Nineteen months into Israel's slaughter of Gaza's children, moral ghouls like Simon Schama and Simon Sebag Montefiore are still being given a platform to smear as 'antisemites' opponents of genocide
As long as they get Morgan too when they hold trials in a multipolar world in which AI has a record of all those complicit in genocide. Raving Zionists are one thing. The millions of Rudolf Hess thinking they can cover their butt are another. Absolute vile creatures like Morgan can't be let off the hook for saying Israel went too far.
Though terrible this is, it's how it goes with western colonialism - aka 'democracy' I recall the Vietnam coverage back in the 60s. It was sold in the west as defending 'democracy' and the USA pledged to never leave Vietnam... roll on X years and they left in a shambles. Not because they thought they were in the wrong. But because the Anti-war movement in the US was getting too big to ignore. That is about the only thing that will work this time - it gets too big to ignore.
As you say, these Jewish intellectuals are actually fermenting antisemitism. They are resurrecting the old antisemitic trope that Jews cannot be trusted due to divided loyalties.
I suspect there is some truth in the assertion that anti-semitism is on the rise; it’s tragic that people can’t or won’t draw a distinction between the individual and the state
That said it just goes to show that the actions of the Israeli government and the IDF have more victims than those trapped in Gaza who are subjected to what is clearly genocide/ethnic cleansing (i.e. innocent Jews who are attacked for their race), equally it makes clear that the idea Hamas can be eradicated is utterly laughable, if anti-semitism is on the rise OUTSIDE Gaza one would imagine it’s universal INSIDE; a perfect recruiting tool
Shama, Jacobson and Montefiore are more examples of Jewish supremacism/exceptionality. With this mindset it is ‘possible’ to justify anything. It’s the old ‘God’s chosen people’ crap and is less of an argument than an article of faith. Or rather, dogma.
As with the Allies’ ‘deNazification’ programme after WW2 the same programme will need to be carried out at some point on these ‘supremacist Jews’ in our midst or the West will never again have any peace.
Speaking of the BBC. I don’t know if anyone listened to Friday’s News Quiz on R4. One of the panelists gave an impassioned catalogue of the crimes committed by the Israelis in Gaza. This was followed by a silence and after a few seconds there was a round of applause. Then the chair continued as though nothing of any consequence was said. The whole episode felt edited; the applause didn’t seem immediately spontaneous as though something had been taken out. I’m not one for conspiracies, but the behaviour of the BBC has been dreadful throughout the genocide and like many I have given up on its news service. I’m afraid for me its distortions go back to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014.
I have to write as I see and hear. The longer this discussion has gone on, the more blatantly antisemitic it has become and I really regret having to write that. You just need to condemn the Nakba, the oppression, the cruelty, the wickedness, the genocide, condemn the world powers supporting it, the Israelis perpetrating it and those Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists enabling it.
That's all, condemn and work towards getting it stopped. I know what I'm about to say would provoke from some quarters a barely coherent torrent of verbal rage and fury but I'll say it anyway, because if people, however justified their grief and bewilderment at the carnage, don't realise what they're doing, the problem will never be solved.
There are some Jews who clearly have no ambivalence, no divided selves, no split internal psychological parts, no remnants of past abuse personal or historically conditioned, who have no problem wholeheartedly disassociating themselves from the foreign state that is Israel, condemning its colonialism, hoping and working for its total dismantling as a structural polity. And good for them, lucky they.
But most people of all classes, nationalities, ethnicities, are not entirely so completely "individual", undivided, so wholly _one_ in everything. We are as I said lucky if all the bits and pieces of our minds, our memories, wishes, fears cohere in one life trajectory, when we don't work against ourselves and our best interests.
Personally, I'm not very "Jewish", I live my life contentedly on the whole without religion, I have not had for decades any connection with Jewish communal life and yet -- the best I can do here is to quote from something Sigmund Freud once wrote.
