Rachel Corrie's Legacy: 

"Nonviolent resistance is no less noble than carrying out a suicide operation."

From Israeli journalist, Ben Dror Yemini's article in Maariv today  

"A few minutes after the publication of the verdict, [Corrie’s] family and their lawyer, Hussein Abu-Hussein, were interviewed for TV. Into the airways,  beautiful words were tossed, about democracy, peace, human rights. To the “New York Times” the celebrated advocate said the following words:

“It’s a black day for activists of human rights and people who believe in values of dignity,” Mr. Hussein said. “We believe this decision is a bad decision for all of us — civilians first of all, and peace activists.” Honeyed words. Even though I do not agree with Abu-Hussein I contemplated offering him  friendship on Facebook.

But I was too hasty. “Palestinian Media Watch” exposed the fact that only last month Abu-Hussein was interviewed for the Palestinian Television. The interviewer, and that’s no less significant, was our old acquaintance, Mohammad Bakri, of “Jenin, Jenin” infamy. So we are speaking here about constitutive text.

Abu Bakri: “You live in an abnormal state … sometimes you lose cases not because you are not a good lawyer but because of judicial tyranny, racial discrimination within the law.”

Abu-Hussein: “The Nazi state was also a state of law. It found refuge in the law from which it committed its most horrific crimes against humanity. Nazi Germany was a state of law for a very short time and found refuge in the law, [but] the state of Israel was founded on theft and dispossession… we suffer from a great injustice. The great monster attacks us every day and gnaws at our flesh… Every day they gnaw at out flesh.”*

Mohammad Bakri, [Israeli Arab actor]:
"I want to step on the head of this monster."

Hussein Abu Hussein, [Israeli Arab lawyer]:

"We all want to step on its head, but talking is not enough. Everyone has their role."

Baki and Abu Hussein are not the representatives of the Arab minority in Israel. They are its disaster. They are agitators and inciters. The subheading under Corrie’s photos on Channel 10 declared she was a  human rights activist.  That’s about as correct as designating her lawyer as a peace activist. On the other hand, there is no doubt he is the best representative of Rachel Corrie, her family and her way."

_____________

* The full quote in PMW translation: “"Nazi Germany was a state based on the rule of law for a short while and it found refuge in the law. [However,] the State of Israel was founded from the start on robbery and theft of a nation's homeland. Actually, the correct and true legal definition of what happened to the Palestinians is homeland theft... We suffer from a great injustice from the giant monster. This monster attacks us daily and bites into our flesh in the Negev, the Galilee, the Triangle [region in Israel], Jerusalem, and the occupied territories, the West Bank and Gaza. Every day it bites into our body."

***

I have written in the past a few times how I think of Rachel Corrie . Here it is, again:

 Corrie aligned herself sentimentally and seamlessly with suffering Palestinians, reserving for them her absolute anger and attendant pity to the extent that suffering Israelis merited nothing but a sneering hatred from her. Corrie’s idealism did not proceed from love but from ideologically induced hatred. She was a de-facto apologist for Palestinian terrorism, and she died trying to prevent the work of an Israeli bulldozer, which was searching for munitions buried in the ground . Contrary to Palestinian reports and what is generally claimed, the bulldozer was not there to demolish a house, (though houses used as cover for weapon-smuggling tunnels were demolished by the IDF, but not on that particular day). Any which way you slice it, those munitions were there to be utilized in attacks against innocent civilians. Corrie died protecting terrorist weapons. She was completely indifferent to the deaths these weapons spelled at a time when suicide bombings were a matter of daily, sometimes hourly, occurrence in Israel.

Btw, when I look at this photo of Corrie what strikes me is less her complete self-abandon to mindless hatred. What I notice is the difference between her semi-crazed demeanor and the baffled and smiling faces of the Palestinian kids, who surround her. What can it mean?

I left my comments on a website "Socialist Unity" where you can hear reverberations of the same kind of fundamentalist and constitutive hatred that is so easily  proclaimed in the dialogue between Bakri and Abu-Hussein

***

Compare and contrast:

Look at this youtube of Rachel Corrie as a fifth grader speaking about caring:

And then look at this picture of her, at age 23 in Gaza:

What happened in the years that passed between that idealistic and innocent young girl and the woman we see in the photos?   

I'll tell you what I think happened: She was seduced into abandoning her humanitarian better self by the cynical, quasi-demonic, calculated, cognitively-dissonant, stratagems of  ISM.   Here is how they define their mission:

" As enshrined in international law and UN resolutions , we recognize the Palestinian right to resist Israeli violence and occupation via legitimate armed struggle. However, we believe that nonviolence can be a powerful weapon in fighting oppression and we are committed to the principles of nonviolent resistance. [-]

The ISM does not support or condone any acts of terrorism – which is not legitimate armed struggle. The ISM does not associate, support, or have anything to do with armed or violent resistance to the occupation. The ISM does not assist or engage in any kind of armed resistance, no matter what form it may take.

