Activist Zionists & Armenian Genocide -- Part Two

Testimony written down by Jewish eyewitnesses, Zionists in particular, describes genocidal acts by Ottoman troops against Armenians. We have presented quotes from a book of memoirs by Eitan Belkind, a survivor of the NILI group that decided to spy on the Ottoman forces and inform British officials based in Cairo. This decision was made after NILI members had learned of the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians. Sarah Aaronsohn, sister of Aaron Aaronsohn, was another eyewitness of the massacres as she traveled by train across Anatolia and saw events from the train window. Meanwhile, Henry Morgenthau, an American Jew and US ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, sent reports on the genocide back to the State Department in Washington, after receiving reports from his subordinates and other Americans throughout the Armenian areas of the Empire.

Hundreds of thousands of Armenians were deported from their homes and sent in the direction of Deir ez-Zor [Dayr az-Zawr] in northeastern Syria of today near the Euphrates. Of course, many many died on the way, and Arab sheiks plucked out attractive women for their own, as well as teenage children of both sexes. When survivors of forced marches reached the Deir ez-Zor area, they were massacred in caves and in other ways, as described in the account by Eitan Belkind which we quote from here at length. Deir ez-Zor has been in the news more recently, again in the context of genocide and mass murder. It was in this same region that Israeli special forces destroyed a plant under construction to produce material for nuclear bombs, in September 2007. This was a plant being built according to North Korean designs for the mass murderous Syrian dictatorship of Bashar Assad. It was a cooperative Syrian-North Korean project. Since Syria's main great power protector and sponsor is Iran, and Iran's leadership has threatened to wipe out Israel, the North Korean Communists were collaborating in a project for the mass murder --meant to be a Final Solution, genocide-- of Jews. Which is entirely fitting, that is, that Communists would help in the mass murder of Jews as Stalin did in 1939 when he joined with Hitler to make war on Poland, thus facilitating the Holocaust.

We continue with Eitan Belkind's account of the Armenian genocide:

After three days riding, I reached Aram-Naharayim [the area between the Euphrates and the Khabor rivers], where I witnessed a terrible tragedy. There were two camps next to each other, one Armenian and one Circassian. The Circassians were "busy" with exterminating the Armenians. There were also Arab sheiks who selected beautiful Armenian girls as their wives. Two women approached me and gave their photos to me. Should I ever get to Aleppo and find their families (whether their families were alive was a question), the women asked me to send their greetings to whomever I found there.
The Circassian officer seeing me talk to the two Armenian women ordered me to leave but I stayed to see what would happen to the Armenians. The Circassian soldiers ordered the Armenians to gather dry grass and pile it into a tall pyramid, then they tied up all the Armenians who were there, almost 5,000 souls, their hands tied together and put them in a circle around the pile of grass and set it afire in a blaze, which rose up to heaven together with the screams of the wretched people, who were being burned to death. I fled from the place. I could not stand this horrifying sight. I rode as fast as I could, wishing to get as far from the place as possible. After two hours of crazy gallop, I could still hear the screams of the poor victims until they died out. In two days, I returned to that place and saw the burned bodies of thousands of people.
. . .
At the foot of the mountain, on my way to the city of Urfa in the north, I witnessed several mass-exterminations of the Armenians. People were wretched, desperate to madness. . . All the roads were strewn with the corpses of murdered Armenians.
[grammatical and spelling corrections made by Eliyahu to the translated quotes from Eitan Belkind's book, That's How It Was, the Story of a Member of Nili (Tel Aviv: 1977; in Hebrew; translation by the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute),
[כך זה היה : סיפורו של איש ניל''י [תל אביב: משרד הבטחון 1977

This account indicates a planned in advance, systematic, deliberate mass murder of the Armenians. This account leaves no room to imagine that what the Ottoman Empire perpetrated was not genocide. The knowledge of the Armenian genocide [albeit the word did not exist at the time] on the part of the Aaronsohns and other future members of the NILI group is what motivated them to form NILI and make contact with the British in Cairo. A recent book by Ronald Florence, Lawrence and Aaronsohn (New York: Viking 2007), demonstrates the mood among the members of NILI at the time. Florence also points out anti-Jewish measures by the Ottoman army: expulsions of Jews from Tel Aviv, forced labor, starvation, etc. Here is Florence:

Once Aaron [Aaronsohn] and Avshalom [Feinberg] heard Sarah's [Sarah Aaronsohn's] descriptions of what she had seen across Anatolia, they could no longer discount the stories of Turkish persecution and outright massacres of the Armenians as rumors. . . with the ready comparison of the escalating measures against the Jews in Palestine, they concluded that they could only expect the same fate as the Armenians. Just weeks before, new regulations had been announced in Haifa drafting all Jewish men from twenty to forty-five. The new recruits would be issued no bread rations, and no stores of food at home for their families, which made the levy "nothing less than a death sentence --through starvation-- not only for the enlisted men but for the women and children they shall leave behind"[Aaronsohn's words, 12-3-1915] . At the end of 1915 the Turks would still let men buy their way out of breaking rocks on the roads, but after years of starvation few could afford the baksheesh. It was "only a pretext," Aaron wrote in his diary, "the truth being that they would meet a shameful, cruel and certain death." The Jews of Palestine, he and Avshalom concluded, would soon have no escape from the fate that Sarah had already seen inflicted on the Armenians.
"My teeth are ground down from worry about whose turn is next," Feinberg wrote in a note to [Leonard] Woolley [Florence, pp 179-180]

Leonard Woolley was a British spymaster in Cairo and a famous archeologist, who made some serious and unfortunate errors in that field of research, which is another story.
So we clearly see that what happened to the Armenians was real genocide, and that Jews in Israel felt real and justified fear that their turn was coming.
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Coming: A Jewess caught up in the Armenian genocide, the Anti-Jewish Racism of the "peace process," the anti-Jewish racism of Condoleezza Rice and the State Department, Jews in the Land of Israel, Jerusalem and Hebron, Muhammad's bloodthirst, peace follies, propaganda, etc.

Activist Zionists & the Armenian Genocide in WW I -- Part One

During the recent controversy over a congressional resolution acknowledging the Armenian genocide during WW I, certain Jews spoke against the resolution and/or against agreeing that there was such a genocide. Moreover, there are certain Jewish historians and Middle East specialists, in the US, Israel, and France, who argue that there was not an Armenian genocide. Some of these writers are rabid Islamophiles for whom Muslims, whether Turks or Arabs, can do no wrong. These cannot be considered friends of the Jewish people. Others may think that they are helping Israel or the Jews keep good relations with Turkey by rejecting the real history.

Be that as it may, while the genocide was going on Jews in Israel and elsewhere were witnesses to the events and sent this information to the world outside of the Ottoman Empire. These included Aaron and Sarah Aaronsohn, and Eitan Belkind. The genocidal events so terrified them and their friends that they set up the NILI group to spy on the Ottoman war effort and send info to the British. This reversed the policy of most Zionists in Israel who were content to be loyal Ottoman subjects, participating in its institutions, before WW I. Aaron Aaronsohn was so desirous to help the Armenians, that he sought out Armenian political leaders in France after the war during the Versailles Conference to give them advice. He advised them, correctly I believe, to declare independence at that time, even though they were in a weak military position.

Aaronsohn and Belkind left testimonies that have been published of the massacres and persecutions. First Eitan Belkind's accounts from a book in Hebrew, apparently translated under the auspices of the Armenian Museum in Jerusalem. Here are translated quotes from Eitan Belkind's book, That's How It Was, the Story of a Member of Nili (Tel Aviv: 1977),
[ כך זה היה : סיפורו של איש ניל''י [תל אביב: משרד הבטחון 1977

Belkind belonged to a locust eradication team appointed by the Ottoman government, which gave him the opportunity to travel about fighting the locusts.

. . . On the second day of our journey, we saw a corpse floating in the Euphrates. We were surprised but the soldier accompanying us reassured us that this was a body of an Armenian. We found out that there was a camp nearby, on the other side of the Euphrates where Armenians deported from Armenia were being held. Our friend Shirinyan turned white and asked to cross the Euphrates and go to the Armenian camp.

