#76860 by Peter RV
Zionists are indeed buying our representatives by pricing them ,like - pigs.

Care to share the evidence? Who pays what to whom? When? Where is your evidence?
Perhaps American lawmakers prefer Israel to Jihadists because, well, the Jihadists are Jihadists.
====================

It is a horror to think that these political mercenaries have been deciding in our name, to devastate the whole countries for the sake of Israel’s “security”.

What’s interesting about this statement is the scare-quotes around the word security. As if Jews don’t deserve to live free from fear of shooting attacks, bomb attacks, knife attacks? What kind of double-standard is that? Jews aren’t really being slaughtered by Arabs? It’s fake?

Re #76801 by lilmamzer on 6/10 at 2:49 pm
(120 comments total)

“Finkelstein has failed.”

Yes, and schlockmeisters like you and Dershowitz have succeeded. Congratulations.

#76801 by lilmamzer on 6/10 at 6:49 am
(120 comments total)

“The bottom line is Finkelstein is not a scholar but an ideologue and there is a huge difference.”

lil,

Real scholars - which obviously do not include you - know good scholarship without the stamp of approval of academic politicians at some second-rate college. So go ahead, smear your slime all over the place. No one can stop you.

The bottom line is

Finkelstein is not a scholar but an ideologue

and there is a huge difference.

DePaul University knows the difference - after all, it’s their business to know.

Publish or perish - in peer-reviewed academic journals. Finkelstein has failed.

Good riddance.

And in other news......

[url="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/ 2007/06/10/wirq310.xml" ]
Palestinians shoot me and Jews treat me[/url]

Peter RV;

RE: ITW comment #76735 on 6/9 at 7:32 pm

“Zionists buying up all the politicians” “Vast Zionist conspiracy”

Facts mean nothing to you. I pity you.”

--------------------------------------------------

Here are some facts for ITW and others… hopefully they’ll mean something to him. No pity though…

Please check out what your US Senators & Congressman/woman in your state & other states have received from PRO-ISRAEL PAC:

==================================================

Pro-Israel PAC Contributions to 2006 Congressional Candidates:

Here is the link for the $$$ numbers & year to date:

http://www.wrmea.com/archives/May-June_2006/0605031.html

FYI:

US CAMPAIGN TO END THE ISRAELI OCCUPATION.

Check the dates: June 10 & 11 Mobilization in Washington, D.C. to protest the 40 years of Israeli occupation.

Phyllis Bennis

http://www.endtheoccupation.org

Tony...thanks for the update on Finkelstein tenure status. I saw it posted earlier today on his website.

Finkelstein has that moral courage to speak the “TRUTH”. He is consistent with his commitments to exposing lies and propaganda. He exposed Joan Peters book...her book was a hoax & a fraud.

BTW, Finkelstein has one more year at DePaul. There is a better future for him...on the horizon; I am sure of that.

ALL THE VERY BEST TO YOU Norman Finkelstein & YOUR FAMILY. MANY THANKS FOR ALL THAT YOU DO FOR CONVEYING & REPORTING THE “TRUTH”!

Following are some remarks by Noam Chomsky in an interview with Amy Goodman on the Finkelstein tenure case:

NOAM CHOMSKY: The whole thing is outrageous. I mean, he’s an outstanding scholar. He has produced book after book. He’s got recommendations from some of the leading scholars in the many areas in which he has worked. The faculty—the departmental committee unanimously recommended him for tenure. It’s amazing that he hasn’t had full professorship a long time ago.

And, as you were saying, there was a huge campaign led by a Harvard law professor, Alan Dershowitz, to try in a desperate effort to defame him and vilify him, so as to prevent him from getting tenure. The details of it are utterly shocking, and, as you said, it got to the point where the DePaul administration called on Harvard to put an end to this.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s very significant, for one university to call on the leadership of another university to stop one of its professors.

NOAM CHOMSKY: To stop this maniac, yeah. What’s behind it? It’s very simple and straightforward. Norman Finkelstein wrote a book, which is in fact the best compendium that now exists of human rights violations in Israel and the blocking of diplomacy by Israel and the United States, which I mentioned—very careful scholarly book, as all of his work is, impeccable—also about the uses of anti-Semitism to try to silence a critical discussion.

