Palin the Quitter

“Good point guards don’t quit and walk off the floor if the going gets tough. Today’s move (by Palin) falls further into the weirdness category; people don’t like a quitter.”

-John Weaver, July 3

Sarah Palin's announcement on July 3 of her intention to quit the Alaska governor's office is the action of a quitter and does not embody the virtues that have made our people great.

Her statements are often ill-informed and downright bizarre, even schizophrenic, as for example her advocacy of our government's trillion dollar Neo-Con/Zionist wars in Afghanistan and Iraq on one hand, with fiery demands for fiscal responsibility from government, on the other.

She takes the typical Republican position that it is very immoral to spend tax dollars on the welfare of the American people, but noble and just to spend it on foreign wars that kill more innocent people, make America more hated and win nothing except lucrative defense industry contracts for the Carlyle Group, the Bush family's investment firm. This is not Christian, it is not Biblical and Sarah Palin does not know what she is talking about. She mirrors the confusion of fundamentalist Protestant-Zionists rather than providing leadership based on a truly Biblical standard.

I viewed a brief video clip of her speech at her lakefront home with her husband Todd standing next to her. He was wearing a pair of wrinkled jeans, clearly visible to the camera. Such attire on so public an occasion of state is a symptom of decay, not the restoration of civilization or high standards of deportment. His choice of clothing sets a poor example for young people, as well as undercutting the Palin family's claims to being traditional. Mr. Palin's attire would have been unthinkable and regarded as disgraceful or mentally defective just a few decades ago.

It is my hope that Mrs. Palin stays out of politics and undertakes a great deal of prayer and personal reflection. Her best contribution to the nation and the world is to be a mother to her children.

She is not tough enough to take on the national media. She clearly wilted under their fire and was even whining when she spoke of the cost of her legal bills.

She can misquote Gen. MacArthur all she wants (he did not make the statement she attributed to him about retreat), Sarah Palin has combat fatigue and post-traumatic stress. She needs a long rest. I have zero faith in her as a leader of anything other than the local Wasila chapter of the League of Israeli Wars.

Sarah Palin, July 3, 2009:

"My decision was also fortified during this most recent trip to Kosovo and Landstuhl to visit our wounded soldiers overseas, those who truly sacrifice themselves in war for our freedom and our security....These troops and their important missions now, there is where truly the worthy causes are in this world and that’s where our public resources should be our public priority with time and resources...

"...the obscene national debt that we’re forcing our children to pay because of today’s big government spending. It is immoral..."

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Today's Talmud Lesson: Heretics and Thought Police

by Michael Hoffman

The almost constant harangue from the rabbinic world and its obedient mass media is centered on the theme of Christian and gentile heresy-hunting, with Zionists always cast as the persecuted victims and Christians and others portrayed as the torch-lit, lynch mob.

Absent from this ugly stereotype is any awareness of the extent to which the rabbis themselves violently persecute errant members of their own fold, especially Judaics who dare to criticize Orthodox rabbis or Talmud scholars ("Talmedei Chachomim").

The same principle of thought policing which the ADL, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Agudath Israel and similar repressive Zionist groups apply to revisionist historians and pro-Palestinian freethinkers, is applied inside Judaism to dissenters in their own ranks.

There is no legacy of freedom of speech or inquiry in Judaism. That heritage is the gift of the West, of ancient Greece and Rome and the ecclesia founded on the gospel of Jesus Christ. Mental freedom is a totally alien concept in Judaism, but it is the Catholic Church, which gave us the Magna Carta, which has the reputation for the suppression of liberty (thanks to books by Dan Brown and movies by Ron Howard), while Judaism is most often portrayed as a fount of humane learning and scholarship.

The Babylonian Talmud in tractate Sanhedrin specifies that anyone who disparages a Talmudist is a heretic ("apikorus"). In Judaism's authoritative legal code, the Shulchan Aruch (YD vol. 2), a category of heretics is given and defined. One such definition is "one who is Mevaze Talmedei Chachamim" (an opponent of the Talmud scholars). Criticism of a Talmudist ("Bizuy Talmedei Chachomim") is a terrible crime in Orthodox Judaism, punishable by destruction of the heretic's reputation, imprisonment, flogging, ritual curses, book-burning and in some cases, death.