We found several hundred people in the camp living in small handmade huts. The territory was clean; the huts were built on one line . We passed by huts and looked inside. We say women and children. In one of the huts, Shirinyan found one of his aunts, who told him that all men had been killed; only women and children remained. Shirinyan had no idea what had happened to his nation. Shocked he began to cry on his aunt's shoulder. . . We went on the further we traveled the more more floating corpses of Armenians we saw. . .

Deir ez-Zor [Dayr az-Zur] was a military center, so it had a military hospital lead by a Jewish doctor Bekhor and Jewish pharmacist Arto. There we found out that Ahmad Bey was the commander of Circassian troops mobilized for exterminating. . . The doctor and the pharmacist invited us to their roomy house, told us that all Armenian men had been killed on the way from their homes in Anatolia, and the beautiful women and girls were left to the mercy of Bedouin. . .

At night before departure, we heard terrible, heart-rending female screams. The Armenian camp was one kilometer from our house. The screaming continued all night. We asked what was happening; they told us that children were being taken from their mothers to continue their education. However, in the morning when we set off and crossed the bridge across the Euphrates, I was shocked to see the river red with blood and beheaded corpses of children floating on the water. The scene was horrible, as there was nothing we could do.
[to be continued]

Now, is there anyone who can honestly claim that Belkind is not describing genocide? Note the massacre of children. Yet there are many throughout the world, not only Turks or other Muslims, who seek to deny the true character of these massacres. To be sure, some of the beautiful women were taken for sexual purposes. Nonetheless, that does not change the genocidal character of these events.

We should be proud to state that Zionist activists left accounts of the genocide and sought to help the Armenians at that time.

By the way, among those opposing the congressional resolution acknowledging the reality of the Armenian genocide was the US State Department, as well as its head, Condoleezza Rice, no friends of the Jews. The State Dept's hostility to the right of Jews to live in parts of the Land of Israel under Jordanian or Egyptian control before the Six Day War of 1967 is anti-Jewish racist in character and unsupported by international law, except as international law is deliberately misrepresented by the USA, UK, other governments, and the UN.
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see earlier post on related matters.
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Coming: Zionist Activists and the Armenian Genocide, Part Two; Jews in Israel, Jerusalem, Hebron; peace follies; the anti-Jewish racism of the "peace process" and the drive against Jewish settlements; propaganda; part of the British press descends into the Nazi cesspool [Johan Hari, et al.], etc.

The Petro-Diplomatic Complex -- Pro-Arab Since Israel's Founding

Contrary to the false insinuations of Walt-Mearsheimer, the Petro-Diplomatic Complex that has dominated American Middle Eastern policy since before World War 2 has always --or nearly always-- been anti-Israel since before its founding. I L Kenen, founder of the America-Israel Public Affairs Committee [AIPAC], wrote this long ago. I doubt that AIPAC today would dare to say what Kenen said years ago.

From the very beginning, Israel has been opposed by the petro-diplomatic complex -- an array of oil lobbyists, Arabists, Central Intelligence Agency agents, missionaries, and diplomats.
[I L Kenen in Jewish Digest, December 1975, condensed from The Jewish Chronicle of London]

Kenen is also providing a convenient definition of the Petro-Diplomatic Complex, which we have discussed before on Emet m'Tsiyon. It seems that Zbig Brzezinski and several State Department veterans on Barack Obama's team [i.e., Daniel Kurtzer, Robert Malley (Malley's father was a Communist ideologue, just by the way), etc.] belong to this array of Israel's enemies in Washington. Kenen went on to point out that an ostensibly private, anti-Israel lobbying organization, the American Friends of the Middle East, was actually founded and funded by the CIA.

It was no coincidence that the "American Friends of the Middle East" came into existence in 1951, when the American Zionist Council was reactivated. The great difference, however, was that the AZC's lobbying budget totalled about $50,000 [per year] while the CIA was secretly putting an estimated $430,000 a year into AFME's treasury via a paper conduit. [Ibid.]