It's what I've always thought a rather curious extract from Freud's preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo (1913):
'No reader of [the Hebrew version of] this book will find it easy to put himself in the emotional position of an author who is ignorant of the language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers as well as from every other religion and who cannot take a share in nationalist ideas, but who has yet never repudiated his people who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew, and who has no desire to alter that nature. If the question were put to him: 'Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen _[sic]_, what is there left to you that is Jewish?', he would reply: 'A very great deal, and probably its very essence.' He could not now express that essence clearly in words; but some day, no doubt, it will become accessible to the scientific mind. ...'
Later developments in psychoanalysis emphasised the ideas of splitting, dissociated fragments living, so to speak, lives of their own. It is not only in the therapeutic situation that one always has to consider which part of the personality of a patient or client one is speaking to, and which part is hearing us and speaking back.
It's the case in everyday life too. And it is, I submit, the case when criticising the evils -- we can all use that word here because it describes what is factually the case -- carried out by Israel and its fascist government and fascist Israeli population, as most of it tragically is now.
But my point is -- always be aware that there will always be a part, or very often a part, in some Jewish listeners' and viewers' minds, that will experience a re-evoked trauma, the stirring of an old wound.
So what? You might say, dismissing the notion impatiently. "More whingeing Jews, there they go again, always trying to make the world guilty for the Holocaust in order to let us do whatever we want in Palestine, except that they say 'in Israel'." But if you don't care about your words, if you minimise the existence or possibility of antisemitism, even if you point to it as bogus cynical manipulation, your words will simply, in the cliché, fall on deaf ears.
Your arguments, your evidence, your justified critiques will have nullified themselves by the -- as heard -- reawakened light sleeper, antisemitism engendering them, as, to repeat, heard. You may deny any antisemitic intention or motivation, but in terms of successfully advancing your case, you will have worked against yourself, and most importantly against the case of justice for Palestinians.
So as I said at the outset, condemn, factually, using evidence-based words, but lower the tone (difficult of course in the context of a genocide, of the deliberate starvation of children, but I think essential nonetheless), leave out the venting and the ranting and the phrases heavy with discriminatory resonance.
Stick to plain words, descriptions, facts, evidence. If you want to win the argument to bring about peace with justice, speak to people's better parts without mobilising their worst.
Thanks very much Mr Grant. As you know there's a very strong Christian Zionist connection, Wikipedia has a long section on it but also there's a very interesting book, I think long out of print but the text is available online. Franz Kobler, 'The Vision was There' https://www.britam.org/vision/koblerpart1.html The book shows that Zionism began as a Christian idea. Its contemporary expression is linked to ideas of "The Rapture". The restoration of the Jews, according to this theory, has to come before the Messiah returns, and that will happen along with the final battle at Armageddon. The righteous will supposedly ascend bodily to Heaven but all the Jews who have not converted (I'm not sure if conversion is allowed in this version) will be doomed to everlasting torment in Hell, from which you can see that contemporary Christian Zionism with its support for the state of Israel is profoundly anti-Jewish!!
I always recall the historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg's neat formulation of the European antisemitism which led to the Shoah. He depicted its evolution in three phrases. First, you shall not live amongst us as Jews (forced conversion), second, you shall not live amongst us (expulsion), third, you shall not live (the 'Final Solution'.
But in the end I actually dislike what I've done here, above, and yet it seems I'm self-condemned to keep doing it. In the context of an horrific genocide perpetrated by Jews, enabled by Jews, and seemingly largely supported by Diaspora Jews and a leadership both clerical and secular, albeit also enabled and supported by the European powers and crucially the USA elites: in that context it really does feel irrelevant, narrow, self-excusatory, a piece of whingeing whataboutery, to keep on about antisemitism, particularly when it's largely a bogus form of it, not prejudice against Jews simply for being Jews, but rather an inevitable and probably justified reaction to crimes against humanity.
It doesn't and didn't have to be, as in WH Auden's famous poem, that those to whom evil is done do evil in return. It was, rather, supposed to be the case that "Never again" was to refer to never again to anyone, by anyone, for anything.
