The Snatch

By Israel Shamir

A fast guy had thought that a wallet was unattended, and tried to snatch it. But to his distress, he was stopped in his tracks by a burly wallet owner. This might be a fair description of Saddam Hussein’s effort to snatch Kuwait. It also fits the war over South Ossetia.

Georgian President Saakashvili thought he could take South Ossetia while nobody was looking; while everybody was busy watching the Olympiad. In order to maximise the surprise factor, he declared barely three hours before the snatch that he would never send troops in.

Here the similarity ends. While Saddam succeeded in taking Kuwait, Saakashvili failed to take over the SO. Saakashvili’s strategy also was different, and more reminiscent of the Israeli conquest of 1948: he wanted to have Ossetia without its native folk, the Ossetians. To this end he bombarded the SO capital, Tskhinvali, causing a mass exodus of the people – some thirty thousand of them, or almost half of population crossed the high mountains to the Russian side. The Russians rolled in and kicked Saakashvili’s troops out.

So far, so good.

(1) Saakashvili has had it coming for a long time. His flirtation, no, his heavy petting with the US and Israel, his fervent anti-Russian sentiments, his Kartveli nationalism had led him and his country to trouble. Like young Fidel, he wanted to turn his land into a match to set the global fire. He was the first to be burnt.

(2) Russia fulfilled its residual imperial duty: as the successor of the Soviet Union, it is duty bound to guarantee some well-being of its erstwhile junior member-states. Russia could not allow Saakashvili to ethnically cleanse the Ossetians, for practical reasons, too: fifty thousand refugees from South Ossetia would destabilise the North Caucasus.

(3) Russia demonstrated that beyond its bark, it has bite, too. Probably other adventurous neighbours, namely pro-American leaders of Estonia, Poland, and the Ukraine will entertain second thoughts before their next paroxysm of anti-Russian sentiment.

(4) Russia proved that it can use force quickly, efficiently and with moderation. There was none of the old Soviet overkill; rather it was a moderate and modest, well-executed military operation. The best thing about it was its brevity, two or three days of actual fighting and the rest just a bit of mopping-up.

(5) Russian leadership proved that they are not scared by Washington’s rhetoric. This is a very good thing after so many years of complicity and impotence.

(6) Military defeat may be very good for the Georgian soul. Georgians are wonderful people, warm, handsome, pleasant and generous. However, they are ferocious nationalists of the tribal kind. Like some of their neighbours, they tend to see others mainly through an ethnic prism. The first thing the Georgians did when they became independent in the wake of 1917 Russian Revolution was to expel all Armenians and confiscate their property. Joseph Stalin also acted in the Georgian way when he expelled the Chechens from their mountains and the Germans from Prussia. Georgia is by no means homogeneous: it is populated by a few smaller ethnic groups, in addition to the Kartveli majority (or at least plurality). Since Georgia became independent a second time, in 1991, the Kartvelis have tried to deal with the minorities by harsh methods, undermining their culture and language and even expelling them on the first suspicion. This was the reason three autonomous areas of the country decided to split off from Georgia. SO is one of the three, but unless the Kartvel nationalism would be reined in, Adgars, Svans and other ethnic communities may rebel, too. Military defeat might just cause the Georgians to re-think their attitude towards their immediate neighbours.

(7) Though Russia did not send in its troops in order to remove Saakashvili, this does not make such an outcome any less desirable. Saakashvili is dangerous for Georgia, Russia, Ossetia and the world. What a pity he did not lose the general elections a few months ago; what a shame that other candidates met with untimely deaths under suspicious circumstances or were jailed. One may hope the true patriots of Georgia will kick him out and choose a better president, opting for neutrality and for friendship with Georgia’s neighbours including Russia.

(8) Georgian communists expressed their distaste with the Saakashvili’s attack; they would like to lead their country back into a close union with Russia. It should be considered: many Georgians, say the Communists in their letter from Tbilisi, would love to see the end of Saakashvili’s adventurism.

(9) A neutral and neighbour-friendly Georgia would be able to re-integrate South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The Kartvel and Mingrel refugees would be able to return into their villages. The Caucasus is so poly-ethnic that mutual expulsions and transfers are unacceptable.

(10) This is the time to stop anti-Georgian propaganda in Russia and anti-Russian propaganda elsewhere. Russia has a long tradition of friendship with the Caucasian nations, with Georgians, Ossetians, Circassians; the tradition has been well established by Leo Tolstoy, Lermontov and Griboedov. Let it prevail. As Marshal Stalin would say, Saakashvili come and go, but the Georgian people endure forever.

Europeans showed more understanding of the Russian action than some might have expected. There was no mass hysteria, and the Ossetians were allowed to express their viewpoint. Israel stopped its supplies of military hardware to Georgia. While American leaders responded to the victory of Russian arms with expected verbal severity, they wisely avoided any action likely to enhance the military standing of Saakashvili. They could have made an airlift of American armour to Tbilisi, they could have shown more muscle, but they did not.

This was the true mystery of the campaign. Did the Americans encourage Saakashvili? Did he act at his own foolhardy will? There may be a few explanations of the enigma.

(1) Every Georgian president has tried to regain the lost provinces, so Saakashvili could have decided to give it a try, perhaps being carried away by the magic of auspicious triple eight, as his offensive was begun on 8.8.8.

(2) Saakashvili may have failed to understand the Americans. This happened to Saddam Hussein when he snatched Kuwait. He was convinced that the Ambassador Gillespie had given him the green light for the operation.

(3) The Americans and Saakashvili may have failed in their prognostication. They interpreted Russian inaction in the past as a harbinger of their inaction in the future. On 8.8.8, a pro-American Russian newspaper Gazeta.ru predicted that the Russians would not move their forces and would swallow the defeat, as otherwise they would have acted earlier.

(4) The Americans are planning some kind of operation in Iran, and they encouraged this Georgian diversion to keep the Russians busy. This could still be the case, as in its present position Russia has a weak hand in the UN to deal with the American demands or with direct aggression.

(5) Iran expressed its support for the Russian operation and condemned the Georgian invasion of South Ossetia. The New York Times and similar papers editorialised that the US should not push Russia too hard, in order to get Russian approval for anti-Iranian sanctions or other measures.

My preferred version of events is that the Americans (and the Israelis) encouraged the Georgian president as they were curious to see the Russian reaction and to observe the preparedness of the Russian Armed Forces. In military parlance, such a minor operation is called “contact reconnaissance”, or just a “feeler”. No one could be certain how the Russian army would operate. In 1996, having been sent to retake the rebellious Grozny, the Russian Army ran away in disarray leaving its burning tanks behind. Since then, the Russians had not fired a single shot in anger; they have been very much a mystery for the West. In such a situation, there is no substitute for a bout of actual fighting, and Saakashvili unwittingly presented this opportunity to the West.

This is rather an optimistic view, as the following comparison will make clear. In the 1930s, the Japanese occupying Manchukuo faced the Russians. The Japanese did not know whether the Soviet Russians would fight well or run away, as they had easily defeated the Russian Imperial Army in 1903-5 war but had taken a beating from the Bolsheviks in 1918. This is why they carried out a contact reconnaissance raid at Khalkhyn Gol (Nomonhan) to take the measure of Russian resistance. After General Zhukov destroyed their attacking force, they decided to keep peace with Russia, and despite many pleas by Hitler, Japanese troops stayed put.

If this reading is right, we may be optimistic. Weakness invites war; the Neocons attacked Iraq because it was the weakest link. Now, the Russian army demonstrated its fighting capability, the Russian diplomats have confirmed their abilities and the Russian society has shown itself remarkably united. Russia is not so weak as to invite pressure or war.

Sages Rule

By Israel Shamir

Who Brought Olmert Down (and Why)

You would not envy the position of Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert. He did not have a snowball’s chance in hell. Every day the newspapers and the TV channels broadcast new accusations against him and announced fresh police investigations. Often the Israeli viewer learned of Olmert’s alleged misdeeds before the Prime Minister himself did. Police did not just leak the details of the case – they poured it out like tropical torrent. Charges landed all over Olmert like the bomblets he dropped on hapless Lebanon: small but plentiful.

The charges were petty, at best. They are summed up here <http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1007072.html> You and I have probably done similar things. Olmert was accused of charging two different organizations for the same expenses, of accepting some contributions in cash, of flying with his family to a trip abroad while not strictly observing the difference between his funds and those of contributors. Probably the Biblical injunction “Don’t muzzle the ox while he is threshing” (Deut 25:4) covers the case. But the police went after him, the Supreme Court began deliberations on private actions against Olmert, while newspapers and the TV blew it out of proportion. Thus two mighty powers of Israeli politics, the media and the legal system, united in one effort to unseat Olmert, and he caved in.

This episode may demonstrate who actually runs Israel. Though media amplifies, the judges judge. The Hidden Hand that unseated Olmert was that of the Supreme Court and its power-hungry President, Chief Justice Dorit Beinish. Beinish and her bosom friend Justice Arbel activated police and prosecution, while their special storm-troops, the fighting sorority of lesbian activists straight out of Barb Wire organised mass demonstration and intimidated the opposition. The reasons had nothing to do with Olmert’s alleged corruption or with his real failure in the 2006 Lebanon War, but were grounded in the power struggle between the weak elected government and the unassailable judges. Moreover, Olmert makes the third recent, high-placed victim of the Supreme Court’s drive to supreme power.

The Supreme Court of Israel is self-elected and self-perpetuated, like the Sanhedrin of old. Formally, the new judges are appointed by the President, who confirms the decisions of a committee led by the Justice Minister <http://elyon1.court.gov.il/eng/system/index.html> ; factually the sages elect the new sages from amongst their apprentices (“interim appointees”) and close colleagues. This system is called in Hebrew ‘haver mevi haver’, ‘a friend brings a friend’. After twenty years of the system’s strict application, the Supreme Court is a monolithic and highly influential body.

The Court is closely and personally connected with other legal authorities, with the attorney general office, the state prosecutor office, the police and the secret police. State prosecutors and attorney generals dream of joining the Court after leaving their jobs. Police bosses take the Court orders as if they were sent down from heaven. The Court is the top of the legal pyramid, and its president can manoeuvre and manipulate the whole system formally and informally. Under the flag of judicial activism, the Supreme Court has assumed control of the state, leaving Parliament and the existing government high and dry. The judges have assumed powers any dictator would envy: they can nullify any law; they can prosecute any MP or minister, they can block any government action or agreement. They rule whether the state has to build shelters for border towns, whether an army commander made a right tactical decision, whether a law can remain on the books and whether prisoners may be swapped.