His reputation is destroyed by disqualifying the "heretic" from being a witness to anything, from testifying about the commission of a crime, to serving as a witness to a "simcha" (witness to a wedding).

Hence, the rabbinic "halacha" (law) on heresy is applied to revisionist historians and intellectual critics of Judaism by our supposedly non-partisan media: the reputation of critics and revisionists is destroyed in the media, they are beaten by terror groups such as the JDL and Betar, they are cursed publicly as "race haters," their books are censored or destroyed, they are imprisoned and some even suffer death.

Because Hollywood and the New York media take no interest in filming or otherwise recording and publicizing rabbinic repression against dissenters within and outside of Judaism, the long history of Judaism's hatred for freethinkers and the Talmudic case law that supports this heresy-hunting is mostly unknown.

Copyright ©2009. All Rights Reserved

To learn more read Judaism Discovered by Michael Hoffman

Other Talmud Lessons by Michael Hoffman in this series:

Why Hollywood is so sex-obsessed

The Evil Eye

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Michael Jackson: Whiteface Star of the Alchemical Minstrel Show

by Michael Hoffman | www.RevisionistHistory.org

We pause in our round-the-clock defamation of Iran to bring you, Michael Jackson.

Our Zionist-controlled media have temporarily shifted from hysterical denunciation of Iran to pious genuflection before the altar of an androgyne.

To the extent that Iran has been demonized, Mr. Jackson is being canonized -- as "the" iconic American entertainer. How strange and at the same time, revelatory.

No white actor may wear blackface today, but Mr. Jackson --who reputedly was once a Black man- -wore permanent whiteface thanks to modern surgery and chemicals. His visage was reportedly collapsing faster than his finances. Where are the photos? Why the coverup?

I don't lament the demise of blackface "entertainment" by white performers, for, as William N. Grimstad documents in his classic work, "Talk About Hate," the lowbrow shtick of vaudeville and movie "coon song" blackface was a Judaic art-form perfected by Sophie Kalish ("Sophie Tucker" the "World-renowned coon-shouter"), Asa Yoelson ("Al Jolson"), Edward Israel Iskowitz ("Eddie Cantor") and Joe Yule ("Mickey Rooney"), promoted by moguls like Louis Lazar ("Louis B. Mayer") and Max Aronson ("Bronco Billy Anderson"), and such early Zionist movie studios as Selig Polyscope.

Jackson was a mirror image of this degraded process, only instead of white greasepaint he resorted to permanent bleach. Was he a Black impersonation of a White transvestite? Or was his alchemy an elaborate fantasy-in-life --a desire to deceive himself into thinking he had actually become a kind of public White aristocrat? In the midst of the idolatry that has followed his death, no one seems to be asking these questions, even as Jackson is portrayed as the focus of the adulation of Blacks the world over. If that's the case, one can only conclude that most Blacks wish they were White. Yet that conclusion seems dubious, to say the least.

Jackson was the first race-change personality on the world stage. Sad to say, he was sick physically, mentally and spiritually. From his dalliances with young boys to his occult persona as "Captain Eo," he was the exoteric manifestation of the esoteric putrefaction exuded by a rootless, soulless, deracinated and boastful capitalist System, which demands that conservative nations like Iran follow its degenerate example or face media-generated hate and if all else fails, Israeli bombs.

The same talking head moralists who saw little but wretched evil in the Muslim Iranian government, adore Jackson as if he were the Second Coming. It is even said that Mr. Jackson was "The voice of America." Jackson as ambassador and voice of the USA? Perhaps in this 21 century, but not in the preceding one; that distinction is still held by the classically educated Harry Lillis "Bing" Crosby, who sold more records than Elvis and the Beatles combined, was a star of radio and movies, winner of the Academy Award, and a culture-bearer, not a culture-distorter.

Jackson is not fit to shine Crosby's golf clubs and I say that not because Jackson was a once and future African-American hermaphrodite and pederast in whiteface. Crosby promoted talented Black singers and entertainers throughout his career, and rightly so. Satchmo and Nat would have rushed Jackson to the nearest priest or shrink and pitied and prayed for him along the way.