This right to resist occupation applies not only to the Palestinian people, but to all peoples who are faced with a military occupation. The ISM regards all people as equals with equal rights under international law. We believe that nonviolent action is a powerful weapon in fighting oppression and are committed to the principles of nonviolent resistance.^[4]

During a CNN interview, Paula Zahn with Adam Shapiro and Huwaida Arraf asked about an article they had co-authored which stated: "Palestinian resistance must take on a variety of characteristics, both violent and nonviolent. But most importantly, it must develop a strategy involving both aspects. Nonviolent resistance is no less noble than carrying out a suicide operation."

Mr.  and Mrs. Corrie  need to demand justice for their daughter's death and explanations from the organization/cult that hijacked their giddy and suggestible daughter's being, brainwashed her, and then sent her to face a giant Israeli bulldozer, operated by an Israeli driver who could not see or hear her, playing into her fantasy that what she was doing amounted to caring about human rights and resisting non-violently the forces of occupation.

 I will repeat this: She died in her "non-violent" attempt to prevent Israel from unearthing munitions that were meant for shredding Israeli kids. She fulfilled in her body and destiny ISM's mission statement to the letter.

___________

Later, addendum:

This old post of mine is tangentially relevant to the point I'm trying to make:  Argumentum ad misericordiam:

From Normblog today:

"There you go, just 'fighting for an ideal', irrespective of its content - and 'admired, romanticized'. I wonder if Melody Kemp has ever given any consideration to the foreign volunteers of the Waffen-SS."

From Wiki:

"Himmler, wishing to expand the Waffen-SS, advocated the idea of SS controlled foreign legions. The Reichsführer, with his penchant for medieval lore, envisioned a united European 'crusade', fighting to save old Europe from the 'Godless bolshevik hordes'"

It's scary how the very same terms are utilized today, arranged along re-configured blocks of beliefs, to describe the mayhem in Europe and the West. For "foreign legions" read Al-Qaeda, "medieval lore" - the Caliphate, "old Europe" Al-Andalus, "Godless" - infidels and apostates, "crusade" - jihad.

Kemp's nostalgia makes her substitute passion for clarity and reason. All nostalgia is reactionary, according to Heidegger. He must have known, having been himself complicit in the nostalgic mission of Nazism. Kemp is incapable of recognizing her own complicity:

"My family were Spanish socialists. I should not brag about that, as they lost. But in those days, going overseas or to another country, to fight for an ideal, was to be a partisan and to be admired, romanticized, courted by artists, and writers. Now it's orange jumpsuits and terrorist charges. French partisans were stubbly warriors, smoking Gauloises Disc Bleu, not ‘madmen’, ‘cowards’ or ‘terrorists’. Yet again this word ‘terrorist’ like ‘insurgent’ is used with a sneer, a curled lip and sanctimony, and cleverly not linked with Israeli tanks pushing over houses or US troops destroying an ancient city and raping and then killing young girls, or staging unauthorised raids into a neighbouring country such as what happened in the nation in which I now live. Neither do we hear the words ‘anti colonial’ forces to describe those who attack US soldiers and their ‘imperialist lapdogs’ Just thought I’d throw in some of that to remind us."

One can get a snapshot of Kemp's mind's furniture from her knee-jerk inclusion of Israel in her Anti-whatever rant. A reference, if I may be so bold as to identify one of those pieces of furniture, to Rachel Corrie, herself a much-sung hero of the Pretend Left-Islamist coalition.

The kindest way I can assess Rachel Corrie’s mission is in comparing her to Pasha Antipov, the idealistic revolutionary from Dr. Zhivago, whose rage of exclusive pity overwhelms his moral values. The immense suffering he saw turned him from a naive idealist to a brutal, mass-killing revolutionary. He was a lost soul.

Corrie, likewise, aligned herself seamlessly with suffering Palestinians, reserving for them her absolute pity to the extent that suffering Israelis merited nothing but a sneering hatred from her. Corrie’s idealism did not proceed from love but from ideologically induced hatred. She was an open apologist for Palestinian terrorism, and she died trying to prevent the work of an Israeli bulldozer, which was searching for munitions buried in the ground. Contrary to Palestinian reports, the bulldozer was not there to demolish a house. (Israel did have a habit of demolishing houses which were used as cover for a weapon-smuggling tunnels, but on that day the bulldozer had a different assignment). Any which way you look at it, those munitions were there to be utilized in pre-meditated attacks against innocent civilians. Corrie died protecting terrorist weapons. She was completely indifferent to the deaths these weapons spelled at a time when suicide bombings were a matter of daily occurrence in Israel.

Corrie fits Kemp's idea of a hero, of a true partisan: She went "overseas... to another country, to fight for an ideal, was .. a partisan" and is "to be admired, romanticized, courted by artists, and writers."

Like Corrie, Kemp is in love with the passion of hatred.

A strong antidote is needed to neutralize the taste of bitter poison such polemics leaves. Maybe a shot of Orianna Fallacci's own polemic against Islamo- fascism. At least Fallacci knew first hand what a partisan was and what that word stands for.

