[A-List] Something I did not like in [Re: Fwd: The Closing of the Zionist Mind - Juan Cole]

[Nadja Tesich]

For Nestor and others,
I am sorry-I don't know who Cole is.
Here is a simple definition-Nationalism that fights against imperialism---
is a POSITIVE force.I think Leon Trotsky said it.If I am  wrong-correct me.
Nadja

----------------------------------------
> From: nmgoro at gmail.com
> Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2010 09:30:33 -0300
> To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu
> Subject: [A-List] Something I did not like in [Re: Fwd: The Closing of the Zionist Mind - Juan Cole]
>
> There is something in Cole´s text that I find sickening.
>
> This man does not understand an iota when it comes to the main issue
> of our times -imperialism.
>
> Bracketing a progressive nationalism such as that of the Yugoslav
> socialists in the 1990s with such reactionary movements as the
> Maronite or the Zionist ones shows that this man Cole would put the
> failure of US American nationalism in Viet Nam and that of the North
> Korean state in Panmunjon in the single one bag of "failed
> nationalisms".
>
> It is noteworthy: a man so interested in other peoples´ blind points
> is not aware of this black area in his mind.
>
> It is not easy to be a revolutionary socialist...
>
> 2010/8/5 Nadja Tesich :
> >
> > Suzanne,
> > We could circle the world with Freedom Flotillas.
> > Nadja
> >
> > ----------------------------------------
> >> Date: Thu, 5 Aug 2010 10:56:38 +0200
> >> From: suzannedk at gmail.com
> >> To: a-list at lists.econ.utah.edu
> >> Subject: [A-List] Fwd: The Closing of the Zionist Mind - Juan Cole
> >>
> >> The essential insanilty of many in Israel to the former realities of
> >> aarcheological studies, acheological research and data reflects the
> >> uses of Israeli insensate rage to U.S. World Encircling Empire
> >> Building. The chaos fully supported insanity produces is used by the
> >> U.S. Military Services as offering amazing opportunites to advace
> >> world control. Look carefully.
> >>
> >> The intent of circling the world with military might is to remove
> >> sovereingity from 98% of world countries. One can begin this process
> >> in differing ways. One of them could be to introduce such internal
> >> disfunctionalities (the Georgian 'War' was quite effective in this
> >> with many useful outcomes supporting Empire encirlement) that the
> >> country targeted turns on itself in inner chaos. This can be also
> >> promoted with carefully set fires (Russian peat acres) or by
> >> introducing pandemics. In the brown people countries this can be done
> >> as was with the nuclear tipped bombing in Falluja to genocidally
> >> punish dissent by the occupying country that, by the way, will never
> >> ever leave. Further used to divide and conquer the Ummah or whole
> >> Islamic set of peoples.
> >>
> >> That the responses may be more suicide attacks world wide, the Ummah
> >> now around the world having been pushed out of their home countries by
> >> oil wars of the US/EU, inceases the sucess of the warmongering tactic
> >> to terrorise the white countries. Obama is the perfectly chosen
> >> President to represent his country as it is not, as will the Mosque at
> >> the World Trade Center Site. At the same time the videos of the
> >> deformed, monstrously deformed, infants and children as the result of
> >> the Nuclear tipped bombs dropped by order several years ago are
> >> neither shown nor written of. Guarrantied to enrage the Ummah
> >> forever.
> >>
> >> Israeli insanity is useful beyond useful as Biib knows well. That
> >> this destroys the ancient religion he professes to believe and
> >> practice is immaterial both to him and the US/EU military joined
> >> through NATO colonies.
> >>
> >> Interesting times needing examination of great care with new eyes, so
> >> to speak. Suzanne
> >>
> >>
> >> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> >> From: Sid Shniad
> >> Date: Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 10:36 PM
> >> Subject: The Closing of the Zionist Mind - Juan Cole
> >> To:
> >>
> >>
> >> http://www.juancole.com/2010/07/7984.html
> >>
> >> The Closing of the Zionist Mind
> >>
> >> Posted on July 30, 2010 by Juan
> >>
> >> It finally happened. The Jerusalem Post has declared archeology itself
> >> anti-Semitic.
> >>
> >> To tell you the truth, I am frankly worried about some of my
> >> colleagues who are committed Zionists having difficulty in dealing
> >> with reality in the wake of the severe difficulties facing the Zionist
> >> project in historical Palestine.
