By GEORGE SALZMAN and MANUEL GARCIA, Jr. | Counterpunch, Dec 29, 2008
The war against the Palestinians arises from the merging of the Zionist view of Jewish exceptionalism with the view in the United States of American exceptionalism, which have focused their common root ambitions for domination and possession as a hostility to Islam, and this is the leading crusade in the “clash of civilizations,” proclaimed by just-deceased Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington, which is the war against the world’s poor and dark-skinned people, the war of conquest carried out to enforce a rule of worldwide apartheid by a culturally Euro-American, racially white, highly industrialized capitalist elite.
The Zionist view of Jewish exceptionalism is critically examined, and demolished, in the book Overcoming Zionism, by Joel Kovel. This mind-set boils down to ‘any victimization of Jews we Zionists can remember, historically, justifies all our aggression, persecution and even genocide of Palestinians; we are, and will always be, the exceptional victims of world history and so are forever blameless; to disagree is to be one with our historical persecutors.’ The Jewish religion is quite incidental to the actual intent of the exceptionalism; Zionism is a criminal conspiracy drawing participants through a Jewishness filter, in the same way the Mafia exploits Sicilian heritage to filter its recruitment and promotion.
The operation of Zionist exceptionalism in Palestine mirrors that of the white Christian exceptionalism Jews had suffered under for centuries, and which was described in the book The Destruction Of The European Jews, by Raul Hilberg. I (MG, Jr.) was made aware of the insights of the Kovel and Hildberg books by Professor Emeritus (of physics) George Salzman. The three stages of development of racial-religious labeled exceptionalism are: conversion, expulsion and extermination. Hilberg summarizes “the three successive goals of anti-Jewish administrators. The missionaries of Christianity had said in effect: You have no right to live among us as Jews. The secular rulers who followed had proclaimed: You have no right to live among us. The Nazis at last decreed: You have no right to live.”
The arc for European Jews between the years 400 and 1940 was first to be pressured to convert to Christianity or face employment discrimination, then from the 13th to the 16th century Jews resisting conversion were expelled from many countries, and finally the Nazis devised industrialized extermination. The arc for Palestinians seems to be compressed to a time scale measured in decades rather than centuries. Conversion was never an option, and many forms of exclusion were enforced from the first days of the State of Israel (which, couldn’t we see as just the earliest Zionist-occupied section of Palestine?). Wars of territorial conquest since 1967, and the continuing invasion of “unoccupied” territory by “settlers” and their protective cavalry, the IDF — or land rushes into Indian Reservations, as we knew them in the U.S. — bend the arc from exclusion to extermination. In the logic of Zionist exceptionalism, there is nowhere within the limits of their territorial vision where Palestinians have “a right to exist.” What other kind of mentality could inflict modern aerial bombardment of essentially unarmed, corralled masses of people? Our world remains at Guernica, the Stukas and Heinkels are now F-16s and Lavi jets.
If the world does not rise up in unison to halt this slaughter in Palestine, and the relentless and hypocritical land theft motivating it, who could then blame the descendants of the victims — for there will be children who survive to remember — if they are well satisfied with the collapse of our own society in the future, and in fact help in its destruction through some great catastrophe, which we may be too arrogant and self-assured to envision now just like the self-satisfied elites of the 1930s. Time and the pressure of increased impoundment always breach dams, and resolve unnatural imbalances by a leveling flood. Time and the unrelieved resentments of increasing world poverty will ultimately breach our separation walls of control and drown our luxuriant indifference under a leveling tsunami. This is not a biblical type of prediction, just a matter of logic. If we, in the nations with the power to discipline the Israeli Zionists — most especially the United States, do not act soon and consistently thereafter for self-evident justice, we will pump up oppositional energies to our national progress. If we continue to act like conquerors apart from the rest of humanity, whom we view in purely utilitarian terms — as slaves — we must inevitably drown under a Red Sea of our own making.
Mere appeals in internet publications can do little, but in our capitalist, hierarchical world, each person can act to a degree commensurate with their level of political and financial power. And, the best application of that agitation is to influence those above you to take action commensurate with their power. Yes, this is the opposite of doing what is good for your career by doing what is necessary to advance the careers of your bosses. I leave to you the delicacy of striking a balance between your particular career and your brotherly and sisterly duty to humanity; but I will irritate you as I can, to choose the more rebellious path, because ultimately career is a personal war against humanity and a defilement of self-respect, which is exchanged for lucre and an illusion of power. Rebel against exceptions to your sympathies. Rebel against indifference to suffering.
