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Post-Osloism: Fraud of the century
Post-Osloism: Fraud of the century
Remember the Oslo Accords of 1993?
Remember the handshake that began it all? Under cover of a smokescreen charade of public negotiations that not even the Palestinian representatives knew were fake those clever peace loving Norwegians had pulled off the peace coup of the century. Secretly, behind the scenes they had organised top level talks that had led to an agreement. It is now over to you, they said. Our work here is done. We will be back next year to bestow a prize on one of you who we deem to have been the most worthy contributor to the noble cause of peace as at the end of the previous calendar year. Who were those nice people? the world said in unison and entirely forgot about the whaling.
1993 was quite a year. It is interesting to reflect on how much has changed since then. For instance Norway would not now be an acceptable good faith intermediary between the Israelis and the Palestinians and that’s just for a start.
But back then the world celebrated. It is well to reflect a moment on the scope of what was agreed and the pent up emotion it released. (As provided in a second by that enormously useful and important resource Wikipedia currently in need of a hand).
At the core was the establishment of the Palestinian Authority with full support for all the limbs of civil administration including the training and equipping of a militia that was to steadily replace the IDF in Gaza and the West Bank. Billions of dollars came with the deal. Governments and NGO’s competed with one another to throw money, volunteers and sympathy at the poor wronged Palestinians and their agencies. Western liberals, including inevitably flocks of Jews, earnestly gave their time and resources to rebuild the newly minted ancient and noble nation of Palestine. For example Marcus Einfeld helped with the jurisprudence of the new court systems. George Soros, an enormously important financier of the “progressive agenda”, has also been an enormously important supporter of the Palestinian cause.
James Wolfensohn helped so much Abbas gave him the Palestine Prize.
Unfortunately there was one detail in the Accords that could have been in the finest of fine print for all the attention it has received from the liberal/left and the media yet has been there from day one on page one in plain view like a giant cow patty on the paper. It came with the Norwegians. This was the issue of “Palestinian refugees” and in particular the notion of an Arab right of return to Israel; all of Israel. All of the Arabs. That was deferred to a later phase of the peace process. (Not of course the issue of the larger number of Jewish refugees robbed and brutally expelled from Arab countries where they had lived since before there were Muslims – that subject was closed. In fact it has never really been open).
Alarmist nonsense, the left/liberals jeered. This is an ambit claim. The Palestinians know they can’t hold out for an unlimited Arab right of return. It would, in the words of Noam Chomsky, mean the destruction of Israel. They know this is a two state solution and if that means anything at all it means one of those states is the Jewish state. They must know that all this global outpouring of help and nurturing and myth making is conditional on that. The Palestinians are not stupid. They want peace too. So say the left/liberals.
The left/liberals were shamefully wrong and I have termed the gut wrenching consequences of that, and how the left/liberals come to terms with it, Post-Osloism.
They are in denial now. Soon anger and the spitting of blame will come (doesn’t it always with the left/liberals?) and there will be desperate attempts to retroactively forge new positions for themselves in their long and sordid history of feeding the forces of Palestinian and Islamist rejectionism. Then will come a deep and maudlin depression. Already “Palestinian rights’ has slipped off the agenda of left/liberal fringe parties, such as the Australian Greens, as if it was a policy to stone homosexuals to death; which of course among other things it is. The Greens have gone into the political party equivalent of chronic major depression; a speechless, no media allowed, moral fugue with a silence so profound they may as well be a caucus of mummies in a museum at midnight.
The terrible news for the left/liberals is that the Palestinians have now abandoned even the pretence of a two state solution and Condoleezza Rice has exposed the breathtaking scope and audacity of their bad faith. They are now out with it. No Jewish state. They had no choice really. They were offered everything and more. All but a few percent of Judea and Samaria with land swaps for that, a deal on Jerusalem which made it a shared capital, a multi-billion dollar Norwegian administered fund for the benefit of the “refugees” (can you believe this stuff? refugees from 1948? nothing for the Jewish refugees from Arab countries of course who ended up in Israel), some people taken back. Everything they could possibly conceivably want and so far more than what was reasonable it is on a different planet.
They could not take “yes” for an answer. They were cornered so they said “no” to yes. They demanded an unlimited Arab “right of return”, knowing this is the supercharged deal breaker from hell that leaves no room to move except war. They say seven million people around the place and abroad are eligible. That means no Jewish state of course. It means no state at all really if it doesn’t have sovereignty over its own borders.
We should have seen it coming with the Hamas Fatah shotgun wedding. The optimists thought the “moderates” might wean Hamas from their violent genocidal ways. They must have known that the opposite was true but as is so often the case with Palestine is was just easier to think that.
Certainly it was obvious from the Abbas UN speech and his speech to the American Palestinians that immediately preceded it.
On Friday afternoon, Abbas said he was adamant about not recognizing Israel as the Jewish state.
"They talk to us about the Jewish state, but I respond to them with a final answer: We shall not recognize a Jewish state," Abbas said in a meeting with some 200 senior representatives of the Palestinian community in the US, shortly before taking the podium and delivering a speech at the United Nations General Assembly.
Should there be any doubt they have put a figure on it. Seven million.
Everyone must have known that the Palestinian narrative was the mother of all crocks (the sudden almost mystical rebirth of the ancient Muslim nation of Palestine that predates Judaism and the Jews, for instance) but what the hell. Ultimately this one is about religion for these people and it’s best to shut up about that because it hurts people’s feelings to question it let alone challenge it. These people in particular it seems and in certain parts of Europe it could be against the law on that count alone. As long as they recognise Israel and stop trying to kill Jews at every opportunity that is enough to expect, they thought. Everything else comes under legitimate multiculturalism and respect for the national narrative of a tragically wronged people who have been made to pay for a horrible European crime of which they are innocent. This includes the Jew hatred for which they can hardly be blamed. The Palestinians, indeed all Arabs, are victims of European crimes themselves, so the story goes, and the foisting of Israel on the Arabs, or as the Islamists would have it, on the Muslims, is one of them.
How many times have we heard variations of this? The liberal/left that infest our universities and mainstream media may well have succeeded in making this fantasy, or important parts of it, or worse, the accepted wisdom of the intellectual classes. It is certainly the prevailing orthodoxy of the urban commentariat across the West and this is no mean feat in liberal societies with a free press and free-flowing information and with liberal universities that encourage scholarship, free thought and the pursuit of truth.
Back in 1993 all of a sudden it briefly became almost hip to be Israeli. Israel was in fashion from London to Paris to Rio but it didn’t last. It began to fade immediately with the new war against Israel and the Jews which was waged with a terrible fresh intensity everywhere but especially in Israel. In terms of lives and human misery Oslo has achieved more death, terror and horror than most other vacuous bumbling diplomatic interventions by stupid and supercilious people. The killings went on even more relentlessly than before and Israel brought the condemnation of the world upon itself, largely mobilised by the left/liberals, to stop it.
The left/liberals who have deluded themselves that the Palestinians were not serious about this (“well they couldn’t be could they? It would mean the destruction of Israel.”) must now, if they are honest, dwell on the consequences of being so badly wrong for so long. They can no longer occupy the place that assumed the Palestinians were acting in good faith. They cannot. They will look like 9/11 truthers or worse. They will have to shift position.