And the framework of his book was a critique of a book of apologetics for atrocities and violence by Alan Dershowitz. That was the framework. So he went through Dershowitz’s shark claims, showed in great detail that they are completely false and outrageous, that he’s lying about the facts, that he’s an apologist for violence, that he’s a passionate opponent of civil liberties—which he is—and he documented it in detail.

Dershowitz is intelligent enough to know that he can’t respond, so he does what any tenth-rate lawyer does when you have a rotten case: you try to change the subject, maybe by vilifying opposing counsel. That changes the subject. Now we talk about whether, you know, opposing counsel did or did not commit this iniquity. And the tactic is a very good one, because you win, even if you lose. Suppose your charges against are all refuted. You’ve still won. You’ve changed the subject. The subject is no longer the real topic: the crucial facts about Israel, Dershowitz’s vulgar apologetics for them, which sort of are reminiscent of the worst days of Stalinism. We’ve forgotten all of that. We’re now talking about whether Finkelstein did this, that and the other thing. And even if the charges are false, the topic’s been changed. That’s the basis of it.

Dershowitz has been desperate to prevent this book from being—first of all, he tried to stop it from being published, in an outlandish effort, which I’ve never seen anything like it, hiring a major law firm to threaten libel suits, writing to the governor of California—it was published by the University of California Press. When he couldn’t stop the publication, he launched a jihad against Norman Finkelstein, simply to try to vilify and defame him, in the hope that maybe what he’s writing will disappear. That’s the background.

The whole article is at

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11& ar=979

“I cannot conceive of Israel withdrawing if Arab states do not recognize Israel, within secure borders.” — Nelson Mandela, President African National Congress, President of South Africa, Primary advocate against South African Apartheid who served 25 years in Apartheid South African prisons.

Well, friends, I guess this means we have to score one for lilmamzer, Dershowitz and the other Zionist political attack dogs who have successfully savaged this fine scholar, or so they think.  There are certain objective standards for scholarship, and Finkelstein’s work is both prolific and of the highest quality. This has every earmark there can be of a crude academic hatchet job engineered by Dershowitz. The reputation of one injured by such tactics will only shine more brightly. Good luck, Norman. You can do a lot better than DePaul anyway. 

June 09, 2007
DePaul Statement on Finkelstein Tenure Decision
DePaul University Statement on the Tenure and Promotion Decision Concerning Professor Norman Finkelstein

06.08.2007

DePaul University confirms that it informed Professor Norman Finkelstein today that Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, C.M., DePaul president, upheld a recommendation by the University Board on Promotion and Tenure (UBPT) - the final stage in the faculty review process - to deny his application for tenure and promotion.

Granting tenure equates to a guarantee of lifetime employment, and the same standards are applied to all faculty members under consideration. In every case, the final decision is one of balancing the various arguments for and against tenure. The tenure process, which is detailed in DePaul’s Faculty Handbook, involves a rigorous review of each applicant’s scholarship, service and teaching, with the recommendations at each level forwarded up to the next level for consideration. It is an evaluation of faculty by faculty.

In Professor Finkelstein’s case, a faculty committee of the Department of Political Science voted in favor of tenure, submitting statements for the majority and minority, with a response from the majority. The Personnel Committee for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences then voted to support tenure and promotion, with reservations that it asked the college dean to note in his report. Subsequently, the college’s dean issued a written opinion against tenure and the UBPT voted against tenure. The UBPT report and materials from the lower committees were forwarded to the president for review. As in all cases of tenure, the final decision was made by the president.

Fr. Holtschneider said, “According to DePaul’s Faculty Handbook, the president can overturn the UBPT’s recommendation in rare circumstances and for compelling reasons. I find no compelling reasons here to overturn the UBPT’s decision.”

Fr. Holtschneider continued, “Over the past several months, there has been considerable outside interest and public debate concerning this decision. This attention was unwelcome and inappropriate and had no impact on either the process or the outcome of this case.”

