During Joe Biden’s presidential confirmation, the entire free world watched in horror and fear at the onslaught of incited crowds on the sanctuaries of American democracy – the Senate and House of Representatives. But for those of us who noticed Israeli flags hoisted alongside the neo-Nazi shirts, the experience was even more shocking.
For anyone for whom Zionism and humanism are important, especially those who remember the trauma of the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, it is hard to think of a more disturbing connection than the one we witnessed that night.
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis on Wednesday marked the 76th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp by urging people to keep a close watch on ideological extremism, because “these things can happen again”.Slideshow ( 3 images )
In which virtual century would you wish to live — Putin's 19th of perpetual war mired in unresolvable religious differences that serve primarily political absolutism? Or the 21st Century with its democratic modernity and reality? https://t.co/jw3e6YtPJO
The poster had claimed that not one of the Democratic Party candidates for President had condemned anti-Semitism within the party.
That might be so — and here the modern propaganda challenge weighs in: how much TIME has one to check the assertion?
And how cogent is the issue, really?
And can anything be done about it?
Always check the dateline, sez I!
January 19, 2018 – and fairly balanced by journalist Aaron Bandler, who at least sought to verify the alleged quote by an “unidentified staffer” (to Sen Patty Murray, D-WA) that began this way: “We don’t care about anti-Semitism in this office. We care about transgenders, we care about blacks. We care about Hispanics, we care about lesbians . . . .” Bandler checked, and Murray’s office disputed the accusation, suggesting, at the least, that a responsible Democratic senator would not endorse such a claims if it had been made!
Before coffee, right?
“Not one Democratic Party candidate condemns anti-Semitism within the Party!”
And there’s the proof of an article right there — expect it dates back more than year, so it had to be dredge from that past, and then it doesn’t really pan out, but, hey, the damage, presumably, would have been done.
Who else (but yours truly) would take a second look?
Instead, heads will nod!
This answered the “What is to be done” part of the puzzle earlier this morning.
Editor here — and Indie Influencer, perhaps — chose to tweet Seema Nanda, CEO of the Democratic Party with this:
@SeemaNanda Your kurtosis appears skewed Soviet/post-Soviet Far Left! Fight these headlines: https://t.co/8Yd1GS7wSxhttps://t.co/4CgNWndhhz My father marched with your party in 1963. Stay inclusive. Curb the New Nationalism. Take it easy on the Far Out Left Socialism.
A mistake was made, and I will apologize here for my confusion — and what might have been a stunning opener but may be still no less true for being a little less custom than supposed. So let it fly — the American Democratic Party will have to grapple with devious Republican agitprop — near disinformation and innuendo — as the opining season heats up many fold for the November contest.
State of Affairs: Palestinian leaders needs must treat the Palestinian main base as captives to be kept from free and open discourse and research in relation to their own history.
For BackChannels, “The Palestinians” exist, but the idea of the “The People” may exist differently than presumed by the dictatorships and kleptocrats that have chosen to exploit as weapons “the refugees of 1948”, i.e., the many Christians and Muslims abandoned between armies as Arab forces abandoned their mission to annihilate the Jews of Israel.
Genuine peace may have something to do with shared integrity, not my-side-your-side and the wheedled detente that is ever a ceasefire, never a peace.
My argument for the Palestinian People: after 70+ years of comparative isolation associated with Arab Apartheid, the cohort defined by the Arab refugees of 1948 have indeed become a People, but they have been also deeply intellectually poisoned. The big lie as a thought left unaddressed to fester . . . to whip resentment into boiling anger: “The Jews stole your land and God wants to you to seize it back (and annihilate the Jews)”. Never mind the Turkish land registries, the land purchases that began long before WWII, the agricultural industry that drew Arab labor into its economy, or the continuous presence of Jews in Roman-named “Palestine” across millennia.
The myth: Israel was an invasion.
The truth: Israel has been an investment legitimately obtained.
The cruelties to which the Palestinians, in some radicalized part, remain subject: Hitler’s license for the harboring of genocidal ambitions now supported by Hamas, at least; Uncle Joe’s and Father (I guess) Andropov’s reliance on “Information Warfare” and political repression in the ordering of their own delusional worlds.
Today we know what happens to Palestinian dissidents.
Haven’t The Palestinians an inherent right to question their leadership — it has been a long time since the last casting of ballots for them — or to read and discuss, I don’t know, say, Benny Morris, Efraim Karsh, or to engage with Israels as each may see fit without fear?
The Soviet / post-Soviet seduced Left / Far Left — the Corbynites, the Cult BDSWaters of the world — are not for the Palestinians but for those who have enriched themselves championing their misery in service to the corruption of those who most purport to represent them.
Soviet cartoons distributed in the Middle East to leverage “the masses” into the Soviet camp.
Might Russia’s animus with the Jews go all the way back to the Viking encounter with the Khazar Kingdom that received tribute from east-west trade?
