Monday, June 04, 2012

The Mos Eisley Spaceport

 

"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy." (Ben Obi Wan Kenobi)


What has brought this hive of scum and villainy to mind?


This article on Modoweiss.  Those poor poor humiliated women. All they wanted was to take a 9 day vacation in Israel.To savour the beauties of this blessed land. And look at them now. Forced to spend the night at some gulaggy facility, disallowed from even setting foot outside the airport and they, just a pair of innocent, stylish, curious American students! 

 

Interesting that among the preparations they made for "visiting" Israel, they solicited advice on how to "cope with the problem" of having to go through strident Israeli immigration and security systems. Why would they need that kind of information? Notice how the story begins at the point of entry into Israel. And we are not informed what those two Palestinian-Americans, with ISM connections, were doing in Israel.


"The Israeli authorities have a notorious reputation for denying entry to Palestinians of all citizenships, and I had received all sorts of advice, solicited and unsolicited, on how to cope with the problem. The security officer opened an email from a friend living in Jerusalem who had advised me to remove myself from internet searches. “They are heavy on googling names at the airport recently,” he had written. “See if you can remove yourselves, not crucial but helpful.”

 

 

And the comments that follow offer a real glimpse into the dungeon of horrors that anti-Zionists dwell in and seem to thrive on. Here is a sampling:


“These [Israelis] people are sick.
How can they heal ? “…annie bis
Bad news. They can’t.
Not without some tremendous kind of shock treatment.
It’s too pervasive in their government and society to be turned around any other way.


(One wonders what kind of "tremendous shock treatment" the poster has in mind).



No more of their sayanim in my land.
No more of their treasonous pols in my government.
No more cash to them from my labor.
No more vetoes in the UN in my name.
I f you are going to be evil, go do it without my support.
May your god have mercy on your souls.

 P.S. It helps to have a dummy gmail account that you can log in to that gives them absolutely nothing, if you’re not sure you’ll be able to tell them no when they ask you to log in. [Doesn't this kind of pre-conniving at deception is a sort of self-affirming admission that the Israeli system is correct to investigate deeper? cc]


It reminds me of the problems Zochrot have commemorating the Nakba. The whole idea is like garlic to the vampire of Zionism.



The sad irony of it all is that the real Jews of Palestine, the ones who were always there in Safed and Jerusalem while the Ashkenazim were eating borscht in the snow – these people had that tradition of hospitality and Zionism destroyed it.


Eating borscht in the snow:





The Glorious Jewish State is one twisted, f*cked up place. It figures you’d have to be a hateful and immoral Zio-supremacist to defend a place like that.


 __________

I think this is enough sampling to give the reader an idea of what kind of place Mondoweiss is, who patronizes it and what sort of ideas and sentiments inform both the owner of the site and his fanatically hateful readers.

It is also a good opportunity to note that this website has been quite welcoming to Peter Beinart's recent book, as described in this article:

"There are certainly still Peter Beinart fans. At this year’s J Street conference, ­Beinart’s speech received several standing ovations (despite the fact that, just days before, J Street’s leader Jeremy Ben-Ami had publicly rejected Beinart’s call for the boycott). And he is sometimes treated as a rock star on college campuses. At Bard, I saw two female students literally clutching The Crisis of Zionism to their chests after Beinart had signed their copies. But while Beinart’s Army still exists, its future recruits may be more likely to come from the anti-Zionist wing of the American Jewish intellectual world.

The hub of that world is the website Mondoweiss, which is run by Philip Weiss, a veteran journalist (and occasional New York contributor) who has largely put aside his career as a generalist writer to become an intellectual godfather to a coterie of younger anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals, who don’t believe Israel must remain a Jewish state. In some ways, Weiss admires Beinart. “There’s a kind of nobility, or a romance anyway, in what he’s doing,” Weiss says. Though their current projects are of course incompatible—“My belief is we have to save Jews from Zionism,” Weiss says; “he thinks you can save Zionism”—Weiss holds out hope that one day they might not be. “The interesting question to me is, What is the crisis of Peter Beinart? Those of us in the anti-Zionist camp wonder if this rude reception, this bum’s rush he’s getting, is going to send him into our arms.”

Shame on Beinart for being courted by the kind of posters whose positions and attitudes are represented in the smattering of quotes I provided above.  He, a savvy, knowledgeable, experienced journalist and writer, cannot pretend that he is innocent of having brought these foul connections upon himself. What he wrote in that book he wrote with full consciousness and awareness.


2 Comments:

At 9:21 AM EDT, Anonymous TNC said...

I thought this was going to be about Counterpunch. Another vile place.

I used to enjoy reading Beinart's work in TNR because he advocated a sort of tough vital center liberalism. This was evidenced by his willingness to share common cause with conservative hawks around the use of force.

That old Beinart is gone from what I can tell. The new Beinart is relatively indistinguishable from your garden variety progressive "social justice" type.

Not sure what caused the transformation. The easy answer is the Iraq War. More specifically the progressive Democratic response which was essentially to demonize anyone who supported the war as a lackey of Pres. GW Bush. People like Beinart were apostates in this context. And, apparently unwilling to stand his ground (or God forbid flip over to the other side) he slowly came around to supporting progressive orthodoxy: the war was an act of belligerence and a failure.

As Beinart increasingly moved into the progressive orbit it was only a matter of time before he embraced their ideas about Israel.

 
At 11:37 AM EDT, Blogger The Contentious Centrist said...

I agree with your theory about what made him change sides (for this is what he has done, all his protestations to the contrary notwithstanding). He is a malleable quality, too easy to sway by fashionable attitudes. In other words, he is no Christopher Hitchens.

 

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