They will have to accept the gut-wrenching reality that Israel was not the principal obstacle to peace in the Middle East after all. They will have to turn on their beloved Palestinians and ask the question are these men helping or harming their people and therefore are we helping or harming their people by helping them. Or they can conclude they never believed in the Jewish state themselves really and that in any event the best solution is to rob the Jews of their democratic state and deliver the survivors to dhimmitude and say so just like the Palestinians.
The academics have been speaking in code about this for some time. They lack the courage to come and say it and so it is all done on a nudge and wink just like the incessant antisemitism of the thirties. This one for instance.
Is Israel an unnecessary distraction for a West in economic crisis?
I would tend to agree. What has happened over the last 12 months has been really worrying for Israel and Israel’s strategic position in terms of the Arab Spring in particular, global economic crises. I think all of these things fold in to create an air of uncertainty and a questioning of priorities which when you get a provocative and seemingly needlessly provocative leader like Netanyahu, depending on your perspective and one could make the case in that regard, the brass tacks conclusion you come to is that Israel could be more trouble than it is worth.
This is a view that has been aired by people across both sides of the aisle in American politics in questioning the strategic value [of supporting Israel], particularly the Kissinger style foreign policy realists in the Republican party.
This is the old view that nations don’t have friends, just interests?
Exactly and if you weigh it up in a cost/benefit analysis, US national and strategic interest isn’t served by maintaining unquestioning support for not so much the state of Israel, but this particular Israeli government and their policies.
Their reasons for why Israel should be abandoned have been getting thinner for some time now. It has now reached the point where they can point at a single man. People who talk like this have concluded that the Jews are not worth the trouble and they have already primed themselves for what that means.
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hao yun chi
I hope you're proud of yourself, Justin
Justin:
"Here's some more, from Amazon:
Pride Logic & Hatred
Pride has nothing to do with it Geoff - it's about reality: the what is, and the what was.
Once again you choose to do an Alan (with the bear behind) Curran: hide. Why? I'll leave that up to you to reflect on.
On flawed logic:
If one is critical of US policies is one anti-American?
If one was critical of apartheid did that make one anti-white?
If one supports a better deal for our indigenous people does that make one anti-white Australian?
If one is anti-zionist does that make one anti-semitic, in which case there are many anti-semitic Jews?
Once again you avoid the bitter truth and play the racist card, from straw man to red herring. No doubt you are a (transparent) student of this type of stuff.
I'm not in this for pride or to win an argument - simply to highlight the unfortunate relationships that existed between the Nazis, Fascists & Zionist (Revisionists). This is not about Jews, it's about leadership, and the related ideology. And I don't like any type of Fascist leadership no matter the nation, the race, or creed. It's as simple as that.
Today the US ticks most of the boxes that would describe a fascist state - the black fella in the white house has seen to that. Does that make me anti-American, or anti -"black fella", or anti-US government? I suspect you know which box to tick.
That said, let's get down to the guts of the problem, for until we come to terms with what the problem actually is then there will never be peace (universally and individually).
So what is the guts of the problem?
In a word: hatred, the hatred (promoted by fear) that is implanted and nurtured in the minds and imaginations of children, by their leaders and their parents - this is not a Jewish thing, it's universal, and feeds on itself cursing both the giver and receiver - tis the lowest of the lowest.
Sadly nothing will change until the individual infected by hatred decides, like a drug addict, that it's time to quit - but I suspect most wear their hatred, as unconsciously as they wear their shoes.
Geoff, did you watch the Father and Son videos? If so, did you observe any hatred? I didn't, only Jewish souls who understood the nature of humane relationship (all things considered) and the destructive nature of hatred itself.
Geofff, does supporting those type of Jews make one anti-semitic?
Think about it mate (sans shoes).
Father and Son
Seeing that we are into the historical stuff here's more regarding the Fascist, and corrupt behaviour of Zionist {insert Geoff invective here}, that Matti Peleb warned of, and more candid historical stuff from his son Miko - definitely from my banned list:
The Son, correcting Zionist myth
The Father, warning of the corrupting nature of US aid that started in 1974 (funny that).
Could people like this and this handle the truth? One can only conclude that kids like this are mentally ill - they need help, but they probably won't get it from their parents.
What the fuck?
Justin: "It has not gone unnoticed that to the best of my observations you care not to address the 51 Documents that the Jewish Board of Directors did not have the balls to debate with Lenni Brenner."
What the fuck are you talking about Justin? Having just defamed the British infantry (and thererfore the Anzacs) in WW1 as "Nazi types" you come out with this piece of meaningless hogshit.
You really need to take a closer look at the places you choose to go to inform yourself. Probably the rest of us should start paying attention to these filthpits as well.
Headpeace filled with Straw
Is that the best you've got Geoff?
Once again you avoid the subject matter.
"It has not gone unnoticed that to the best of my observations you care not to address the 51 Documents that the Jewish Board of Directors did not have the balls to debate with Lenni Brenner."
From all reports those 51 documents exposing Zionist collaboration with Mussolini and Hitler are bona fide. No publisher would have had the stupidity to publish them (for obvious reasons) had there been any doubt. Brenner made that point absolutely clear, at the beginning of the interview I posted.
Geoff, if you wish to challange the authenticity of those documents (and content) then please do so. Show me the money.
If you disagree with Brenner then you have his email address - it would be an interesting exchange.
Here's a link to Amazon if you want to sue the publisher.
Mate you can attack the player all you want, but until you can come up with something concrete to disprove the above, then I can only assume the subject matter is totally true.
Here's some more, from Amazon:
Geoff, now would you like to address the subject matter, or find another straw man to get exited about. Lenni Brenner obviously has balls - you?
Read more
Geoff, what precisely is your obsession with this?
The Zionist were not better than fNazis and we were not these great heroes of WW1, we massacred tens of thousands who had nothing to do with anything in Palestine and Turkey.
We massacred innocent Bedouins after the war and the racism towards Arabs was truly as bad then as it is now.
There are many jews who are very ordinary, decent human beings but there are many Jews, as described by Ilan Pappe and Benny Morris, who were no better than Nazis.
For thine is the kingdom - of Zion
Geoff, my apologies for reading stuff you disapprove of. I agree, who knows who said what to who, and especially if it's reported by a lefty type froggy.
We all must add them French, as persons to be avoided, to that looooooong list of authors, articles, books, historians, documents, and miscellaneous scumbags who are vile enough to spew out bile that in any way reflects a morsel of truth regarding Zionist idealism, ambitions and behaviour.
I suppose one has to reply on (reliable) historical data regarding the essence and descent of Zionist ideology.
It has not gone unnoticed that to the best of my observations you care not to address the 51 Documents that the Jewish Board of Directors did not have the balls to debate with Lenni Brenner.
It also has not gone unnoticed that history records Ze'ev Jabotinsky was a fascist lover, here's a pic of him all dressed up in his Nazi type uniform. It is also a fact of history that Bibi Netanyahu's father was Jabotinsky's adoring secretary and supporter. Like father like son no doubt.
It is also a fact that the Zionist Youth trained in Mussolini's fascist Italy until Mussolini felt it advantageous to pal up with Hitler.
It would appear that Zionist Revisionists found Fascism somewhat compatible with Zionist ideology - it showed then and it shows now. If Nazi Germany had not been anti-Semitic then it would be a safe bet that the Revisionists would have been totally comfortable with Hitler as well.
Fascism, Nazism, Zionism - birds of a feather, ideologies that are underpinned by bloody minded nationalism, hatred, racism and propaganda, that inevitability manifest in violence as the preferred model of doing business. "Noble" ideas that descend ultimately into criminality and mental illness.