Today Jackson is the god of the Chamber-of-Commerce-dump-for-cheap-labor-Chinese-junk, otherwise known as the USA. Jackson symbolizes the "joys" of our "capitalist way of life": the freedom to scarf hormonally-enhanced chicken at KFC while watching your ten-year-old daughter have her childhood stolen by Hannah Montana and "Madonna."

Way out here in the boonies of north Idaho, where this writer makes his home, it's not exactly Norman Rockwell country anymore. As Brer Rabbitt said when asked if he knew of a place so far away there was no trouble, "There ain't no place that far away." Idaho certainly has its share of modern troubles. But many of the people of Idaho are committed nonetheless to reviving the America of old that God once shed His grace upon, and the sudden reanimation of the Michael Jackson circus strikes us as perverted and delusional.

If Jackson is the face of America, then America no longer exists, except in places like Idaho and Montana --while New York and Hollywood bear the same relation to America that Michael Jackson's collapsing nose and bleached skin do to the proud Black men and women he insulted with his mission of becoming the leopard that can change his spots and the Ethiopian who can change his skin.

But let us not feel smug or superior. We live in a scientific era where cloned meat and genetically-altered corn are fed to our children; where "pro-life" Republicans massacre Muslim and Arab civilians; where the worst ideas are touted as the best ideas; where heads is tails. In such a mixmaster milieu, why wouldn't Black be White, and male be a simulacra of female, and Michael Jackson the king of American culture and the star of the alchemical minstrel show that has become a religion for the masses?

Copyright©2009 RevisionistHistory.org

Hoffman is a former reporter for the Associated Press and the author of Judaism Discovered, a book banned by Amazon.com

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The Invention of the Jewish People

A sizable portion of my research has been aimed at those people and institutions throughout history who have automatically taken the word of self-described "Jews" that they are in fact descendants of the Jews on the Bible, based on the following "evidence": their own say so. (Historically, the Catholic Church fell particularly hard for this masquerade).

Their say-so has never been enough for this writer and I am shocked at how entire theological and political architectures have been erected around the baseless assumption that Israelis, Zionists, and Talmudists from Brooklyn, are certainly the descendants of the Jews of the Bible.

Has anyone read Rev. 2:9? Rev. 3:9?

In autumn, Verso Press will publish in English, Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People. (400 pages. Cloth ISBN-13: 978 1 84467 422 0. US$34.95)

Sand is a historian at the University of Tel Aviv. He demonstrates that today’s "Jews" are mostly not the descendants of Biblical Israelites. They are descended in large part from Khazars who converted to rabbinic Talmudism ("Judaism").

You can pre-order the book.

Here is the press release from the publisher:

Leading Israeli historian evaluates the national myth of the Jewish exile from the promised land

All modern nation states have a story of their origins, passed down through both official and popular culture, and yet few of these accounts have proved as divisive and influential as the Israeli national myth. The well-known tale of Jewish exile at the hands of the Romans during the first century AD, and the assertion of both cultural and racial continuity through to the Jewish people of the present day, resonates far beyond Israel's borders. Despite its use as a justification for Jewish settlement in Palestine and the project of a Greater Israel, there have been few scholarly investigations into the historical accuracy of the story as a whole.

In this bold and ambitious new book, Shlomo Sand shows that the Israeli national myth has its origins in the nineteenth century, rather than in biblical times — when Jewish historians, like scholars in many other cultures, reconstituted an imagined people in order to model a future nation. Sand forensically dissects the official story — and demonstrates the construction of a nationalist myth and the collective mystification that this requires.

A bestseller in Israel and France, Shlomo Sand's book has sparked a widespread and lively debate. Should the Jewish people regard themselves as genetically distinct and identifiable across the millennia — or should that doctrine now be left behind and if the myth of the "Jewish state" is dismantled, could this open a path toward a more inclusive Israeli state, content within its borders?