As for the religious aspect, as with I think all religions, one can pick and choose, and these days we tend to pick the bits which accord with the Declaration of Human Rights, and suppress the rest, unless, that is, you're a member of Israel's fascistic government. The worst, as with the far right religious fanatics in Israel elevate as a principle of government the racist and genocidal elements in the Hebrew Bible. Jewish opponents of what the late philosopher and polymath Yeshayahu Leibowitz called "Judeo-Nazis" emphasise the more liberal bits.
Myself, I prefer these days to think the whole thing, Earth, evolution by natural selection, 200,000 years of modern humans, the universe itself, is meaningless, all meaningless. If we all believed that, we'd stop imposing our meaning on those of others, and they reciprocally likewise and we'd all be happier. Live and let live. And stop fighting one another so we can unite to fight the big challenge confronting all of us, the climate crisis. Maybe that's too much to ask.
What worries more than ever is the normalizing of this type of warfare. It will not remain contained in Gaza nor will it remain against the Palestinians. I am miffed at the fact that the so-called leaders of the so-called civilized world are not acting strongly to stop this type of warfare.
We have seen in human history the assault of one group of individuals upon another, but in today's world we are seeing technology being used to target individuals, using facial recognition and AI. It seems that this war on the Palestinians is a testing ground for a more barbaric type of warfare. It is showing us the weakness of the ICJ's edicts, as few if any are even attempting to adhere to the indictments against Netanyahu and his ilk.
We are seeing the so-called most powerful nation in the world, the US and its allies support this type of warfare. We are seeing debauchery as the IDF soldiers display their total psychotic disdain for the Palestinians. And grimly, we are seeing thousands of innocent people's lives being upended in the most grotesque of ways. And we have seen this go on for 19 months. Not to mention the pager attack that Netanyahu had the audacity to give a golden one to Trump, and what is currently occurring in Syria.
Allowed to go unabated, it will become the modern warfare strategy in the coming decades. International humanitarian law will not be a deterrent as it has not been today or over the past 19 months.
If this is not stopped and stopped now, how in the world, what in the world, and who in the world can make an argument when this same approach to war is replicated in other theaters around the globe.
Israel is openly and belligerently giving the world their middle finger. They care not what anyone says about this barbarism, even their fellow Jews. This must be stopped or our world is utterly doomed to the very destruction the Armageddon these Zionist are hell bent of bringing about.
Jonathan Cook: thanks for proving a good old fashioned analysis of this horror story, at a time when “analyses” of any kind are so hard to come by. One senses that a weird and unthinking kind of ethical subjectivism, even solipsism, has infected not merely the “intelligentsia,” as it were, but Western society as a whole. Sadly, as we mark today the anniversary of the Kent State murder of four students, the student movement, at least in North America, seems to me, much of it, indifferent to the war crimes of our governments. Not all, by any means, but more than I would have thought possible given the vividness of the daily live-streaming of Israeli atrocities.
Powerful piece. Soon there will be a generation of European leaders for whom the holocaust is history learnt as part of 20th century history rather than modern history or remembered history, in the same way that the Armenian genocide is touched upon as a subject of historical curiosity (if taught at all). In other words it will not inform their decision making.
They are resorting to their most tried and trusted formula - Cry out loud Antisemitism, to divert the attention from the Genocide occuring in Gaza. From Genocide Joe to MAGA(Make America Genocidal Again) the Genocide continues.
The position of these genocide-supporting ghouls is indefensible. I remember Howard Jacobson as one of my lecturers in English I at Sydney University in 1966. Young and English is my only memory of him - but I was only 16 at the time. Simon Schama I know only from TV History series - and Montefiore - merely a Jewish name I recognise. They have done a severe disservice to their names and other claims for historical or literary trustworthiness.
As long as they get Morgan too when they hold trials in a multipolar world in which AI has a record of all those complicit in genocide. Raving Zionists are one thing. The millions of Rudolf Hess thinking they can cover their butt are another. Absolute vile creatures like Morgan can't be let off the hook for saying Israel went too far.
