I learn the interesting news that David Aaronovitch tweeted to Joan Smith and Jenny Jones that I am:
“an angry and dangerous man who could as easily be on the far right as the far left”.
I had no idea I was on the far left, though I suppose it is a matter of perspective, and from where Mr Aaronovitch stands I, and a great many others, look awfully far away to the left. I don’t believe you should bomb people for their own good, I don’t believe the people of Palestine should be crushed, I don’t believe the profit motive should dominate the NHS, I think utilities and railways were better in public ownership, I think education should be free. I guess that makes me Joseph Stalin.
But actually I am very flattered. Apparently I am not just angry – since the invasion of Iraq and the banker bailouts everybody should be angry – but “dangerous”. If I can be a danger to the interests represented by a Rupert Murdoch employee like Aaronovitch, I must have done something right in my life. I fear he sadly overrates me; but it does make me feel a little bit warmer, and hold my head that little bit higher.
Link, sorry –
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-08-28/assange-asylum-wins-correa-anti-u-dot-s-dot-cachet-as-trade-to-suffer
Sorry again – but when I said “have a look at this”, I meant to post the following link:
http://occupiedpalestine.wordpress.com/2010/11/16/the-new-abu-ghraib/
[Mod/Jon: Fixed]
Regev has been on the airwaves defending Judge Gershon’s ruling on the death of Rachel Corrie. Matthew Amroliwala has just been interviewing Mrs Hurndall, mother of Tom, who was also killed by the IDF. He didn’t like it one bit when she explained that the driver of the bulldozer is high up when driving this ‘fearsome machine’ as she called it and had a full view of Rachel but chose to drive forward. I have heard that the blade was dropped on her. Amroliwala was keen to quote Regev who had said that an Israeli soldier was convicted of Tom Hurndall.
Verdict
On 27 June 2005, Hayb was convicted of manslaughter, obstruction of justice, giving false testimony and inducing comrades in his unit to bear false witness; and, on 11 August 2005, he was sentenced to eleven and a half years for manslaughter by a military court, of which he was to serve eight years in prison. Hayb had, in August 2010 after an army committee headed by Advocate-General Avichai Mandelblit decided to do so, his sentence shortened for good behavior, as a result of which he served a total of six and a half years in custody.
Before Tom Hurndall was shot – ‘the British journalist James Miller had been killed by an Israeli soldier just three weeks after Mr. Hurndall was shot, a mile away from Hurndall’s position. The coroner Dr. Andrew Reid stated that he would write to the Attorney General about how similar incidences could be prevented, including the possible prosecutions of Israeli commanders, and that the case raised issues of command within the IDF. He stated that “two British citizens engaged in lawful activities” had been killed by Israeli soldiers, and that “British citizens, journalists, photographers or others may be subject to the risk of fatal shots.”‘.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hurndall
…convicted of killing Tom Hurndall.
At Venezuela News and Views, Daniel Duquenal is daring to predict Chavez’s defeat in the October 7 presidential election (presuming a reasonably fair election). This despite his government’s efforts to depict his social democratic opponent, Henrique Capriles Radonski, as a gay Zionist agent.
@Arthur, @Passerby – an observation, in a personal capacity. I don’t know that the debate is advanced by terms such as ‘Zionazis’, ‘Ziofuckwits’, etc. I am pro-Palestine and anti-Zionist, but our being on the side of justice needs to extend a hand towards the good-faith and moderate supporters* on the other side (there is indeed such a category). Not only does the above language look like the language of nutters, but it entrenches the racism fired from both sides that I spoke about on another recent post.
* Indeed, there are paid disinformation agents, propaganda shills, born-again Evangelists, Israel-firsters, Megaphone users and GIYUS subscribers. There is probably no point in persuading this crowd with reasonable, repeated arguments for justice. But these are, I think, quite a small group – certainly compared to the number of ordinary (and perhaps conservative-minded) people in the world. They are the ones we need to persuade that the pro-Palestinian side is in favour of universal justice, and is even-handed when it comes to criticising war crimes and racism on each side.
Steve Cook 27 Aug, 2012 – 11:27 pm
The the concepts “left/right” are just the in“left/right” dichotomy isn’t merely some emergent property of the industrial age…
With all due respect Steve, says who?