That’s possible. The Khazar, representing a Turkic Khaganate, had converted en masse to a Karaite form of Judaism and would have been regarded as Jews by those whose eastern trade they had taxed. The ever expanding-contracting-expanding range of Nordic / Russian power overtook the Kingdom has it would Kiev as well as half of Britain: the Vikings were to hold sway in what is today thought of as “The West”, or one might say the European tribes north of the Roman Empire.
Has anti-Semitic hate traveled forward from that far in the past?
That too is possible, the calendar of the Hebrews dating back 5,779 years this year.
How primary in the life of polities are fundamental beliefs and accompanying attitudes?
Would Great Britain be “British” without the anti-Semitic depictions of Shakespeare’s Shylock and Dickens’ Fagin, both far predating the encouragement of Russia’s Okhrana and later Bolshevik KGB?
Add the thought to conjecture.
Whatever history may tell the scholars, today’s hatred of the Jews, i.e., contemporary anti-Semitic ideation and obsession, seems a part of the medieval world and its views, not the modern one of integrity, reason, and study.
For The Palestinians, living as subject to the capricious and unquestionable power of Fatah (via the PLO / PA) and Hamas (thanks to its financial supporters), their dignity, freedom, and human rights will remain in the hands of their true captors, and that is the present Palestinian “leaders” who have led them into the most absurd and dark of dead ends.
There’s a great deal of material “related online” — and in the libraries — but this happened to cross my desk while the post was still a week or so new, and I though I would recommend its reading:
The topic is perennial: “The Poles did nothing to stop Hitler”; “The Poles murdered the Jews”; “The Poles were the worst of anti-Semites”; etc. So here is one fast response to all of that.
The Holocaust may be unique in this overlooked way: it was an event so damning of the character of our species that it has been and may remain visited universally over time. The experience of it has given over to the memory of it. Each soul that visits The Holocaust, and there are many ways now, will experience and respond to it differently.
Compiled by the Polish American Librarians Association, a new list of recommended reading emphasizes books that effectively examine inflammatory questions that may never be fully answered or understood but continue to be asked: Did Poles collaborate with the Germans? Why did Poland have the largest Jewish population of any country in Europe? Why did the West disbelieve information about the death camps that was gathered by the Resistance? Why didn’t more Jews resist? Why was Poland the only country in which the death penalty was imposed for Christians harboring Jews? Why was the response of the Catholic Church so meek? Why, by far, are there more Polish names on the roll at Yad Vashem of Righteous Gentiles who saved Jews than any other nationality?
Three million Poles were also taken by the Holocaust.
And there’s no denying the theft and inhabiting of Jewish property by the Poles.
Nonetheless, lose the black-and-white thinking.
For the energetic, two lesser known proper nouns might be worth a look-up in relation to The Holocaust: “Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter”; “Michael Kellogg” (The Russian Roots of Nazism).
I had left the nouns — Kellogg and Scheubner-Richter — without URLs to encourage readers of the thread to make a little bit of effort to know the true kernel of The Holocaust.
Inspiration: Corbyn’s intellectual connection with the Soviet Era as mentioned by Ben Cohen in a notice and review (The Tower, October 2016) of David Rich’s The Left’s Jewish Problem. My conversational partner had asked about the origins of British anti-Semitism, and while I had a sense of where the answer might be, I hadn’t much validation for it. Now that little patch of curiosity and intuition may be on the cusp of becoming known.
From the Awesome Conversation on Facebook
Of course. I’ve been right about the “Phantoms of the Soviet”. I just purchased the earlier Kindle edition of David Rich’s The Left’s Jewish Problem and hope that will fill in some gaps.
The west has made broad strides in mopping up after the Cold War; however it has succumbed to the new “syndicate”, a melange of authoritarian governments bent on the renewal of feudalism above a darker background of global crime and corruption driven by trade in narcotics and abetted by money laundering.
For Russian power, today’s “anti- anti-Semitism” and anti-Semitism are just political tools for the defense of the terminal or singular representation of the power of the state in one person. What it long ago promoted beyond its borders has been pure intellectual poison.
Moscow has long had hold of two immensely manipulative levers in its often malign and narcissistic vying for the control of political circumstance and their image as perceived: anti-Semitism most of all: Okhrana | Protocols –> Germany via White Russian fleeing the Bolsheviks, especially contributing to the Holocaust: Max Erwin Von Scheubner-Richter. The other lever: socialist | nationalist totalitarianism. Revival of the Russian Orthodox Church as a sop for Russian disgruntlement, and, of course, revival of the military as a power need little explication. The effect intended, imho: weaken democracy in EU / NATO and revive what Russia has known best: a paternal and authoritarian feudalism that is itself also absolute in power.
As BackChannels interests developed, it became possible to plug-and-play appropriate material into Facebook and Twitter feeds with the hope that the same would pass through the western choirs, as they may be, and into the Palestinian’s own debilitating, degrading, faked-up “orientalist” gang counseling resistance with one hand and thieving (via corruption and other methods) from the same with the other.