Praise for The Invention of the Jewish People:

"The Invention of the Jewish People is an indispensible challenge and a very complex intellectual exercise … a more secure society [than Israel] would include the book in the core curriculum of its school system…" — Avraham Burg, former Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel, Yedioth Ahronoth

"The reader will have understood the message: what this well-documented and fearless book explodes is the myth of a unique Jewish people, miraculously preserved, in contrast to all the other peoples, from external contamination … [Sands'] conclusions, which are prudently formulated, nonetheless lead one towards a sole solution: the construction of a secular and democratic Israel." — Jacques Julliard, Le Nouvel Observateur

Shlomo Sand studied history at the University of Tel Aviv and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, in Paris. He currently teaches contemporary history at the University of Tel Aviv.

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What if Joan of Arc were an American alive today?

"Joan fought and died to preserve the identity and particularity of a sovereign place; she dedicated herself to the unique and irreplaceable soul of a country. She did not believe that it was right for her country to be--as it had already become in part and was dangerously close to becoming --a fiefdom of the kingdom of England."

Donald Spoto, Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint (HarperCollins, 2008), p. xv.

One could change the words slightly in the preceding passage and describe the struggle for the soul of contemporary America against predatory capitalism, open borders, cheap immigrant stoop labor and being made a fiefdom of Red China and Israeli Zionism and Judaism.

Today Joan would be labeled neither a saint nor a heretic, but a "militant extremist" and "racist terrorist." She was none of those, of course, but the capitalists and the cheap labor lobby, through their media, demonize any true patriot. Joan's patriotism was heaven-sent.

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Talmud permits judicial deviation from the Constitution

Attention conservatives, strict constructionists and all those opposed to judicial "activism" and who want to see the Constitution restored as the law of the land: the Talmudic Tradition embodies a wide range of principles that permit judicial deviation from Constitutional law

"Judicial Discretion in Talmudic Times and the Modern Era"

by A. David Pardo (Law offices of Foley Hoag LLP)

7 Cardozo Pub. L. Pol'y & Ethics J. 429-454 (2009)

The abstract states:

In this Article, I explore judicial discretion under Halakhic law, Anglo-American law, and Israeli law. In Part I, I compare the differences in treatment of judicial discretion between the Palestinian Talmud and the Babylonian (Bavli) Talmud. In Part II, I explore judicial discretion in the modern era. In Part III, I argue that the Babylonian Talmudic conception of judicial discretion is forthright about the existence and need for discretion, thus avoiding the doctrinal problems that inhere in the Palestinian Talmud. Moreover, I argue that the Bavli should serve as a model approach for coming to terms with the discretion that inheres in our Anglo-American judicial system, which is indispensable for the administration of justice.

The notion of discretion in the exercise of governmental powers is one that vexes scholars and the public alike. Is the mere existence of discretion the first stop on the road to judicial tyranny? Or is it an indispensable element in the pursuit of justice?

Some consider discretion to be “the law of tyrants: It is always unknown: It is different in different men: It is casual, and depends upon constitution, temper, passion. In the best it is oftentimes caprice: In the worst it is every vice, folly, and passion, to which human nature is liable.” This view is codified in an oft-cited provision of the Massachusetts Constitution.

It is also reflected in an engraving on the side of the United States Department of Justice building, in Washington, D.C., summarized by five words: “Where law ends tyranny begins.” Yet, in our system of government, where law ends tyranny need not begin. Where law ends, discretion begins, and the exercise of discretion may mean either beneficence or tyranny, either justice or injustice, either reasonableness or arbitrariness . . . . No government has ever been a government of all laws and not of men . . . . Every government has always been a government of law and of men.

The study of discretion in the judicial process has generated countless treatises and jurisprudential theories. These studies, naturally, analyze this concept from a contemporary perspective that is rooted in modern Anglo-American law. Judicial discretion, however, is not a new concept or one that is unique to democratic societies. Indeed, it is an issue that has divided post-biblical societies in Ancient Israel. Furthermore, the methods developed by rabbis in the Talmudic era are as relevant now as they were then, in understanding and accepting judicial discretion in our democratic society.

(Emphasis supplied)

Hoffman's note: if anyone has a complete copy of Mr. Pardo's article I would like to have it.

For further reading

"Justice Scalia Cites the Talmud: An Exegesis"

Judaism Discovered: A Study of the Anti-Biblical Religion of Racism, Self-Worship, Superstition and Deceit

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CIA Coup Attempt in Iran

Links:

1. Iran's Election

2. CIA Coup in Iran

3. "Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday extended the tenure of Mossad chief Meir Dagan for an eighth year, a testament to the spymaster's perceived success in waging shadow wars against Iran and its allies."