Just incidentally, the National Security Act of 1947 that set up the CIA explicitly forbids the CIA to make political propaganda within the United States itself. So much for the CIA's observance of American law.

The American Zionist Council was a forerunner of AIPAC. In the past few years, some of its officials have been prosecuted for allegedly doing something very commonly done in Washington: they received information from a government employee named Larry Franklin who worked for the Defense Department. Various circumstances and testimony at the trial indicate that Franklin was deliberately sent to set up these two officials for prosecution, since he seems to have volunteered information that they had not asked for.

Be that as it may, Israel has some enemies in official and semi-official Washington circles. The Washington embassies of Arab states also enjoy a privileged relationship with the Petro-Diplomatic Complex, and indeed Saudi Arabia has often been especially favored in Washington. Michael Moore, known as a "leftist," showed this in his movie Fahrenheit 9-11, but he seems not to have absorbed the meaning of the facts that he showed in his own movie. The "Left" that styles itself "anti-capitalist" and "anti-imperialist" seems to have trouble dealing with the special status of Arab states and their money in the capital of the United States.
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Coming: jimmy carter strikes again, Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, and the Land of Israel, propaganda, peace follies, etc.

Condoleezza Rice Embraces Anti-Israel Terrorists -- Her Friends in Kossovo Traffic in Human Body Parts

UPDATE 4-22 & 4-23-2008 at bottom

We have long known that Condoleezza Rice [riso amaro] is partial to Arab terrorists who believe that they have the right to murder Jews. We don't know whether Condi goes so far as to share that attitude. But she has spoken in a favorable way in the past about both Fatah & Hamas. Meanwhile, we also know that Condi and the State Department, even before she became secretary of state, favored the ethnic Albanian terrorists in Kossovo. Support for the breakup of Yugoslavia and for the several ethnic groups there hostile to Serbs appeared as early as the first Bush administration, in the days of Daddy Bush. Recently, George Junior's State Dept, led by Condi, has been promoting Kossovo independence, although it has been known that scores of thousands of ethnic Serbs were "ethnically cleansed" from there since the 1999 war, not to mention Serbs driven out of Kossovo starting in the 1970s when the area was under ethnic Albanian government within the Yugoslav framework.

Now it turns out that Condi's friends in Kossovo were trafficking in human body parts. This is the accusation of Carla del Ponte, the former chief prosecutor of the Hague court on crimes in the former Yugoslavia.

Kosovo Albanian leaders have been implicated in the war-time trafficking of organs taken from hundreds of Serbs, according to a book by former UN war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte.

The book entitled "The Hunt: Me and War Criminals" alleges those involved in the trafficking included leaders of the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) which fought Serbian forces at the time in mid-1999.

Del Ponte wrote that around 300 prisoners, including women and other Slavs, were kidnapped and transported from Kosovo to Albania, where they were locked up and had their organs removed.

"These organs were then sent from Tirana airport to private clinics to be implanted in patients abroad who paid," she said in the book, available in Italy under the title "La Caccia: Io e i criminali di guerra." [Agence France-Presse, France24 (French counterpart of the BBC), 14 April 2008]

Condi's friends now running the Kossovo govt were kidnapping live people, mainly Serbs, to use their organs in trade in order to make money.

See commentary here.
For condoleezza rice's pro-Hamas sympathies, see here. It's true that rice has recently criticized jimmy carter for meeting the top Hamas leaders in Damascus against official US Govt policy. But it is clear that she herself --and most likely the State Dept as an institution-- wants to bring Hamas into "talks" with Israel, thereby diminishing Israel by placing it on the level of a Nazi-like, outlaw body that wants to commit genocide against Jews [see Article 7 of Hamas charter].
Tony Blair too has his pro-Hamas sentiments. See here and here.
For more on Kossovo on the Emet m'Tsiyon blog, see here.