Through a glass, darkly. The rattle of a simple man.
Just why, me old (deceased? wombat and if so what, shape changer, is your new form?) did you quote an acknowleged anti semitic arsewipe? Brilliant poet nonetheless. Sometimes I wonder though whether or not he was rascist,; after all, such was the culture in his time, (think Shylock and Fagin,) that conflated avarice and unscrupulousness with Jewry was par for the course. Maybe like me, he wouldn't know a Jew if he tripped over one. (Unless of course he was in Israel, the body dismembered by a bomb blast, wearing a silly bit of cloth on the back of his melon or alternatively, dressed in sombre colours, a freaked out hair do, even sillier tall black hat with his shirt tail hanging out of his pants.)
But I digress, such is my want with a junk yard for a mind.
I would certainly not engage with Geoff on this topic, going over the same old ground that was well covered in my post " A dogs breakfast" some years ago.
(Sorry about the the lack of link, I've been denied access.)
No, what does interest me is Geoff's obsession; it reminds me of the local, so called, Aboriginal population; not all of them but a significant majority. Emotionally well balanced, they've got a chip on both shoulders and most of 'em unrecognisable as being even part Abo.
The dispossessed and persecuted have a psychology and culture of their own. This is the dumb thing, they could so easily be integrated into the general community, all that is required is that that they be good neighbours.
It's a self perpetuating "apartheid" . Us versus them, epitomised by the decisions of Pat O'Shane and the disgraceful assault on Austrialia day. For once I agree with Tony Abbott; time to move on and embassies are for foreignors.
I'm not judgmental, I merely observe mindsets and besides being a junk yard, my mind is critically analytical.
Hei Shui Long Nian
To be quite candid Scott, iJustin had no idea that man, whose lips form prayers to broken stones, was just another anti-semitic semantic arsewipe, only ever read a few of his poems, that's it, never again - looks like he's gotta go on me banned list.
Don't engage Geoff? Shucks.
You're missing the point old wanderer, I want to engage my Lotus, just think about it, muse on our more tender moments together, we could serenade each another with touching songs, in the manner of Leonard Cohen (I think he's not on my list - yet):
Just fantasize on our 4 play, and our 27 play (a favourite, especially when combined with 72 play in D sharp); truly it could be the birth of a beautiful marriage - but it aint gunna happen...
Geoff is far too tight to even afford me a decent ring, I'm sure he'd much prefer Alan, for obvious reasons.
Yep, that smelly old useless mangy (fatally flawed) warrior wombat is deaded. A big bang, a somewhat bigger bounce, and then a whimper, but onlookers reckoned it sounded more like a tiny burp. He won't be missed - funny, that's what the driver of the car that hit Winnie said as well, or something like that.
So it's back to being me, the creature I was born, that which I am, and was, and will be: A Water Dragon
"Nazi style" uniforms
That "Nazi style" uniform Lt. Jabotinsky is wearing in that photograph Justin has just posted here is that of 38th Royal Fusiliers. This was the Jewish Legion from Palestine that among other things fought along side the Anzacs at Gallopoli. Ben Gurion also served in the RF as a private.
If that is a "Nazi style" uniform then a number of my relatives died wearing "Nazi style" uniforms, or the shreds of them, including one who died while tending Australian POW's of the Japanese in Burma in 1943. So did the relatives of many other Australians.
If you had an ounce of genuine morality about you, Justin, you would apologise for that comment and come to what remains of your senses.
Would John Winston Howard...
Apologise? Not on your JWH Geoff, all uniforms look Nazi "type" to me, regardless, no matter what uniform the stupid prick wore, nothing will change the fact that the moron fancied the fascist mode of fucking with innocent peoples lives. So did Bibi's dad, so does Bibi, who, apparently by his own admission stated his father influenced him most - which is quite normal.
Once again, it has not been lost on yours truly that you play the straw man, rather than have the balls to address the guts of those historical documents which reveal the collaboration of the Zionist Revisionists with Mussolini and Hitler.
Once again:
I don't apologise to ignorant Fascists, or those who support Fascism, no matter what they wear - would you apologise to Hitler, or Mussolini, or those scumbag turds who supported them?
If you feel the above quotes have been made up by a pinko self hating Jew then I'm sure that Lenni Brenner would be happy to discuss the matter with you, to the best of my knowledge no other Zionist has to date:
BrennerL21@aol.com.
Philip Mendes
Arie : The scholar who came up with it, Philip Mendes, apparently a committed Zionist himself, doesn't agree with these authors (on not very clear grounds) but at least he pays them the compliment to take them seriously.
Philip Mendes, on the Zionist left as I understand it, Arie, but you probably know better than me, may or may not have paid those authors that compliment some years ago. I suspect he was just doing his job as a research academic. But let me be very clear on this point. I don't pay those authors that compliment..
Antisemitic propaganda
"Cruel Zionism" 2 Ben Gurion - stolen land
Geoff says:
You will note they never provide references. If they do it's to an "interview" with a "former Ben Gurion aide" on page 14 of an obscure French left newspaper published in 1956. This is how Nazis and other leftists fight their wars against the Jews and the West and it does Justin no credit at all to indulge it. "
So what do you think of this one Geoff:?
"One day, or rather night, in 1956 I sat up at his house till three in the morning. ... That night, a beautiful summer night, we had a forthright discussion on the Arab problem. 'I don't understand your optimism,' Ben Gurion declared. 'Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We come from Israel, it's true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been antisemitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwiztz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations' time, but for the moment there is no chance. So, it's simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army. Our whole policy is there. Otherwise the Arabs will wipe us out.' " [p. 99]
"That was Ben Gurion all over: he had told me that so as to show how well he knew in his heart that Israel could not exist without peace with the Arabs, but his stubborn, aggressive, unbending character prevented him from following what his own intelligence told him. The best proof of that is that having lost his grip on power his intelligence reasserted itself; he even became a 'Goldmannite', declaring that all the occupied territories except Jerusalem should be restored." [pp. 99-100]
It supposedly comes from the memoirs of Nahum Goldmann, the founder and long time president of the World Jewish Congress. (Goldmann, N., 1978, The Jewish Paradox: a Personal Memoir)
See:
http://globalwebpost.com/farooqm/study_res/zionism/nahum_paradox.htm
Unanswered questions
I'm not playing this game, Arie. I'll persue historical items that are of interest and relevant such as the robbing and brutal expulsion of the Iraqi Jews by Arab fascists beginning with the Second World War and continuing post war until the job was finished By Saddam. I'll do that on another thread.
I know the genocidal and dickhead lefts have spent decades poring over Israeli and other Western books, newspapers, biographies, memoirs, reports, academic opinions, speeches .... to find material that they think they can use to demonise Israel (and the US -- boy do they ever hate the US) And the West. That is what they do and they have nothing better to do.
It comes in handy to obfuscate truth and that is also what they do. Also to destract from awkward questions on where they stand. From memory we haven't cleared up one in particular. Where do you stand on the two state solution, Arie? Do you think Israel has no right to exist and should be destroyed?
As I recall the last time this came up you muttered something about demographics and had to run off to look after visitors.
Non-Zionist terrorism
This is an example of why I am asserting that it is imperative that that part of the left that has been inclined to accept the anti-Israel leftist "pro-Palestine" narrative should take a close look at what they may be harbouring.
Yes, I mean you Australian Greens. Among others.