I would be quite happy to place a hefty bet that there is zero evidence for what you suggest.
Someone else mentioned Erich Fromm. This is psychoanalysis, which is based on Freud, which is based on…what exactly?
Since the 1990s new technologies have been developed such as FMRI and PET and the great thing about these technologies is that we are able to see what is going on in the brain in real time.
I am afraid that the theories of Freud just don’t map. That is quite apart from scandals involving ‘recovered memories’ and control groups who receive no therapy getting better faster etc. Freud, and everything that sprang from Freud is nowadays in the dustbin of history where it belongs.
You, Steve, just seem to be pathologising people with a different opinion to you.
I read that recently a US Marine was (whatever the US equivalent is) sectioned and locked up in a psychiatric hospital for posting anti government opinions on Facebook! He must be mad to have a different opinion!
A book I haven’t read yet but is on my hit list is The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt, which deals with these issues in a more scientific not to mention humanistic way.
I am going to read it, I suggest others take a look too.
Regards
The Sperglord of Doom.
PS to all posters and Craig, thanks for a really interesting read, when the assenge-in-the-embassy drama surfaced in the corporate media, my bullshit detector went off the scale. I’ve think I’ve figured out whats really going on from reading this site. Cheers.
I have found most of the commentators on this blog are excellent in providing well researched facts and cogent argument, but the type of ‘nutty’ comments that you rightly highlight drag it down towards the gutter.
BBC TV 1pm news have just had an item about an orchestra performing in Edinburgh composed of young Iraqi men and women who have taught themselves to play their instruments over the last ten years by watching videos and downloading fingering charts and mostly without teachers etc.
The vacant presenter Kate Silverton came on when the piece had finished, beaming as if to say ‘Isn’t that wonderful. Human nature triumphs over all’ when she knows full well that the BBC carried Bliar’s propaganda for the war especially Marr.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19395540
http://www.musicians4harmony.org/nyoi.html
Mary:
The vacant presenter Kate Silverton came on when the piece had finished, beaming as if to say ‘Isn’t that wonderful.
The BBC loves this sort of feel-good nonsense. The implicit message, as you say, is self-serving and very Blairite: “Come on everybody, no point in dwelling on that unfortunate war. Let’s get a move on. We’ve got a country to build”. The only thing missing is the tune of the 7 dwarves.
In fact, the BBC is copying American networks who love these sort of insipid “human interest” stories that create false impressions or distract viewers from what is really going on. The BBC promotes ignorance.
@Jon – you misunderstand how Zionist propaganda and the Israeli national identity works. There are no reasonable Zionists. Of course as well as those who make tee-shirts with cartoons of pregnant Arab women in their rifle sights and captions saying “1 shot, 2 kills”, there are those who say they are in favour of “land for peace” – until, that is, they are ordered to shift their position to one of support for “transfer”, throwing up their hands and saying it’s become clear to them now, after all their years of bleeding-heart liberalism, that the Palestinians don’t really want peace. What fakes. It’s all Nazi, Jon – from those who danced in the streets to rejoice in the Gaza Massacre, to the vile kibbutzniks who have thieved more land now the wall’s up, but who tell western journalists how much they sympathise with their local Arabs, to those who say they are “Jews Against Zionism” – i.e. who don’t want Jews to look too much of a shandah fur die goyim, but who are damned if they’re going to spend too much time in a room with the said goyim opposing their slaughter and oppression.
Mordechai Zanunu, Gilad Atzmon, and to some extent Israel Shahak, have recognised all of the above.
‘Zionazi’ is a 100% reasonable term to use, and puts the finger on what Zionism is all about, which it’s good for a descriptor to do. What Zionist ‘moderates’ there are may shout at ‘extremists’ or at each other, but so what? When it comes down to it, they’re united.
What needs to be undermined, attacked, and not given any truck whatsoever, is the legitimacy of the Zionazi structure. And they know this very very well. That’s where all the stuff about “Israel has the right to defend itself” comes from. It’s to bolster the unstated idea that “Israel has the right to exist”. It doesn’t. Not as a Jewish state it doesn’t. That’s the bottom line.