UPDATE 4-22 & 23-2008 More about Kossovo atrocities and UN coverup.
The BBC website in English mentions Carla del Ponte's charge of organ trafficking very briefly towards the end of an article devoted to the appointment of a new chief prosecutor for the Hague Tribunal and his meetings with Serbian officials. The very important body parts story is NOT the subject of an article in its own right. Thus, the BBC wanted to minimize what is a very sensational story.
Where are Amnesty International & Human Rights Watch on this story? Isn't this a human rights matter?? Suppose that there were some way to connect an Israeli, any Israeli or any Jew, to a similar story. Would the BBC or Amnesty or HRW show any restraint or hesitation whatsoever in featuring it prominently in their broadcasts, on their website, or in their press releases???
Julia Gorin wrote up the story for Huffington Post and here.
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Coming: Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, and the Land of Israel, propaganda, peace follies, etc.

"Leftist" English Prof Publishes Propaganda Excuses for Obama in the Nation Mag

When fascism comes to America,
it will be called anti-fascism.
attributed to Huey Long, governor of Louisiana

The Nation mag today is a rag publishing support for State Dept postions in the name of Leftism [whatever that means today]. At one time, back in the 1940s, it criticized the State Dept for its anti-Israel policy . Now it supports State Dept policy. This may be due to a series of ownership changes that the weekly underwent back in the 1970s. One purchaser was Hamilton Fish IV [or the III or the V?]. Young Fish's grandfather was Republican Senator Hamilton Fish who, to be honest, provided some help to the campaign to save Jews during the Holocaust, going so far as to criticize President Franklin Roosevelt [as I recall]. Where young Fish or his successor owners stood I don't know. As far back as 1979, the Nation supported Ayatollah Khomeini's takeover of Iran, which was also supported by Zbigniew Brzezinski, at that time, Jimmy Carter's national insecurity advisor. Zbig is now advising the Obama campaign for president. Zbig's presence in his campaign indicates the fraud of Obama's claim to represent the new, the fresh, the innocent, untainted by Washington's corruption. That fakery by Obama shows just how dangerous he could be.

Obama's campaign of fraud & imposture has thankfully run into some snags, including a silly Harvard Professor who can't keep her mouth shut. Samantha Power embarassed Obama repeatedly during her European tour and has since resigned. Curiously, Zbig wanted Samantha Power to stay with the Obama campaign. Maybe he wanted her as a soft-feminine face to cover his brutal plans to bring the world more Khomeinis, more Hamas gangs, and more Hizbullah.
Here's a gem from a Nation editorial in support of the Khomeini takeover of Iran in 1979. After Khomeini's takeover of Iran in early 1979, supported by the Brzezinski/Carter team, a committee was appointed in Iran to draw up a new constitution. The Nation described the members of this committee as men of:

"impeccable civil libertarian credentials."

Today, everyone can judge the civil libertarian nature of the Iranian regime for himself.

Be that as it may, recently, a Nation columnist Eric Alterman, an English prof at Brooklyn College, has written a propaganda tract defending Obama, Zbig, & Company. Alterman exemplifies several propaganda techniques in his article: appeal to authority, omission of vital information, sneering at opponents and critics rather than answering them substantively..

Here is a column by Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, of all papers, that details Obama's offensive relationship with a Judeophobic minister who admires the Judeophobic demagogue, Louis Farrakhan.

Debbie Schlussel uncovered evidence of "Nation of Islam" personnel on the Obama staff in DC and in his campaign.

Alterman defends Obama by omitting information & misrepresenting Obama's critics.

During the past few months a small group of neoconservative Jews, many of whom hold key positions in the world of official Jewish institutions, have been working to undermine the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama with a series of carefully planted character assassinations and deliberately misleading innuendo.

So the opposition to Obama is based on innuendo and character assassination. No mention of his minister, Rev Wright's attacks on Israel appears in the article. Indeed, Rev Wright does not appear at all in the article. Nor does Tony Rezko, a Chicago slumlord and Obama's Syrian financier, appear in the article. But further down in the article, Alterman mentions the concerns that some Jews have over Zbigniew Brzezinski being one of Obama's advisors. We ought to conclude that Zbig is his main foreign policy advisor, since he has already undertaken a trip to Syria on Obama's behalf. What does it mean that Obama's foreign policy advisor goes to visit Syria, a bloodthirsty Arab dictatorship which just happens to be the junior partner in an alliance with Islamofascist Iran, a country where the present regime was helped to take power by that same Brzezinski in 1979??? Alterman treats all this as mere "guilt by association," like the often reckless guilt-by-association charges made by Senator Joseph McCarthy back in the early 1950s.

