Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Daily Scorecard fisks a letter from an admirer on Norman Finkelstein's site, here. The letter writer is lauding Finkelstein for his stand against international Jewish power and is expressing his sympatico feelings with his mentor's opinion that anti-Semitism is an over-rated problem:
My impression of the program was that there are a lot of paranoid feelings that are out of proportion to the current threat. As I was listening to it I felt that your findings in Beyond Chutzpah are also relevant to the issue of Israel/Palestine in the UK.
Here in the UK there have in recent years been a number of attacks on Jewish buildings, desecrations of Jewish graves and some Jewish individuals have been attacked, however there have been far more attacks on Mosques and Hindu or Sikh Temples. In the UK one is much more likely to be attacked by the local thugs and racists if one is Muslim, Asian or Black/African or any kind of identifiable foreigner than if one is a White British Jewish person...
I don't know if he's correct according to UK statistics, but I'd be interested in knowing. I believe the answer is that he is not correct, although I couldn't put my finger on a relevant post one way or the other. I know that is not correct with regard to Massachusetts or the US generally. I just wanted to remark on one aspect of this that I find interesting, then go on over and read Mike's post. The letter:
Those who are Zionists and those who support Zionist objectives in Israel and occupied Palestine know that the plan of an ethnically exclusive, expanded Israel requires more land confiscation and more ethnic cleansing. So I think they are battening down the hatches and crying wolf so that they can denigrate Pro-Palestinian elements and tar Muslim objections and those who have Anti-Israeli sentiments with the brush of traditional Anti-Semitism...
This is very typical of the far Left, and you'll find it in elements from Finkelstein and Chomsky to the door-to-door salesmen of the Somerville Divestment Project -- antisemitism is an exaggerated phenomenon that exists only as a cynical creation of ruling class Jews in order to manipulate the masses. This rhetoric is utterly analogous to the rhetoric of the antisemites of the far Right who believe in sinister Jewish control and manipulation through wolf-crying. It's one of the reasons the Left and Right are so often so comfortable with each other these days. They're at home with each other's paranoid delusions.
MarathonPundit Post on Finkelstein.
http://marathonpundit.blogspot.com/2005_10_01_marathonpundit_archive.html#113020529653464550
"Those who are Zionists and those who support Zionist objectives in Israel and occupied Palestine know that the plan of an ethnically exclusive, expanded Israel requires more land confiscation and more ethnic cleansing."
Oh, really? I've been a Zionist since I was eleven. I've supported Zionist objectives (i.e. the preservation of the State of Israel) all my adult life, including three years' service in the IDF.
So what's this plan I'm supposed to know all about? Did I get left off the CC list? Or did the memo go out last weekend, when my fax machine broke down? (I hate it when that happens...)
Isn't it interesting that, although Israel has always permitted Arabs to live pretty much wherever they wanted -- while Palestinians keep insisting that the land they want must be Judenrein -- it is nonetheless Israel that gets accused of "ethnic cleansing". (Yep, Israel recently performed "ethnic cleansing", all right... of her own people, so as to leave the Gaza Strip entirely Jew-free, as requested. And this is the thanks we get??? Sheesh.)
I know that some people believe this claptrap, but I have a hard time understanding how they manage it.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
What crap. There is racial crime- and there is religious hate, fostered by the religion.
Other than Islam, can you name one religion in the civilized world, where after worship and reflection, worshippers leave in a frenzy, ready to kill. So much for 'spiritual peace.'