Remember this is Baghdad 1941. The very darkest hour of the war. The Holocaust is in full blast in Europe, the Baltic states and Russia. There has just been a pro-Nazi coup against the British advised regime which the British will have to put down as efficently and thoroughly as possible. The city is seething with agents from countries at war and every other band you can imagine --- Nazis, British, Islamists, Fascist French, criminal gangs out for plunder and revenge, operatives of the Mufti of Berlin and Jerusalem.
Also present are some Zionist agents from Palestine, in so close alliance with the British they were part of its war machine, doing what they can to help the large thriving 2500 year old established Jewish community get out of harm's way.
In the middle of this horrible war some bombs go off in synagogues. It would be astounding if anybody noticed. Who does Marilyn (and apparently Arie) blame? The Jews. Well documented.
Apparently it wasn't even the Zionists.
"right or wrong my country" wrong!
Geoff wrote:
“Remember this is Baghdad 1941. The very darkest hour of the war.…present are some Zionist agents from Palestine, …doing what they can to help the large thriving 2500 year old established Jewish community get out of harm's way.
In the middle of this horrible war some bombs go off in synagogues. It would be astounding if anybody noticed. Who does Marilyn (and apparently Arie) blame? The Jews. Well documented.”
Geoff can’t you in “your right or wrong my country” zeal ever get anything right? The bombings under discussion started in April 1950, not in “the very darkest hour of the war”, 1941.
One lie at a time
Arie, when you referred to bombings of synagogues in the years 1941 and 1942, and supported Marilyn's version also set in wartime Baghdad, I took you to mean the years 1941 and 1942. As you would.
Like here
Yehudah Shenhav wrote:
: "The Zionist movement began to pay attention to Mizrahi Jewry in the years 1941 – 1942. It was then that Ben Gurion introduced his 'one million plan' Anticipating that many Jews will be annihilated by Nazi persecution causing problems for the Zionist movement, Ben Gurion decided that a plan must be introduced based on Jews from Arab lands.”
How to get these Jews to migrate from a country as for instance Iraq, where they had lived and were well respected for centuries, to a place like Israel. It was by the methods of what Ben Gurion himself called at one stage “cruel Zionism”.
Let us look at what one of the victims, an ertstwhile Iraqi Jew called Naeim Giladi, wrote about this:
yadda yadda yadda
Fine by me. We'll move onto the Iraqi exodus of 1950. It's good that people should know about this. However I will leave it to another thread for which I am about to submit a starter.
To the back of the class
Geoff, I am out of patience with you. You go to the back of the class for a while.
You wrote:
"Arie, when you referred to bombings of synagogues in the years 1941 and 1942, "
And to sustain that fib came up with one of my quotes:
" Yehudah Shenhav wrote:
"The Zionist movement began to pay attention to Mizrahi Jewry in the years 1941 – 1942. "Since when doers 'paying attention' equate bombing?
And Marilyn can speak up for herself but she never referred to "wartime bombing" - neither did I "support" such a fictitious post.
And how come that you, who suggested that you have seen all this literature before, could be misled by slipshod reading of one bit of my posts?
Anyway, you do not deserve attention for a while. A pity you couldn't make up your mind about that Ben Gurion quote or are you dismissing him too now as a "leftwing Zionist"?
Here we go round the prickly pear
The left and why they must lie about Jewish refugees
Here is a detailed account of the miserable treatment of Jews in Iraq since the Nazi wartime insurgency in Baghdad in 1941. We should ask ourselves, not whether the genocidal and dickhead wings of the left are lying about the brutal persecution, robbing and expulsion (or escape) of Jews from Muslim lands in the twentieth century. We should ask ourselves why they feel compelled to lie..
I believe the answer is obvious. It has absolutely nothing to do with the Palestinians who the left are perfectly happy to see kept on display in cages like animals in a zoo in Lebanon, Syria and half a dozen other countries, apparently for all eternity or until Israel is destroyed and its population too is robbed and destroyed.
http://www.wsps.org.uk/jewsofiraq.html
Life was not too bad until April 1941, when a pro-Nazi coup d’ etat was mounted against the pro British and the government which resulted in a pogrom. On Shavout, 1st and 2nd June 1941, 300 Jews were killed, hundreds injured, shops and houses looted. The British troops came back to re-establish power. That was called the Farhud. Life returned to normal afterwards, although some Jews decided to leave Iraq.
Unfortunately, after the birth of Israel life became unbearable. 150,000 Jews left Iraq on operation Ezra and Nechamia to go to Israel. They had to forfeit their citizenship, leaving behind all their properties, belongings and all they had for over 2,500 years. They went to Israel and they had to live in tents - Maabarot until they were resettled. Few thousands decided to stay in Iraq. My family was one of them.
The left and genocide
There is one final point that should be made about the left and why a wing of it deserves the tag -- the genocidal left.
Take a look at the sneering reference to Ben Gurion's motives in ordering the rescue of as many Sephardic Jews as possible that Arie quotes in his earlier post on this thread. Those in the gutless and pissweak wings of the left in particular should take a close look at this and consider what nasty virus you are carrying.
' Anticipating that many Jews will be annihilated by Nazi persecution causing problems for the Zionist movement, Ben Gurion decided that a plan must be introduced based on Jews from Arab lands.” [my emphasis]
Arie then moves on effortlessly to say this:
"How to get these Jews to migrate from a country as for instance Iraq, where they had lived and were well respected for centuries, to a place like Israel. It was by the methods of what Ben Gurion himself called at one stage “cruel Zionism”. [for which of course Arie provides no reference or context but for himself]
Remember now the time frame Arie has provided for the desperate and courageous efforts of the Palestinian Zionists in the rescue of Jews still beyond the reach of Hitler that he and Marilyn have so breezily reviled.
The years 1941-42
You can't make this stuff up.
During these years British and Australian troops, along with other allies, were deployed in a desperate struggle to keep Rommel out of Egypt and Palestine. The worst case was a linkup with Japanese forces still on the rampage from the east.
Rommel was no genocidal murderer but there can be no doubt what would have quickly followed on his heels.
By now, the Jews in Europe and Russia were already in the maw of Hitller and that was most of the Jews in the world. The Zionists in Palestine were well aware by now what was going on. So was everyone else.
Syria and Lebanon were in the hands of Nazi German allies who had facilitated a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq. Damascus might not yet have been liberated from the fascists by Australian forces (again)
In Palestine, the "Palestinian" Arab leadership was in Berlin cheering on Hitler, raising SS divisions from Yugoslav Muslims and poring over the blueprints of Auschwitz.
So what motives do Arie and his references attribute to Ben Gurion and his Zionist colleagues for their attempts to save as many as possible of other Jews in the very plainest of grave and imminent danger?
The annilation of these people would cause problems for the Zionist movement.
I suppose it is possible for a person to think this way and not be an antisemite. But they sure must hate people.
"cruel zionism"
"Take a look at the sneering reference to Ben Gurion's motives in ordering the rescue of as many Sephardic Jews as possible that Arie quotes in his earlier post on this thread. Those in the gutless and pissweak wings of the left in particular should take a close look at this and consider what nasty virus you are carrying."
Arie then moves on effortlessly to say this:
"How to get these Jews to migrate from a country as for instance Iraq, where they had lived and were well respected for centuries, to a place like Israel. It was by the methods of what Ben Gurion himself called at one stage “cruel Zionism”. [for which of course Arie provides no reference or context but for himself]”
After having recuperated from the accusation that I am a ‘nasty virus’ the piss weak left should keep an eye on I have decided to answer this one as well, though this man rapidly reaches the stage in which I will no longer bother.