He added, “Some will consider this decision in the context of academic freedom. In fact, academic freedom is alive and well at DePaul. It is guaranteed both as an integral part of the University’s scholarly and religious heritage, and as an essential condition of effective inquiry and instruction. On a daily basis, DePaul faculty and students explore the most important ideas of our time, including difficult and contentious issues, and they do so in ways that adhere to professional standards of academia and respect the dignity and worth of each individual.”

40 Years of Lies

Believe It or Not in the Middle East

By Robert Fisk

June 9 /10, 2007

“Only the president of France, General de Gaulle, moved into the political isolation by telling a press conference several months later that Israel “is organising, on the territories which it has taken, an occupation which cannot work without oppression, repression and expulsion - and if there appears resistance to this, it will in turn be called ‘terrorism’”. This accurate prophecy earned reproof from the Nouvel Observateur - to the effect that “Gaullist France has no friends; it has only interests.” And Believe It or Not, with the exception of one small Christian paper, there was in the entire French press one missing word: Palestinians.”

Here is the link to the rest of the details:

http://www.counterpunch.org/fisk06092007.html

“It seems to me a certainty that the fatalistic teachings of Mohammed and the utter degradation of the Arab women are the outstanding causes for the arrested development of the Arab. He is exactly as he was around the year 700, while we have been developing.”—General George S. Patton

Wasn’t it around the year 700 that Mohammed and Ali supposedly lived?  So, it would seem that islam is responsible for this 1,400 years Arab dark ages.  That would explain why pea-brain monkey’s, like Robert “Abu Keffiyeh,” suffer from such arrested developement, bitterly complain about others, like me, using big words that he can’t understand, and are incapable of making coherent, substantive argument, much less responding to one.

It would also seem that it remains only for these primitive Arabs evolve into humans, so that they can reject the disease of islam that infects them, and have their long, long, long overdue renaissance.

Comments(?) by “stenchy/lefty=ephraim pesach”

Wow..."stenchy/lefty=ephraim pesach”...how did you ever come up with those brilliant & dynamic comments!

I am sooooo...impressed with your intelectual abilities. I bet that you can stand up against Ilan Pappe, Finkelstein, Chomsky, Dr Nurit Peled-Elhanan...PhD...just to name a few! It makes us wonder just who is giving you all your zionist garbage propaganda to “type & post” on “truthdig”.

Your juvenile heckling is a reflection of the size of that pus filled abscess that is in your frontal lobe!

Your grunts, moans, groans & whining about our comments...can be heard coming out of your isolated manure filled...stall.

Is that all that you are capable of? A trained baboon can out do you...Ephraim!

You have been over-dosed on your sick zionism mode of therapy! Its time to get a seond opinion!

Re: #76112 by Robert on 6/07 at 12:22 pm
(59 comments total)

Ill-lie-mamzie...you have been frothing at the mouth & bragging about your Apartheid zionist Israel for the past several weeks.

All what we can see out of all your hysterical propaganda is stenchy garbage. Your Israel cannot survive without the billions of dollars & all other aid that comes from the American taxpayers.

We can’t see your abscessed head out of all that garbage that you are standing in! Hit that dusty trail…
==================================================

No, Robert “Abu,” YOU have been frothing at the mouth with vicious lies and hysterical propaganda. You are an islamist, fundamentalist, propagandist, Arab imposter, paid to troll internet websites and spew your putrid, Arab, propagandist, puke.

You and your kind are scum.  Israel will continue long after you and your kind have come to the quick and violent ends that you so justly deserve.  In fact, why don’t you do the world a favor and strap on that suicide bomb you’ve been saving for that special moment, right now!

Re: #76399 by Fadel Abdallah on 6/08 at 3:13 pm
(Unregistered commenter)

Judging from the frequency and timing of their rants, it should be clear to every one that Lilmamzer and Lefty are full-time paid employees of the Zionist propaganda machine. Possibly this is the only job open for such disturbed souls. They writefor the filthy dollar and that’s why they cowardly hide behinnd fake names. In my way of thinking, if someone writes out of conviction, they should be courageous enough to sign his/her real name to what they write. You can’t find more lowly person than someone who wants to disassociate him or herself from the garbage they keep recycling.
=================================================

For months I have been outing Fadel and his brigade of islamist, fundamentalist, Arab, propagandists as paid, full time internet trolls.