Later:

And more on the kind of thinking that Kemp advocates, from Michael Waltzer, (again, via Normblog):

But our most dangerous enemies right now are people who defend inequality, hierarchy, and authoritarianism idealistically, with ideological fervor and organizational discipline. We may not remember the idealism of the Nazis; we think of them as thugs, which many of them were, but without young idealists they would never have seized power in Germany. We remember Communist idealism all too well, because so many people on the left were seduced by it and became apologists for a murderous and tyrannical regime. Today we need to be clear about our hostility to religious fundamentalism - in all its versions, but most important, right now, in the form of Islamic radicalism, because this is by far its most threatening form. Here we have idealistic hatred of everything the Western left stands for (or should stand for); here we have fanatical zeal, cruel intolerance, a cult of death, a passionate commitment to the subordination of women, vicious anti-Semitism, and a pervasive hostility to liberalism and democracy. And yet there are people on the left who insist that the dangers posed by this hatred are exaggerated (or even invented by rightwing politicians) or who make excuses for it, invoking cultural difference or imperialist oppression - as if our enemies were (secretly: it would have to be secret) advocates of multiculturalism and national liberation.

____________

And tangentially pertinent: The curse of the Jew

(Via The Big Pharoah):

"Whenever a Muslim blows up himself to kill hundreds of other Muslims I always tend to call that "the curse of the Jew". We allowed and justified suicide bombings against innocent Israelis in cafes and malls. We religiously sanctioned the actions of every Palestinian suicide bomber who killed and maimed Israelis. Now it seems the suicide bombers are killing far more Muslims than Jews.

The deafening silence of the Arab/Muslim world towards the mass slaughters in Iraq indicate one thing: this region will stay in the abyss of darkness, ignorance, and backwardness for a very long time until someone really rises up, takes it by the neck, and forces it to look in a mirror and see the ugly reflection.

The Politically-Correct Antisemite

On a blog named "RANAR-BARI" I ran across this astounding statement:

"For the sake of Vanunu and Rachel Corrie, it is foolish to conclude that Jewish money controls the American mind."

In other words, if it were not for Vanunu and Rachel Corrie, it wouldn't be foolish to conclude that Jewish money controls the American mind.

It is the sort of thunderbolt worthy of the judicious sagacity of Angry Arab. It purports to be a rebuttal to a standard antisemitic accusation that Jews control the world and that the American administration is enthralled to ZOG. The blogger rejects this allegation, not on the grounds that it is a vile demonization with evil historical roots and manifestations. No. The blogger fancies himself as a sort of Abraham, who haggled with God about how many righteous men in Sodom would it take for God to remove the threat of destruction from the city. Abraham could negotiate God down to ten righteous men. RANAR-BARI's author is even more ambitious: he is perfectly willing to exonerate all the Jews in the world, for the sake of these two lone righteous Jews: Rachel Corrie and Mordechai Vanunu. These two Jews, the embodiment of decency, are enough to redeem the entirety of basically perfidious Jewery from the crime of, suspicion of, world domination cabal.

But there is a problem.

Corrie wasn't, and never had been, Jewish and Vununu converted many years ago to Christianity, and is no longer Jewish.

Where does this leave our blogger's Abrahamic nobility?

The obstacle to the conclusion that "Jewish money controls the American mind." is now removed. Our blogger is no longer restrained by his love and respect for these two persons, and his way is clear to embrace the antisemitic canard that indeed Jews do control the American mind.

____________

Update:

On RANAR-BARI blog, where I left a comment, the blogger responds:

"To The Contentious Centrist

I dont know what you are getting at. Rather convoluted and twisted and typical of the well-organized Israel-no-matter-what conglomeration that has decended on the web. You concoct and construct an affiliation for anti-semitism for all those who oppose zionism, just as the Canadian Parliament recently attempted to in a failed attempt. It does not take a noble-mind to designate Israel as a pariah state, cruel and thuggish and perhaps the foremost perpetrators of anti-semitism in the long run and of course in direct collaboration with life long anti-semites like the Christian zionists...As far as America goes, that country has the largest body of well-meaning progressives, including a significant and increasing number of progressive Jews who are disgusted with the filth that Israel spews out..So I dont know what is your problem with that..the only problem is that they cannot control the hegemony of mainstream speak...."

Another rant, in which a worldview comes together in a pretty lucid way: well-organized Israel-conglomeration, the antisemitic card, Israel= thuggish, cruel pariah, American Christian Zionists, Israeli propaganda filth, and the marginalization of helpless, often Jooish, "progressives" (aka "Good Jews").

Is there any element of the New Left dogma that is missing from this garden-variety "two-minutes of Hate" ?

Comments:

@ Engage: About "The Promise", a play about the Israel/Palestinian conflict seen through the eyes of a British girl who comes to visit the place for a few weeks to see for herself. Many of the comments to this review of the play respond in the predictable far-Left clichoid manner that the creator of the drama and the network that screens it probably and possibly aimed at: example.

(Engage, the website, has a rigid and ideologically-based moderation policy where quite a few comments I left in the past did not make it through. Therefore I'm reproducing my comment here by way of recording it just in case it is deemed too pro- Israel to be allowed to appear on this self-described "non-Zionist" blog.