> >>
> >> Caroline Glick’s inaccurate and angry attack on me in the Jerusalem
> >> Post reminded me again of why I am anxious about the Closing of the
> >> Zionist Mind.
> >>
> >> Glick is actually alleging that anyone who practices critical history
> >> of the ancient world or the Middle East in general is thereby an
> >> anti-Jewish bigot. Glick, from Chicago, was a captain in the Israeli
> >> army and a judge advocate-general during the first Intifada or
> >> Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank,
> >> which the Israeli army brutally crushed. She seems to be going off the
> >> deep end, having made herself notorious with the sick satirical video
> >> ‘We Con the World,’ which made fun of the civilian aid workers killed
> >> by Israeli commandos on May 31 of this year (and which appears to have
> >> had some backing from the Israeli government itself).
> >>
> >> I don’t know if Captain Glick ever was not a zealot, but the
> >> bitterness and extremeness of her comments are now to the point of
> >> irrationality.
> >>
> >> It is not just she. I’ve been at conferences where committed Zionists
> >> in the audience would afterwards approach me and, with a sort of
> >> glazed look in their eyes, give me a little set speech, then abruptly
> >> walk away. I initially always think they want to have a discussion.
> >> They don’t. They want to engage in some sort of strange ritual speech
> >> to exorcise the doubts I raised. They want to tell me off and then
> >> escape before I can reply.
> >>
> >> One time some Orthodox students approached me at a conference to say
> >> that in their reckoning, Israeli settlers on the West Bank had almost
> >> never done any harm to anyone and maybe in total had killed 14
> >> persons, for which they were sorry. I was frankly outraged. I mean,
> >> what world did these university students live in? Had they never read
> >> even one academic book on the effects of the Israeli Occupation on the
> >> Palestinians of the Palestinian West Bank? Why invent fairy tale
> >> statistics, and what is with the passive aggressive ‘apology?’ There
> >> is something wrong with this way of thinking, and it is a kind of
> >> group think that reinforces itself in small, tight, communities of
> >> discourse.
> >>
> >> Last month, I was at a conference where a prominent academic at a
> >> prominent university gave a whole series of set speeches on various
> >> occasions.. Hamas is a terrorist organization that says it will never
> >> negotiate with Israel. Iran is near to being able and willing to nuke
> >> Israel. It was like a series of mantras to ward off any real, critical
> >> thought. When I told the person he was being essentialist, he was
> >> taken aback, then in a passive aggressive way, said he ‘hoped’ that
> >> what I was saying was true. It is so weird dealing with people who are
> >> supposed to be critical thinkers by trade who, when it comes to
> >> Israel, suddenly exhibit all the originality of a mynah bird. And they
> >> don’t let you get a word in edgewise once they start. And they
> >> constantly imply, with body language and innuendo, that you are
> >> misinformed or actively lying.
> >>
> >> Other strange features of this discourse are the disregard for any
> >> evidence that contradicts the set talking points, unwillingness to
> >> seriously reconsider positions in the light of such evidence, the
> >> repetition of key phrases in an impenetrable way, the allegation that
> >> critics said things they never said, and insistence on demonizing the
> >> source of the alternative evidence.
> >>
> >> I got exactly the same treatment in the 1970s from Maronite Christians
> >> in Lebanon and in the 1990s from pro-Milosevic Serbs, and recognize
> >> the condition. It is Failing Nationalism Syndrome (FNS).
> >>
> >> Not all national projects succeed. There are by some counts 5000
> >> ethnic groups in the world of a sort that could be the basis for a
> >> nation-state, but there are only about 190 countries. Some political
> >> projects, such as French Algeria (dominated by colons or colonists as
> >> a privileged group) or a Christian-dominated Lebanon, get going but
> >> just don’t have staying power. Algeria is now an almost wholly Muslim
> >> country, and Christians in Lebanon, while still powerful and numerous,
> >> are probably down to less than a third of the total population. But if
> >> we went back in time to 1935, we could sit at cafes in Algiers or
> >> Beirut and talk with these two about the future of their countries,
> >> and the ones in Algiers would have said that Algeria’s fate was to
> >> always be a part of France, and the Lebanese Maronites would talk have
> >> talked about their majority being strengthened and about the
> >> Phoenician identity of their country in the future.