Well, I suppose it was predictable that a cheap, dim-witted, propagandist, troll, like Fadel, would run out of material sooner or later, and resort to stealing mine. 

Inspiration from allah, Fidel?

Re comment #76638.  Robert, I can’t thank you enough for posting the link to such a powerful video.  It not only exposes the truth behind this brutal occupation, but, on a broader scale, the extent to which America’s corporate-owned mass media has degenerated into a propaganda network, easily manipulated not only by the Zionists but, in a broader sense, by the military-industrial complex and U.S. imperialism.  Especially powerful were the words of Robert Fiske to the effect that brutal illegality of the occupation has become “the last taboo subject in America.”

I also found the discussion of how the U.S. media, unlike media in both the UK and Israel, “always” portray clashes between Palestinians and the IDF as the “defense” of Israel, even when it occurs in the occupied territories and involves purely offensive action.  One comment by Noam Chomsky would appear to have equal application, whether applied to the IDF, U.S. Forces in Iraq or, for that matter, the German army in occupied France during WWII.  “You can’t defend yourself when you are occupying someone’s land.  Call it what you like.  It’s not defense.”

Of course, there is also the tired effort to hide the brutal reality with the Orwellian “war on terror.” Any who would dare resist occupation are, of course, classified as “terrorists.” That isn’t new.  It isn’t just the label slapped on Palestinians resisting Israeli occupation or Iraqis resisting the American occupation.  In fact, the Nazis designated all European resistance movements as “terrorists.”

The revelation of the concerted campaign to denounce any and all who speak out against this brutal and entirely illegal occupation and gradual ethnic cleansing as either anti-semitic or as “self-hating Jews” is, as Norm Finkelstein aptly describes it, truly “beyond Chutzpah"--a description that applies equally to the verbal assaults by Emphraim “Lefty” Pesach, lilmamzer, and the hot air flowing from Inherit the Wind.

That said, I also saw in this remarkable video, in the 2,000 Israeli & Palestinian women who staged a peace march in the middle of Jeruselem, in the hundreds of IDF “refusniks” who prefer jail to taking part in this abominable subjugation, and in the Israelis who joined with ordinary Palestinians in rebuilding homes that had been bulldozed by the IDF a ray of hope.

This one hour, 19 minute video is a must for anyone who desires to learn the truth about “40 years of occupation.”

Comment #76554 by Peter RV on 6/9 at 4:06 am

PRV...what our friendly & civil/civility(?) zionist zealots are attempting to accomplish on this & other threads...is CRY ANTI-Semites, and DILUTE this forum or attempt to change the topic...etc…

ITW(howling in the wind)...is sounding like his other hysterical ranting zionist zealots.

I am NOT anti-Jewish, I am ANTI-ZIONISM and its RACISM & APARTHEID Israeli established policies. These racist policies are practiced & enforced on, the Palestinians, the victims of this tragic conflict.

There are many Jews who are for PEACE and against the horrific crimes committed by Zionists from the 1940’s to this day.

I have high respect for the Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky, Uri Avnary, Sara Roy, Amira Haas, Tanya Rheinhart, Gideon Levi, Elliot Cohen and many other Jews who are on the side of TRUTH, MORAL JUSTICE & PEACE.

They are NOT on the side of the BRUTAL, RACISM, APARTHEID ideologies of Zionism of Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Olmert, Yitzhak Shamir, Menahem Begin, the IDF generals, the IDF soldiers and the fanatic zionist ZEALOTS.

MORAL JUSTICE, EQUAL RIGHTS TO ALL ARE THE INGREDIENTS TO A LASTING PEACE.

Defending Israel from democracy
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 5 June 2007

The second Palestinian intifada has been crushed. The 700km wall is sealing the occupied population of the West Bank into a series of prisons. The “demographic timebomb”—the fear that Palestinians, through higher birth rates, will soon outnumber Jews in the Holy Land and that Israel’s continuing rule over them risks being compared to apartheid—has been safely defused through the disengagment from Gaza and its 1.4 million inhabitants. On the fortieth anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel’s security establishment is quietly satisfied with its successes.