Incidentally, these powers have no legal basis. The American professor of law Richard Posner noted that the Israeli judges abrogated these powers to themselves “without benefit of a constitutional or legislative provision. One is reminded of Napoleon's taking the crown out of the pope's hands and putting it on his own head.”

The man who took the crown of Israel and placed on his head was not Arik Sharon. It was the previous Chief Justice Aharon Barak, the most powerful man of Israeli politics. Posner called Barak “Enlightened despot … who created a degree of judicial power undreamed of even by the most aggressive [American] Supreme Court justices”. After he retired, sycophantic slime spewed forth from printed and electronic media alike. Barak had had to retire having reached the mandatory age, but he remained very much a moving force behind the scenes.

His succession by the highly ambitious Dorit Beinish brought the conflict between the Judicial and Executive branches to the fore. A tug-of-war ensued, with the government trying to cut the Supreme Court down to its natural size, and with the Supreme Court fighting for the top slot. Both sides wished to keep the struggle under the carpet, far away from the eyes of hoi polloi.

The wars of succession were concentrated around the Judges’ Nominations Committee, which is chaired by the Minister of Justice who is appointed by the prime minister, while the actual appointment of judges is done by the Israel’s president. Surely this was sheer coincidence that all three of these persons were politically assassinated!

In 2006, Minister of Justice Haim Ramon objected to the nomination of Dorit Beinish to the top post of chief justice. He also planned to break with the unwritten tradition of appointing to the Supreme Court only those interim candidates who had been invited there by the Supreme Court to serve on a temporary basis, and instead to bring in an outsider, a lawyer or a judge not vetted by Beinish.

Ramon was treading on a live wire, and the response was fierce. Within a month, Ramon was under investigation for sexual harassment; in July 2006 he was forbidden to appoint judges, and in January 2007 he was convicted.

The story went as follows. A soldier girl came to visit the Justice Minister Ramon; she looked at him with adoring eyes and asked to be photographed with him. Eventually Ramon kissed the girl who later claimed she had expected a kiss, but rather a fatherly and less fervent kiss than the one she got. The girl went away, expressed her dissatisfaction with the French kiss, and flew away to Latin America. A senior police officer flew to Latin America, located the girl and literally forced her to file a criminal complaint. The police woman in charge of the investigation admitted at the hearing that she had threatened the girl with prosecution unless she stuck to her complaint.

The newspapers and TV discussed the details of the case but practically nobody (but a few bloggers) dared to ask who had ordered Ramon’s head. It took an American Jewish journalist to break with the vow of silence and connect this “targeted judicial assassination” with the struggle for Court primacy. Halpern wrote in the Forward: “Many suggest that the judges and the attorney general had it in for Ramon because he opposed the appointment of Judge Dorit Beinish as chief justice of the Supreme Court. His trial prevented him from appointing someone else, while his conviction prevented him from making changes to the judicial system later. “

Meanwhile, the President of Israel, Moshe Katsav, the man who actually appoints judges, came under fire. He was also against Beinish’s rise to Fuhrership, and paid for it dearly.

A girl in his office codenamed “A” complained of sexual harassment. It appeared in the course of investigation, that she was lying. She had actually carried an affair with the President and had tried to blackmail him. Her lies were so obvious that the prosecution had to drop her, but meanwhile, the media had a field day, or rather a field month. The media harassment sparked many complainants; apparently every woman who ever worked with Katsav came forward to try her luck, and a few of the accusations could possibly stick. There were daily demonstrations by the angry feminists, the fighting sorority of Beinish and Arbel, demanding Katsav’s balls, or at least his resignation. In August 2006, he was forbidden to appoint judges, just a few days after Ramon's resignation. If that was not enough, on September 7, 2006 the Israeli Police declared they have the evidentiary basis for an indictment.

On that day, the Judges' Election Committee approved the succession of Dorit Beinisch to the presidency of the Supreme Court. Katsav refrained from attending, "to prevent dispute". He also stayed away from Beinisch's formal swearing-in ceremony, normally held in the presidential compound, now to be held in the Knesset, so she was sworn-in by another woman, the Knesset speaker.

Katsav agreed to be charged with indecent behaviour, then later changed his mind, but still had to resign and vacate the position to Shimon Peres, a smooth man very much to Beinish’ liking.
Olmert understood that not only his own career, but the very position of the legitimate government was being undermined. He harboured these heretical thoughts for a long time. In 2002, the fighting sorority attacked another male Oriental politician, Minister of Internal Security Avigdor Kahalani. Edna Arbel, then state prosecutor, indicted him and brought him to trial, but he was acquitted. Ehud Olmert, then mayor of Jerusalem, called upon Arbel to resign and said that she lacked the professional judgment to continue in her senior position. State Attorney General Elyakim Rubinstein defended Arbel in his response to Olmert’s comments. Since then, Rubinstein has been rewarded with a seat in the Court, while Olmert has gained an enemy not to be trifled with.

Olmert went on the warpath by returning Ramon to his cabinet in a senior position (though not to the post of Justice Minister) and by hiring a new justice minister, Professor Daniel Friedmann, the very man who was most vocal in his objection to the rule by the Supreme Court. Friedmann made a two-pronged attack, by bringing into the Supreme Court the first external nominee and by proposing to limit the Supreme Court agenda by a law that would restrict the Supreme Court from ruling on political, security and budget matters. He was immediately attacked by the retired justices of the Supreme Court, especially by the former president of the Supreme Court Aharon Barak and his ex-deputy Mishael Cheshin, the very men who had established the present system, enthroned Dorit Beinish and kept advising her. While acting judges are precluded from speaking ex-cathedra, it is a moot point with the retired ones: they bear the title of Justice and they draw their Judge’s pension, but they certainly speak out all the time. They went to the Knesset, to newspapers and to TV channels and described Friedmann’s actions as a “putsch”.

They pled with Olmert to fire Friedmann and let the things go as usual. But Olmert wanted to return executive power to the government, to the elected legitimate body from the self-appointed usurpers. He stuck to his guns. Ehud Barak, the Labour leader and a minister in Olmert’s government, threatened Olmert with his resignation and the possible fall of government unless he fired Friedmann; but the unrelenting Olmert refused to bend and said he’d rather let Barak go than part with Friedmann.

And then they attacked Olmert personally. They found an American Jew Morris Talansky who claimed he had squeezed crumpled dollar notes into Olmert’s sweaty palm. In the course of interrogation it appeared that the man used to boast that he gave money to every Israeli PM, including Yitzhak Rabin, the very paragon of honesty. He had also threatened to bomb some Rabbis who did not want to pay him. The trustworthiness of his claims was severely undermined. But Olmert’s enemies did not stop: every day they produced a new complainant, a new accusation of corruption. If it was parried, they made a new one. With the police and the Attorney General at their disposal, their resources were practically unlimited.

Meanwhile, the retired justices were outspoken. They demanded Olmert’s resignation, completely forgetting the “innocent until found guilty” rule; just as they had in the related cases of Katsav and Ramon. Dalia Dorner, a retired justice, declared: “Olmert must resign. The public opinion should force him to resign.” But public opinion remained unconvinced despite the relentless spin, and Dorner bewailed Israeli simplicity of mind: “There is no public culture of politics in Israel, and people pay no attention to reports about misbehaving leaders”.

In the end, Olmert resigned to the supreme force of the Supreme Court. Was this a victory of Law over arbitrary and corrupt politicians? Do not be so sure.

Law or Democracy?

One may like or dislike Ehud Olmert, but he was elected by the people to do his job. We elected Olmert. One may be happy or unhappy about this result, but one should respect the decision of the majority. We did elect Olmert, Katsav and Ramon, and we did not elect Mrs Beinish and her fighting sorority, though she thinks she knows what we need better than we do. In a democracy, one should respect the people’s decision. A prime minister should rule the country, a hard enough job, instead of spending his time answering questions by the police.

Olmert has been neutralised as prime minister, because nobody is yet able to survive a media cum judiciary assault. Apparently, Israel may need a Berlusconi Law protecting its executive from police investigations and legal actions. Police investigation about whether Ehud Olmert took his wife along at government expense can wait until he completes his tour of duty.

But the problem lies deeper; the choice is whether we want democracy, or the rule of law. These two regimes are not identical, - they stand in direct opposition. In a democracy, the people rule via their elected representatives; under the rule of law, the sages (or Judges) rule supreme. Now Israeli democracy faces a serious challenge, more serious than Altalena crisis: unless we stop the police and the Court from meddling in politics, democracy will be lost.

A short detour is required. Of old, there were three branches of government, or ‘powers’: the Legislative, the Executive and the Judicial, as described by Montesquieu and as established by the US constitution in the 18th century. The 20th century ushered in a fourth power, Media[1].
The Legislative, in our case, the Knesset, is a democratic body, despite its limitations. The Executive is also elected - by the Knesset and is responsible to the Knesset.

But the Judicial power, i.e. the Court is not elected. It is a self-appointed and self-perpetuating oligarchy equipped with a vast apparatus which intervenes in matters of war and peace, labour, education, family life and even in questions of faith. This is, let us put it charitably, a Platonic rule by Sages. Yes there is the Law, but they interpret it as they see fit. They may nullify a law, or reinterpret it in an entirely different vein. Jewish history had a go at it, too, when the sages of Talmud reinterpreted the Written Law. The Rule of Halacha was actually rule by sages, and only the Enlightenment broke its iron grip. Now we have reverted all the way back to the Sanhedrin, this traditional (for Jews) but not very successful, non-democratic system of rule by Wise Elders.

This was noticed by the American law professor Robert Bork, who wrote: “[Aharon Barak’s rule of law… is in fact … the rule of judges, a trend to which he himself is the major contributor. Perhaps [Barak] believes that judges are simply intellectually and morally superior to other actors in the nation’s politics”.

The supporters of the Supreme Court supremacy deride the Ultra-Orthodox Jewry of Mea Shearim who accept rule by their sages, but they themselves actually want to return us all to the rule by sages, albeit sages of their own choosing. Karl Popper correctly stated that this is just another form of totalitarianism. In our case - liberal totalitarianism.