> >>
> >> Since the government of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is
> >> doing its best to run out the clock on a two-state solution, the only
> >> two plausible outcomes in Israel/Palestine in the coming decades are
> >> long years of dreary Apartheid or a one-state solution. It is not
> >> plausible that the Israelis will be allowed to keep the Palestinians
> >> stateless and without, ultimately, any real rights, forever. So
> >> Zionists (Israel nationalists) are increasingly suffering from Failing
> >> Nationalism Syndrome, and it is causing them to flail about saying the
> >> strangest things.
> >>
> >> Let me take Glick’s weird screed section by section (she is replying
> >> to my essay in Salon.com)
> >>
> >> ‘ One of the most prominent anti-Zionists today is Prof. Juan Cole
> >> from the University of Michigan.
> >>
> >> Zionism is just Israel nationalism. Nationalism is of two sorts. It
> >> can be a sane patriotism in which people take pride in their identity
> >> and pull together to achieve national projects of self-improvement. Or
> >> it can be an aggressive, expansionist, grasping and destructive
> >> movement that exalts the in-group over out-groups and disadvantages or
> >> damages the latter. The second sense of the word ‘nationalism’ was the
> >> more common in the 19th and the early 20th century.
> >>
> >> So, I am not an anti-Zionist in principle (and it is weird that Glick
> >> would accuse me of being one), since Israel nationalism is fine with
> >> me as long as it is of the first sort. Any nationalism of the second
> >> sort, I roundly denounce, whether adopted by Jews, Arabs, or
> >> Melanesians. It is the virulent sort that Closes the Mind.
> >>
> >> ‘ Part of being a successful anti-Zionist involves claiming that Jews
> >> have no right to the land of Israel. So to be a good anti-Zionist, one
> >> needs to deny Jewish history.
> >>
> >> To this end, in March Cole published a piece of historical fiction in
> >> the Salon online magazine.
> >>
> >> Titled “Ten reasons why East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel,”
> >> Cole mixed half truths with flagrant lies to justify his denial of
> >> Jewish history and belittlement of the Jewish rights.
> >>
> >> Cole wrote, “Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then
> >> non-existent ‘Jewish people’ in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was
> >> not even inhabited at that point in history. Jerusalem appears to have
> >> been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for
> >> the united kingdom under David and Solomon.”
> >>
> >> This assertion is so mendacious that it takes your breath away. As
> >> anyone who has actually been in Jerusalem can attest, it is all but
> >> impossible to be physically present in the oldest areas of the city
> >> and not bump into relics dating from between 1000 and 900 BCE.’
> >>
> >> Glick is the one who is out of touch with reality. She cannot bump
> >> into a single monument from the period 1000-900 BCE in today’s
> >> Jerusalem. The position I hold is what is called the ‘Copenhagen
> >> school’ or ‘biblical minimalism,’ and it is a perfectly respectable
> >> academic movement. I think all archeologists and historians would hold
> >> it if some were not religious believers in the Bible. It is people
> >> like Capt. Glick who are politicizing archeology and tampering with
> >> science.
> >>
> >> There is no evidence for a monotheistic cult in Canaan in the period
> >> leading up to 1000 BCE. Monotheistic Judaism appears to have been
> >> invented in the Babylonian exile or perhaps a little before, and the
> >> fables of a great kingdom of David and Solomon were woven together
> >> then. The Assyrians were the gossips of the ancient world and they
> >> wrote down everything that happened in their clay tablets, and even
> >> talk about minor Arab queens in the Hijaz, and they didn’t know
> >> anything about a magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon with
> >> palaces. If these figures existed at all, I suspect they just had
> >> really, really nice tents, not golden palaces (which by the way have
> >> not been found despite what ideologues like Glick assert). Historical
> >> Judaism was a reformation of Canaanite religion over a period of time.
> >> (Some readers asked me who I thought was carried off to Babylon in the
> >> first place, and the answer is simple: Canaanites, perhaps those of a
> >> certain religious cult, but very possibly not the sort of monotheist
> >> depicted in the Bible).
> >>
> >> ‘ Cole’s allegation is the academic equivalent of Louis Farakhan’s
> >> claim that white people are devils planted on earth by aliens. As an
> >> anti-Zionist anti-Semite, it was just a matter of time until Cole
> >> traveled into the fetid swamp of denying the historical record to
> >> facilitate his false claim that Jews are not a people and therefore
> >> are bereft of rights as a nation to our national homeland.