There are many, many injustices and tragedies underway in our world, which cry out for immediate attention, and no one can really rank them as to deserving more or less help. Nevertheless, many currents of history have been distilled into what we see today as the war against the Palestinians, and it is keenly observed throughout the world. For this reason, we could say that the fate of the Palestinians is the measure of the world’s conscience, and will mark our level of civilization in the pages of time.
Manuel Garcia, Jr. can be reached at mango@idiom.com.
George Salzman can be reached at george.salzman@umb.edu.
Peace and Justice Post 
US: Criticize Israel and lose your job
March 9, 2009US academic freedom in peril
Paul J. Balles | Redress, March 8, 2009
Paul J. Balles considers how Zionists in positions of authority at academic institutions in the United States are persecuting and defaming anyone who dares to criticize Israel or even mention Palestinian rights.
About the worst thing one can do in America or Europe is to criticize Israel. “Freedom” even in academia doesn’t allow critical comments about Israel or Zionism. Those who risk it can lose their jobs and be labelled anti-Semitic bigots.
Joel Kovel was terminated from Bard College after 20 years of service because of “differences between myself and the Bard administration on the issue of Zionism”. The president of Bard, Leon Botstein, didn’t consider Kovel’s critiques of Zionism to be protected academic freedom.
The worst of the critic bashers is Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz. He spearheaded a campaign against Norman Finkelstein’s tenure for writing Beyond Chutzpah, documenting in detail the falsifications in Dershowitz’s book The Case for Israel.
After being denied tenure, Finkelstein said: “I met the standards of tenure DePaul required, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the political opposition to my speaking out on the Israel-Palestine conflict.”
In his 2008 book, The Case Against Israel’s Enemies, Dershowitz defamed many who have been critical of Israel, calling them bigots or labelling them anti-Semitic. Dershowitz has led the pack attacking Israel’s critics.
On former President Jimmy Carter, Dershowitz wrote: “Whatever the reason or reasons for Jimmy Carter’s recent descent into the gutter of bigotry, history will not judge him kindly.”
Attacking University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer and Harvard University Professor Stephen M. Walt, who together authored The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (2007), Dershowitz wrote: “They are hate-mongers who have given up on scholarly debate and the democratic process in order to become rock-star heroes of anti-Israel extremists.”
Writing about the British University and College Union (UCU) boycott of Israeli educators and academic institutions, Dershowitz explained how he and others “wrote an op-ed piece for the Times of London, in which we demonstrated parallels between this boycott and previous anti-Jewish boycotts that were undoubtedly motivated by anti-Semitism”.
On another front, Roosevelt University of Chicago at Illinois fired a philosophy and religion professor for allowing students in his class to ask questions about Judaism and Islam. The chair of the department, Susan Weininger, fired the professor, Douglas Giles, saying that students should not be allowed to ask whatever questions they want in class.
Weininger said that free discussion in world religions could “open up Judaism to criticism”. Any such material, she said, was not permissible to be mentioned in class discussion, textbooks or examinations. Further, she ordered Giles to forbid any and all discussion of the “Palestinian issue”, any mention of Palestinian rights, the Muslim belief in the holiness of Jerusalem, and Zionism. When Professor Giles refused to censor his students, Weininger fired him.
One of the worst types of Zionist harassment involves cases of Muslims generally and Palestinians in particular for speaking out on behalf of their favourite causes. The US government has often been complicit in these cases.
One such case involves Dr Sami Al-Aryan who taught computer engineering at the University of South Florida before his arrest in 2004. Al-Arian was charged with raising money and otherwise assisting Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a group the US government declared a terrorist organization in 1995. At trial in 2005, he was acquitted on eight of 17 counts, and the jury deadlocked on the other counts.
All counts were trumped up by Zionist prosecutors who wanted to silence Al-Aryan. If anything could vaguely approach justice in this case, the Israelis who have been slaughtering Palestinians for half a century would have been labelled terrorists and brought to trial for committing much worse deeds than Al-Aryan.
The gravest injustice allows Zionists to silence honest critics for violating the Zionist taboo.
Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. For more information, see http://www.pballes.com.Share this:
Tags:critiques of Zionism, Dr Sami Al-Aryan, Joel Kovel, Muslims, Palestinians, Professor Alan Dershowitz, US government
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