Those genuinely interested in peace but making their careers, for now, on the spine of the conflict may today ask themselves how much they need to sustain the conflict as a conveniently evil institution.
As a dictatorship or sham democracy, one may expect today’s Moscow and company in similarly absolute power to want to keep another generation of refugees or Gaza and West Bank residents trapped in time and kept exactly as they are. The business that made Arafat and Abbas multimillionaires and Haniyeh and Mashaal billionaires has been pretty good for cash and the related power that comes with dispensing the same as patronage. Why stop now? Or ten years from now? Or twenty . . . or seventy-plus?
BackChannels would ask a different question: what do the open democracies wish to do with political systems redolent of medieval and totalitarian epochs and post-modern and politically criminal worlds?
Should Palestinians not “enjoy” another 70+ years as the political captives of their interlocutors?
There’s no end to bibliography and producing it becomes after a while mindless. With strong word processing software, it may be possible for the URLs to become a long list at the back of a book, so BackChannels will again freeze this “set” about here (August 12, 2018). If there is a place to go with the contemporary history of the middle east conflict, it would be into Yuri Andropov’s relationship with terror worldwide and then, to get to “now”, the KGB/FSB’s relationship with al-Qaeda, the Taliban, ISIS, and others that so bedevil the west and that appear in Vladimir Putin’s “RealPolitikal Theater” to support feudal-medieval political absolutism.
Chosen link for a look-see: “Hostility to Putin’s Russia is largely a Jewish phenomenon”:
Russia Insider’s mission is to explain and describe Russia and her role in the world. As soon as you begin to drill into how other nations relate to Russia, and Russian history, it becomes obvious that the unreasonable hostility towards Putin’s Russia, particularly coming from the US and the UK, is very much a Jewish phenomenon, and has been for centuries.
And yes, ‘Jewish’ is the only term that accurately describes it, and not one of the many euphemisms we frequently see used.
The most vitriolic and obsessive Russia-bashing journalists in the media are mostly Jewish. The publications which push these writers most energetically are ALL Jewish-owned, and as a publisher, I know very well, that is where the buck stops.
BackChannels most respectfully suggests that Colonel President Emperor and Pharaoh Putler — if that is how he wishes to be known — may consider either disassociating his godliness from so cliche and puerile a revanche of the Imperial style in Jew Hate or now let the world know now he endorses it!
Excerpt About the Forgery that Became Through the Agency of Russia’s 19th Century Okhrana — Tsar Nicholas II’s Secret Police — The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
A few months ago he bought a number of old books from a former officer of the “Okhrana” (Political Police) who had fled to Constantinople. Among these books was a small volume in French, lacking the title-page, with dimensions of 5½in. by 3¾in. It had been cheaply rebound. On the leather back is printed in Latin capitals the word Joli. The preface, entitled “Simple avertissement,” is dated Geneva, October 15, 1864. The book contains 324 pages, of which numbers 315-322 inclusive follow page 24 in the only copy known to Mr. X, perhaps owing to a mistake when the book was rebound. Both the paper and the type are characteristic of the “sixties and seventies” of the last century. These details are given in the hope that they may lead to the discovery of the title of the book [See Preface]. Mr. X. believes it must be rare, since, had it not been so, the “Protocols” would have speedily been recognized as a plagiarism by anyone who had read the original.
That the latter is a “fake” could not be maintained for an instant by anyone who had seen it. Its original possessor, the old Okhrana officer, did not remember where he obtained it, and attached no importance to it. Mr. X, glancing at it one day, was struck by a resemblance between a passage which had caught his eye and a phrase in the French edition of the “Protocols” (Edition de la Vieille France, 1920, 5, Rue du Préaux-Clercs, 5, Paris 7th Arrondissement). He followed up the clue, and soon realized that the “Protocols” were to a very large extent as much a paraphrase of the Geneva original as the published version of a War Office or Foreign Office telegram is a paraphrase of the ciphered original.
Before receiving the book from Mr. X, I was, as I have said, incredulous. I did not believe that Sergei Nilus’s “Protocols” were authentic; they explained too much by the theory of a vast Jewish conspiracy. Professor Nilus’s account of how they were obtained was too melodramatic to be credible, and it was hard to believe that real “Learned Elders of Sion” would not have produced a more intelligent political scheme than the crude and theatrical subtilties of the Protocols. But I could not have believed, had I not seen, that the writer who supplied Nilus with his originals was a careless and shameless plagiarist.
Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov seems unable to separate the good intent shown in producing this overdue course correction from the seeking of advantage yet against Ukraine and the nationalist posture once taken against the Jews. In fact, the Scheubner-Richter and Hitler relationship tells of a larger Russian history in the generation and dissemination of anti-Semitic libel and myth. Nonetheless, Lavrov’s stern comments may pave the way for a long overdue pivot westward and away from the crimes against humanity of the Stalin years, the Soviet Era, and, most recently the same delivered with horrific brutality by Assad — as flanked by Putin and Khamenei –to noncombatant Syrians across the course of the civil war.