But like a shark whose physiology requires that, to stay alive, it never sleeps or stops moving, Israel must remain restless, constantly reinventing itself and its policies to ensure its ethnic project does not lose legitimacy, even as it devours the Palestinian homeland. By keeping a step ahead of the analysts and worldwide opinion, Israel creates facts on the ground that cement its supremacist and expansionist agenda.

So, with these achievements under its belt, where next for the Jewish state?

I have been arguing for some time that Israel’s ultimate goal is to create an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space in expanded borders from which all Palestinians—including its 1.2 million Palestinian citizens—will be excluded. That was the purpose of the Gaza disengagement and it is also the point of the wall snaking through the West Bank, effectively annexing to Israel what little is left of a potential Palestinian state.

It should therefore be no surprise that we are witnessing the first moves in Israel’s next phase of conquest of the Palestinians. With the 3.7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories caged inside their ghettos, unable to protest their treatment behind fences and walls, the turn has come of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.

These citizens, today nearly a fifth of Israel’s population, are the legacy of an oversight by the country’s Jewish leaders during the ethnic cleansing campaign of the 1948 war. Ever since Israel has been pondering what to do with them. There was a brief debate in the state’s first years about whether they should be converted to Judaism and assimilated, or whether they should be marginalised and eventually expelled. The latter view, favoured by the country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, dominated. The question has been when and how to do the deed.

The time now finally appears to be upon us, and the crushing of these more than one million unwanted citizens currently inside the walls of the fortress—the Achilles’ heel of the Jewish state—is likely to be just as ruthless as that of the Palestinians under occupation.

Read the rest of article at:

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article7001.shtml

Israel’s former parliament speaker Avraham Burg has branded Israel as a ‘Zionist ghetto’ in ýhis newly-published book
Israel’s former parliament speaker has branded Israel as a ‘Zionist ghetto’, scoffing at the regime’s self-definition as a Jewish state.

In an interview published in Ha’aretz daily on Friday, Avraham Burg said that this self-definition is the key to the regime’s ruin.

“It [Israel] can’t work anymore. It’s explosive. It’s dynamite.” said Burg, parliamentary speaker from 1999 to 2003.

Burg has newly written a book, “Defeating Hitler” in which Ha’aretz says he describes Israel as a “Zionist ghetto” and compares Israeli behavior in the occupied Palestinian territories against Palestinians to that of Nazi Germany.

Also a former chairman of the semi-governmental Jewish Agency responsible for immigration to Israel, Burg took issue with the law of return, under which any Jew is able to come to live in the occupied lands.

“The law of return is the mirror image of Hitler. I don’t want Hitler to define my identity,” he said.

A former activist in the anti-settlement Peace Now movement, Burg is today a businessman who considers Israeli society paranoid and comparable to pre-Nazi Germany.

Burg slammed Israel for construction of a separation wall in the West Bank, saying, “The separation fence is a fence against paranoia ... There is something so xenophobic about it. So insane,” he said.

He also criticized targeted assassinations carried out by the Israeli army against Palestinian resistance fighters, comparing them to murder.

PEACE, PROPAGANDA & THE PROMISED LAND:

A VIDEO that reflects the TRUTH is better than millions of words!

We in the U.S. will NOT see this documentary on CNN, FOX NEWS, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC and the rest of our mainstream news media.

This is a powerful video that exposes the Israeli army/IDF brutal policy, horrific crimes and barbaric aggression on the unarmed Palestinian population.

You will flinch & may be stressed when you see the facts in cold blood.

Here is the link to: Peace, Propaganda & The Promised Land Video

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11& ar=533

Comment #76353 by Ill-Lie-Mam on 6/8 at 11:09am

IT IS WORTH REPEATING. ONE MORE FOR THE TRUTH RECORD:

I doubt if many Americans are aware that Israel has committed acts of aggression, war crimes, criminal acts, non-stop spying against the United States.

The Lavon Affair, the criminal & war crime attack on the USS Liberty, Jonathan Pollard/Israel spy scandal & other spying incidents...just to name a few.

The Israeli IDF attack on the USS Liberty ship left 34 American men dead and 174 were wounded. To this date, no formal investigation was initiated or conducted (by U.S. Congress) regarding this horrific attack/aggression. Everything has been swept under the rug.