Though terrible this is, it's how it goes with western colonialism - aka 'democracy' I recall the Vietnam coverage back in the 60s. It was sold in the west as defending 'democracy' and the USA pledged to never leave Vietnam... roll on X years and they left in a shambles. Not because they thought they were in the wrong. But because the Anti-war movement in the US was getting too big to ignore. That is about the only thing that will work this time - it gets too big to ignore.
As you say, these Jewish intellectuals are actually fermenting antisemitism. They are resurrecting the old antisemitic trope that Jews cannot be trusted due to divided loyalties.
I suspect there is some truth in the assertion that anti-semitism is on the rise; it’s tragic that people can’t or won’t draw a distinction between the individual and the state
That said it just goes to show that the actions of the Israeli government and the IDF have more victims than those trapped in Gaza who are subjected to what is clearly genocide/ethnic cleansing (i.e. innocent Jews who are attacked for their race), equally it makes clear that the idea Hamas can be eradicated is utterly laughable, if anti-semitism is on the rise OUTSIDE Gaza one would imagine it’s universal INSIDE; a perfect recruiting tool
Shama, Jacobson and Montefiore are more examples of Jewish supremacism/exceptionality. With this mindset it is ‘possible’ to justify anything. It’s the old ‘God’s chosen people’ crap and is less of an argument than an article of faith. Or rather, dogma.
As with the Allies’ ‘deNazification’ programme after WW2 the same programme will need to be carried out at some point on these ‘supremacist Jews’ in our midst or the West will never again have any peace.
Speaking of the BBC. I don’t know if anyone listened to Friday’s News Quiz on R4. One of the panelists gave an impassioned catalogue of the crimes committed by the Israelis in Gaza. This was followed by a silence and after a few seconds there was a round of applause. Then the chair continued as though nothing of any consequence was said. The whole episode felt edited; the applause didn’t seem immediately spontaneous as though something had been taken out. I’m not one for conspiracies, but the behaviour of the BBC has been dreadful throughout the genocide and like many I have given up on its news service. I’m afraid for me its distortions go back to the Scottish independence referendum in 2014.
Charlie Lynch
I have to write as I see and hear. The longer this discussion has gone on, the more blatantly antisemitic it has become and I really regret having to write that. You just need to condemn the Nakba, the oppression, the cruelty, the wickedness, the genocide, condemn the world powers supporting it, the Israelis perpetrating it and those Jewish Zionists and Christian Zionists enabling it.
That's all, condemn and work towards getting it stopped. I know what I'm about to say would provoke from some quarters a barely coherent torrent of verbal rage and fury but I'll say it anyway, because if people, however justified their grief and bewilderment at the carnage, don't realise what they're doing, the problem will never be solved.
There are some Jews who clearly have no ambivalence, no divided selves, no split internal psychological parts, no remnants of past abuse personal or historically conditioned, who have no problem wholeheartedly disassociating themselves from the foreign state that is Israel, condemning its colonialism, hoping and working for its total dismantling as a structural polity. And good for them, lucky they.
But most people of all classes, nationalities, ethnicities, are not entirely so completely "individual", undivided, so wholly _one_ in everything. We are as I said lucky if all the bits and pieces of our minds, our memories, wishes, fears cohere in one life trajectory, when we don't work against ourselves and our best interests.
Personally, I'm not very "Jewish", I live my life contentedly on the whole without religion, I have not had for decades any connection with Jewish communal life and yet -- the best I can do here is to quote from something Sigmund Freud once wrote.
It's what I've always thought a rather curious extract from Freud's preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo (1913):
'No reader of [the Hebrew version of] this book will find it easy to put himself in the emotional position of an author who is ignorant of the language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers as well as from every other religion and who cannot take a share in nationalist ideas, but who has yet never repudiated his people who feels that he is in his essential nature a Jew, and who has no desire to alter that nature. If the question were put to him: 'Since you have abandoned all these common characteristics of your countrymen _[sic]_, what is there left to you that is Jewish?', he would reply: 'A very great deal, and probably its very essence.' He could not now express that essence clearly in words; but some day, no doubt, it will become accessible to the scientific mind. ...'