4. Zionist tells Iranians: "Time to shift strategies"

TIMES REPORTER MICHAEL SLACKMAN WANTS THE IRANIAN ECONOMY CRIPPLED

Using the tactic of quoting unnamed sources, the New York Times advises Iranians to go on national strike to damage their nation's economy:

"...one question political analysts and opposition members were beginning to ask was if it was time to shift strategies, from street protests to some kind of national strike.... a strike would be immune to the heavy hand of the state and could wield leverage by crippling the already stumbling economy..."

--Zionist Michael Slackman, NY Times, June 22, 2009

Reply by Mr. Slackman:

Dear Mr. Hoffman ...(T)here is no conspiracy. If you read the story carefully, you will see that Mr. Moussavi is directly quoted as calling for a strike if he is arrested. The analysts were wondering if that would be the case. Thank you, Michael Slackman

Rejoinder by Hoffman:

Dear Mr. Slackman: I did read "carefully" and you are either having a hallucination or your employer, the NY Times, altered your story after I exposed it. Nowhere in your original article as it first appeared on the NY Times website* is there any quote attributed to Moussavi calling for a strike. Moreover, Moussavi said nothing about "crippling the Iranian economy." That was your suggestion and you ought to take responsibility for it. Sincerely, Michael Hoffman

Background:

"Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani remains a formidable figure in Iranian politics with a network of well-placed allies straddling the reformist and moderate conservative camps. If any one leader is able to force a re-run of last Friday's disputed poll, it may be the two-term former president nicknamed the "shark"...The super-rich Rafsanjani, his family, and his supporters in the reformist Kargozaran party make no bones about helping finance and direct Mir Hossein Mousavi's campaign to topple Ahmadinejad, whom they despise. ...Rafsanjani remains unpopular with many Iranians who believe the corruption claims (against him) and blame him for a murderous, covert campaign to silence dissidents at home and abroad during his 1989-97 presidency..."

--The Guardian

"...crook, cynic, capitalist and Iran-Contra arms dealer, Hashem Rafsanjani." --Richard Seymour

*Slackman's article as it first appeared on the NY Times website:

Unrest in Iran Sharply Deepens Rift Among Clerics

TEHRAN — A bitter rift among Iran's ruling clerics deepened Sunday over the disputed presidential election that has convulsed Tehran in the worst violence in 30 years, with the government trying to link the defiant loser to terrorists and detaining relatives of his powerful backer, a founder of the Islamic republic. The loser, Mir Hussein Moussavi, the moderate reform candidate who contends that the June 12 election was stolen from him, fired back at his accusers on Sunday night in a posting on his Web site, calling on his own supporters to demonstrate peacefully despite stern warnings from Iran's top leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that no protests of the vote would be allowed. "Protesting to lies and fraud is your right," Mr. Moussavi said in a challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei's authority. Earlier, the police detained five relatives of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who leads two influential councils and openly supported Mr. Moussavi's election. The relatives, including Mr. Rafsanjani's daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, were released after several hours. The developments, coming one day after protests here in the capital and elsewhere were crushed by police officers and militia members using guns, clubs, tear gas and water cannons, suggested that Ayatollah Khamenei was facing entrenched resistance among some members of the elite. Though rivalries have been part of Iranian politics since the 1979 revolution, analysts said that open factional competition amid a major political crisis could hinder Ayatollah Khamenei's ability to restore order. There was no verifiable accounting of the death toll from the mayhem on Saturday, partly because the government has imposed severe restrictions on news coverage and warned foreign reporters who remained in the country to stay off the streets. It also ordered the BBC's longtime correspondent in Tehran expelled and ordered Newsweek's correspondent detained. State television said that 10 people had died in clashes, while radio reports said 19. The news agency ISNA said 457 people had been arrested. Vowing not to have a repeat of Saturday, the government on Sunday saturated major streets and squares of Tehran with police and Basij militia forces. There were reports of scattered confrontations but no confirmation of any new injuries by evening. But as they had on previous nights, many residents of Tehran clambered to their rooftops and could be heard shouting "Death to the dictator!" and "God is great," their rallying cries since the crisis began. It was unclear whether protests, which began after the government declared that the conservative president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, had won re-election in a landslide against Mr. Moussavi, would be sustained in the face of the clampdown. Amateur video accounts showed at least one large protest gathering, on Shirazi Street, though it was unclear how long it lasted. But in the network of Internet postings and Twitter messages that has become the opposition's major tool for organizing and sharing information, a powerful and vivid new image emerged: a video posted on several Web sites that showed a young woman, called Neda, her face covered in blood. Text posted with the video said she had been shot. It was not possible to verify the authenticity of the video. The Web site of another reformist candidate, Mehdi Karoubi, referred to her as a martyr who did not "have a weapon in her soft hands or a grenade in her pocket but became a victim by thugs who are supported by a horrifying security apparatus." Accounts of the election's aftermath in the state-run press suggested that the government might be laying the groundwork for discrediting and arresting Mr. Moussavi. IRNA, the official news agency, quoted Alireza Zahedi, a member of the Basij militia, as saying Mr. Moussavi had provoked the violence, sought help from outside the country to do so and should be put on trial. The Fars news agency quoted a Tehran University law professor as saying that Mr. Moussavi had acted against "the security of the nation." State television suggested that at least some of the unrest was instigated by an outlawed terrorist group, the Mujahedeen Khalq, which does not have a strong following in Iran. Mr. Moussavi was not seen in public on Sunday but showed no sign of yielding. In his Web posting, he urged followers to "avoid violence in your protest and behave as though you are the parents that have to tolerate your children's misbehavior at the security forces." He also warned the government to "avoid mass arrests, which will only create distance between society and the security forces." The moves against members of Mr. Rafsanjani's family were seen as an attempt to pressure him to drop his challenge to Ayatollah Khamenei — pressure that Mr. Rafsanjani's son, Mehdi Rafsanjani, said he would reject. "My father was in jail for five years when we were young. We don't care if they keep her even for a year," Mehdi Rafsanjani said in an interview, referring to his sister, Ms. Hashemi. Mr. Rafsanjani was deeply critical of Mr. Ahmadinejad during the presidential campaign, and is thought to have had a strained relationship with Ayatollah Khamenei for many years. But he remains a major establishment figure, and the detention of his daughter, albeit briefly, was a surprise. In Ayatollah Khamenei's sermon on Friday, in which he backed Mr. Ahmadinejad and threatened a crackdown on further protests, he praised Mr. Rafsanjani as a pillar of the revolution while acknowledging that the two have had "many differences of opinion." Last week, state television showed images of Ms. Hashemi, 46, speaking to hundreds of people to rally support for Mr. Moussavi. After her appearance, state radio said, students who support Mr. Ahmadinejad gathered outside the Tehran prosecutor's office and demanded that she be arrested for treason. Mr. Rafsanjani, 75, heads two powerful institutions. One, the Assembly of Experts, is a body of clerics that has the authority to oversee and theoretically replace the country's supreme leader. He also runs the Expediency Council, empowered to settle disagreements between the elected Parliament and the unelected Guardian Council. The Assembly of Experts has never publicly exercised its power over Ayatollah Khamenei since he succeeded the Islamic Revolution's founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in 1989. But the increasingly bitter confrontation between Ayatollah Khamenei and Mr. Rafsanjani has raised the prospect of a contest of political wills between the two revolutionary veterans. In a sign that the crisis in Iran threatened to spill far beyond the nation's borders, the speaker of Parliament, Ali Larijani, on Sunday called for reconsidering relations with Britain, France and Germany after their "shameful" statements about the election. State radio reported that Mr. Larijani, who has his own aspirations to one day become president, made his comments in a speech to the full Parliament. Mr. Larijani's position, which reflects the anti-Western orientation of the hard-liners in charge, could further undermine President Obama's efforts to reach out to Iran and begin a diplomatic dialogue. The United States severed ties with Iran 30 years ago. In Washington, Mr. Obama resisted pressure from Republicans who have called his response to the Iranian crackdown too timid. On Saturday, Mr. Obama stepped up his criticism of Iran's government, calling it "violent and unjust," and said that the world was watching its behavior. Mr. Obama has argued that a more aggressive White House stance against the Iranian government crackdown would be used by Tehran as anti-American propaganda. "The last thing that I want to do is to have the United States be a foil for those forces inside Iran who would love nothing better than to make this an argument about the United States," Mr. Obama said in an interview with Harry Smith of CBS News broadcast Friday. "We shouldn't be playing into that." In an interview broadcast Sunday on Iranian television, Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said that officials were examining the charge of voting fraud and expected to issue their findings by the end of the week. But like Ayatollah Khamenei, Mr. Mottaki appeared to have already judged the vote as clean and fair. He said the "possibility of organized and comprehensive disruption and irregularities in the election is almost close to zero," according to Iran's English-language Press TV. At the same time, serious new questions about the vote's integrity were raised outside of Iran. Chatham House, a London-based research organization, released a study done with the University of St. Andrews challenging the Iranian government's declared results, based on a comparison with the 2005 elections as well as Iran's own census data. The study showed, for example, that in two provinces where Mr. Ahmadinejad won a week ago, a turnout of more than 100 percent was recorded. The study also showed that in a third of all provinces, the official results, if true, would have required that Mr. Ahmadinejad win not only all conservative voters and all former centrist voters and all new voters, but up to 44 percent of formerly reformist voters. With the police on the streets demonstrating a willingness to injure and even kill, one question political analysts and opposition members were beginning to ask was whether it was time to shift strategies, from street protests to some kind of national strike. It was unclear if the opposition had the support or organization, especially within the middle class, to carry out such a measure, but a strike would be immune to the heavy hand of the state and could wield leverage by crippling the already stumbling economy, analysts said.