Some simple-minded people consider these judges to be “of the left”. A pro-family right-wing activist and blogger, while correctly noting the anti-family tendency of the Court, called them The Wicked Witches of the Left. One may agree or disagree with “the wicked witches”, but they certainly have nothing to do with the Left, and this blogger should have his eyesight checked. The Supreme Court sages, after twenty years of inbreeding and selection, belong to an almost pure strain of totalitarian liberals, and they indeed enforce liberalism in the worst meaning of the word:

Workers’ rights are frowned upon as an affront to humanity. Majority of Israeli workers are now employed by subcontractors on contract basis, thus eliminating benefits and social security. They approved of shifting the tax burden to the worker, while usurers pay no tax.
They do not protect tenants against rent rise and allow landlords to collect rent tax-free.
They are against children. That’s why abortions and gay marriages are welcomed; gay pride parades are approved, but life of families with children is getting increasingly difficult.
Even their favourite topic, gender equality, does not lead to a more equal society but rather encourages young girls to join the counter-insurgency fighting units.
They authorise torture, the kidnapping of civilians, the demolition of Palestinian homes, the confiscation of their land, and the building of settlements.
They accept the Secret Services version of everything, sight unseen.
They participate in the Assassination Committee, or the committee for “extra-legal executions”.
They support the illegal Wall.
They had no problem trying and imprisoning illegally kidnapped civilians, from Mordecai Vanunu to Marwan Barghouti.
They undermine religion because they hate anything smacking of compassion.

If that is “Left”, then what is Right? But let us be fair, they are not Right neither Left, they are the Third Kind, totalitarian liberals. Totalitarian liberals are profoundly undemocratic, for they are forever suspicious of the Majority. They use the Minority Rights in order to undermine Majority Rule. They do not act in the interests of the minorities whose name they bear in vain: rather, they use them as a ploy for seizing supreme power. Their world-view is essentially that of Leo Strauss, the godfather of neo-cons, “a man profoundly hostile to the concept of rule by the people. He believed it was the natural right of the wise and strong to lead societies to the fulfilment of their wise aims, using subterfuge when necessary”.

Such a subterfuge is a presentation of the Court as the only defence of pro-Western, ‘civilised’ society against the onslaught of crazy religious nationalists, Kahanists and unruly settlers. Without their approval, however, not a single settlement would ever have arisen, and not a single dunam of Palestinian land would ever have been confiscated. With one hand, they allow the Wall to encroach on the Palestinian lands, with another, they pretend to defend Palestinian peasants.

Actually, the leading judges of the Supreme Court, Beinish and Arbel, are personally responsible for the outbreak of the First Intifada. As state prosecutors, they came up with a nasty legal trick, the type a rabbi might describe as “kasher aval masriach” (“it is kosher, but it stinks”). Only a minority of Palestinian lands were parcellated and privatised, while the majority of lands were in public use and were called ‘the lands of the Sultan’. The two “liberal leftist” lady lawyers claimed that these lands belong now to the Jewish State as it is now the Sultan, and thus they allowed the State to seize Palestinian common lands and give them to the settlers. Aharon Barak authorised the snatch. This mass confiscation was the reason for the First Intifada.
They are also responsible for the second intifada, as they permitted Ariel Sharon his march to the Temple Mount.
They are responsible for the terror, as this was caused by their glaring injustice. When they sentenced Nahum Korman to six months of public service for the murder of a Palestinian child, they signalled to the Palestinians that they should not expect legal remedies from this Court.
They are responsible for the Second Lebanon War, as they blocked the release of Kuntar after Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
More than anyone else , they are responsible for creating the apartheid system in Israel.


We should not allow them to shift their guilt to the Executive or to the Legislative powers, i.e. to the government and to the Knesset. They interfere in the affairs of the state so often and so thoroughly that they should bear the responsibility themselves.

Still, they would not be able to seize supreme power without some important help from the Media. The Media are another non-democratic, non-elected power. In Israel, the media belong to five wealthy families; they appoint chief editors and journalists as they see fit, and they decide who are their friends and enemies, and whether they should attack Olmert or Beinish, nuke Iran or make inroads into Gaza. Being inherently non-democratic, mass media owners tend to support other non-democratic structures, be it the Armed Forces or the Supreme Court.

These two non-elected and non-democratic powers of Media and Judiciary entered into conspiracy against the elected parliament and government. In every newspaper you can read that the public despises the parliamentarians and does not trust the government. The media promote these feelings, thereby undermining the democratic powers. The police and the judiciary do all they can in order to confirm our suspicions. They leak their deliberations into the media and start a witch-hunt. As a result, the elected politicians appear as sinful, if not outright criminal, weaklings, and the very concept of democracy, of Majority Rule is undermined.

When the Judicial and Media powers allied and took control over the Executive and Legislative, they create a paradigm shift. This shift is universal, rather than local. Just recently, in Turkey, the High court decided to outlaw the ruling party; in Philippines, the High court blocked an accord that was concluded by the government and the Muslim rebels. In the US, the courts allowed for abortions and same-sex marriages, for dismantling trade unions and for social insecurity. This is the great success of totalitarian liberalism. People convinced that Supremacy of Law is a good thing should consider that this puts paid to democracy as decisively as any dictatorial coup. This leads to rule by anonymous ‘Wise Elders’, while ordinary people are excluded from decision-making.

The true Left and true Right should look at this shift with horror, for these movements have their basis in the people’s will. They seek the people’s approval; they try to attract the people to their side. Even the most far out political movements, from Fascists to Communists, still turn to the people for their mandate. Deep down, they are democratic, for they believe in Majority Rule. Now is the time for the Left and the Right to unite to regain democracy, while cutting the judges power down to their normal size.

The People never had much say in Israel: the country was run for years by one party and one army, with power smoothly shifting from a party boss to a general and back. Still, there was at least the occasional appearance of democracy, and a chance to extend the democratic base. Now, the Knesset and the Government have been made irrelevant by the Court’s powers; and the Court is outside of our influence.

Under the Court’s rule, Israel is entering the dark realm of faceless and nameless dictatorship. This is not the dictatorship we were taught to be afraid of, with the dictator riding a white stallion surrounded by outriders or speaking in a stadium to the enchanted masses. We have no portraits of the new dictators in our homes; we are not asked to adore them; it’s the other way around, we may not utter their names or even suspect that they exist. They do not run for public office, they do not ask for our opinion, but they decide what will be done.

They do not belong to the left or to the right. The Left and the Right are parliamentary terms, while they are against democracy. They undermine outstanding, personable and charismatic leaders; only petty and corrupt politicians are allowed to survive their purges, for such would never dare to fight these nameless dictators. With every generation, Israeli politicians grow smaller in moral stature, until they finally disappear in all but a name.

There is an urgent need to clean up the act of the police and the Court. They should stay away from state business and leave parliamentarians alone. They should take care of their job instead of hunting for mischief. This needed roll-back can’t be done without some left-and-right cooperation.

Fighting Sorority

Active and pugnacious feminism is a part of the Court agenda. The President of the Supreme Court, Dorit Beinish, and her best friend Justice Edna Arbel are fervent feminists of Gloria Steinem’s type. The rumours in Tel Aviv are divided, whether they like women, or just gratuitously hate men. Such persons are certainly needed and useful for the society, but they are entirely unsuitable to bear the dictatorial powers they assumed. This subject is rarely discussed openly for fear of being labeled ‘sexist’; likewise US Democrats are unable to effectively fight the Neocons as they can’t politically survive an accusation of antisemitism.

It would be good to roll the sorority’s advances back a notch, for being convinced of the justices’ support, lesbian and feminist organisations have sped up their drive to convert the country to their creed: they ran gay pride parades, even in Jerusalem, though this annoys the conservative and pious Jerusalemites. They noisily demonstrate against the men pointed out by Beinish. Persecution of alleged heterosexual harassers and abusers assumed the dimensions of a Salem witch hunt. Under Beinish’s guidance, a new law has been promulgated, which classified every heterosexual relationship between two co-workers as sexual abuse, if not rape. The majority, family men and women are discriminated against as they have less disposable income than gays and lesbians.

Forceful and aggressive feminists take too much of air time and wield too much influence. They are clannish, and defend each other; criticism of such a woman is perceived as an attack on women’s rights. In the Jewish state, the lesbians became the Jews of the Jews: influential, powerful, pugnacious and protected by fear of sexism label. It’s not that they have grievances: the prosperous and numerous lesbian community is well integrated into all areas of public life. From the Jewish religious point of view, lesbianism is not a sin (as opposed to male homosexuality). They are really after re-gendering of the whole society, and here they find some extremely antidemocratic allies: re-gendering is not a way to gratify sexual desires or to correct wrongs, but a most efficient form of social taming.

Under the fighting sorority’s influence, Israel has been transformed. Once, US Jews would send their kids to Israel to get married, now, Israel is the place to find a same-sex partner. Once, Israel was a country of manly men and womanly women; not anymore. Things have changed since the macho days of Six Day War, when homosexuality was banned, one-eyed Defence Minister Dayan screwed every female conscript and the Israeli army vanquished three Arab armies in a single week. Now the gay tendency is no snag, ministers are sued for kissing a girl, and the army is beaten up by a few bearded Lebanese. Traditionally independent, Jewish women became even more so as they now serve in the combat units, earn as much as men do, and are protected from flirtatious looks by ever-alert police.

Beinish and Arbel are representative of this group. The woman they hope will become the next Prime Minister of Israel, Tsippi Livni, the foreign minister and an ex-secret service agent, is a sorority girl, she passed millions of dollars to gay organisation led by her patriotic sisters. Her victory is almost certain.

The sorority fights especially hard against men of other, non-Ashkenazi communities, not only because of their racism, but also because they – the Oriental Jews, the Arabs, the Russians – were not tamed and re-gendered. They watch out and destroy every bright or personable public man of these communities. For this purpose, they set the police to spy after him, and eventually arrange for his downfall.