. . . the neoconnish campaign against Obama was not able to gain much traction. Perhaps as a consequence, as the Forward {Alterman quotes the "leftist" Jewish paper, once the major Yiddish newspaper in the United States-Eliyahu} has editorialized, "the attacks on Obama have metastasized into a wide-ranging assault on his associations." These attacks, as blogger Matthew Yglesias notes, have largely amounted to the following: "First Obama was an anti-Semite because Zbigniew Brzezinski is an anti-Semite. Then Obama was an anti-semite because Robert Malley is an anti-semite. And now according to [Commentary's Noah] Pollack [sic] it's Samantha Power who's tainted by Jew-hatred."

Well, maybe they are really Judeophobes, including Malley whose father was a Jewish Communist. Let's just wonder at this point at how the son of a prominent Communist becomes a high official of the State Department, whereas back in the fifties, Communists were anathema in the United States. Zbig was raised in Nazi Germany as the son a Polish diplomat there. While in office as jimmy carter's gray eminence [eminence grise] Zbig helped Khomeini takeover Iran, as said above, badgered poor Menahem Begin to make concessions to Nazi-sympathizer Anwar Sadat, and turned his back on the civil war in Lebanon, which the US could have done much to alleviate. Moreover, by supporting Khomeini, Zbig opened the way to all kinds of horrors, the Iranian bomb and the fanatic ayatollahs oppression of their own people and the Hizbullah, which killed hundreds of Americans in bombings in Beirut. By using fanatic Sunni Muslims to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, Zbig helped to make Osama bin Ladin into a major threat to the world.
All this seems either unknown to Alterman and Matthew Iglesias or is unimportant to them. Of course, Alterman also tries to belittle Zbig's advisory relationship to Obama.

According to a report in Newsweek, Ann Lewis, a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton, made reference during a conference call with Jewish leaders to Brzezinski, whom she falsely labeled Obama's "chief foreign policy adviser." (In fact, according to Brzezinski, he has advised Obama on a total of one occasion.) While Brzezinski did anger some Jews with his endorsement of the controversial Walt/Mearsheimer book, his views are not only well within the foreign policy mainstream; they are also completely consistent with those expressed by a majority of American Jews--far more so than those hawks who profess to speak in their name.

Besides groundlessly belittling the Zbig-Obama relationship, there are other curiosities in this statement. First, our "leftist" Alterman lightly steps over the very deceitful walt-mearsheimer book, a propaganda tract written by two very Establishment political scientists, indeed w&m are State Dept consultants. Then, Alterman tells us that Zbig's views are "well within the foreign policy mainstream." How is it that our "leftist" Alterman defends a maker of foreign policy whose views are "mainstream," that is, Establishment?? Further, just which foreign policy views of Zbig are consistent with those of most American Jews. A few months after 9-11, Zbig was interviewed for the French paper, Le Monde. He was asked if he had any regrets for arming and aiding otherwise the Muslim fanatics fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan, since some of them, led by Bin Laden, had carried out the 9-11 attack. No, he said, he had no regrets since Soviet losses in the Afghan war had brought down the Soviet Union. In other words, everything was OK. I hope those Americans who advocate a foreign policy based on "pure American interests" consider this answer by Zbig. Recall that the Soviets, however evil they were throughout the world, never carried out mass murder attacks on American civilians within the United States. That's how Zbig is loyal to the safety of American civilians.
Alterman makes another curious defense of Robert Malley mentioned above.

CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America. . . [declared] that Malley's articles on Middle East issues "demonize Israel only slightly less than his father." This is nonsense, naturally. Former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and former State Department officials Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer, all of whom worked with Malley, signed a letter denouncing "a series of vicious personal attacks" against him.