The claim that Ben Gurion used the term “cruel Zionism” comes from the erstwhile Iraqi Jew Naeim Giladi, who has of course been accused by Geoff’s kindred in spirit that he is another bare faced liar. Here is an interview with him:
http://www.inminds.co.uk/jews-of-iraq.html
David Hirst, who used to be Middle East correspondent for the Guardian, provides some background to it all. This is what he wrote in his book that you can find in the ‘list of bare faced liars’. The term ‘cruel Zionism’ can be found here as well:
The left and bare faced lying
I have just now read this warped piece of gross historical revisionism and posted a reply on the Soda and Pretzel thread.
As you can see Arie's account of why the Jews left Israel is an example of the bare faced leftist lie of which I speak.
We should ask ourselves why the dickhead and genocidal wings of the left do this. I believe the answer is obvious. They know the Israel delegitmisers have no case. The state of Israel would have to be the most legitimate nation of all. If they can succeed in delegitimising Israel then no state has legtimacy. That is the point and that is why these people have no place in any position of influence in academia or politics.
There are many truthful accounts of the robbing and brutal expulsion (or many cases escape) of Iraqi and other Jews from Arab lands, and Iran, where they lived for millenia. This book is one.
Iraq's last Jews
This from interview with one of the editors.
You would have to really hate Israel to pervert this terrible truth in the way Arie and Marilyn's "Iraqi friends" have here.
A list of the bare faced liars
In his disquisition about the bare faced liars of the left, purportedly a reaction to my account of the 1950-bombings in Iraq that, according to quite a few authors “encouraged’ Jews to leave a place where they had had a mostly honored position for millennia, Geoff Pahoff gives a rambling account of their history (mainly taken from an interview in David Horowitz’ baby, Frontpage Magazine, a veritable fountain of truth) and fails to address one point: the bombings, the topic of my earlier contribution.
Wikipedia mentions. “A secret Israeli inquiry in 1960 found no evidence that they were ordered by Israel or any motive that would have explained the attack, though it did find out that most of the witnesses believed that Jews had been responsible for the bombings.” So the investigators came apparently to a conclusion that directly contradicted most of their own witnesses.
Geoff would know what these witnesses were about. They were of course trying to “delegitimise” the state they were living in, “the most legitimate state of the world”.
“There are many truthful accounts of the robbing and brutal expulsion (or many cases escape) of Iraqi and other Jews from Arab lands, and Iran, where they lived for millenia (sic)” says Geoff, and comes up with exactly one, a book he found mentioned in, you guessed it, Frontpage Magazine, that has an interview with its authors.
We are left in the dark whether these authors discuss the bombings in any detail at all.
Well, there are quite a few authors that support the thesis that I discussed viz. that it was indeed the Israeli underground that was instrumental in these bombings.
.According to a contribution by the Latrobe sociologist Philip Mendes to a Jewish Studies Conference the following authors support the notion that the bombings in Iraq, that hastened the departure of Jews there, were indeed its handiwork (Mendes himself doesn’t believe so).
Several of these authors I already mentioned in my earlier post. The great majority of them are Jewish. Mendes finds it necessary to remark that they are “anti-Zionist” (without providing any evidence for that – the idea is of course to make these authors look suspect to a Zionist audience).
Here is the list of supporting authors:
Avnery, Uri. 1986. My Friend, the Enemy. London:Zed Books.
Black Panthers. 1975. "The Iraqi Jews and Their Coming to Israel," in Uri Davis & Norton Mezvinsky (eds.), Documents from Israel 1967-1973. London: Ithaca Press:126-133.
Cohen, Ben. 1999. Review of "The Jewish Exodus from Iraq". Journal of Palestine Studies, 27(4):110-111.
Eveland, Wilbur Crane. 1980. Ropes of Sand. London: W.W.Norton.
Giladi, Naim. 1993. Ben-Gurion's Scandals: how the Haganah and the Mossad eliminated Jews. New York: Glilit Publishing.
Hirst, David. 1977. The Gun and the Olive Branch. London:Futura Books.
Shapiro, Raphael. 1984. "Zionism and Its Oriental Subjects." in Jon Rothschild (ed.) Forbidden Agendas: Intolerance and Defiance in the Middle East. London: Al Saqi Books: 23-48.
Shiblak, Abbas. 1986. The Lure of Zion: The Case of the Iraqi Jews. London: Al Saqi.
Shohat, Ella. 1988. "Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Standpoint of its Jewish Victims." Social Text 19-20:1-35.
Wolfsohn, Marion. 1980. Prophets in Babylon: Jews in the Arab World. London: Faber and Faber.
The left and the truth about the Iraqi Jews
The proposition that the Iraqi Jews, eventually the entire community, fled Iraq because they were terrorised into it by "Zionists" , is about equivalent to what you would expect from a 9/11 truther. It's not quite on the same level as Holocaust denial (which of course the same people try on whenever they think they get away with it) but it is certainly in the same branch of "intellectual' thought.
Look at the list Arie has provided. He hasn't provided links but he doesn't need to. Most of the "sources' are well known and this material is typical of the era it was published. This is right at the very height of the last Zionism = Racism hysteria when even the UN General Assembly passed a resolution in support.
This is the most cynical lie that the left has ever tried to sell.
It is no coincidence that the genocidal left is recycling this material now. It is because they know the "two state solution" is off the table, having been exposed by the Palestinians themselves for the fraud it is. So it's back to the "one state solution", just like the seventies and eighties, and that requires the demonisation of Jews. For the genocidal left this demands equating "Zionisn" with "racism' and it's interesting they have no new material (although labelling Israel an "Apartheid state" is definitely new)
It is as if the left takes the truth, gives it a 180 degree twist, and voila, that's the new party line. At least Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood are honest about their genocidal antisemitism.
The brutal ethnic cleansing of the Iraqi Jews, one of the cruellest and most thorough in all of history short of actual extermination, and their flight to Israel, has been recorded in painful detail by the victims themselves and has been the subject of deep research by true academics over many years (not the frauds).
I posted a list of testimonials from the people themselves, telling us the history of their noble and fruitful society, and it's ultimate destruction by Arab fascists. Here it is again. I invite readers to scan it and pick a few accounts about what happened to these people at random.
http://iraqijews.awardspace.com/testimonies.html?
And that's just Iraq. Anyone want to talk about Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Algeria, Syria, Iran ...?
You knew them all, didn't you
"Look at the list Arie has provided. He hasn't provided links but he doesn't need to. Most of the "sources' are well known and this material is typical of the era it was published. This is right at the very height of the last Zionism = Racism hysteria when even the UN General Assembly passed a resolution in support."
This is Geoff all over. At first the strong suggestion is that Marilyn and I, apparently committed members of the 'genocidal left', respectively a 'nasty virus' in the 'piss weak left', cooked this thing up between ourselves. And when he is then confronted with a fairly respectable list of literature his reaction is : oh these are the usual suspects, dated stuff recycled now because the 'genocidal left' is out to do us the dirt. Us, us, though we rock and they suck and , for your information, you suck as well. But we knew that already.
Incidentally, that list is an abstract from a bibliography presented at a meeting not of the genocidal left but of a Jewish Study Centre. The scholar who came up with it, Philip Mendes, apparently a committed Zionist himself, doesn't agree with these authors (on not very clear grounds) but at least he pays them the compliment to take them seriously.