Aryeh Deri, the astute and pious founder of the Moroccan Shas (“the Jewish Hamas”) religious party, was followed for ten years, until they succeeded in building a dubious case against him and sending him to jail.
Avigdor Lieberman, a brutal but personable leader of a Russian party. The many sexist remarks around him concentrate on his, and his party members, moustaches, that clear sign of hated masculinity. Lieberman has been called to the police from time to time, and this event is well publicised with the suspicions being aired, but he has never been charged. Last week (27.7.08) frustrated Lieberman appealed to the Supreme Court against the Attorney General. He demanded to termination of the case against him, still open after 12 years of police efforts: “Charge me, or close the case”. In his words, “State Prosecutor Edna Arbel continues to hound him because he is a “friend of Aryeh Deri, Russian, sports a beard, and a settler”.
Arcadi Gaydamak, the charismatic Russian businessman and philanthropist, is rather a romantic buccaneer type of a businessman; a Henry Morgan or Cecil Rhodes. His past includes stints in the Angola jungle and in the mountains of Yugoslavia, and friendship with MPLA guerrillas and Serb militants. Now he is running for mayor of Jerusalem. He was attacked by the sorority the moment he decided to enter Israeli politics. He was accused of money-laundering in a Bank ha-Poalim Affair, which came to naught despite years of investigation and much of bad publicity. He was never charged, but his name was besmirched and many Israelis are afraid to be seen in his company. He also demanded to be charged or declared innocent, but they prefer to keep the Damocles Sword hanging over his head.

Could it be that these men were rotten, and police just fulfilled its duty by investigating reports of their misdeeds? If you go to police and complain that your house was robbed or your car stolen, you’d probably will be told that they have no time or resources for such investigations. They have more pressing things to do, like spending thousands of working hours and millions of dollars to fight the politicians. And the crosshairs were being set by the fighting sorority.

[1] It may be conceived as the rebirth of the old fourth power, the Ecclesiastic one, for Media preaches, and guides minds of people, establishing normative and forbidden behaviour, just like the Church did.

Noam Chomsky and the 9/11 Crusaders

By Israel Shamir

Walking around town, we are sometimes accosted by well-meaning people who are greatly devoted to a cause. It can be a Kurdish refugee replete with blood-curdling photos of Turkish atrocities, or an Iranian émigré with a petition to sign, or, if we are lucky, it could be Mia Farrow asking us to condemn the Chinese. These good people do not take no for an answer. They grasp your buttonhole and keep it in their sweaty hands until you sign their petition or ask them rather impolitely to buzz off. Then they explode in a fury not unlike that of a woman scorned.

Such a thing happened to the great luminary Noam Chomsky. He was accosted by one Kevin Barrett, a 9/11 enthusiast, whom he tried to reason with politely, but was eventually forced to tell to get off. An infuriated Barrett published an acrimonious attack: “Chomsky, an anemic speaker with all the charisma of a garden slug, endlessly bashes the USA in a whiney voice, phrasing his criticism in terms that only the sectarian left will agree with. Chomsky's boring, unpleasant style, and his obsessively anti-American argument, identifies anti-Empire with anti-American.”

What did Chomsky do to deserve this abuse? If one delves into Barrett’s tedious torrent of vituperation, one finds that his main objection to Chomsky is that the Boston Professor does not want to fight Barrett’s war for crediting Bush and Mossad with 9/11. And so he does not. Does he have to? Barrett tried to push Chomsky into immersing himself in the technicalities of 9/11 “Truth Movement” discourse, and refused to take no for an answer. You know these guys: anyone who does not agree with them is an agent of the Enemy. Chomsky did well to retort: “That's a curious feature of the Truth Movement … the curious ‘with us or against us’ mentality that pervades much of the movement: either you accept our claims, or you're a ‘left gatekeeper.’”

There is always a place for critique and argument -- even against Chomsky, and I have had my go at that, too. However, there are some red lines we should try to observe in friendly critique, and this one was a crude ad hominem and paranoid attack. Barrett is similar to the holocaust-obsessed Jews (and their ‘denying’ counterparts) who need your confirmation of their narrative and do not let go of your buttonhole until you respond. Let Barrett fight this war himself, without Chomsky at his disposal. This is a free country, more or less. For instance, I do not deny or confirm holocausts and massacres. Peak Oil does not pique me overmuch. And as for 9/11 whodunit, I feel that the 911 Truth Movement of Barrett et al. trivializes the event, turning it into a successful insurance swindle. I wrote about the event, at the time it took place:

“The kamikaze could be practically anybody: American Nationalists, American Communists, American Fundamentalist Christians, American Anarchists, anybody who rejects the twin gods of the dollar and the M-16, who hates the stock market and interventions overseas, who dreams of America for Americans, who does not want to support the drive for world domination. They could be Native Americans returning to Manhattan, or Afro-Americans who still have not received compensation for slavery.
They could be foreigners of practically any extraction, as Wall Street and the Pentagon ruined many lives of people all over the globe. Germans can remember the fiery holocaust of Dresden with its hundreds of thousands of peaceful refugees incinerated by the US Air Force. The Japanese will not forget the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima. The Arab world still feels the creeping holocaust of Iraq and Palestine. Russians and East Europeans feel the shame of Belgrade. Latin Americans think of American invasions of Panama and Granada, of destroyed Nicaragua and defoliated Colombia. Asians count their dead of Vietnam War, Cambodia bombings, Laos CIA operations in millions. Even a pro-American, Russian TV broadcaster could not refrain from saying, ‘now Americans begin to understand the feelings of Baghdad and Belgrade’.

The Riders could be anybody who lost his house to the bank, who was squeezed from his work and made permanently unemployed, who was declared an Untermench by the new Herrenvolk. They could be Russians, Malaysians, Mexicans, Indonesians, Pakistanis, Congolese, Brazilians, Vietnamese, as their economy was destroyed by Wall Street and the Pentagon. They could be anybody, and they are everybody. Their identity is quite irrelevant as their message is more important than their personalities, and their message is read loud and clear in the choice of targets.”

This was also the view of the late French thinker Jean Baudrillard: “In the end it was they who did it but we who wished it. If we do not take this into account, the event loses its symbolic dimension; it becomes a purely arbitrary act. . . (A)nd in their strategic symbolism the terrorists knew they could count on this unconfessable complicity.” He saw 9/11 as “arguably the most potent symbolic event since the crucifixion of Christ”, says Bradley Butterfield.
In other words, the act of 9/11 was by far too powerful of a symbol to give it away to the Enemy. Not in vain did people all over the world rejoice when this Mammon symbol collapsed. The knowledge that the Americans may be beaten on their home ground has comforted the innumerable victims of the Empire. I do not know who did it, but it was planned and executed by people of great spirit.

I can’t accept the Mossad and/or the Jews as the perpetrators of the 9/11, not because it is an antisemitic claim. My readers know that this consideration has never stopped me before. It’s the other way around: I consider it a deeply pro-Jewish claim implying that only Jews are capable of enterprises of great pith and moment, while others prefer to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and never take arms against a sea of troubles. In a way, the Jewish perpetration theory shows how far this belief in Jewish superiority has entered the hearts of Americans and of many Muslims: “if it was done and it did not flop, it’s got to be Jews”. We Israelis are more critical; we say “if it did not flop, it can’t be the Mossad”.

This does not mean that one has to subscribe to the 19 Osama warriors’ conspiracy as presented by US officialdom. Of many kamikaze attacks, that of 9/11 towers above the rest. It cannot be compared with any other, certainly not with any Islamic suicide attack. The assault on the very symbol of Mammon and at the heart of its military might was a great, paradigmatic event. It is easier to believe that this feat was done by avenging angels, by St Michael in person, rather than by five merry Mossad agents or by Bush and Cheney’s accomplices. It is easier to agree with Baudrillard that the Twin towers had committed suicide in order not to be outdone by the pilots, than it is with Barrett et al that it was done by crafty Jew Larry Silverstein in order to collect insurance.

Baudrillard spoke of people who “try everything to discredit their actions. Thus we call them "suicidal" and "martyrs," and add immediately that such martyrdom does not prove anything. But such a moral argument can be reversed. If the voluntary martyrdom of kamikazes proves nothing, then the involuntary martyrdom of the victims cannot prove anything either, and there is something obscene in making it a moral argument.”

Unwillingly, Barrett and the Truth Movement are engaged in undermining and discrediting the supreme sacrifice of those who died to knock off the Towers. I understand Noam Chomsky, who did not want to support this effort. Nor did he want to uphold the arrogant American view of 9/11 as the worst lie and the most dreadful atrocity ever. Chomsky suggested that Barrett compare this lie with “the massacre of 4 million people in Indochina or the Reaganite terror, leaving some 200,000 tortured and mutilated bodies in Central America.”

“But qui bono?!” – I hear them calling. – “The Jews (call them Zionists, or Neocons, if you wish) profited from 9/11. Even Netanyahu said recently that 9/11 was good for Israel.”

There is no doubt that the Jews used 9/11 to its fullest extent; but they can make use of any event due to their media control. Be it a Mars landing, a victory over Germany, a defeat in Iraq, oil price rise or the dollar’s collapse – they can use it to their advantage. They do not have to fly to Mars, knock down the dollar – or the Twin Towers, themselves.

“In order to succeed, a terrorist needs dynamite and newspaper”, quipped a Jewish terrorist in 1901. In 2001, a hundred years later, a newspaper alone would suffice. With newspapers, or rather, with TV under one’s control, one can utilize others’ dynamite for one’s own benefit. One can expropriate others’ actions freely, even others’ supreme sacrifices. In such situations, qui bono? does not apply. Everything, even the most damning event will be turned for their benefit – as long as they will do the explaining.

Noam Chomsky does not fight the Truth Movement. Let these good people continue with their research of steel and concrete boiling points; let them accuse the administration, the CIA, the Jews and Mossad as much as they wish. Their struggle has some positive value: it undermines public trust in mainstream media and in good intentions of the authorities. They may try to understand that their position is not the only one possible: others may actually approve of the attack, or consider it of little importance, or just have other fish to fry.

People attach the “left gatekeeper” label to anybody who does not agree with them with great ease; but this pertinent expression should be used against pundits who fight us, not against allies and neutrals.