Here are a couple of samples of what some of the US Navy personnel commented on the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty ship:

“Never before in the history of the United States Navy has a Navy Board of Inquiry ignored the testimony of American military eyewitnesses and taken, the word of their attackers.”

_ Captain Richard F. Kiepfer, Medical Corps, US Navy (retired), USS Liberty survivor.

--------------------------------------------------

“The evidence was clear. Both Admiral Kidd and I believed with certainty that this attack...was a deliberate effort to sink an American ship and murder its entire crew...It was our shared belief...that the attack...could not possibly have been an accident...I am certain that the Israeli pilots [and] their superiors...were well aware that the ship was American.”

- Captain Ward Boston, JAGC, US Navy (retired), senior legal counsel to the US Navy Court of Inquiry.

-----------------------------------------------------
Click on this excellent website… and see what former US Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, former CIA Director, Richard Helms and other Americans had to say about the Israeli IDF attack on the USS Liberty ship.

Here is the link/website to the USS Liberty ship & its BRAVE AMERICAN SAILORS:

http://www.ussliberty.org

Comment #76444 by ill-lie-mam on 6/8 at 6:03 pm

“keep quoting Finkelstein. he’s a fraudulent wannabe-academic, and now he has lost his chance at tenure at DePaul.
****DENIED***”
-----------------------------------------------

Ill-Lie-Mam...Could you give this forum/thread where this latest news break/article on Finkelstein tenure has been printed? I can see where you provided (From FrontPageMagazine.com / May 29,2007).

Are you 100% sure regarding Finkelstein tenure status at DePaul? If you are 100% on this… sure would like to read the official transcript/news release!

BTW, the above website is interesting...should be able to provide good zionist propaganda references for your hysterical trails of comments.

Comment #76282 by IWT on 6/8

“And they want total control, total power, and unimaginable wealth. Israel? that’s a puppet, a thorn, and an excuse, no more.”
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

ISRAELI PRESS: October 3, 2001

Sharon to Peres:"Don’t worry about American pressure; we control America”

“An acrimonious argument erupted during the Israeli cabinet weekly session last week between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his foreign Minister Shimon Peres during which Sharon reportedly yelled at Peres, saying “don’t worry about American pressure, we control America.”

According to Israel radio (in Hebrew) Kol Yesrael, Peres warned Sharon Wednesday that refusing to heed incessant American requests for a cease-fire with the Palestinians would endanger Israeli interests and “turn the US against us.”

At this point, a furios Sharon reportedly turned towards Peres, saying “every time we do something you tell me Americans will do this and will do that. I want to tell you something very clear, don’t worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it.”

The radio said Peres and other cabinet ministers warned Sharon against saying what he said in public because “it would cause us a public relations disaster.”

http://www.wrmea.com/html/newsitem_s.htm

--------------------------------------------------

It is clear and obvious who controls this administration’s “U.S. POLICY” in the Middle-East.

You can curse the “zionist establishment” in and around Washington, D.C. all you want to, but that is not going to change the situation nor what is really going on. You may think that it is “cute & clever” to badmouth the zionist gang...Paul Wolfowitz, Bill Kristol, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle...et al...but you are NOT fooling anyone here.

I have seen this zionist pattern too often being used on “truthdig” and other forums.

YOU ARE NOT IMPRESSING ANYONE BY YOUR ...WORDS/GESTURE & FAKE POSITIONING!

BTW, G W Bush “backed down” with his confrontation with Ariel Sharon during Israel Brutal IDF assault on the Palestinian town of Jenin!

Re #76444 by lilmamzer on 6/08 at 6:03 pm
“
Norman Finkelstein, one of the leading lights of the international hate-Israel movement, has been denied tenure at DePaul University in Chicago.”

==================================================

There is no politics as nasty as academic politics, and I’m sure Dershowitz is good at it. The excellence of Finkelstein’s work stands on its own, however, and denial of his tenure is a travesty of justice.