> >>
> >> I don’t know where she found a quote by me saying that the Jews are
> >> not a people. She doesn’t actually seem good with like, evidence. But
> >> peoples anyway are not eternal essences. They are formed over time.
> >> All I am saying is that her timeline for the formation is off by
> >> several hundred years.
> >>
> >> Anyway, if Israel nationalism depends on the Bible’s stories of David
> >> and Solomon being historical, then kiss it goodbye. But note that my
> >> point in the Salon article was not that Israelis had no right to be in
> >> Israel but rather that they have no right to expel all Palestinians
> >> from Jerusalem (Yes, that is what Israelis of Glick’s stripe are
> >> doing). Glick’s shouting is designed to cover up an ongoing set of
> >> crimes against someone else, by painting herself the victim of,
> >> horror, biblical minimalism of an academic sort.
> >>
> >> And note Glick’s segue from calling me an ‘anti-Zionist’ to calling me
> >> an ‘anti-Semite’ because I won’t accept the bible at face value as a
> >> privileged text without some kind of supporting evidence (and in the
> >> face of contrary such evidence). I’ve gotten so I really don’t care
> >> about being called a bigot by people who are very obviously bigots.
> >> And I am afraid that pretty much everyone is getting that way, which
> >> is a shame. Because the history of anti-Jewish bigotry in the West is
> >> cosmically ugly and should not be trivialized.
> >>
> >> ‘ And why shouldn’t he cover himself in anti-Semitic muck? So far, the
> >> stench has brought him great success. The very fact that I felt
> >> compelled to write an essay explaining why anti-Semitism is
> >> anti-Semitism and why anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism is depressing
> >> proof that anti-Semites have been wildly successful in whitewashing
> >> their bigotry.’
> >>
> >> I’m still looking for evidence of anti-Semitic muck in anything I’ve
> >> written, as opposed to just practicing history. And, I’m glad she
> >> thinks me a success, but lets face it, I’d have gone much further in
> >> conventional life if I hadn’t gotten on the wrong side of strident
> >> fanatics such as she. But, I was never interested in a conventional
> >> career. I have a sneaking admiration for Hunter S. Thompson that I
> >> doubt very many deans share.
> >>
> >> ‘What makes contemporary anti-Semitism unique is its purveyors’ great
> >> efforts to hide its very existence. Their motivation is clear. Outside
> >> the openly genocidal anti-Semitic Muslim world, most anti-Semites are
> >> self-described liberals who claim to oppose bigotry. For these people,
> >> pretending away their prejudice is the key to their continued claim to
> >> enlightenment.
> >>
> >> And so the likes of Oliver Stone publish clarifications.
> >>
> >> And Cole invents history. And the Europeans blame Jews and Israel and
> >> Zionism when Jews inside and outside Israel are assaulted and killed.
> >>
> >> And I am sorry I wrote this column.
> >>
> >> Because an audience that demands an explanation of why evil is evil is
> >> an audience that has already sided with evil.’
> >>
> >> If all that ranting makes sense to anyone, they should please explain
> >> it in terms that sane people can understand. Some of it is just guilt
> >> by association and conspiracy thinking.
> >>
> >> Glick let slip at the end what is really going on. She is a cultist,
> >> who sees the world as black and white, good and evil. She and her
> >> movement are pure good. Those who oppose anything it does, including
> >> Apartheid, are evil.
> >>
> >> And since the world will increasingly oppose Israeli Apartheid against
> >> the Palestinians, we are in for lots more furious rants and character
> >> assassination like Glick’s.
> >>
> >> The Closing of the Zionist Mind, so evident in Glick’s weird column,
> >> is dangerous because a cult-like, black and white mindset is the first
> >> prerequisite for a turn to violence and it makes compromise and
> >> flexibility impossible. But what the Mideast needs more of is
> >> reasoned, humane, complex openness to change, to negotiation, to
> >> seeing the Other as human. Glick is foreclosing that process, and in
> >> so doing is helping dig the grave of Israel as we know it.
> >>
> >> Luckily, most Israelis I know are nice people and Glick is not
> >> representative, so maybe I’m wrong to see a trend here as opposed to
> >> just a supremely annoying and ignorant individual.
> >>
> >
>
>
>
> --
>
> Néstor Gorojovsky
> El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autoría
>