti-semitic and a “a grave disturbance of public order”.

To be honest, I can’t say I’m familiar enough with Dieudonné to know whether he is anti-semitic or, as has happened to many others, he was given that label because he’s anti-Zionist or just critical of certain policies of the Israeli government. However, given his background it’s highly unlikely that he’s racist. He himself is of mixed race, his father being a white artist and his mother a black accountant originally from Cameroon. He was raised mostly by his mother since they divorced when he was one. His first comedy partner and childhood friend was Jewish, and in the 1997 and 2001 legislative elections in Dreux, he campaigned against racism and ran against the National Front.

Even if Dieudonné was a racist and anti-semite he should not have been censored (though it’s true if his performances weren’t banned I may not have heard of him). No matter how offensive one might find someone’s words and ideas, the best policy is open discussion and debate so people can decide for themselves what to believe and what to reject.