Update: Strange. When I checked about an hour ago, the comment appeared in the thread. When I checked again just now, it disappeared again. So what happened between then and now? I noticed this
on my sitemeter:

"London, United Kingdom, 0 returning visits

5th March 2011	09:38:10	Page View	No referring link contentious-centrist.blogspot.com/
5th March 2011	10:05:22	Exit Link	http://www.blogger.com/profile/07370528817706233156
5th March 2011	10:22:19	Page View	No referring link contentious-centrist.blogspot.com/

I'm guessing that when the comment was allowed, the moderator was unaware of my sarcastic remark about the website's eccentric moderation policies. Then someone checked it out and found it and got pissed off. And action followed quickly. Either that, or another moderator disagreed with the first moderator about allowing such brazenly pro-Israel apologetics ...

Either way, a mature and well-considered reaction. )

___________

From "Truth"'s link:

"According to Israeli authorities, the bombers entered Israel through the Egyptian border with Israel, after slipping out of Gaza when Hamas forces demolished a portion of the separation wall between Gaza and Egypt last month. "

If you wish to cast a doubt about the veracity of a statement of fact, better be attentive to the facts and what they tell us.

"Israeli statistics indicate that the barrier has substantially reduced the number of Palestinian infiltrations and suicide bombings and other attacks on civilians in Israel and in Israeli settlements, and Israeli officials assert that completion of the barrier will make it even more effective in stopping these attacks[33] since "An absolute halt in terrorist activities has been noticed in the West Bank areas where the fence has been constructed".[34] Israel's state comptroller, however, notes that most of the suicide bombers crossed into Israel through existing checkpoints.[35]

Israeli officers (including the head of the Shin Bet) quoted in the newspaper Maariv have said that in the areas where the barrier was complete, the number of hostile infiltrations has decreased to almost zero. Maariv also stated that Palestinian militants, including a senior member of Islamic Jihad, had confirmed that the barrier made it much harder to conduct attacks inside Israel. Since the completion of the fence in the area of Tulkarm and Qalqilyah in June 2003, there have been no successful attacks from those areas. All attacks were intercepted or the suicide bombers detonated prematurely.[17] In a March 23, 2008 interview, Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Ramadan Abdallah Shalah complained to the Qatari newspaper Al-Sharq that the separation barrier "limits the ability of the resistance to arrive deep within [Israeli territory] to carry out suicide bombing attacks, but the resistance has not surrendered or become helpless, and is looking for other ways to cope with the requirements of every stage" of the intifada.[36]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_West_Bank_barrier#Effects_on_Israeli_security

_________

About Rachel Corrie and her legacy:

Corrie aligned herself sentimentally and seamlessly with suffering Palestinians, reserving for them her absolute anger and attendant pity to the extent that suffering Israelis merited nothing but a sneering hatred from her. Corrie’s idealism did not proceed from love but from ideologically induced hatred. She was a de-facto apologist for Palestinian terrorism, and she died trying to prevent the work of an Israeli bulldozer, which was searching for munitions buried in the ground . Contrary to Palestinian reports and what is generally claimed, the bulldozer was not there to demolish a house, (though houses used as cover for weapon-smuggling tunnels were demolished by the IDF, but not on that particular day). Any which way you slice it, those munitions were there to be utilized in attacks against innocent civilians. Corrie died protecting terrorist weapons. She was completely indifferent to the deaths these weapons spelled at a time when suicide bombings were a matter of daily, sometimes hourly, occurrence in Israel.

Btw, when I look at this photo of Corrie what strikes me is less her complete self-abandon to mindless hatred. What I notice is the difference between her semi-crazed demeanor and the baffled and smiling faces of the Palestinian kids, who surround her. What can it mean?

http://www.scottishfriendsofisrael.org/Images/Activists/rachel-corrie-burns.jpg

A politically-activist art exhibit has let out some genies at New England's heartland.

A stinky affair

"Over the Wall: Censorship or anti-semitism? Inside the furor over an Art Hop exhibit

by Ken Picard

"The Art Hop debate raging this week in Burlington ...[i]s about walls themselves — walls that protect or imprison us, walls we hide behind, and walls that separate us from one another and from the truth. To shift the metaphor: Art is supposed to cast light in the darkness. But whether this controversy generates enlightenment or just a lot of heat and smoke remains to be seen. As does who will get burned.

The trouble started with a South End Art Hop installation by Peter Schumann, the 73-year-old Silesian-born founder and art director of Bread and Puppet Theater. In November 2006, Schumann visited Beit Sahour, a small, mostly Greek Orthodox town near Bethlehem in the Palestinian West Bank. For 10 days, he tried to teach Palestinians between the ages of 18 and 60 about performance art.

Schumann’s goal, he tells Seven Days, was to hear Palestinian stories about the pains and indignities they’ve suffered at the hands of Israeli soldiers — checkpoint searches, home incursions, property destruction and the deaths of loved ones — and then to turn those stories into street theater. Against this backdrop, Schumann was reading The Wall, John Hersey’s famous account of the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto Jews by the Nazis.