Our friend Jim Petras had unleashed such philippics against Chomsky: “Noam Chomsky has long been one of the great obfuscators of AIPAC and the existence of Zionist power over US Middle East policy... To continue to masquerade as ‘war critics’ while ignoring the central role of the Zionist Power Configuration makes pundits like Chomsky, Moyers and Powers and their acolytes irrelevant to the anti-war struggle. They are part of the problem, not part of the solution.”
Petras also wants Chomsky to fight his war, that is the war against Jewish establishment (he calls it ‘Zionist Power Configuration’). Yes, it would be nice, but then, Petras won’t be needed. Instead of seeing Noam Chomsky as an enemy (“part of the problem”), it is better to view him as an important ally covering an important part of the battle line. He does not cover all, he does not go to places Petras or I go, but he does not stop us from going. That is why it is ridiculous to call him “left gatekeeper”, as he keeps no gate locked.

We have many points of disagreement with Noam Chomsky. To mention a few:

(1) He supports the obsolete idea of Two States in Israel/Palestine and thus of preserving the Jewish state, while we call to undo it and replace it with One state where Jews are equal rather than superior.

(2) He considers the American support of Israel being derived from “the imperial interests”, (‘Chomsky thesis’: “Israel is good for true imperial interests of the US elites, and the Jewish Lobby is powerful exactly because its line coincides with these interests of elites”) while we think that this support is caused by the commanding heights the Jews occupy in the US discourse.

We argued for our views and against his, sine ira et studio, in many articles, both our own and those of other writers published on our site or circulated. My essay Fiesta of St. FerminRNR (included in the book The Galilee Flowers) dealt and debunked the Chomsky thesis in 2001. It caused very interesting polemics. I discussed it with Chomsky. In Spider Web, we brought up the polemics of Noah Cohen who called Chomsky’s position on Palestine "Apologetics for Injustice". We published Jeffrey Blankfort’s ‘The Israel Lobby and the Left: Uneasy Questions’ and ‘The Chomsky/Blankfort Polemic. W e published a very censorious article by Bob Finch, who described Noam Chomsky as “the chief Rabbi of the left who absolves the Jewish state of guilt and responsibility for its apartheid regime and its military belligerence against neighbouring countries.” We published harsh critique of Chomsky’s views qua the Lobby by Pappe, Blankfort and Petras in Contra Chomsky and by Mazin Qumsiyeh., see also Chomsky under Fire.


Despite many, many attacks on him, Chomsky never responded in kind. He always remained polite, even courteous. He had never ever blocked a publication. He is going his way and let us respect it. Light infantry and heavy artillery have different modes of operation. Chomsky is our heavy cannon, while Petras or Gilad Atzmon or Israel Shamir, we are light scouts, the reconnaissance unit. We should go further than he does, but he is our fallback. Let us cherish this man and his activity.

The bottom line was editorialized by Ian Buckley in his In Defence of Shamir .. and Chomsky

“I would content that Noam is basically an honest and very knowledgeable man, despite his occasional personal blind spots. It should be freely admitted that Chomsky doesn't go far enough on the Middle East. Whatever the slight defects and blind spots in this particular area, he still deserves kudos for his excellent, indeed pioneering, investigations into the distortions of the mass media and the profoundly undemocratic nature of 'democratic' societies. After a reading of Chomsky, you are inoculated for good against the foetid netherworld of the mainstream media. There is nothing wrong at all with a little criticism, but we shouldn't lose sight of who the 'good guys' really are. After all, there are so few of them around. And in my book, both Shamir and Chomsky are good guys.”

July Thunder

By Israel Shamir

Since the recent Russian presidential election of Medvedev (which shifted Vladimir Putin to the less prominent post of Prime Minister) and even for a while before that, Russian foreign policy was a matter of guesswork. There was a widely-held view that Mr Medvedev would take a more submissive line towards the US and the West, and eventually surrender the positions taken by his mighty predecessor. Assuming that Russia is the main hindrance to Bush’s wet dream to take over Iran, this was not just a theoretical question, and many observers around the world (including this one) followed these developments in Russia with great apprehension.

Recent developments have disabused those fears. The Russia of Medvedev-Putin is even more independent and coherent than the Russia we knew last year. The transfer of power has been hanging like a dark cloud over the Russian skies for a very long time, and only now, with the July thunder of Russian-Chinese veto over Zimbabwe, can it be said to be over. It had been preceded by a small warning: Russia had demanded the dismantling of the Yugoslavia Tribunal, this last vestige of NATO’s war against the once-independent Balkan state.

This was a richly symbolic demand. Yugoslavia had indeed been the arena of a terrible crime, but the crime was not a NATO- invented and Photoshop-produced “genocide”. So many years of the Tribunal’s operation produced zero proof, while “mass graves” and “million victims of Bosnian Holocaust” turned out to be a figment of somebody’s imagination. The real crime was NATO’s intervention, blockade and bombardment which eventually led to the Balkanization of the Balkans, and to endless suffering for all its residents. This crime was made possible by Russia’s disappearance from the world arena. After 1991, the broken, impoverished, mentally exhausted and spiritually colonised successor states of the USSR became objects rather than subjects of international relations. With a great black hole where the USSR used to be, the West was able to act freely for the first time since 1920, and it did so by reverting to the colonialist-imperialist policies of Nineteenth Century: The brutal rape of Yugoslavia and the first Bush war on Iraq were the high points of the 1990s.

But the Russian people proved their resilience once again, just as they did after the German invasion of 1941. Sobered out of her silly pro-American sentiments by the bombing of Belgrade, Russia regained her legitimate place in the world. She did not acquiesce in the Anglo-American attack on Iraq, Afghanistan and (now) Iran. She supplies Chavez with weapons. Russian leaders routinely meet with Hamas, the much-demonised though democratically elected governing party of Palestine. In friendship with China, Russia may yet reshape world politics.

There is one area where the 1990s still lingers, and that is Africa. The Black Continent is in terrible shape, and the US-proposed resolution on Zimbabwe would have made it even worse by repeating the experience of Somalia. Somalia is a disaster: the US-sponsored Ethiopian invasion has destroyed virtually all of its life-sustaining economic systems; Somalis are now being starved, and a flood of refugees flows freely, from South Africa to Sweden. The Ethiopians invaded when Somalia had just recovered from the previous American intervention under the UN flag, and they formed a rather stable rule of local autonomous bodies called Islamic Courts. This invasion – and consequent disaster – would not have happened without the relevant Security Council resolution. Salim Lone, a columnist for the Daily Nation in Kenya and a former spokesperson for the UN mission in Iraq, wrote:

“The US pushed through an appalling resolution in December [2007] saying the situation in Somalia was a threat to ‘international peace and security’ and basically gave the green light to Ethiopia to invade. Not much different in text and intent to the current failed attempt by the Bush administration to bulldoze a Security Council resolution on Zimbabwe. Unfortunately for Somalia, neither Russia nor China intervened then, resulting in a blatantly false resolution setting up the country for an American-backed invasion leading to inevitable losses, including displacement of millions.”

This time around, Russia and China united in vetoing the Zimbabwe resolution, supporting the view of virtually all African and Asian countries, including Zimbabwe’s own neighbour, South Africa. One does not have to be an expert on African affairs to bless this veto. We have had enough of the many neo-colonial interventions since Gorbachev’s time: Iraq, Panama, Nicaragua, Yugoslavia, Somali, Eritrea, Congo and what not. It is a good thing that in Zimbabwe, this wave has been broken -- the principle of sovereignty has been upheld. If today the colonial masters were to be allowed to ride into Zimbabwe, tomorrow Iran would follow, and sooner or later Moscow and Beijing would be besieged. Now we can hope that Russia and China will use this right more often, and will block every colonialist attempt to strangulate Iran or squeeze Burma.

For too long a time Russia and China have hesitated to use their right to veto; this right has been used mainly by the US in the interests of its Middle-Eastern proxy, Israel. Now, the Brits and the Americans are enraged that this right is being used by Russia and China. Let them rage, and let them discover that the world has changed once again, and that the lull of opportunity they have had since 1990 is over.

What was going in Zimbabwe? There was a failed “orange revolution”, like those the US and the UK instigated in Ukraine and Georgia and failed to achieve in Burma and Mongolia. Pro-Western forces tried to remove President Robert Mugabe. Mugabe won elections just like Milosevic in Yugoslavia, or Lukashenko in Belarus or Hanieh in Palestine, but the West never accepts democratic elections if the results are politically unsatisfactory. The main opposition candidate opted out of the second tour of elections by his own will, and it does not make the elections’ results illegitimate. Moreover, even if they were not legitimate, it should not provide green light for the US intervention.

Stephen Gowans wrote: “At the core of the conflict is a clash of right against right: the right of white settlers to enjoy the stolen land against the right of the original owners to reclaim their land.” This is not exactly correct. Everywhere the imperialists try to use a local minority in order to undermine an undesirable regime. This is not a White against Black struggle. The white settlers could be a useful and important element of national economics, but some of them have made a wrong choice. The Zimbabwe whites should not ally themselves with the imperialist West. Their problems, along with other local problems, may only be solved locally, with help and advice of South Africa and African inter-state organisations.

Our friend, South African Joh Domingo explained the situation: “There was an opportunity for individual White farmers to utilize their experience and embed themselves into the fabric of African society, but they chose the path of aligning themselves with big agribusiness, and with exploitation of the mineral wealth of Zimbabwe.”

Mirroring the campaigns in Belarus, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and Venezuela, reports of electoral bias fills the media. - "The opposition is being starved, they are assaulted, and the elections are rigged": So goes the refrain. At the same time, progressive groups bemoan their fate, and ask why they cannot champion saints instead of savages. Instead they should ask why all those at odds with the Global superpowers are always savages: Mugabe, Saddam, Milosevic, Aristide, Castro… the list goes on and on.”

For sure Zimbabwe goes through a difficult period, but the way out of crisis goes through regional consultations, without overseas intervention. Russia and China are working for stabilisation of the region; but the final word will be said by the people of Zimbabwe.

By Israel Shamir

India is as warm and comfortable as ever. Over thirty years have passed since I roamed around in her cities and temples as a young long-haired white-cotton-trousered journalist cub, but coming back is easy. Things on the ground have not changed much – but they have changed.
It is the same dense, busy crowd in Old Delhi, but the terrible poverty and hunger has disappeared or been pushed away. There are beggars, but they appear to be Gypsy professionals who reputedly fly to summer vacation sites for their short season, rather than disaster-stricken Bihar peasants, who ask for our charity.

It is the same immense green lawns of the British-built New Delhi, but now they are frequented by middle class families picnicking in their Sunday garb.