Later developments in psychoanalysis emphasised the ideas of splitting, dissociated fragments living, so to speak, lives of their own. It is not only in the therapeutic situation that one always has to consider which part of the personality of a patient or client one is speaking to, and which part is hearing us and speaking back.
It's the case in everyday life too. And it is, I submit, the case when criticising the evils -- we can all use that word here because it describes what is factually the case -- carried out by Israel and its fascist government and fascist Israeli population, as most of it tragically is now.
But my point is -- always be aware that there will always be a part, or very often a part, in some Jewish listeners' and viewers' minds, that will experience a re-evoked trauma, the stirring of an old wound.
So what? You might say, dismissing the notion impatiently. "More whingeing Jews, there they go again, always trying to make the world guilty for the Holocaust in order to let us do whatever we want in Palestine, except that they say 'in Israel'." But if you don't care about your words, if you minimise the existence or possibility of antisemitism, even if you point to it as bogus cynical manipulation, your words will simply, in the cliché, fall on deaf ears.
Your arguments, your evidence, your justified critiques will have nullified themselves by the -- as heard -- reawakened light sleeper, antisemitism engendering them, as, to repeat, heard. You may deny any antisemitic intention or motivation, but in terms of successfully advancing your case, you will have worked against yourself, and most importantly against the case of justice for Palestinians.
So as I said at the outset, condemn, factually, using evidence-based words, but lower the tone (difficult of course in the context of a genocide, of the deliberate starvation of children, but I think essential nonetheless), leave out the venting and the ranting and the phrases heavy with discriminatory resonance.
Stick to plain words, descriptions, facts, evidence. If you want to win the argument to bring about peace with justice, speak to people's better parts without mobilising their worst.
Thanks very much Mr Grant. As you know there's a very strong Christian Zionist connection, Wikipedia has a long section on it but also there's a very interesting book, I think long out of print but the text is available online. Franz Kobler, 'The Vision was There' https://www.britam.org/vision/koblerpart1.html The book shows that Zionism began as a Christian idea. Its contemporary expression is linked to ideas of "The Rapture". The restoration of the Jews, according to this theory, has to come before the Messiah returns, and that will happen along with the final battle at Armageddon. The righteous will supposedly ascend bodily to Heaven but all the Jews who have not converted (I'm not sure if conversion is allowed in this version) will be doomed to everlasting torment in Hell, from which you can see that contemporary Christian Zionism with its support for the state of Israel is profoundly anti-Jewish!!
I don't want to mislead so as to numbers will only say that my memory, which may be faulty, recalls that I've read somewhere that the USA figure for Christian Zionists was 90 million but I'd welcome any correction of this. I found this https://christianeducatorsacademy.com/how-many-christian-zionists-are-there-shocking-facts-revealed/
I always recall the historian of the Holocaust Raul Hilberg's neat formulation of the European antisemitism which led to the Shoah. He depicted its evolution in three phrases. First, you shall not live amongst us as Jews (forced conversion), second, you shall not live amongst us (expulsion), third, you shall not live (the 'Final Solution'.
But in the end I actually dislike what I've done here, above, and yet it seems I'm self-condemned to keep doing it. In the context of an horrific genocide perpetrated by Jews, enabled by Jews, and seemingly largely supported by Diaspora Jews and a leadership both clerical and secular, albeit also enabled and supported by the European powers and crucially the USA elites: in that context it really does feel irrelevant, narrow, self-excusatory, a piece of whingeing whataboutery, to keep on about antisemitism, particularly when it's largely a bogus form of it, not prejudice against Jews simply for being Jews, but rather an inevitable and probably justified reaction to crimes against humanity.
It doesn't and didn't have to be, as in WH Auden's famous poem, that those to whom evil is done do evil in return. It was, rather, supposed to be the case that "Never again" was to refer to never again to anyone, by anyone, for anything.