Out of this experience, Schumann, no stranger to controversial art, created “Independence Paintings,” so named because the street performances were held on Palestine Independence Day. The paintings, done on blackened cardboard in his distorted and free-wheeling style, depict people in various states of anguish and persecution. The figures are juxtaposed with “random” quotations from Hersey’s book and descriptions of the Palestinian street theater.

Local opposition to Schumann’s exhibit was stirred up by Ric Kasini Kadour, a Burlington writer and gallery owner, who circulated emails about the piece before it had even opened. Kadour wrote an essay for Art Map Burlington entitled “Art Hop Exhibition Takes on Palestinian/Israeli Conflict — Wades into Anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial.” In it, Kadour repeats many of the charges that were leveled against Schumann in Boston — that the piece equates the Israeli/Palestinian conflict with conditions in Nazi Germany, trivializes the Holocaust and undermines historical fact.

For his part, Schumann has repeatedly denied the accusations of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial — after all, he and his family fled Nazi Germany when he was 10. He says his critics not only misinterpret his work but “over-interpret” it.

“I’m not saying that what’s happening in Palestine is the same as what happened in Warsaw . . . but it’s certainly a reminder,” Schumann says. “I don’t understand how a people so terribly violated can now violate another people so badly.”

This fracas unfolds against the backdrop of multilateral assault on a beleaguered Jewish community on a few fronts: Jimmy Carter's highly biased book about Israel, Mearsheimer and Walt's "scholarly" treatise on the insidious power of a "Jewish Lobby" which has a stranglehold over the American administration, the thorny issue of tenure for rabidly anti-Israel scholars who publish books which attempt to deny Jewish history and Jewish identity, Ahmadinejad's invitation to address Columbia.

And then, there is this comment from "Nina Parris ... who turned 80 on September 11 [and] is a VTJP member and a Holocaust survivor.":

“If you think back to the 1930s, what happened the other day and the tactics that were used by the group that was creating the ruckus were exactly the tactics that were used by the Nazis in every meeting, whether it was trade unions, artists’ groups or on university campuses,” she says. “When this is a tactic adopted by Jews, something is rotten in Denmark.” which is as close to hate speech as I have seen recently, all the more dangerous coming, as it does, from a Holocaust survivor whose words then appear to have weighty "moral authority". Something is indeed rotten here.

As Oliver Kamm suggests, here, "Historical analogies are never exact but sometimes useful. If they are to be useful, then the precedent needs at a minimum to be stated accurately."

So let's see how this analogy works. Here's a record recounting what happened to trade unions under the Nazis:

The trade union movement fared no better. Hitler declared the First of May a National Labour Day, to which the trade union leaders humbly offered their full cooperation. The official organ of the German TUC, Gewerhschaftszeitung, published an article for its May Day edition with the following scandalous statement: 'We certainly need not strike our colours in order to recognise that the victory of National Socialism, though won in struggle against (the Social Democrats)...is our victory as well'!

After the National Labour Day mass demonstration of 100,000, Goebbels wrote: 'Tomorrow we will occupy the trade union buildings. There will be little resistance'.
The next day the SA occupied the trade union headquarters, dissolved the unions, confiscated the funds and arrested its leaders. They were loaded into trucks and taken off to the Nazi concentration camps.

And what did the Vermont "Jews" do to merit this comparison with a the might and brutality of the well-oiled Nazi regime?

"The letter [drafted by Members of the Israel Center of Vermont] then urged the board to: issue a public apology for allowing the Kovel lecture; adopt a formal policy that “only art presentations” be included in future Art Hops; conduct formal reviews of Art Hop programs before they’re approved; and open all future SEABA board meetings to the public."

So there is the proposed analogy, a letter written by a Jewish community under attack is analogized to the brutal, physical and legal violence of Hitler's regime. If this is not an example of blatant Holocaust trivialization, which is itself the younger brother of Holocaust denial, I don't know what is. Enough said.

The US has not yet formally confronted the full implications of this "new antisemitism". There is no uniform, universal statement defining and detailing what is antisemitism today by an authoritative body of scholars and litigators. Europe, however, did recognize that the erosion in the safety and freedom of the Jews among them called for a special scrutiny and concern. Which is why they commissioned the research and drafting of this document I'm referring to for consultation in this matter.

In December 2006, The European Union issued a document which set forth a list of definitions and examples deemed antisemitic. Here's a Summary overview of Antisemitism in the European Union .

This document was drafted and published in order to "allow people to copy and past parts of the definition as needed in order to clarify when debate and discussion has cross the line from free speech to hate speech. In the EU hate speech is not protected, it is in fact a crime".

According to this document,

Contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere could, taking into account the overall context, include, but are not limited to:
Calling for, aiding, or justifying the killing or harming of Jews in the name of a radical ideology or an extremist view of religion.

Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective - such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.

Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, or even for acts committed by non­ Jews.

Denying the fact, scope, mechanisms (e.g. gas chambers) or intentionality of the genocide of the Jewish people at the hands of National Socialist Germany and its supporters and accomplices during World War II (the Holocaust).

Accusing the Jews as a people, or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust.

Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel, or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide, than to the interests of their own nations.