Centuries-old Mughal gardens are bristling with visiting ladies clad in exquisite polychrome saris and with striped pyjama-fashion grey squirrels, but the palaces are in good repair and visitors do not feel threatened by their imminent collapse.

The smell of curry and baking bread still sojourns with that of jasmine and mango, but the once prevalent smell of Indian tobacco (I was almost arrested for smoking their fags in Europe) has practically disappeared. Indians are almost saints: they do not smoke, do not drink alcohol and they rarely eat meat.

They are modest shoppers and modest dressers, though now there are decent western-style shops. The feet of Indians are still bare, but clean and pedicured. There are many jobless, but whoever has a job manages well even on a low salary. Now even lower middle class families have servants, as in 19th century Europe, and not just temporary help – real servants with separate duties: cooks, drivers, cleaners, errand boys. Cars and bikes have multiplied a hundred times in the past thirty years, but they still incessantly honk their horns.

Their sergeant-majors still boast the most fearsome moustaches and sideburns, but now they have nuclear weapons to boast about too. Next time, when imperial soldiers advance to India thinking “Whatever happens, we have got // The Maxim gun, and they have not”, they will be mistaken. India now has an impressive army with a goodly amount of arms; they have launched a few satellites and are on the way to becoming a power in space.

Indian Pundits

With their nuclear armoury and modest affluence, Indians are being heard today in the West – better than they were in the days of poverty, hunger and weakness. “The Wisdom of a poor man is despised”, says the Writ. Now we pay attention to Indian political thinkers, not only to the gurus. I had the honour to meet a few of the like-minded people in India. We publish Indian writers here. Among them, there is Ambassador Gajendra Singh, a man with first-hand knowledge of the Middle East, Turkey and East Europe. Another one is J C Kapur, whose text delivered in St Petersburg University is published here as well. We have also published Ambassador Bhadrakumar and Satya Sagar. Come Carpentier, a French expatriate living in India, Lille Singh, an Indian expatriate in New York, Syed Zaidi of Delhi -- all participate in our deliberations. We also publish and cherish the essays of Arundhati Roy and other Indian thinkers.

It is not that India needs much of an army; but nukes and missiles are a modern way to prove a country’s virility. That is why the US and Israel are so stubbornly fighting against other countries having them – they want to be the only males in the harem with a few eunuchs on the side. They are trying to take Indian nukes under their control, too – and some say that the last India-US agreement is nothing less than a capitulation. I am not so sure: the Indian leaders have not acquiesced in the US drive against Iran, and this is an important criterion. President Ahmadinejad was better received in Delhi than President Bush. Another reason is the old tie: Persian was to India what French was to the rest of Europe, the language of civilisation and poetry.

Instinctively India, historically its first victim, can’t support the Empire against Iran. Today this Empire covers much of the unipolar world; it subdued Germany and Japan in two world wars, Moscow submitted in 1991, and since 2003, the Arab world is also cowed. But it began as a small trading post in East India. The British were the first carriers of modern Empire, and India was subdued by them centuries ago. We say “the British Empire, the American Empire”, but actually these countries were and are rather carriers of the Empire than her owners. The Empire is an independent parasite, the Alien, feeding on many nations including its proud carrier and enforcer. Gladstone was right in his argument against Disraeli: empire is not good for the mother country. Now, worn-out Britain is a junior partner in the enterprise; its head offices have moved from London to Washington and New York.

India was the laboratory for imperial devices. A long time before Baghdad was looted by the Americans, British troops in 1799 conquered and looted Seringapatam, the fortress capital of Mysore, and killed (beside tens of thousands of natives) Sultan Tipu, who twice defeated the Brits and who had nearly reverted the crawling colonisation of India. The Sultan was described as an “infamous tyrant, usurper and ruler of the most perfect despotism in the world”, the same title later ascribed to Saddam Hussein. All the horrors of occupation ever experienced by the enemies of the Empire were visited on Delhi in 1857, when British troops slaughtered millions of Indians in what was probably the greatest holocaust the world had ever known up to that time.

Still, Indians nurse no ill feelings towards the Brits. They fought and died by their tens of thousands for England in the WWI and WWII. Now they are proud to be part of the Commonwealth, happily speak English, shop on Oxford Street and visit their relatives in Earls Court. The old-timers miss the British days (perhaps it is the time of their youth they miss). Captain Nemo with his dream of vengeance was, after all, invented by the French writer Jules Verne, not by an Indian. Indians are not vengeful by nature. English is also the lingua franca of this huge country and, by default, the language of many wonderful Indian writers, from Arundhati Roy to Salman Rushdie, who would be unknown outside of their provinces. Thanks to the ubiquity of English, India is the preferred country for outsourcing, and this has provided it with considerable income.

The new Indian affluence is thinly spread. There were always rich Indians, and that’s why there were always so many poor Indians. Even for outsourcing and similar crumb-sharing schemes, Indians pay a high price: Western companies have made huge inroads into the Indian economy. The courts do not defend ordinary Indians against the multinationals. They could take a leaf from the Canadians, who ruled in favour of a farmer against Monsanto in 2008. The countryside remains very poor, but the country is so huge, and there are so many people, that the lower middle class is quite numerous, and even they have servants aplenty.

Until recently, the Empire placed its bet on Pakistan -- now India has become stronger and more attractive. This is a fateful hour – if India should once again become its crown jewel, the Empire would engulf China and undermine South East Asia. The US continues flirting with India, offering American weaponry while demanding that it toe the line on Iran and China, and some forces in India are ready to embrace the Americans. It is therefore all the more important to keep India friendly to China, to Russia, to Iran and the Muslim world.

The bottom line is that India today is not as strongly anti-imperialist as she was in the days of Nehru and his friendship with Nasser, Tito and Fidel, but she has not switched sides completely, either. She is rather biding her time, playing cricket.

Despite the rise of Hindu fundamentalism, fuelled (and paid for) by second-generation Indian Americans and by the US State Department, India is not a natural enemy to the Muslim world. It's the other way around: sixty years after the Partition, North India (including Delhi) has a distinctly Muslim flavour. If Pakistan had not been created, Islam would probably predominate in India. The founders of Pakistan had a strange idea that the Hindus would seek revenge on their former masters; as a result, some space was vacated, leaving room for a Hindu revival. This revival is not entirely natural, as revivals go: they built in Delhi a vast, bright and garish complex of Hindu temples. The statues of Hindu gods, terrifying and bewildering when venerable and old, give the impression of a kind of Disneyland when shining and new. Films like Ramayana have filled in the chasm between the sacred and profane, and one is left wondering: are these the statues of gods or of movie characters? This is not to say that the Hindu religion is dead: there are millions of small shrines on every corner, and all passers-by do their obeisance. These small shrines are islands of calm in the turbulent world, and surely they are greatly needed and appreciated.

However, the mosques in the Indian capital are still much more impressive than the Hindu temples. Everything pre-British is Muslim-built, as for a thousand years, ever since Mahmud of Ghazna, the rulers of Hindustan have been Muslims. The warlike neighbours of pacific Indians, - Afghanis, Central Asians, Persians and Turks conquered North India and colonised it. They were quite tolerant and friendly to their non-Muslim subjects, giving the lie to modern claims that Muslims are harsh rulers when it comes to infidels. Judging by Indian films, they lived well together in mutual respect. Not that I consider Indian films an authority on history, but surely they express some popular feeling on the subject.

The invaders of the 16th century became fully subsumed in India. Hindus and Muslims venerate the same tombs of the same saints and celebrate the same feasts. I tried to provoke my Muslim Indian friends by asking them: “Aren’t you upset by seeing Indian idols? Shouldn’t one remove them?” But they did not even understand the thought: “They worship one way, we worship other way; God is anyway one and the same for all of us”, they replied. Many native Indians embraced Islam, and eventually Islam became as Indian as Hinduism or Buddhism.

Subsuming Colonisers

The British could have followed in the steps of Muslim incomers to become subsumed ex-colonisers, and William Dalrymple, a sensitive and knowledgeable author, wrote at length in his White Mughals: from the days of Clive and to 1820s, the Brits tended to conform to the local habits. They went native, married local women, many of them converted to Islam or, to a lesser extent, to Hinduism, and thus they formed a part of the Indian upper classes. The change came later, when the British women were brought in. They formed a fighting sorority and excluded the Indian wives and their children from society interaction. Since then, fearing ostracism, the British Indians separated themselves from native Indian society, and their children of Indian women could not rise up in the world. Instead of conforming to India, and gently adjusting to her ways, they tried to erase her culture and reshape her. Instead of slowly becoming Indians, they became enemies of India. Rudyard Kipling, India born and bred, proved it by his Kim: all his knowledge of India may serve only the Intelligence Service.

This weather change from absorption and integration to separation did not happen just because of English ladies’ malice. The communications between India and England rapidly improved, so the ties between the settlers and their mother country could be maintained. If the communications were poor and difficult, or artificially severed, the settlers would be integrated. In case of Israel/Palestine, if the ties between the Israelis and their “mother country”, the World Jewry, were severed, the Israelis would be easily absorbed in Palestine.

It is true for other ex-colonial states, as well. Settlers and their children are valuable asset, and it would be mistake to get rid of them. Due to colonial injustice, they are better trained and have important and useful professions. This injustice can’t be corrected by mass expulsion or by mass flight. Algeria is a good example: the French departed, taking with them practically all educated Algerians and leaving the country without teachers and doctors. On the other hand, Spain was forced to give up its possessions in America, but Spanish settlers remained, and guaranteed continuity. Africa suffered much because of this traumatic decolonisation. White settlers left in droves, and the newly independent countries had to invite experts instead of using people familiar with local reality. Thus, colonists-settlers should be subsumed, rather than expelled.

Kashmir

Kashmir, a chain of pleasant green mountain valleys was the most cherished patrimony of the Great Mughals, who embellished it with palaces and gardens. Here the Muslims and Hindus lived together in peace and harmony. However, the Empire did not will it. At first, there was a Hindu-Muslim conflagration which resulted in the Partition. Still, the Hindu refugees quickly came back to the Valley after the battles were over. Peace had returned, but not for long. The American meddling in Afghanistan in 1970s-80s had undermined stability. The Americans created Islamist insurgency to embroil the Russians in the fire of guerrilla war in neighbouring Afghanistan. Sparks of the insurgency ignited fire in North India, and soon the villages and towns were engulfed by fratricidal struggle. The Hindus were forced to leave Kashmir and move to Jammu and other places; many Muslims had left too, rather than being forced to serve the firebrand insurgents. Their empty, ruined or burned down houses still stick out in Srinagar and elsewhere, though many of the properties were sold for a song during the insurgency.