I don’t know what you mean about racism on both sides. The Jewish religion is 100% racist. Anti-Jewish racism (i.e. viewing all people whose ancestors followed that religion as the enemy, or as inferior to other people) is of extremely little force or relevance in the world today compared to Jewish racism. That was not true a few centuries ago in some places, nor indeed (obviously) in some places in Europe in the 1930s and early 1940s. But it’s true now, and only very clouded minds don’t recognise it. Similarly, rich Jewish interests control the United States. It is necessary to defend the truth here.
“Talking of hasbara, how is the word pronounced?”
Usually, in the Western media at least, it is pronounced “news”.
Grain:
One correction – it’s Vanunu not Zanunu.
Otherwise, I am in complete agreement with you. Re those who pretend to be on the side of the Palestinians in order to control the debate, Atzmon has an excellent term for them: AZZ (anti-Zionist Zionists).
Prime example from Grain. Illogical, offensive, blinkered, disproportionate claptrap that does nothing to further any debate.
I commend you for trying to reach out with reasoned argument Jon, but unfortunately some people are too ingrained with hatred to listen.
Sperglord “You, Steve, just seem to be pathologising people with a different opinion to you” – oh, I don’t think so. Suggest you re-read his interesting and multi-layered post.
“I’ve think I’ve figured out whats really going on from reading this site. Cheers. – but your style is so familiar. Don’t tell me you’re a new visitor?
Jon, completely agree, of course. All this hateful exaggeration does is erect bigger boundaries and make it far more likely that Gaza, for example, will continue to starve and be strafed and suffer.
“The Jewish religion is 100% racist.” Grain.
Oh, come on. That kind of absolutist statement detracts from any other point you might have been trying to make about the gatekeeping of dissent, etc. There are elements in all religions one might argue are supremacist – ‘race’, sex, tribe, whatever. It’s different if one says, ‘Zionism is a supremacist ideology and there are elements in the religions which facilitate that supremacism’. Just as there are elements which do not.
“..there is zero evidence..”
This is a claim which is too often made by certain people. Some will claim zero evidence of global warming, others zero evidence of wrong doing. I think it betrays that the speaker has a tendency to blank evidence which is counter to their position.
There usually some evidence for most things, whether true or not.
O/T (sorta)
http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/1109886_re-os-us-iran-ct-did-a-u-s-government-lab-help-israel.html
More than I’ve seen before about Stuxnet.
“The vacant presenter Kate Silverton came on when the piece had finished, beaming as if to say ‘Isn’t that wonderful.”
Maybe she really thought it was. What do you expect people at the BBC who disagreed with the Iraq carnage to do? All leave? Would you prefer a BBC entirely staffed with people who agreed with Iraq? I’m sure that’s what they’d prefer.
@SS:
Is it racist to claim that you are the “chosen people” of God? Does this sort of “religious ideology” have any place in today’s world?
VivaEcuador: “those who pretend to be on the side of the Palestinians in order to control the debate” – oh, like the Shminitsim? Or Yuri Avnery? Or the protesters recently beaten up by the IDF? Or the majority who believe in talks with Hamas? Honest to goodness, this inability to see that Israel, like anywhere else, is composed of millions of different people, no matter what their official religion, is crazy.
Either, as I say, mere coincidence—or some sort of crawler bot set to seek out any name occurring in conjunction with relevant trigger words. In this case, my name + rabbi.
.
Not a betting man, but the number of tweets (24,000+)—all with the same apparent purpose—would tempt me to risk a large sum that my new follower’s not, as one or two have suggested, some zit-bespattered 15-year-old havin’ a trollish larf.
.
Interesting, though. A quick glide across IDF Rabbi’s 9,000+ followers reveals a sullen Galapagos of Armageddon-beckoning exotics. Potential rich field data, I’d say, for some digital Darwin seeking to investigate further—perhaps even explain—the multifarious fringe life-forms seemingly eager, one way or another, to bring evolution to an end..
.
https://twitter.com/IDFrabbi
As I said, VivaEcuador, there are supremacist and/or intolerant elements in many religions (as we know) – the various sects of Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, Christianity and in fact most others. But that’s a lot different from saying that a particular religion is “100% racist”.
Interesting if scrappily presented interview with the Australian mathematician & former Assange associate Daniel Mathews is to be found in July issue of the magazine of La Trobe University student union:
.
