Posted on 12/25/2001 4:08:58 PM PST by CrossCheck
She's typical of the politicized lefties of non-poli-sci and history backgrounds. They are not inculcated with and are not peer-reviewed by established "fact checking" and such implicit in those departments.
Her cant is Chomskyesque. Note the lefty obsessions, but without the "post-modern" lingo by which other lefties make their work unreadable (though she uses the term "discourse" in her first sentence, but thereupon engages in plain-language insinuations a la Chomsky.)
She's pretty slick, like Chomsky. The first paragraph is an example. She dismisses "retaliation", and by proximity implicates that it was "foreplanned" by the Israelis. This is sophistry. First, the "retaliations" weren't against the PA at first, they're against Hamas and I. Jihad, which it seems Arafat has issues with too. Second, any country has a "variety" of plans for all sorts of situations. Third, she subsumes specific "retaliations" into a "plan" against "Arafat" without analyzing the very retaliations. Fourth, the focus on Arafat is a typical lefty side step, a "decontextualization" of "voices" that might upset their mindset and mental zoo of the current crisis. In other words, they don't have to confront what Hamas thinks or Islamic Jihad thinks, and publicly expresses, to wit, killing of all jews and the destruction of Israel. Read this more as the opening of the mind of a western academic rather than an analysis of the players.
I like this sentence, "The plan includes everything that Israel has been executing lately, and more." The Chomskyesque innuendo, lack of factual connection, and glibness is quite well inculcated into this worman.
What is it about the spirit of Christmas that brings all these Jew-haters crawling out of the woodwork?
"...The Jewish state of Israel is a state of mind, a projection of the American Jewish mind. The worries and problems it articulates are American Jewish problems. For Israeli 'Jews', there is no need for segregation, war, or subjugation of natives. We eat no bagels with lox, speak no Yiddish, read no Saul Bellow or Sholom Aleichem, and avoid synagogues. We prefer Arab food and Greek music. My neighbourhood has seven pork butchers to a kosher one. Forty per cent of Tel Aviv weddings are done outside Jewish framework: young Israelis prefer to go to Cyprus to get married, just to avoid contact with Rabbis. Tel Aviv is the gay capital of the Middle East, though according to Jewish law, gays should be exterminated.
If American Jews did not bribe Israelis on a large scale, we would just forget about the Diaspora and dissolve into the hospitable Middle East. If they continue to bankroll us, we shall oblige them with a small show of Jewishness.
We are master-sellers of illusion, and as long as there are buyers, we shall provide the goods..."
Imagine. You are to believe a Hasid in Jerusalem is oblivious to the Christianity in the City.
That's the delusional, secular, atheistic leftist Israeli mentality in a nutshell. They are losing control, and losing it fast. The Haredi ("ultra-Orthodox") population is growing at a much faster rate than the seculars, and the most extreme of seculars hate Judaism so much they would rather turn the country over to the Muslims than share power with the Haredim.
There are self-hating Jewish Palestinians on the staff of Hebrew University, which is the Israeli equivalent of UC, Berkeley. They ought to move to France for a while.
I'm beginning to think this "author" makes up facts to fit his essays.
Sabramerican, I can tell you stranger stories than the one about a Hasid who asks what Gentiles are doing in the Old City.
60% of the Under 30 Jewish crowd (at least the ones that voted) voted for Bush in the last election.
The problem with so much writing on the Middle East is that tempers run so high and there is so much at stake in practical terms, that it's hard to find out what is true in any particular case. The larger "truth" that each side wants to persuade people of takes precidence in so much that we read over the actual, smaller truths about any particular event, person or situation.
Boiled water bagels are an American thing. My relatives in Meah Shearim had these things made out of cake dough they called "bagels" but not what we're used to. Anyway, bagels are not anymore "Jewish" than pizza is "Italian."
How do you guys collect this stuff? REally, its amazing that jews are subjected and analyzed via this stuff. Does it happen to any other people in the world? Weirder is the self-hating jew phenomenon and the screeds they produce, which feeds into various paranoia around the world. What a world!
In much the same way that Jane Fonda was a critic of US policy.
If the purpose of 9/11 was to get the attention of the American people (as bin Laden told journalists would be the aim of attacks on US civilians), we ought to get serious. Our pols have been doing whatever they felt like doing for their own interests and it wasn't a big issue to the average American. Now we can get killed for what our government is doing; thats serious; thats not something to be silly and bravado about.
25 years ago we left Vietnam because the American people made clear to their government that whatever the heck that war was about, it wasn't worth any more Americans dying for it. Several years before that, the government ended conscription so no American could be forced against his will to die for it. But now, only 25 years later, what American pol will defend the Vietnam war? Reagan used to call it a "noble cause" but that was sloganeering and pandering; he sure didn't make any effort to make the case for that war. So, you say that we've supported Israel historically, but this country can make an absolute 180 as we did with Vietnam, if the American people decide to turn on the pols.
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