Call it “democracy,” or go to a camp
Avnery on Israel’s impending law:
How lucky we are to have the extreme Right standing guard over our democracy.
This week, the Knesset voted by a large majority (47 to 34) for a law that threatens imprisonment for anyone who dares to deny that Israel is a Jewish and Democratic State.
The private member’s bill, proposed by MK Zevulun Orlev of the “Jewish Home” party, which sailed through its preliminary hearing, promises one year in prison to anyone who publishes “a call that negates the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State”, if the contents of the call might cause “actions of hate, contempt or disloyalty against the state or the institutions of government or the courts”.
One can foresee the next steps. A million and a half Arab citizens cannot be expected to recognize Israel as a Jewish and Democratic State. They want it to be “a state of all its citizens” – Jews, Arabs and others. They also claim with reason that Israel discriminates against them, and therefore is not really democratic. And, in addition, there are also Jews who do not want Israel to be defined as a Jewish State in which non-Jews have the status, at best, of tolerated outsiders.
The consequences are inevitable. The prisons will not be able to hold all those convicted of this crime. There will be a need for concentration camps all over the country to house all the deniers of Israeli democracy.
The police will be unable to deal with so many criminals. It will be necessary to set up a new unit. This may be called “Special Security”, or, in short, SS.
Hopefully, these measures will suffice to preserve our democracy. If not, more stringent steps will have to be taken, such as revoking the citizenship of the democracy-deniers and deporting …< .blockquote> FULL
And here’s another one from Counterpunch today, that connects the dots from Israel to the flailing empire, by Conn Hallinin.
Michael Anderson:
A comment from FTW, as best I can remember it:
Israel is a country
Judaism is a religion
Zionism is NOT Judaism
It is possible to be anti-Zionist and NOT be anti-Semitic
Over the years I’ve had very conflicting feelings about Israel and Zionism, which were recently resolved (somewhat) after reading Ed Black’s book “The Transfer Agreement”. I like Ed Black…his investigative reporting is thorough, and the other books by him that I read; IBM and The Holocaust, and Nazi Nexus, are good primers for those who don’t know (or want to know) more about the real, extremist (I use that word on purpose) mindset of hard-core corporatist reptiles. They’re also, by their nature and in lieu of my present views, another indictment of our system.
However, after reading the Transfer Agreement, what I get out of it is that the Zionist movement, who had been colonizing Palestine by degrees since the 19th century, basically let some millions of their (Jewish) brethren, as well as collateral damage in the form of the deaths of some millions of criminals, “insane” people (by Nazi standards), and Gypsies perish at the hands of the Third Reich, in order for Zionism to have a homeland in Palestine, as was consistent with Nazi propaganda stating that the Jews should have a country of their own, and get the hell out of Germany (and Europe). This was in spite of a worldwide boycott of Germany after 1933 that was proving increasingly effective, which they attempted to sabotage in order to effect the material business transactions for the realization of a Homeland for the “core”, the “main stem” of Judaism, i.e. THEM.
Zionism seems to me to be a racist, xenophobic, corporatist creed that, even given its opposite polarity, would’ve made Hitler’s Boyz proud.
We here in the U.S. are part of the Capitalist system, and as has been said, if you’re in the system then you DO accept the actions of that system, like exploitative resource wars (of both natural and human resources), so that the metropolitan core can have an easy life and make a buck. And, the complexity of how Capitalism ans Militarism has permeated our lives here makes it hard to find a way out, other than just getting out. How to turn your inherited position into a point of resistance is part of the solution. Speaking for myself, it is not possible for me to go elsewhere (and I’m glad my daughter IS elsewhere, much as I miss her), so this is where I gotta be, and bit by bit am trying to come to a point of resistance. It’s a complicated road, and scholarship and reasoning are as important as precursors to action.