Fadel Abdallah:  Thank you for the haaretz reference.  Quite a remarkable article.  Before reading it, I had no idea that Rabbi Schlomo Goren sought to get General Markiss to blow up the Mosque of Omar immediately after the IDF seized the Temple Mount in 1967.  It serves to underscore that the central argument made by Israeli historian Tom Segev that the scope of discourse within the Israeli media is far greater than it is here, within the U.S., where the AIPAC alliance with the American military-industrial complex and neoconservative political elites seeks to squelch any and all criticisms of the Israeli government’s brutal occupation, even from Jewish Americans, by conflating such criticism into the bogus charge of anti-Semitism.

Those who read my contributions to Truthdig Blog might have noticed that I like to introduce writings and opinions by courageous and honest Jews. I do this because I believe that if we have enough of those, Jews collectively will be saved from the fanatic Zionists who are bound to destroy other Jews along with the Palestinians they hate so much, just because they happened to exist as the natives of the land when the colonial Zionist project came into existence.

Here’s one of those noble, courageous and honest Jews with whom I can share my land and live with in peace.
===================================
1967 - The war that ended Judaism
By Bradley Burston

…If absolute occupation corrupts absolutely, no group would be more corrupted by Israel’s presence in the territories than rightist rabbis.

With Messianic zeal, they set to dictating new commandments and enunciating new prohibitions, revolutionizing Judaism by casting the settlements as the building blocks of a Third Temple - all the while turning the settlement enterprise and territories as a whole into a new Golden Calf, a god to which the people as a whole would be forced to sacrifice.

Long dismissed as passive politically, militant religious Judaism came to set policy for the settlement movement as a whole, and, in effect, for the rest of us. Because we let them. We coddled the settlements with our tax revenues, we protected them with our army service, and knowingly, impotently, we tolerated their intolerance of Arabs.

If fundamentalist Muslim Palestinians taught their children that all of the Holy Land belonged to them alone, and that it was permissible that all of the Jews should be killed or expelled, entire Jewish organizations would make their livings detailing the baseness of the incitement.

But if fundamentalist rabbis in Israel taught Jewish children that all of the Holy Land belonged to them alone, and that it was permissible that all of the Palestinians should be killed or expelled, how did we respond?

We continued to pay their salaries as civil servants.

Kindly read the entire article at: 

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/867362.html

For those who have grown weary of the ceaseless diatribes posted by Truthdig’s resident Zionists and who are curious as to what an honest intellectual debate on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict might look like, I would suggest the June 8, 2007 segment of Democracy Now! entitled, “Israeli Historian Tom Segev, Palestinian Physician Mona El-Farra and US Scholar Norman Finkelstein on 6-Day War and Its 40-Year Legacy.”

Mr. Segev noted agreement with Ms. El Farra’s assertion that occupation will never bring peace and that “only peace that is built on justice will bring peace to the area.”

Segev added: 

“American friends of Israel should redefine their friendship for Israel.  Friendship does not mean support the government at all times.  And I think they should make a distinction between Israel and the government of Israel, just as they do that for their own country....  There are many, many Israelis who object to the occupation.  Nothing you will say in your rally in Washington will be new to Israeli ears.  In fact, the public debate in Israel is much more open than it is in this country regarding the future of the territories....It is very important that people realize that freindship to Israel does not mean supporting occupation of the territories.”

The effort by lilmamzer, Ephraim “Lefty” Pesach and Inherit the Wind to shut down that debate by flooding this post with their endless rants exposes that, at their core, these AIPAC Zionists are fascists who seek to close all dialogue.  What else explains the brownshirt-like delight of someone like lilmamzer in the denial of tenure to one of this nation’s most outstanding scholars, Norman Finkelstein.  In that delight, lilmamzer reveals that he and his ilk are not merely racists who pose a threat to the continued survival of Palestinians as a people, but to the core principles embodied in the First Amendment inside these United States.

For a Secular Democratic State
by Saree Makdisi (UCLA) in The Nation, 4 June 2007

This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Four decades of control established and maintained by force of arms—in defiance of international law, countless UN Security Council resolutions and, most recently, the 2004 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice in The Hague—have enabled Israel to impose its will on the occupied territories and, in effect, to remake them in its own image.

The result is a continuous political space now encompassing all of historic Palestine, albeit a space as sharply divided as the colonial world ("a world cut in two") famously described by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth. Indeed, Fanon’s 1961 classic still enables an analysis of Israel and the occupied territories as fresh, insightful and relevant in 2007 as the readings of Cape Town or Algiers that it made available when it was first published.