"Examples of the ways in which antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the state of Israel taking into account the overall context could include:

Denying the Jewish people their right to self ­determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

Applying double standards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis.

Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

I highlighted in red the relevant clauses in this document that can be applied to the Art Exhibit, and to the specific analogy made by Nina Parris, equating Jews with their Nazi exterminators of 65 years ago.

Regrettably, the stench is unmistakable.

___________

Sidebar:

Rachel Corrie is mentioned in the Ken Picard's article, in that following manner:

"Neirman was one of several people who circulated flyers at the Schumann/Kovel talk. One flyer took aim at a Bread and Puppet performance called “Daughter Courage.” That theater piece deals with the death of 23-year-old American activist Rachel Corrie, who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to stop the destruction of a Palestinian house. Neirman’s flyers featured photos and captions depicting eight other “Rachels” who lived in Israel and were killed by Palestinian violence. "

As usual the information contained in this nugget is wrong.

The kindest way I can assess Rachel Corrie’s Palestinian mission is in comparing her to Pasha Antipov, the idealistic revolutionary from Dr. Zhivago, whose rage of exclusive pity overwhelms his moral values. The suffering he saw turned him from a naive idealist to a brutal, mass-killing revolutionary. He was a lost soul.

Corrie, likewise, aligned herself sentimentally and seamlessly with suffering Palestinians, reserving for them her absolute pity to the extent that suffering Israelis merited nothing but a sneering hatred from her. Corrie’s idealism did not proceed from love but from ideologically induced hatred. She was a de-facto apologist for Palestinian terrorism, and she died trying to prevent the work of an Israeli bulldozer, which was searching for munitions buried in the ground . Contrary to Palestinian reports and what is claimed in the article, the bulldozer was not there to demolish a house, (though houses used as cover for weapon-smuggling tunnels were demolished by the IDF, but not on that particular day). Any which way you slice it, those munitions were there to be utilized in attacks against innocent civilians. Corrie died protecting terrorist weapons. She was completely indifferent to the deaths these weapons spelled at a time when suicide bombings were a matter of daily occurrence in Israel.

_______________

Anti-Racist blogged on the same topic, here.

About Rachel Corrie and her legacy:

Corrie aligned herself sentimentally and seamlessly with suffering Palestinians, reserving for them her absolute anger and attendant pity to the extent that suffering Israelis merited nothing but a sneering hatred from her. Corrie’s idealism did not proceed from love but from ideologically induced hatred. She was a de-facto apologist for Palestinian terrorism, and she died trying to prevent the work of an Israeli bulldozer, which was searching for munitions buried in the ground . Contrary to Palestinian reports and what is generally claimed, the bulldozer was not there to demolish a house, (though houses used as cover for weapon-smuggling tunnels were demolished by the IDF, but not on that particular day). Any which way you slice it, those munitions were there to be utilized in attacks against innocent civilians. Corrie died protecting terrorist weapons. She was completely indifferent to the deaths these weapons spelled at a time when suicide bombings were a matter of daily, sometimes hourly, occurrence in Israel.

Btw, when I look at this photo of Corrie what strikes me is less her complete self-abandon to mindless hatred. What I notice is the difference between her semi-crazed demeanor and the baffled and smiling faces of the Palestinian kids, who surround her. What can it mean?

Rachel Corrie's Journals

From Solomonia:

A review of Rachel Corrie's recently published journals:

deliberately self-deluded to her untimely and unnecessary death

"..hard as she tried to impose the ISM narrative on what she saw, her reports constantly contradicted this narrative, though she didn’t recognize the contradictions."

I wrote about her here. It's interesting that my impression of her is not at all challenged by what is revealed in her journals, according to this review.

Vanessa: Politics before compassion

The silver-spoon British Actress continues the journey she started when she embarked on her crusade against Zionists and their supporters. Her first public stand was courageously taken when she accepted her Oscar award, and declared her admiration for Jane Fonda for standing firm and refusing to be intimidated by a bunch of Zionist hoodlums.

She also pledged, with some self-defeating illogic, to continue to fight against antisemitism and fascism...

She has proven stalwart in her dedication to fight the Zionists and to advance the cause of antisemites in the world, in her latest act of extreme bravery:

The Telegraph: Two suspected al-Qa'eda operatives released from Guantanamo Bay have walked free from court although they are still wanted in Spain on terrorism-related offences.
One of the men, who is accused of distributing extremist propaganda produced by Osama bin Laden, had half of his £50,000 bail surety met by the actress Vanessa Redgrave.

Jamil el-Banna, 45, who was said during a brief court hearing to have helped run a cell called the Islamic Alliance, recruiting people to fight jihad in Afghanistan and Indonesia, returned to his London home tonight.
The other man, Omar Deghayes, 38, a Libyan national freed from Guantanamo and allowed into the UK because he once lived here, is said to have had links to the same al-Qa'eda cell. He was also released on bail. Spain issued European arrest warrants for both men within hours of their arrival in Britain last night from the Cuban detention centre.

Miss Redgrave said: "It is a profound honour and I am glad to be alive to be able to do this.' She added: "Guantanamo Bay is a concentration camp. It is a disgrace that these men have been kept there all these years."

