Footnotes

I've been thinking a lot about this, from a post by oisleep (aka ross) about a dispute over water in Valle de Abdalajis, Spain:
There is one non Spaniard involved in the occupation... Darron has freely admitted in the past that he ‘knows nothing about politics’ – yet time and time again in the last year from the schools occupations to the factory occupations it appears that those who ‘know nothing about politics’ are those who are the most active in taking practical steps towards fighting back.*
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Towards the end of last week, I posted a huge post with loads of links. I suspect many of them got lost, so I want to highlight my favourite two: Dave Rich's "What's in a Name" and Terry Glavin's "Thousands are sailing". If you only click two links, click those.

***

Noga-style, here is my comment trail for the last week or so. At TNC's on the coup in Honduras. At Coatesy's on leftists who didn't sell out. At Third Estate on the BNP and class. At BuJ's on Latuff's antisemitic cartoons.

***
To get past all this bitty trivial stuff to my last decent posts, go to: The lessons of the Lucozade plot and its follow up Terror and British Islam, or before that to my obituary of Ellie Greenwich. That's a bit embrassing, only three decent posts since before the summer...


*Hyperlinks added by me.

Comments

schalomlibertad said…
thanks for pointing to the thread about the latuff comic. i posted a comment, but it hasn´t shown up yet, or maybe it wont get by the moderator.
i simply wrote that i thought CC´s contribution was great, namely by pointing out how the comic updated age-old christian anti-judaism by using the palestinians to attack the jews.

with that in mind, it would appear impossible to see the comic as pro-palestinian. instead, it is simultaneously antisemitic and anti-palestinian. christian fundamentalism playing itself out in the israeli-palestinian conflict, where the palestinians become the weapon of the christians to attack the jews.
bob said…
Thanks SL. It took a while for my comment to appear, but it did. It takes energy to combat this sort of thing, and I am glad CC has that energy (I don't!).

Latuff has considerable influence, I think, on the discourse in the pro-Palestinian/anti-Zionist world, more so than Gilad Atzmon does, and nearly as pernicious.
Recent comments in which I provided links to accounts about the ethnic cleansing and massacre of Jews from the West Bank prior to 1948 did not make it into those blogs while responses to them appeared with a warning not to bother them with my propagandist Zionist sources. In a thread on my blog, after TNC posted some information from the encyclopedia Britannica, the same attitude was brought to bear. Any historical record that deviates from the Arab "narrative" is thus deemed propaganda and can then be dismissed as irrelevant, or whatever.

I will continue to follow up on these blogs and others, if I can bear it, and report what I find in my blog.

Let it be understood that Buj or DJ are not extreme or radical in their worldviews. They are considered moderate. They speak of "peace" and "truth", and freedom, politeness and cordiality, but seem incapable of keeping up these appearances when their basic assumptions are challenged. It's as if "peace" and "truth" have other meaning, which resides alongside the meanings commonly known for these terms.

As Anne Carson, the great Canadian poet, wrote:

"What really connects words and things?

Not much, decided my husband
and proceeded to use language
in the way that Homer says the gods do.
All human words are known to the gods but have for them entirely other meanings
alongside our meanings.
They flip the switch at will. "

And looks like these bloggers use words the same way these gods do.
BuJ said…
Insisting on Palestinian rights is not anti-Semitic. Plus as an Arab, I am Semitic myself. What flawed logic.

Seems when you expose the truth about Zionism you acquire a considerable fan base. I can safely add CC, Solomon2, and now Bob to my list :)
schalomlibertad said…
BuJ,
thanks for re-posting your bumper sticker. you've really enlightened us a ton!

Here, I've fixed you comment:

XXXXXXXXXXX

Insisting on Palestinian rights is not anti-Semitic [unless you use antisemitism to defend Palestinian rights]. Plus as an Arab, I am Semitic myself [therefore agreeing with the German and other psuedo-scientists that there are such things as "races." I know this has nothing to do with the topic, but hey, I am throwing everything at you but the kitchen sink, in order to avoid addressing the issue.]

Seems when you [propagate antisemitism] you acquire a considerable fan base. I can safely add CC, Solomon2, and now Bob to my list :)


XXXXXXXXXXX

If the requirement for being added to your fan base includes being censored from your blog for criticizing antisemitism and anti-Palestinian racism (which is what my comment did), then please add me to your fan base!
schalomlibertad said…
Additionally BuJ, you were not defending Palestinian rights by praising Latuff´s "Mother Palestine" comic.

You were rather endorsing the Christian fundamentalists´ instrumentalization of the Palestinians in order to assault the Jews.

No wonder then that you´ve chosen a photo of Ahmadinejad as your personal icon, a leader in instrumentalizing the Palestinian cause for other purposes.
bob said…
Insisting on Palestinian rights is not anti-Semitic.

Insisting on Palestinian rights is NOT antisemitic, but a good, noble thing to do. Propagating the blood libel IS antisemitic. Denying, minimising or relativising the Holocaust IS antisemitic. That does not mean that you, BuJ, or the other people that do this are somehow "antisemitic people". You may be well-intentioned and genuinely care about rights. Plenty of Jews do these sorts of things. But when you do this, you ARE doing something antisemitic.

Plus as an Arab, I am Semitic myself.
Like SL, I don't think "Semitic" means anything, except as a description of a language family that indeed includes Arabic. There is no such thing as a "race" of Semites; like all "races", this is a fantasy of the European colonial project.

That is why I use "antisemitic" rather than "anti-Semitic": there are no "Semitics" to be against. Antisemitism, quite simply, is the name for racism against Jews.

Seems when you expose the truth about Zionism you acquire a considerable fan base.
What is the "truth" about Zionism that has been covered up here? In your comment thread, it seemed that any fact that contradicted a very monochrome narrative of Palestinian history was described as simply "Zionist propaganda". The truth is complex and contradictory. And Zionism has been and is complex and contradictory.
I suspect that Buj has never made an effort to learn about the origin of term "anti-Semitism" or he would have learned that:

"In 1873 German journalist Wilhelm Marr published a pamphlet "The Victory of the Jewish Spirit over the Germanic Spirit. Observed from a non-religious perspective." ("Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum. Vom nicht confessionellen Standpunkt aus betrachtet.") in which he used the word "Semitismus" interchangeably with the word "Judentum" to denote both "Jewry" (the Jews as a collective) and "jewishness" (the quality of being Jewish, or the Jewish spirit). Although he did not use the word "Antisemitismus" in the pamphlet, the coining of the latter word followed naturally from the word "Semitismus", and indicated either opposition to the Jews as a people, or else oppositon to jewishness or the Jewish spirit, which he saw as infiltrating German culture.[11] In his next pamphlet, "The Way to Victory of the Germanic Spirit over the Jewish Spirit", published in 1880, Marr developed his ideas further and coined the related German word Antisemitismus - antisemitism, derived from the word "Semitismus" that he had earlier used."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism#Etymology

It is funny how eager are some people to be given the privilege of joining Jews in their designated place of racial inferiority and venality.

"We are all Jews now"!

Quite touching universality there.

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