The man must be embarrassed reading Geoff's stuff.: "with friends such as this who needs enemies."
Another one
It was Jewish terrorism
It is now well documented that it was Jews that bombed Iraqi Jews and begged them to go to Israel because Europeans did not want to go.
You need to read more than your right wing ranters' bullshit.
Netanyahu's visit to Holland today.
Unfortunately his is to a certain extent still a voice crying in the wilderness, certainly as far as his own party is concerned, the Christian Democratic Union, that is presently in a minority coalition government that depends on the support of Wilders’ rabidly pro-Israel PVV. The policy towards Israel is mainly in the hands of the rightwing-liberal Minister of Foreign Affairs, Uri Rosenthal. Van Agt sent a copy of this op-ed by letter to Rosenthal.
Haul Netanyahu solidly over the coals when he visits us.
Make a point of asking the Israeli Prime Minister questions during his visit to the Netherlands. About the sabotage of the peace process, about the blockade of Gaza and the violations of human rights. That is instructive for him and others.
© afp
Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu is visiting our country on Thursday. The prospect of his visit causes quite a stir among those who are fighting for international law. When Netanyahu’s visit was announced earlier to take place in November some argued that this visitor should be declared to be an unwanted alien and sent home. For it is under his responsibility that numerous violations of international law have been committed, against the Charter of the United Nations, and against binding resolutions of the Security Council. But also against a whole range of international treaties to which the state Israel has committed itself. For instance the Convention of Geneva regarding the protection of civilians during a time of war. And quite a few others such as the treaty regarding the rights of children and that against torture.
So many are of the opinion that we should not admit this visitor and most certainly not with a red carpet and Champaign. It has also been suggested that his arrest on Dutch territory is an option, though this is impossible because of Netanyahu’s diplomatic inviolability.
We opt for a different treatment. Government and parliament should use the impending encounter with Mr.Netanyahu to haul him solidly over the coals. They should, among other things, ask the Israeli premier this question: how can you urge the resumption of peace negotiations with the Palestinians about a two state solution (that you have claimed to support) when you continue fully and even in accelerated tempo with the building and expansion of settlements in territories that have now been occupied for forty years, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.
You want to negotiate about a cake that you continue to greedily consume yourself.
There are other urgent questions for premier Netyanyahu. The European Union, and Holland too, has repeatedly exhorted the state of Israel to make an end to the strangling blockade of Gaza. The Israeli premier has each time again been heedless of these urgent requests that were shaken off like water of a duck’s back.
How can this arrogant rejection be reconciled with the steady efforts of Israel, and also of the Dutch government, to raise the relations between Israel and the European Union even further? The relations between Israel and the Netherlands are already deepened and broadened at breakneck speed, without doubt also during the impending visit of premier Netanyahu, without the government putting conditions regarding Israel’s behavior on human rights and its position on the peace process.
I would like to make some suggestions that, when acted upon, could make the visit by the Israeli premier more valuable. Our country calls itself not only the nursery but also, with a pride that is no longer justified, the guardian and focus of international law. It would therefore be good to give premier Netanyahu some extra days of hospitality to provide him with the opportunity to pay his respects to the International Court of Justice in the Hague and to explain there why Israel couldn’t care less about the 2004 judgment of that Court regarding the Wall, also called the ‘security fence’.
And perhaps Mr.Netanyahu could, when at it, also visit the International Criminal Court. There he can explain why the State of Israel, in contradistinction to all member states of the European Union, refuses to accept the jurisdiction of that Court. And why so many Israelis, who in all probability have committed war crimes such as the deliberate killing of Palestinian civilians, are still freely walking around. Many of these cases have been documented by Israeli human rights organizations.
If he stays even longer in Holland the Israeli premier might also be able to give a lecture to an authoritative audience of people involved in disarmament and weapons control. Then it might be discussed why Israel, that has already had since decades a considerable arsenal of nuclear weaponry at its disposal, refuses to sign the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The Institute Clingendael of the Dutch Society for International Affairs could offer him a platform for this. Then the question can also be asked why Israel is beating the war drum against Iran, though it does not allow itself any international inspection of its atomic arsenal and other weapons of mass destruction in its possession.
So let us welcome Mr.Netanyahu and provide him with the opportunity to deal with other people than just the denizens of the governmental quarters. His visit can then deliver instructive experiences, both for himself and others.
What the Greens support.
This sort of thing has nothing to do with the problematic peace process, of course. These are the official voices of the Palestinian leadership when talking to their own people just a few days ago..
Please do not respond by saying there are extremist Israeli or US politicians too, or there are hateful rabbis or Christian clergy as well. You will have lost the argument. To suggest there is an equivalence to Israeli or US society is disgusting to the point of being morally depraved.
And what do the Australian Greens do? Announce that BDS campaigns against Israel are "legitimate" tactics and press for the unilateral recognition of "Palestine" so there is "equivalence" between the "two sides".
Obscene.
Luxury
The truth about the peace process
There is another point of view on the peace process and why it is going nowhere, you know Paul. Apart from the left/liberal (look at me I'm a trendy progressive knowitall) narrative that swamps us all. The truth.
The problem is that the Australian Greens and the rest of the gutless left are too bloody cowardly to even listen to it.
The luxury living in Jenin.
Geoff, you keep peddling this fantasy of the hard doneby Jews, but have just come from a site where an offering (from a person of Jewish background) describes more violence and misappropriations of property in "Area C", on the West Bank, over the last couple of days.
But Geoff would have us beleive the oppressed Palestinans are better off than the Netanyahu real estate cronies and loafers in Tel Aviv, with their swimming pool water filched from Arab agricultural needs.
The luxury living in Gaza.
What this is about
Paul, if you really believe this is about forcing Israel to disgorge the West
Bank, Gaza and Arab Jerusalem you should look at this video and think about it. Obviously my words are not helping.
The Palestinians are not even "guest workers" in these countries no matter how badly "guest workers" are treated in Muslim or other countries. Palestinians are neither "guests" nor "workers". Guests and workers, even in Muslim countries, have rights. The Palestinians have none (except for the notable exception of Jordan where they have full citizen rights and where they form the majority of the population. Jordan, all of it, was part of the original "Palestine Mandate" afterall).
Moreover they do not, repeat do not, belong to a group distinguishable in any respect whatsoever from other Arabs, especially in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria, except for this artificial "national" construct that is the ugly bastard child of the UN, KGB and the Muslim Brotherhood and barely fifty years old.
They can have another Muslim state if they want one, they've been offered it enough times and they can call it what they like, but only idiots and liars say this is what this is about. It's about eradicating Israel because Israel is not a Muslim state. They'd feel the same way if Israel was "Christian" or "atheist" or whatever. Being secular and "Western" is enough to earn the undying hatred of many of these people, especially the MB and the Shi-ite equivalents.
And yes, in the nasty cesspit of Middle East politics, an enemy is essential for many groups in the Muslim countries to gain and hold power. They seek to rule by hate. Do not forget that in modern times Muslims kill many many many times more Muslims than they do anybody else no matter how many Christians and Jews they slaughter. At least up until now they have. Also we should not forget there are more Christian Copts in Egypt than there are Israelis and Palestinians put together. Their numbers might protect them for now but these people too are at risk.
But ultimately it's about robbing Jews of their land and property, and their lives ; it's always been about that. It is the achievement of the Western left that they have refined this tiny slice of property as "Arab" or "Palestinian" or "Muslim". Anything but Israeli or Jewish. They have redefined this tiny but tough bullwark against the most ruthless totalitarian and aggressive imperialism of our age as an "imperialist venture". They have had to suspend truth and history to do that.