Roger L. Simon blogs about it here.

*****

On the matter of these outlandish analogies I rely on Olivar Kamm's rule of thumb:

"Historical analogies are never exact but sometimes useful. If they are to be useful, then the precedent needs at a minimum to be stated accurately."

So let's see what is the precedent that should be accurately stated in Redgrave's analogy?

What is a concentration camp?

"Prior to and during World War II, Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps.. throughout the territories it controlled... The two principal groups of prisoners in the camps, both numbering in the millions, were Jews and Soviet prisoners of war (POWs). Large numbers of Roma (or Gypsies), Poles, political prisoners, homosexuals, people with disabilities, Jehovah's Witnesses and others—including common criminals—were also sent to the camps. In addition, a small number of Western Allied POWs were sent to concentration camps for various reasons.[1] Western Allied POWs who were Jews, or whom the Nazis believed to be Jewish, were usually sent to ordinary POW camps; however, a small number were sent to concentration camps under anti-semitic policies.[2]

In these concentration camps, millions of prisoners died through mistreatment, disease, starvation, and overwork, or were executed as unfit for labour; though they were not extermination or death camps which started in 1942.

Death camps were established for the sole purpose of carrying out the industrialized murder of the Jews of Europe—the Final Solution. These camps were located in occupied Poland and Belarus, on the territory of the General Government. Over three million Jews would die in them, primarily by poison gas, usually in gas chambers, although many prisoners were killed in mass shootings and by other means. These death camps, including Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau, are commonly but erroneously referred to as concentration camps, but Holocaust scholars draw a distinction between concentration camps (described in this article) and these extermination camps"

And what is Guantanamo Bay?

"Guantanamo Bay detention camp is a cooperative military prison and detention camp under the leadership of Joint Task Force Guantanamo since 2002.[1] The prison, established at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, holds people accused by the United States government of being terrorist operatives, as well as those no longer considered suspects who are being held pending relocation elsewhere. The detainment areas consist of three camps ... The detainees held by the United States were classified as enemy combatants.

Since the beginning of the War in Afghanistan, 775 detainees have been brought to Guantanamo, approximately 420 of which have been released. As of August 09, 2007, approximately 355 detainees remain"

(Source: Wikipaedia)

Death at Guantanamo Bay:

"Three detainees at U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, died of apparent suicides early this morning, military officials reported today...

The detainees appear to have hanged themselves with nooses made from clothing and bed sheets, Harris said."

[www.defenselink.mil/news/newsart...]


Clearly, Redgrave knows nothing about either the Concentration Camps or Gitmo, or else she would not be making such an uninformed analogy.

But she is nothing if not consistent about the pledge she made in 1977.

Never mind the enthusiastic analogy. It is after all just speech and speech is free.

What about the choice of bestowing her charity upon a detainee accused of “producing extremist propaganda for Osama bin Laden,” ? Yes, the very Bin Laden who issued a fatwa urging for a Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.

Bin Laden is less choosy in his words. He is not shy about calling those who occupy Palestine "Jews" and offers his own solution to the Jewish problem.

Vanessa is a bit more discreet. She calls those same Jews "Zionist hoodlums", and pushes for a destruction of Israel, by way of solving her antisemitic problem.

It's not the first time that she donates money to a good cause. She was also an intrepid mover and shaker of the production of Rachel Corrie's play. Another terrorist sympathiser who was killed while actively defending a weapons cache meant for Israeli women and children.

Tariq Ramadan was banned from the USA for similar affiliations.

I somehow don't see Vanessa being banned from entering the USA. She is, after all, white, blond and British, while he is a Swiss, brown skinned, black haired Middle Easterner.

As I always say, antisemitism is not for Jews to cure. There is nothing Jews can do, short of commit sui-genocide, to cure this disease. It is up to non-Jews to identify this malignancy and extirpate the disease.

___________

As an Afterthought:

I can never quite understand the priorities of these people, who are willing to give so much money to such dubious causes. If I were Vanessa and had $50,000 to spare, I would ask myself: who is in most need of benefiting from this money? Would it be a suspected terrorist, or an entire year's supply of food and medication to a few thousands starving children in Africa? The answer is a no brainer, of course: The suspected terrorist.

Such is the choice of someone who puts her politics before her compassion.

On the memorialization of the Holocaust:

Norm challenges Tony Judt's arguments:

(1) For the question why people should be so sensitive about the destruction of European Jewry is not a good one, and the irritation behind it is not an impulse worthy of respect. These are responses based either on ignorance or on something worse than ignorance... 'the powerful incentive [there was] in many places to forget what had happened, to draw a veil over the worst horrors'.

(2) Judt himself allows that in 'moral terms' (his emphasis) it is proper that the central issue of the war should now be Auschwitz. If on this account we get some poor history, that is simply an inevitable product of the moral focus that is a proper one according to Judt himself. Unless, that is, he thinks that, its moral centrality notwithstanding, there is just too much attention being given to the Shoah today. But we need a reason, in that case, for thinking that this much attention is too much. And we don't yet have it.