This was a tragic development. Kashmiris – Muslims and Pandits (as local Hindus are called) are ethnically and linguistically the same people, they have the same family names. My host in the Valley, Ustad Bashir Butt, told me of their affinities and of good neighbourhood relations. He is a devout Muslim, but there are Pandit Butts as well, sharing the same ancestry. Butts saved lives of their Pandit neighbours during the militants’ raids, though mainly they were preoccupied with staying alive. Disappearance of the Pandits is a tragedy for them, and for all Kashmiris.

This sad situation is relevant for Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinians were forcibly expelled by the Jewish militants in 1948, and since then they are not allowed to come back. But will they if they can? I am on record of being in full support of al-Awda, of Palestinian refugees’ right of return, but I do not know whether many ex-Palestinians would like to come back. The Pandits of Kashmir may come back, after all, India is not a Muslim fundamentalist state, and Hindu parties are close to power. They may, but they do not come – even from nearby Jammu. They say they have nothing to go back to: their houses are burned or taken over. The Pandits are not an exception. Though it is not easy, the German exiles may come back to Sudetenland in Czech Republic and to Poland; but somehow they do not. They come for a visit, but do not stay there for long. It can be the case in Palestine, too.

Now Kashmir is calm and pleasant to visit. Militancy died out, but not many potential Western tourists know of it, and you may now enjoy summer in Srinagar for knock-down prices. There are newly prosperous Indian tourists from Bombay and Delhi, but Western tourists are rare. This is the best time to go to Srinagar, the valley’s summer capital.

A delightful place, to be sure, this town on the Dal Lake, in the shade of mighty Himalayas. It is often compared with Venice, but our Italian friend, who is a permanent resident there, corrected the image: Srinagar may become Venice, but meanwhile it is a Venice of AD 500. The canals and lagoons of the city are not yet fixed and built up and polished to perfection. Imagine the Grande Canale with fishermen’s huts instead of majestic palaces, the Piazza di San Marco covered with cucumber gardens and Rialto full of water lilies instead of pizza stands, and you’ll get the image of Srinagar.

The lake is covered with grass, and this grass is collected by local peasants who roam the lake on their small boats. The grass is used as fertiliser in their tiny gardens which produce amazing harvests. They build floating gardens, and cultivate every bit of land; the plentiful canals dissect the islands, so it is difficult to decide whether you view an island crossed by canals or a part of lake with floating gardens. These grass-collecting boats compete with local gondolas “shikaras” carrying tourists and sightseers and doing taxi job. The scene of this pre-Venice lagoon is very lively and quite unique.

Around the lake, there are magnificent formal gardens laid by the Mughals, and the mountains are nearby for trekking or fishing. The town is also a charming place, especially the house of British representative now turned into emporium of local arts and crafts. There is a strange place often described as “Jesus Tomb”. A local legend says that Jesus after resurrection moved to Srinagar and lived here, happily married, until his death. Perhaps it is the burial place of an early Christian preacher or an apostle. I have brought there the candles lit at the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and left them at this sanctuary.

In the days of the Raj, the English colonial administrators loved to spend summer in Srinagar and other hill stations, but the Raja did not allow them to buy land for the houses they wanted. As a solution, the Brits turned to build luxurious houseboats, small floating palaces and villas. After Independence, they were gone, and the houseboats were extremely popular place for hippies and other travellers in 1970s and 80s. By the end of 80s, civil war was raging, and the hippies moved to Goa, but the houseboats remained.

Peace with the Past

Shamir’s Introduction to Mahler Interview

Last year, the German edition of the US Magazine Vanity Fair published an interview with important German radical thinker and revolutionary Horst Mahler. Now we present you with a shortened English translation of the interview rendered by Mahler’s comrade, Markus Haverkamp – on our website www.israelshamir.net . It is exciting reading! A friend of Palestine and anti-zionist, an anti-imperialist freedom fighter, Mahler is considered Public Enemy № 1 by the present German regime. He is somewhat akin to Roger Garaudy, Jean Genet and Jean Luc Godard, to Carlos Ilich Sánchez and Che.

In the late sixties he was trained in a fedayeen Fatah camp in Jordan (Genet and Godard also went there), and in the seventies he applied his knowledge as an active member of the urban guerrilla group Red Army Fraction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof group. They fought the imperialist establishment as “the fifth column of the third world”, fighting the war for Vietnam, Palestine, Bolivia. He spent ten years in jail, while his comrades Andreas Baader and Ulrika Meinhof were murdered by the prison guards. He was such a charismatic personality that even his defending lawyer (Schily) became minister of the interior and a chancellor of Germany (Schroeder).

After his release from jail he changed his far left terminology into a far right one. In his view the German and European Left had become as “jewified” as the Galilee [the official term of Israeli internal politics, meaning that Jewish priority is assured], taken over by Zionists. “Antifascism” became the slogan of pro-American and pro-Israel activists in Europe. “Antifascists” today are against Palestinians, and support US intervention in the Middle East, mass immigration and neo-liberalism.

The far right contains a staunchly anti-globalist, anti-imperialist, anti-neoliberal, anti-American and anti-Zionist nucleus. (Only very recently the pro-Zionist far right, Nazis for Israel, was formed http://nasofi.blogspot.com/ to coincide with British National Party overtures to British Jews.) While the Left has been gentrified and has gone upmarket, rebellious working class youth are much more likely to join far right militants than a left-wing group. The leftists’ infatuation with immigrants and gender minorities also undermines their appeal to indigenous underprivileged workers.

As one learns from the interview, despite his apparent rightward swing, Mahler has remained faithful to his anti-imperialist and anti-zionist worldview. “Left” and “Right” are less important labels; it is one’s attitude towards imperialism and Zionism that counts. A denial of yesterday’s views in changing circumstances is the only way of remaining true to oneself. Likewise, Lawrence of Arabia condemned the British order in the Middle East after 1920, though he worked hard to establish it; he remained true to his love to the Arabs. De Gaulle was for the Brits and against the Germans in 1940s, and for the Germans and against the British in the 1960s, but he remained true to the cause of French independence. Thus, for us the north is cold, but the ship in the South Seas has to steer northwards to stay in warm waters.

As a Red freedom fighter, Mahler fought US imperialism, while now he identifies the Judaic Mammonite spirit of rootless capitalism as the main enemy. “Today we can see clearer what US imperialism is, and as such the enemy is the same”. Mahler refers to the larger-than-life role played by the US Jewish Lobby in defining the US policies, and to the exalted place prepared for Jews in the Pax Americana. But he looks well beyond the narrative proposed by Miersheimer and Walt: it is the Judaic Mammonite spirit that moves US imperialism, not a lobby of sorts. This is a Marxist thought: Karl Marx wrote of “Jewish spirit in control of America”. Mahler is closer to Marx’s disciple Werner Sombart who insisted that the spirit was brought over by the Jews. He does not separate the spirit from people. Here he fails to notice that the Judaic spirit may exist without a single Jew, as it was already preinstalled in some Protestant sects even among the earliest Fathers Pilgrims, and I’ve written about at length in Cabbala of Power.

Paradoxically, Mahler’s attitude to Jews fits the traditional Jewish outlook.

(1) He compares Jews with a thumb that opposes the four fingers and allows the hand to grasp things. Jewish Rabbis often offer similar comparisons proposing a special role of Jews opposing the Nations of the Earth.

(2) Mahler speaks of Jewish negativity, as opposed to the constructive role of non-Jews. Iliya Ehrenburg, a great Russian Jewish writer, expressed this sentiment in his Julio Jurenito. In this fantastic novel, published in 1923, Europe is visited by the Spirit of Destruction, embodied in the unlikely form of a Mexican itinerant philosopher. He calls the Jews ‘his best weapon’. “Aren’t Jews the same people as we are?” asked a disciple, and Julio the Destroyer replies: ‘Dynamite is not the same as cement’. Julio asks his disciples to choose one word, yes or no, and all of them – a Russian Tolstoy follower, an Italian anarchist, a French bourgeois, an American millionaire, an African savage, a German order-addict – prefer yes. Only Iliya the Jew chooses no. Nobody has yet to call Ehrenburg an antisemitic writer.

(3) Mahler speaks of eternal enmity between Jews and non-Jews. This is an axiom of the Jewish worldview: Mount Sinai is so called so because of sina [enmity, hatred] between Jews and goyim; if it is good for Jews, it’s got to be bad for goyim, and vice versa, say the Rabbis.

Thus, Mahler agrees with the Jewish worldview but from a diametrically opposing departure point. A mouse can agree with a cat that Cats and Mice are enemies, but their understanding of the reasons for their animosity may be quite different.

Nowadays, these ideas (right or wrong) are permitted to Jews but forbidden to non-Jews by ‘hate laws’. Similarly, a Jew (Deborah Lipstadt) may campaign against Jew-Gentile marriages, but a goy (her opponent David Irving) may not do so, under threat of imprisonment. Indeed Mahler is a frequent visitor in German jails. A proud man, he accepted the Judaic narrative but inverted it.

Mahler’s attitude to Jews is a violent reaction to the philosemitic indoctrination that persists in Germany, from the servile words of Frau Merkel to the Israeli parliament, to the supply of nuclear-capable submarines to Israel, to relentless Holocaust propaganda. He exaggerates when he proposes that Germany is occupied by Jews. In reality, Germany is occupied by the US troops, and this special treatment of Jews is imposed on the Germans as a sign of their integration into the New World Order.

Indeed, Mahler’s adulatory attitude towards the Third Reich and to Adolf Hitler is an embarrassment and calls for explanation. One possible explanation was provided by President Bush, who declared that “Saddam is the new Hitler”. This is affirmed by many Jewish and Christian Zionist pundits, like this. Formal logic says that this identity claim works both ways. If Saddam is the new Hitler, Hitler is a Saddam of old. If Gamal Abdel Nasser was a Hitler on the Nile, Hitler was a Nasser on the Rhine. These rebellious rulers had all challenged the Anglo-American Empire.