That is why I despise them so.
Alternative reality
"they do not, repeat do not, belong to a group distinguishable in any respect whatsoever from other Arabs,"
What you wrote about the artificial states that comprise Arabia Geoff is of course true and had it not been for the diaspora would also apply to the Jews. Think what it would be like in that part of the world had the Jewish people not been ethnically cleansed? They'd be Muslim for a start and indistinguishable from the other sons of Abraham. As it is, centuries of co-habitation with Northern Europeans has most certainly changed their genetic make up and another culture adopted and mixed with their original one.
Hypocrisy
Paul, to my knowledge neither Chomsky or Mearsheimer has appeared on Press-TV. As odious and disgusting as I find their bigot-rooted views of the world, they were not on this occasion the target of my ire.
Loewenstein has. So has a number of other leading lights of the anti-Israel Australian left, including prominent member of the Stalinist wing of the Australian Greens.
Given these people can be defined by their almost violent BDS campaigns against Israel, this makes them hypocrites every bit as ugly and nasty as "Gallows" Galloway.
Paul, please don't bore me with the "they are often Jews" bit. It is tedious. You must know how much that counts with me by this stage of the game.
Flash!! Palestinians living under apartheid!
George "Gallows" Galloway
George Galloway -- disgusting hypocrite and liar.
Australian Greens and other Australian anti-Israel and anti-West campaigners and fanatics, including notably Antony Loewenstein and the "Freedom Flotilla" mob, routinely appear on Press-TV.
ode to Pliny.
After two weeks of Christmas solemnitude at WD, this splenetic outburst by Geoff Pahoff. Happy new year Geoff, but what brought this on?
Presumably you intend that your glowing assessment of Galloway should extend to Ant and others (me?) who also remain sceptical of your viewpoint or feel it needs a little qualification or leavening; will head off to my closet and commence instant flagellation for daring to question the take provided above. But seriously, swathes of highly intelligent and well read folk like Loewenstein, Mearsheimer, Chomsky, often Jewish, btw and so forth- cant be totally a) evil and malicious, b) failing that, utterly foolish and unable to read a history book.
Israelis already have a country, what about the Palestinians, or is that just too silly a contradiction?
Israel is NOT under threat, it is a military power in its own right and too closely symbiotic with the US and its objectives to be under any meaningful threat.
It bellyaches paranoia like Hanson bellows paranioa over boat people, its understandable, a human foible. But at bottom, it needs to carry on to convince both itself and world opinion that it is hard done by, lest it be forced to disgorge East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank.
Which is counterproductive. Were all the money wasted by all concerned on military solutions, instead ploughed into making the Territories viable via infrastructure and investment in industry for the masses, I'd reckon things would change. currently, what Israel does to Palestine is not much better than the Warsaw ghetto in the forties, for lazy violent solutions to some thing better handled with a bit of nous, humanity and common sense.
And yes, I easily see Netanyahu wearing a brown shirt..he typifies what constitutes what's wrong with the Israeli side of the problem, except of course, by Geoff's reading, Israel and Israelis always are as pure as the driven snow and only the nasty lefties and Muslims have character flaws and (inevitably) bad intentions ..some thing I find a tad offensive.
Chutzpah
GP wrote "Name a single country in the history of the world, faced with threats comparable to that of Israel, that has a better record of human rights, the rule of law and concern for the lives of civilians."
This is a breath taking chutzpah. Whereas the "threats' are largely a matter of a paranoid imagination, the humans rights violations are very real.
For the paranoia see Carlo Strenger, Chief of the Clinical Graduate Program at the Department of Psychology of Tel Aviv University:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carlo-strenger/paranoid-vicious-circles_b_803673.html
Iraqi Jews
I have Iraqi friends who remember the Irgun and other setting off bombs in Iraq to induce the jews to go to Israel because no-one else wanted to.
Dr Elias Chacour wrote about it also.
"brutal expulsion" ? III
In the last paragraph of my first letter about this Ben Cohen, whom I quoted there, referred to the Zionist false flag-operation in Egypt that afterwards was called the "Lavon Affair". This is what Wikipedia says about it:
So according to Allon, says Cohen, these methods were first tried in Iraq (to induce the local Jews to move to Israel).
"brutal expulsion" ? II
. As far as Morocco is concerned I will quote some statements from Professor Pinto, a Jewish Dutchman of Moroccan origin, who is or was president of the European Federation of Moroccan Jews.
The quote is from the Dutch paper "De Telegraaf" of 9/20/2005
. "Many young Dutch people of Moroccan origin don't realise, according to Pinto, that Morocco was for a long time a quite pleasant land for Jews to live in." In my time there were 300,000 Jews living in Morocco" said the Professor who moved to Holland in 1963. Jews could function in all sections of society, he said. There was absolutely no question of discrimination. Pinto refers to the adviser of King Mohammed VI, A.Azoulay, as an example of the fact that Jews and Moroccans can live well together."
Thus far Pinto. What also seems to be forgotten is that, when in 1940 the German controlled French Vichy government issued racist laws excluding Jews from public functions and obliging them to wear the yellow star of David, Sultan Mohammed V refused to apply these laws in his country, then still a French colony, and made a point of inviting Moroccon rabbis to the enthronement celebrations.
It is true that after the foundation of Israel there have been locally some anti-Jewish riots but it is to me an open question to what extent the migration of the Moroccon Jews was a matter of the push from Morocco or the pull of Israel. At any case, according to Job Cohen, erstwhile Mayor of Amsterdam and now parliamentary leader of the Dutch Labor Party, who visited the place some years ago, the remaining Jewish population there is doing quite well. Also, King Hassan II issued invitations for the Jewish migrants to return. These seem not to have been taken up. For Palestinians to have on the West Bank the same position as Jews in Morocco can for them be only a pipe dream. But then, of course, the whole idea is to get them out through surreptitious "ethnic cleansing".
Brutal expulsion?
Geoff Pahoff’s tiresome repetition of hasbara myths will, I fear, never end. One of his latest has to do with:
" ... the issue of the larger number of Jewish refugees robbed and brutally expelled from Arab countries where they had lived since before there were Muslims – that subject was closed. In fact it has never really been open.”
I wrote about this elsewhere, especially as far as the Jews of Iraq and Morocco were concerned and the general conclusion was that the ‘brutality’ of this expulsion had a lot to do with the brutality of the methods Zionists employed to get these Jews to go to Israel. It all started with Ben Gurion’s “one million plan”:
Yehudah Shenhav wrote:
: "The Zionist movement began to pay attention to Mizrahi Jewry in the years 1941 – 1942. It was then that Ben Gurion introduced his 'one million plan' Anticipating that many Jews will be annihilated by Nazi persecution causing problems for the Zionist movement, Ben Gurion decided that a plan must be introduced based on Jews from Arab lands.”
How to get these Jews to migrate from a country as for instance Iraq, where they had lived and were well respected for centuries, to a place like Israel. It was by the methods of what Ben Gurion himself called at one stage “cruel Zionism”.