I’m not sure how to phrase this, but:
Given the fact that Israel is a nation of (pretty recent) immigrants, and it seems apparent that whether you espouse Zionism or not, if you immigrate there, you accept the risk of aggressive military action towards the country in general from a number of hostile quarters—are the Israelis who are NOT Zionists as responsible for the behavior of Israel as the hard-core Zionists are? I know there is a large peace faction in the country, which goes pretty much unreported here (who’da thunk THAT, huh?). Are they second generation? Are they taking their “inherited” position and making it into a point of resistance? Is there a degree of collective responsibility here, as would be the case in the U.S. (or anywhere)?
Another thing I wonder about is; how far away are we here in this country from taking a formal loyalty oath?
4 June 2009, 10:38 amMichael Anderson:
Found an interesting post on Globalresearch.ca that touches on the origins of Israel, and ties into a lot of other (cornucopian, money, and statism) threads here. It’s called:
Origins of the American Empire: Revolution, World Wars and World Order
Global Power and Global Government: Part 2
by Andrew Gavin Marshall
There are a couple of paragraphs that illustrate the linkage between the Rothschilds, Russian Oil, and the foundation of the state of Israel:
“The Rothschilds “had long been involved in developing Czarist Russia’s nascent industry and banking system, while that country’s growing network of railroads was largely financed by Rothschild-managed loans.”[8] When the Czar died, he was succeeded by his son, Czar Nicholas II, who instituted anti-Semitic pogroms, discriminating against Jews, which had the effect of stimulating a massive emigration of Jews out of Russia and Eastern Europe and into Western Europe. However, these East European and Russian Jewish émigrés grew up in a newly industrializing nation in which the tyranny of the government and collusion between it and powerful financial and industrial interests left the great majority of people dispossessed and incited more socialist tendencies in thought and action.
The English Rothschilds were very alarmed “when the socialist tendencies of the émigrés contributed to a massively disruptive tailors’ strike in the East End of London in 1888. A young Georgian communist who would become known to the world as Joseph Stalin was already organizing laborers to strike at the Rothschild oil interests in Batum.” The British Rothschilds were very concerned with this wave of Jewish immigrants into Western Europe and Britain, as they were intensely anti-Czarist and progressively socialist, and the Rothschilds were known for their heavy collaboration with the Czarist regimes of Russia. One potential solution considered to the problem of increased socialist-leaning Jewish immigrants in Britain was to institute restrictions on immigration. However, this would likely backlash, in the sense that it would be viewed as comparable to expulsion. So, Edmond Rothschild began his personal campaign to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine in order to create a release valve for Jewish émigrés to put their political action behind a new cause, and to promote them emigrating to Palestine, and out of Western Europe.[9]
On top of this, as the pre-eminent Zionist in Britain, his proposal for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine served major economic interests of the Rothschilds and of the British Empire, in that several years prior, Rothschild bought the Suez Canal for the British, and it was the primary transport route for Russian oil. Palestine, thus, would be a vital landmass as a protectorate for British and Rothschild imperial-economic interests.”
I can see now where some of the right-wingnuts get their connection between Communism and Judaism—pretty feckin’ tenuous, but people believe the darndest things. I think a point could be made that Israel was a creation of general purpose money and energy. Capitalism is amoral and sociopathic at its core (as well as being primarily a white guy thing, too), so the Rothschilds seem to have been doing what Capitalism does best—-accumulate capital, without regard for how many innocents of whatever race, religion, or creed would lose their lives.
My interest was piqued in this some years ago, when my daughter was going to high school in a rural area of Oregon (Monroe), and she brought home a book of British origin (which I’m sure was overlooked in this small-town school library) that had a pic of a GE hydroelectric power plant in Soviet Russia, and a caption explaining GE’s financial interests in Russia. In my nascent awareness of globalism, this was a WTF!!! moment.
Another good article (pamphlet, actually) that was written post WW1 (1923) is “Oil and The Germs of War”, by Scott Nearing (one of the originators of the modern Am-er-EEK-an back-to-the-land movement):
http://www.walden.org/Institute/Collections/Nearing/Oil%20and%20the%20Germs%20of%20War.pdf
It’s history, but a good background for folks who are unaware of the historical development of this particular energy source.
31 July 2009, 2:47 pm