(3) ... look at the list of items that Judt compiles to show the profligacy with which public discussion has recourse to the word evil. This list includes: Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Chechnya, the Congo, Sudan, Saddam's Iraq and North Korea. .. To speak the word 'evil' in any of these cases doesn't seem the least bit exorbitant... why it should be a difficulty or a worry to anyone that, for example, genocide is spoken of as evil, or an evil, is entirely mysterious.

(4) I don't know what audience or set of interlocutors [Judt] has imagined for himself, but if there are people who believe that anti-Semitism is the only evil in the world and the greatest threat to Western civilization, I doubt there would have been many of them listening to his lecture on Hannah Arendt

(5) But to say this without noting that there is also anti-Semitic hostility to Israel, in the Arab world and in the West, some of it perfectly overt and some of it more discreet, is to pretend that anti-Semitism is a smaller problem than it is. To lament such misuses of the Holocaust without mentioning the misuses in the opposite direction that equate Israel with the spirit and the methods of the Nazis is to see with only one eye. The same goes for writing as if the most serious sources of anti-Semitism might be arguments used by defenders of Israel or an over-emphasis on the Shoah. Really? This is a centuries-old hatred, and yet here we find ourselves in a situation where it is defence of the Jewish state and memory of the genocide against the Jews that are the stimulants of anti-Semitism; these, at any rate, are Tony Judt's sources of choice.
***

Is there too much about the Holocaust - too much writing, too much memorializing, too much reference? The whole weight of what Judt has to say pushes towards the conclusion that there is, though without his providing... a single compelling argument for this. But my own answer to the question is: no, there is not too much. I offer a moral and a political argument in support of that answer.

Morally - humanly - if you were to spend an hour of every day during a lifetime remembering, learning, lamenting, teaching what was done to the victims of the Nazi genocide you could not encompass all the cruelty and all the pain of those years.

We do better to take note of Primo Levi's poem 'Shema':

Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house,
when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed,
when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.

...This is true not because of what happened to those Jews, but because of what happened to those people;

An afterthought, from George Szirtes

Encounters I have known or witnessed.

X: The working class has suffered much more than the Jews have.

Y (The majority of whose family was wiped out in the war): Yeh.

X: Jews have no monopoly on suffering.

Y: No, they don't.

Y smiles in relief at such a satisfactory conclusion to the conversation. End of conversation. They drink and talk of something else.

X (thinks): Y is a very good man in his late seventies. There is no point in upsetting Y with any personal point-making. Beside who would want to cast such things into balances and make points? (But X remembers the conversation nonetheless.)

Exeunt omnes

I am puzzled:

What exactly does X remember? And why?

_____________

A day later:

What do poets do?

Poets, I've been told by a poet in the context of a conversation about Poe's The Imp of the Perverse , are intuitively cognizant of the "chemical" elements that construct our soul, seem to understand analytically the workings of the human mind, yet are always strangely detached from what he describes. A poet is someone who goes to the edge, and comes back with a report.

George Szirtes is a poet and happily provided a report of how the above character X's multi-layered mind works in layer-to-layer analysis:

X knows Y's background, not perhaps in intimate detail, though Y has very rarely referred to it and is unlikely to do so. But that only makes things worse for X. He feels Y has an invisible grip on him, or rather that he might have such a grip, and the possibility of that is even worse. He fears Y might address him from some moral high ground of suffering, both racial and personal, and therefore imagines Y playing the victim card. The victim card is the Joker. He wants a moral game without Jokers. He suspects Y would not play the victim card, but that may only be because Y is subtler than that. Y wonders whether X is projecting Y as a sly character. Like much of his race, X might think (thinks Y). But voicing that thought, however silently, however briefly, makes X feel worse still. He blames Y for this (suspects Y). X might well be thinking: Look what you made me do! And after all, is it not true (the little demon grows a shade bigger) that they have a tendency to slyness? And cruelty. Just look at Israel. Just think of the uses to which the Holocaust is put. X feels a certain solidarity with John Berger, Norman Finkelstein, etc etc. Why should a man not think the truth?

Y, for his part is also stuck between truths. He is quite aware of the possible misuse of his racial and personal history and is convinced it would be unjust to lay this on anyone, least of all on someone who has shown him kindness in the past. On the other hand the history is as it is and he can't make it disappear. In fact it is getting harder to make it disappear.... X's comments worry him and prey on his mind. He cannot help remembering them, just as he cannot help knowing what he does know. He cannot help feeling a little frightened and wondering if this is how holocausts begin.

I've encountered X-types before. In fact, I even quote them from time to time on my blog. I don't possess the refined mind of a poet so I plainly call them closet-antisemites, the ones who get all indignant about Jewish resistance to Rachel Corrie's memorialization, who are the first to buy Jimmy Carter's books about Israel or project barely-concealed exultation for Mearsheimer&Walt's doctrines, who mock Jews for being over-sensitive when Muslims refer to them as "apes and pigs" and are always in a rush to "contextualize" the Holocaust whenever that term makes an appearance.

But it's the poet's surgical laser-eye that can really do them the justice they deserve.