Let us look at what one of the victims, an ertstwhile Iraqi Jew called Naeim Giladi, wrote about this:
"I write this article for the same reason I wrote my book: to tell the American people, and especially American Jews, that Jews from Islamic lands did not emigrate willingly to Israel; that, to force them to leave, Jews killed Jews;…”
Giladi referred in this context inter alia to the late Wilbur Crane Eveland, erstwhile CIA operative, whose book "Ropes of Sand: America's Failure in the Middle East", N.Y. Norton 1980, was quite unwelcome to the foreign policy establishment. Roberta Strauss Feuerlicht, who wrote an equally unwelcome book that was suppressed after the first print run of 7,000 copies (The fate of the Jews: a people torn between Israeli power and Jewish ethics, New York Times Books, 1983) quotes extensively from Eveland:
"Just after I arrived in Baghdad an Israeli citizen had been recognized in the city's largest department store: his interrogation led to the discovery of fifteen arms caches brought into Iraq by an underground Zionist movement. In attempts to portray the Iraqis as anti-American and to terrorize the Jews, the Zionists planted bombs in the U.S. Information Service Library and in synagogues. Soon leaflets began to appear urging Jews to flee to Israel. Although the Iraqi police later provided our embassy with evidence to show that the synagogue and library bombings, as well as the anti Jewish and anti-American leaflet campaigns, had been the work of an underground Zionist organization, most of the world believed reports that Arab terrorism had motivated the flight of the Iraqi Jews whom the Zionists had 'rescued'…"
Indeed, the habitual assertion is that the two Jews who were hung for the affair after a trial had been 'falsely accused'. I don't know of any evidence that can lead to that assertion. And in case any one sniffs at the idea that the Iraqi police of around 1950 could come up with such a thing as reliable evidence s/he should consult the book of David Hirst, Middle East correspondent for the Guardian and contributor to such publications as the Christian Science Monitor, The Nation and others. Hirst is in "The Gun and the Olive Branch: The Roots of Violence in the Middle East" 1977, 1st ed., reissued 2003, quite emphatic about these Zionist bombings and he provides some further evidence for them. As Eveland mentioned above, the whole affair started rolling when an Israeli citizen was recognized in a Baghdad department store by a Palestinian refugee. This Israeli, Yehudah Tajjar, was in the first instance sentenced to life imprisonment in Iraq, but was released after ten years. He broke Jewish silence on this Zionist conspiracy when he was back in Israel. This led, in 1966, to a publication in the weekly magazine Ha'olam Hazeh. The full story was published, in 1972, in the organ of militant Sephardim Jews "The Black Panther", which also drew on the testimony of two Israeli citizens who were in Baghdad at the time, a certain Kaduri Salim and an Iraqi lawyer, then living in Tel Aviv. The Black Panther article is apparently very bitter about the fact that Iraqi Jews were 'induced' in this way to move to Israel. David Hirst quotes its statement that a community that "ruled over most of the resources of Iraq … was turned into a ruled group, discriminated against and oppressed in every aspect". This transformation took place in Israel.
One of those erstwhile Iraqi Jews is Ella Shohat, Professor of media and cultural studies at the City University of New York (CUNY). In her article "Rupture and Return : A Mizrahi Perspective on the Zionist Discourse" she is quite categorical on the Zionist bombings. She writes:
"The displacement of Iraqi Jews for example was not, simply, a choice of the Arab Jews themselves. Even if some Arab-Jews expressed a desire to go to Israel, or to "Zion", the question is why, suddenly, after millennia of not doing so, would they leave overnight? I would argue that Arab-Jewish displacement was the product of complex circumstances in which panic rather than desire for Aliya was the key factor. The 'in-gathering' seems less natural when one takes into account the circumstances forcing their departure: the efforts of the Zionist underground in Iraq to undermine the authority of the community leaders such as that of Hassam Sasson Khturi, Zionist attempts to place a 'wedge'between the Jewish and Muslim communities, for example by placing bombs in synagogues to generate anti-Arab panic on the part of Jews…"
Who smuggled the weapons, for the Zionist organization called "The Movement", into Iraq? Hirst quotes a letter from Yigal Allon, then chief of the Palmach commandos and later Foreign Minister of Israel, which seems to reveal that his group was responsible for this ( below I will quote Ben Cohen regarding a telling statement by Allon on this).
In his article Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam, Israel, published in the School for Peace Annual Review, January 2001, Yehudah Shenhav also refers to the bombing as if it is a matter that is commonly known. He writes:
"Around this time, working undercover as representatives of Solel Boneh, Israeli Mossad agents began underground activities in Iraq. All of a sudden there was an explosion in the Mas'uda Shem Tov synagogue and immediately afterwards 24,000 Jews registered to leave the country. Abbas Shiblak describes in his book how each time there was a fall in registration, another bomb went off followed by another mass exodus. Five of these bombs did the job."
Is there any scholarly weight now to the publications that have denied that there was a Zionist conspiracy here? The most authoritative of these seems to me the book by the Israel historian Moshe Gat, entitled "The Jewish Exodus from Iraq, 1948 -1951" London: Frank Cass, 1997. Daniel Pipes, the auctor intellectualis of 'campus watch', says, in his review of this book, inter alia:
"The author puts to rest the notion that Israeli agents used terrorism to get Iraqi Jews to make aliyah; 'there was no connection between the bomb-throwing incidents and the departure of the Jews'".
The scholar who reviewed the book for the Journal of Palestine Studies (in Vol.27, No.4, Summer 1998), Ben Cohen, was considerably less complacent on this point. He wrote:
"Gat lists a number of writers who have concluded that Israel was behind these attacks to terrorize the Jews into leaving. For Gat, however, it is 'unlikely that there will ever be' a definitive answer to the question of responsibility (p.187). But then he exonerates Israel in an example of the periodic inconsistencies that mar the text; he argues that the Zionist underground would not have adopted such a risky strategy at a time when the Iraqi police was closing in on them (p.186). Yet, he does not consider the possibility that leading Iraqis, whose pockets were being lined, turned a blind eye; nor does he take into account Yigal Allon's admission, in comments on the 'Lavon affair' of 1954 (i.e. a Zionist bombing campaign in Egypt – AB) that such a method of operation – a bombing campaign – 'was first tried in Iraq' "
1967
Tom Segevs masterpiece 1967 explains it all in terrible detail.
Someone send Geoff a copy - unless Geoff thinks yet another Israeli historian is talking crap.
Point taken
I take your point Paul Morrella.
In discussing these issues I make a distinction between a campaign or policy that is racist or antisemitic (such as BDS) and the supporters of the campaign whose drive and motives I usually avoid attemptng an analysis. That would involve an exploration of the darker inner reaches of an individual's mind for which I am unqualified to undertake and would in any event likely find abhorrent.
It is also irrelevant. For instance a number of these people have at least some Jewish background (including as I understand it Rhiannon). So what? It is not in the slightest bit relevant and besides there have always been a few of them upfront for cover in every antisemitic campaign.
Name a single country ...
Name a single country in the history of the world, faced with threats comparable to that of Israel, that has a better record of human rights, the rule of law and concern for the lives of civilians.
I make the same challenge now, courtesy of the medium of Webdiary, to Senator Lee Rhiannon and the NSW Greens responsible for the odious resolution to "pressure the Israeli state (sic) to respect international law and human rights norms." Name a single country. Surely some of them still read WD.
Here that sound? That's the squeaky noice of a cowardly moral fugue slipping out the back door.
Senator Lee Rhiannon is not a supporter of human rights. She is an enemy of human rights. If you are thinking of voting Green, or even joining them, then surely you must see this is a moral issue as profound as any in the world today. People like me intend to ask you at every opportunity -- how do you sleep? -- have you no conscience?