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

[Néstor Gorojovsky]

Lenin said it, and the Third Congress of the Communist International.

Stalin explained it, on an essay that many believe was written in
close colaboration with Lenin.

And yes, Trotsky said it many times, with some very interesting Latin
American examples.

In fact, even the Stuttgart Congress of the 2nd International said
something on the same line (but there was already a heavy block that
accepted colonialism, thus representing those layers of the workiing
class in the imperialist core that had already been co-opted by their
bourgeoisies).



2010/8/5 Nadja Tesich <nadjatesich at hotmail.com>:
>
> 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
>>
>



-- 

Néstor Gorojovsky
El texto principal de este correo puede no ser de mi autoría