‘The extent to which Wikileaks has threatened existing power structures, and to which it may shift the field, is made clear by the lengths to which powerful institutions have gone to silence it.
.
‘Hysteria about Wikileaks being somehow “terrorist” and calls for the assassination of Julian, from high-ranking US establishment figures, are an indication of the threat it poses to power. It doesn’t matter that this hysteria, taken literally, seems scarcely sane. What matters is the degree of panic it indicates, and the barbaric political options that become available once the incantation of “terrorist!” is invoked.
.
‘If Wikileaks is silenced, Julian convicted for espionage and imprisoned, or if Bradley Manning is convicted and excoriated as a traitor, the chilling effect will be enormous, and we may well return to business as usual. If, on the other hand, a movement emerges to support transparency and the right to know what our governments and corporations are up to, then the orientation of our social institutions will have shifted significantly towards democracy.’
.
http://bit.ly/Or5ZJv
Looks to me more as if the shut-in “rabbi” has written a ‘bot to crawl the Jewish scriptures and exude the really frightening bits onto Twitter in bite-size chunks….
(He’s not the Messiah – he’s a very naughty boy)
People who doubt the deep levels of racism and general ill will to humanity inherent in modern Judaism should familiarise themselves with the Talmud. You wont find much peace and love there.
The modern Jews have nothing to do with ancient Hebrews apart from a shared alphabet – as is evidenced by the term ‘anti-Semitism’, Semitism being a linguistic designation and nothing more – yet another example of a word’s meaning being twisted to suit an agenda. People who knee-jerk ‘anti-Semitism’ with racial/religious hatred are actually brainwashed.
In fact, the entire history of ‘the Jews’ is a myth, the evidence is overwhelming. Anyone can do this very simple test for themselves. Go find the text of an English language bible that pre-dates the 18th Century. Now get a modern translation. In the modern translation every time you see the word ‘Jew’ look up the chapter and verse in the old translation and compare. Now what do you see? What does this tell you?
If you prefer hearing it from a Jew (because those old Bible translators were anti-Semitic right) try Tel Aviv University Professor of Hebrew Studies Shlomo Sand’s book – The Invention of the Jewish People. Even better, go to you local library and get them to order it in (good luck with that).
@SS:
If you believe that you are the “chosen people” and that gives you the right to dispossess hundreds of thousands of non-Jews and create a Jewish state, that sounds rather racist to me.
The Afrikaaners believed that God gave them right to rule South Africa. They too thought they were a chosen people.
Jon,
Cow dung, Cow shit, etc. only a fitting description of the cow pat that is in sight or is being referenced, therefore reflecting upon aspects of reality somehow cannot be misconstrued as committing obscenity or use of the language of “nutters”.
I appreciate your forwarded points, that you have forwarded in the past also However, in the spirit of the respect that is afforded to your point of view, perhaps it is time that the same respect was afforded to those of us who no longer view the supremacists’ creed of the ziofuckwits as a “reasonable” or a “tolerable” or a “palatable” proposition, as a political platform. Furthermore, we are prepared to voice such an opposition openly, and vociferously.
Those of us who resort to the elegant use of vernacular in description of subscribers to such an obscene, vile, hateful, supremacist notion, find the quaint notions that there can exist a dialogue with insane ziofuckwits, to be the epitome of insanity itself. Furthermore we find the obscenity to be the supremacists’ creed and not our elegant use of vernacular in description of those insane murdering thieves.
,
As for:
All this hateful exaggeration does is erect bigger boundaries and make it far more likely that Gaza, for example, will continue to starve and be strafed and suffer.
No need to even dignify this unconscious drivel with any kind of response.
Whoops.
“Let me tell you, Bradley Manning didn’t kill anybody,” the Texas congressman declared at around minute 45, speaking of a “soft spot” in his heart for whistleblowers. “Bradley Manning hasn’t caused the death of anybody. And what he has exposed—he is the equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg, who told us the truth about Vietnam!” The crowd exulted. Paul then pivoted to a spirited defense of Julian Assange, chastising the government of Sweden for truckling to alleged American demands that the Aussie be extradited to the U.S. for prosecution.
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/ron-paul-stands-for-manning-and-assange/
A Republican who believes in that ridiculous conspiracy theory about the wicked sex offender Julian Assange, whom the US has no current plans to extradite? Surely not.