As for the religious aspect, as with I think all religions, one can pick and choose, and these days we tend to pick the bits which accord with the Declaration of Human Rights, and suppress the rest, unless, that is, you're a member of Israel's fascistic government. The worst, as with the far right religious fanatics in Israel elevate as a principle of government the racist and genocidal elements in the Hebrew Bible. Jewish opponents of what the late philosopher and polymath Yeshayahu Leibowitz called "Judeo-Nazis" emphasise the more liberal bits.
Myself, I prefer these days to think the whole thing, Earth, evolution by natural selection, 200,000 years of modern humans, the universe itself, is meaningless, all meaningless. If we all believed that, we'd stop imposing our meaning on those of others, and they reciprocally likewise and we'd all be happier. Live and let live. And stop fighting one another so we can unite to fight the big challenge confronting all of us, the climate crisis. Maybe that's too much to ask.
What worries more than ever is the normalizing of this type of warfare. It will not remain contained in Gaza nor will it remain against the Palestinians. I am miffed at the fact that the so-called leaders of the so-called civilized world are not acting strongly to stop this type of warfare.
We have seen in human history the assault of one group of individuals upon another, but in today's world we are seeing technology being used to target individuals, using facial recognition and AI. It seems that this war on the Palestinians is a testing ground for a more barbaric type of warfare. It is showing us the weakness of the ICJ's edicts, as few if any are even attempting to adhere to the indictments against Netanyahu and his ilk.
We are seeing the so-called most powerful nation in the world, the US and its allies support this type of warfare. We are seeing debauchery as the IDF soldiers display their total psychotic disdain for the Palestinians. And grimly, we are seeing thousands of innocent people's lives being upended in the most grotesque of ways. And we have seen this go on for 19 months. Not to mention the pager attack that Netanyahu had the audacity to give a golden one to Trump, and what is currently occurring in Syria.
Allowed to go unabated, it will become the modern warfare strategy in the coming decades. International humanitarian law will not be a deterrent as it has not been today or over the past 19 months.
If this is not stopped and stopped now, how in the world, what in the world, and who in the world can make an argument when this same approach to war is replicated in other theaters around the globe.
Israel is openly and belligerently giving the world their middle finger. They care not what anyone says about this barbarism, even their fellow Jews. This must be stopped or our world is utterly doomed to the very destruction the Armageddon these Zionist are hell bent of bringing about.
As someone once said, we're a flawed species.
Absolutely, without a doubt.
Jonathan Cook: thanks for proving a good old fashioned analysis of this horror story, at a time when “analyses” of any kind are so hard to come by. One senses that a weird and unthinking kind of ethical subjectivism, even solipsism, has infected not merely the “intelligentsia,” as it were, but Western society as a whole. Sadly, as we mark today the anniversary of the Kent State murder of four students, the student movement, at least in North America, seems to me, much of it, indifferent to the war crimes of our governments. Not all, by any means, but more than I would have thought possible given the vividness of the daily live-streaming of Israeli atrocities.
Powerful piece. Soon there will be a generation of European leaders for whom the holocaust is history learnt as part of 20th century history rather than modern history or remembered history, in the same way that the Armenian genocide is touched upon as a subject of historical curiosity (if taught at all). In other words it will not inform their decision making.
They are resorting to their most tried and trusted formula - Cry out loud Antisemitism, to divert the attention from the Genocide occuring in Gaza. From Genocide Joe to MAGA(Make America Genocidal Again) the Genocide continues.
So it is bad to covering up for the Gaza slaughter, but perfectly fine to be silent on 9/11? We call that triple hypocrisy.
This genocide is showing us who and what these people are: hollow human beings with no soul and who deserve to be shunned and shamed by the world.
The position of these genocide-supporting ghouls is indefensible. I remember Howard Jacobson as one of my lecturers in English I at Sydney University in 1966. Young and English is my only memory of him - but I was only 16 at the time. Simon Schama I know only from TV History series - and Montefiore - merely a Jewish name I recognise. They have done a severe disservice to their names and other claims for historical or literary trustworthiness.
Very well put, thank you. And thank you for the clarity of argument, as well as the clear diction.