END QUOTE

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The End of Zionism

The End of Zionism

by David Lindsay

Once you admit that there is, or even that there could be, a place called Palestine, inhabited by people called Palestinians, then it is all over. But then, as we shall see, it was all over anyway.

Netanyahu was elected by those opposed in principle to a Palestinian state, but now says that he will accept one if it is “demilitarised” (unable to defend itself) and recognises “an undivided Jerusalem” as the capital of Israel.

Imagine what he would say if a Hamas politician, having been elected by those opposed in principle to a Zionist state, said that he would accept one if it were demilitarised and recognised an undivided Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine.

As for the Jewish identity of Israel, what Jewish identity? Anyone is now classified as a Jew provided that they are not an Arab. Russians Christians, Russian Nazis, East Africans with their religion based on the Old Testament brought by Christian missionaries, Peruvian Indians “converted to Judaism” (or is it Mormonism?), absolutely anyone at all.

And then there are those who regard the godless Zionist State as wholly illegitimate, yet are perfectly happy to live on its largesse (so that they do nothing except study, a very far cry indeed from the integration of scholarship and more conventional labor by their very recent ancestors, an integration usually held up as a glory of Judaism) while not only refusing to serve in that State’s Defense Force, but even raising their hands against the teenage conscripts who do.

But when it was decided to give the Jews (or the secular Ashkenazim, anyway) a separate portion of what has been one of the most multiethnic places on earth since the Year Dot, then a potentially never-ending chain of events was set off. There is no love lost between the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea, so each of them will want its own soon enough.
After all, drawing as they do on traditions mediated by, in, through and as ethnically different groups of Jews (so much for “all one people”), each of the ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel already has its own school system and what have you, in addition to the exemption from military service and the lavish welfare spending on them.

But they are not satisfied. Given the history, how can they be? If you can show that you are sufficiently (even if not terribly) different, then you get your own little statelet, however dangerously, unjustly or absurdly drawn or constituted.

What with the Ethiopian Jews, those listed above, and all the rest, this will never end.

Or, at least, it will never end until a line is drawn under Zionism, the population (and thus the character) of Israel and Palestine is declared to be exactly as it is, the Law of Return is duly repealed, and any wildly impractical Palestinian demand for a corresponding right of return is blown out of the water.

Nothing less will do.

And that really is the end of Zionism, as such, once and for all.

The American Conservative, June 18, 2009

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