Israel maintains two separate road systems in the West Bank, for example: one for the territory’s immigrant population of Jewish settlers, one for its indigenous non-Jewish (i.e., Palestinian) population.

The roads designated for the Jewish settlers are well maintained, well lit, continuous and uninterrupted; they tie the network of Jewish “neighborhoods” and “settlements”—all of them in reality colonies forbidden by international law—to each other and to Israel. The roads for the West Bank’s native population, by contrast, are poorly maintained, when they are maintained at all (they often consist of little more than shepherds’ trails); they are continuously blockaded and interrupted. A grid of checkpoints and roadblocks (546 at last count) strangles the circulation of the West Bank’s indigenous population, but it is designed to facilitate the free movement of Jewish settlers—who are, moreover, allowed to drive their own cars on the roads set aside for them, whereas Palestinians are not allowed to drive their cars beyond their own towns and villages (the entrances to which are all blockaded by the Israeli army).

The wall that Israel has been constructing in the West Bank and East Jerusalem since 2002 makes visible in concrete and barbed wire the outlines of the discriminatory regime that structures and defines everyday life in the occupied territories, separating Palestinian farmers from crops, patients from hospitals, students and teachers from schools and, increasingly, even parents from children (it has, for example, separated one parent or another from spouses and children in 21 percent of Palestinian families living on either side of the wall near Jerusalem)—while at the same time enabling the seamless incorporation of the Judaized spaces of the occupied territories into Israel itself. And a regime of curfews and closures, enforced by the Israeli army, has smothered the Palestinian economy, though none of its provisions apply to Jewish settlers in the occupied territories.
There are, in short, two separate legal and administrative systems, maintained by the regular use of military force, for two populations—settlers and natives—unequally inhabiting the same piece of land: exactly as was the case in the colonial countries described by Fanon, or in South Africa under apartheid.

All this has enabled Israel to transplant almost half a million of its own citizens into the occupied territories, at the expense of their Palestinian population, whose land is confiscated, whose homes are demolished, whose orchards and olive groves are razed or burned down, and whose social, economic, educational and family lives have been, in effect, all but suspended, precisely in order that their land may be made available for the use of another people

For a Secular Democratic State
by Saree Makdisi (UCLA) in The Nation, 4 June 2007
(Continued)

The result has been catastrophic for the Palestinians, as a World Bank report published in May makes clear. While the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem enjoy growth rates exceeding those of Israel itself, Palestinian towns and villages are slowly being strangled. While Jewish settlers move with total freedom, the combination of physical obstacles and the bureaucratic pass system imposed by the Israeli army on the Palestinian population has not only permanently separated the Palestinians of the West Bank from those of Gaza, East Jerusalem and Israel (movement among which is forbidden for all but a tiny minority) but has also broken up the West Bank into three distinct sections and ten enclaves. Half of the West Bank is altogether off-limits to most Palestinians; to move from one part of the rest of the territory to another, Palestinians must apply for a permit from the Israelis. Frequent bans are imposed on movement into or out of particular enclaves (the city of Nablus, for example, has been under siege for five years), or on whole segments of the population (e.g., unmarried men under the age of 45). And all permits are summarily invalidated when Israel declares one of its “comprehensive closures” of the West Bank—there were seventy-eight such days in 2006—at which point the entire Palestinian population stays home.

The lucky few who are able to obtain passes from the Israelis are channeled from one section or enclave to another through a series of army checkpoints, where they may be searched, questioned, hassled, detained for hours or simply turned back. “The practical effect of this shattered economic space,” the World Bank report points out, “is that on any given day the ability to reach work, school, shopping, healthcare facilities and agricultural land is highly uncertain and subject to arbitrary restriction and delay.” Given the circumstances, it is hardly any wonder that two-thirds of the Palestinian population has been reduced to absolute poverty (less than $2 a day), and that hundreds of thousands are now dependent for day-to-day survival on food handouts provided by international relief organizations. Not only has the international community refused to intervene; it has actively participated in the repression, imposing—for the first time in history—sanctions on a people living under military occ