Iranians, Kurds or Iraqi Communists could not possibly say a single positive word for Saddam, and with a good reason. But for the Iraqi resistance fighters the name of Saddam means ‘Down with the US occupation of Iraq and down with the US-installed regime’ as I previously wrote. Mahler’s ‘Heil Hitler” means “Down with the US occupation of Germany and with the US-dependent regime”, though the Russians or Jews or German Communists would never agree with any adulation of Hitler. And indeed for many annoyed and unemployed youths it means just “Fuck you!”

Hitler was similar to Saddam even in his mistakes: both leaders sought the friendship of the Anglo-American empire and rejected bids for friendship from the Empire’s enemies, Stalin’s Soviet Russia and respectively, Khomeini’s revolutionary Iran. These mistakes turned out to be fatal for both. Apparently, Mahler did not look that far, but this is an important lesson for today’s rulers.

We may, however, understand Mahler’s words as a sign of his love for Germany and his desire for a resurrection of the German national spirit and national pride, for German independence and resistance to Anglo-American imperialism. Germans once had an excess of national hubris, but not anymore; now they probably could use a bit more of the old poison, to counterbalance the all-eroding influence of globalization. After all, the Mongols placed a statue of Genghis Khan in their capital Ulan Bator after winning independence, the French still adore Napoleon, and the Russians love Stalin. Israelis named their airport after David Ben Gurion, the Father of al-Nakba. It is obvious that these leaders are loved for what they signify today, not for their evil deeds.

We condemn the German practice of punishing positive references to Hitler by jail sentences. Germans may learn from their eastern neighbour: in Russia, one may refer to Josef Stalin approvingly and admiringly without being prosecuted. Sooner or later, nations should come to peace with their past.

In Defence of Prejudice

Israel Shamir answers ADL complaint

Beyond the Golden Gate, on a sandy shore of the cold North Pacific, spayed by black rocks and frequented by Sirens, lies Marin County. In this most delightful part of California, the Sirens do not ravish seamen; well-nourished mammals (also called manatees or sea-cows) peacefully flock on the beach, near equally peaceful and tranquil humans. They (humans, not sea-cows) are pleasant, blond and suntanned, given to yachting, white wine and Sufi poetry; or so it seemed to me after a fly-through visit. The comfortable life does not make the residents sluggish and placid, probably due to relatively bracing climate: Marine County is the home to this rare breed, the American radical. There are more of our readers and friends there than in the whole city of New York.

More than once I found myself mumbling: Northern California and its people are too good for the United States. The border should be drawn at Monterey. Let the Yanks keep the urban spread of LA with its toothy lawyers, their broad-backed spouses, the steroid instructors and silicon starlets who provide their relief. Northern California should be hitched to a few large whales and moved to the Atlantic shore of Europe, somewhere next to Normandy. Not in vain did this strip of land belong to Russia for a while, and it retains some of the Russian soulfulness, though it faces the Pacific rather than the Baltic.

Their local paper, the Coastal Post, is mind-bogglingly free from subservience to the Lobby. So free that they ran my piece Carter and Swarm, in defence of President Jimmy Carter after he crossed the line and the Lobby served him the black mark and threatened him with prosecution under a quaint law of 1799. The ferocious Jewish political police, the ADL, attacked the paper and me “objecting to unsubstantiated perpetuation of stereotypes of a malicious cabal of Jews "pushing for war," as well as Shamir’s stereotype of "Jewish media-lords" that "clinch the party line."

Here is my reply to the ADL’s attack:

In Defence of Prejudice

Stereotypes and prejudice are a legitimate part of our life. They are here to make our life easier. If you walk the dark streets of an urban ghetto and notice a gang of male teenagers without a single woman among them, your prejudice tells you to make a prudent detour. If a tramp in rags proposes to sell you a gold watch, your prejudice advises you to avoid the deal. If a charming stranger is eager to get bedded, your prejudice calls you to use a condom – or run away. ADL correctly states that there is a stereotype of a “malicious cabal of Jews” who are “pushing for war," as well as that of "Jewish media-lords" that "clinch the party line.”

A stereotype, or prejudice, usually is a result of many unpleasant experiences by persons who did not heed them. Ghetto teenagers may beat you up, the tramp is likely to unload hot goods, a brazen hussy may supply you with the clap. And organised Jewry did push for World War Two, for the Iraq War, and now for the war with Iran and Syria, while supporting apartheid in Israel. American mainstream media from The New York Times and Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times has Jewish owners and sticks to the party line.

Prejudice makes life difficult for stereotyped persons, and this is sometimes unfair: the tramp may be a rightful heir and owner of the golden watch, a charming stranger may be a chaste creature swept away by your wit and looks, the teenagers may discuss Plato’s Cave, while a publicity-shy Israel Taub, an octogenarian scion of a great Hassidic dynasty, a Jewish prince, of sorts, spends his personal fortune rebuilding Palestinian houses destroyed by Israeli soldiers. Together with a Palestinian prince Nashashibi and a WASP Professor McGowan he erected a memorial to the victims of the Zionist-perpetrated Deir Yassin Massacre. For him, Jimmy Carter is right, while AIPAC is even worse than the Israeli destroyers. Still, such men are rather the exception to the rule, and in chance encounters, a prudent man will hope for best and expect the worst.

A person unhappy with a stereotype or with prejudice may fight it. There is a good, hard way to fight a stereotype you dislike: act contrary to the stereotype. At the end of 19th century, Asians were stereotyped as weaklings and walkovers, doomed to submit to the White Man’s Destiny. The Japanese did not like the stereotype, pulled up their socks and sank the Russian Navy, before doing the same trick to the American one. In 1950s, Japanese goods were stereotyped as ‘shoddy’. They did not complain, but worked harder and by the 1980s, Japan-made cars became a byword of quality.

Indeed, prejudice may be defeated. If you are a ghetto dweller, be stranger-friendly and make your ghetto a nice place to visit, proving that prejudice is baseless. This was done by the Chinese who suffered from terrible prejudice in the beginning of 20th century. They got together, eliminated petty crime, and now their ghetto, Chinatown, is a delightful place to come for a stroll or for a dinner out. Prejudice against the Chinese died out, or rather got limited to Mia Farrow.

The Jews fought against prejudice a few times and won every time. In the 18th century they were considered illiterate and to be living in the Dark Ages. In the 19th century they were considered unmanly. Each time, they listened to the received wisdom of stereotype and acted to correct their behaviour. They can do it now again. They may engage in work conducive to the general benefit, shy away from stock markets and banks, give Christmas presents, demand “troops out of Iraq, no aid to apartheid Israel”, be friendly to their non-Jewish neighbours. Do not demonise nor threaten with legal action everybody who does not agree with you. Do not turn the media into your private reserve. Try this, and an old stereotype will wither and vanish. Actually, Zionism came into being as an idea of fighting the stereotyping of Jews by turning Jewish money and media men into peasants and soldiers. This was partly successful, but the old habits die hard.

The ADL and their wealthy Jewish supporters went by an easier way: sticking to stereotypes and intimidating those who notice their relevance. Together, they fit stereotype to a tee: they are warmongering (against Iraq and now Iran), interfering with free speech (see their attack on Carter), protecting of thieves (remember Marc Rich?), spying on dissidents (as in the Blankfort case in California), abusing the legal system (by suing their ideological opponents), acting as a cabal (defending and hiding Israeli crimes). And they still dare to speak of “unsubstantiated perpetuation of stereotypes”! Next we may expect a Spaghetteria fighting the stereotype of Italians eagerly devouring spaghetti.

Jews are usually quite happy applying stereotypes and prejudice, that is if they apply it to somebody else. Michael Kinsley, a star of Jewish punditry (Harvard, Oxford, LA Times, Slate, CNN, New Republic, Time, Economist, Harper) blessed stereotyping of Arabs: “When thugs menace someone because he looks Arabic, that's racism [because it is done by others - ISH]. When airport security officials single out Arabic-looking men for a more intrusive inspection, that's something else [because it is done under control of a good Jew, Mr Chertoff – ISH] , for the airport security folks have a rational reason for what they do. An Arab-looking man heading toward a plane is statistically more likely to be a terrorist. That likelihood is infinitesimal, but the whole airport rigmarole is based on infinitesimal chances.”

Well, the whole life rigmarole is based on small chances, but the chances that your average Jewish pundit will be violently anti-Arab, pro-war, against Iran and generally will stick to their party line are not small at all. They are better than winning in rouge et noir. There are exceptions, but they are aware that they are exceptional. The stereotyping of Jews is quite justifiable, and only their behaviour change will change it.

The ADL serves as a bad example to other groups. Instead of working harder or changing behaviour, they copycat Jews and moan about prejudice. If the Japanese would do that, they still would be producing shoddy cars, but the hate laws would forbid us to mention it. Hate laws and political correctness may hush up a problem but never solve it.

I know of it first-hand: my own Russian community had a bad image problem in admittedly prejudiced Israel. Instead of whining, the Russians created their own theatre, now arguably the best in Israel, promoted their own newspapers and political parties, and eventually asserted its place. Granted, they were helped a lot by Putin’s Russia which reasserted Russian pride. In California, I’ve met the Black Muslims, well-spoken and well-dressed men and women, who are respected without appealing to hate laws. They remind me of the youngish senator Barak Obama, another leader who does not need anybody’s condescension or defence.
People should be equal in law, this goes without saying. But stereotyping and prejudice usually correspond to reality, and they will change with the change of reality.

The ADL is not a means of prevention of the stereotype, but an important reason for its perpetuation. With their army of lawyers, their seemingly unlimited resources and their access to power they may forbid every related public expression of people’s feelings. But they can not forbid the feelings, and suppressed feelings will burst out sooner or later with greater, devastating force.

They are repeating the error of Soviet days: the Party had banned criticism, people suppressed their feelings, and their outburst swept away the Party rule. The democratic regimes allowed for free speech and criticism because this provided an outlet for people’s feelings and moderated the need for violent revolution. Now, with their supreme power of censorship and intimidation, organised Jewry has almost recovered the ground lost by the Party.

If all three major-party contenders for the Presidency of the Republic go, hat in hand, to proclaim their fealty to AIPAC, if a former President is unable to express his views without being brutally abused by the ADL, America may need a revolution in order to regain its freedom to express its feelings, unless the whining lot of ADL activists is somehow reined in first.