So "leftist" Alterman wants us to take the word of Malley's State Dept and National Security colleagues that "personal attacks" on Malley were "vicious" and presumably unjustified. Bear in mind that Sandy Berger is notorious for stealing and destroying US govt documents in order to protect himself from criticism. Berger was also the national insecurity advisor when the Clinton Adminstration went to war against Serbia, twice. Does "leftist" Alterman approve of those wars?? Could a "vicious" critic of US policy in the Clinton years see those wars as "imperialist"??? Those wars helped to ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of Serbs from Croatia and Kossovo. They also helped to set up a govt of drug smugglers and white slavers in Kossovo. Is all that OK with Alterman?? By the way, I have put in boldface Alterman's remark that it's "nonsense" that Malley is less an enemy of Israel than his father, Simon Malley. Does Alterman's remark mean that Malley hates Israel more than his father did??

Let's conclude with some warnings about Obama that Alterman ridicules:

Morton Klein, who heads up the . . . Zionist Organization of America, . . . term[ed] the notion of an Obama presidency "frightening." He was joined by Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the umbrella group that professes to speak for all American Jews. Hoenlein told the Israeli daily Ha'aretz that Obama's talk of "change" could prove "an opening for all kinds of mischief" and gave voice to what he termed "a legitimate concern over the zeitgeist around the campaign."

Now, full disclosure. I have met both Klein and Hoenlein. In fact, I first met Hoenlein many years ago. I have not always agreed with him, but I always believed that Hoenlein was an honest man who spoke his sincere beliefs. Further, Dr Hoenlein has a PhD in political science, whereas we are told that Alterman is a "Distinguished Professor of English." That alone does not mean that Hoenlein is superior in the knowledge of politics to Alterman. But since Zbig was and is a prominent political scientist, it is more likely that Hoenlein is familiar with Zbig's often terrifying writings than Alterman and it is likely that Hoenlein understands these matters better. Indeed, I wholeheartedly agree with Hoenlein that Obama's demagogic talk about "change" could open the door for "all kinds of mischief." Alterman belittles all of these very genuine concerns that an informed, intelligent and civilized man ought to share.
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Here is more on Obama, the Obama-Zbig connection and on Alterman:
Noah Pollak responds to Alterman on the Contentions blog.
Ted Belman of Israpundit on Zbig: here & here & here
Spengler, columnist for the Asia Times, examines Obama's character.
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Coming: More lies of the "peace process," peace follies, propaganda, Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, the Land of Israel, etc.

Public Opinion Polls as Propaganda at HaArets

Israel's HaArets daily newspaper fancies itself the Israeli counterpart of The New York Times. I and others would not see such a resemblance as a source of pride. Yet there is something to it, although the NYT commits many more crimes against the trees than the thinner HaArets does. But both pretentiously high-brow rags distort and even falsify the news. HaArets does it through public opinion polls, among other ways. Political scientists and sociologists are well aware that one can usually obtain the answer that best serves one's interests and policy preferences by framing the questions in a suitable manner --or even by eliminating possible choices. That's a good reason to always be wary of public opinion polls. You have to ask, What questions did the poll ask, What alternative choices were supplied, etc. Here's an example from the Israel correspondent of the Economist, not exactly a friend of Israel or of truth.

The correspondent, one Gideon Lichfield, wondered at the apparently contradictory results of two public opinion polls taken in Israel. A poll published in HaArets asserted that most Israelis wanted negotiations with Hamas. A poll by the Tami Steinmetz Center for Peace Research at Tel Aviv University showed that a solid majority of Israelis preferred to deal with Hamas by military means. This percentage [circa 64%] is even higher if we look only at the answers of the Israeli Jews.

The pollster for HaArets, one Camil Fuchs, frankly admitted his dishonest, unscientific polling method to Lichfield. His poll presented only two options, Should Israel negotiate with Hamas, Yes or No, plus a Don't Know option. On the other hand, The Steinmetz Center poll contained several operational options, plus Other & Don't Know. Lichfield asked:

So which poll is “right”? What does the Israeli public actually think about talks with Hamas? I [Lichfield] asked Fuchs.
“When you include other options, you’re cognitively giving legitimacy to them,” he [Fuchs] says. “What you’re doing is hinting to the person that there are other people who prefer these options.”

So what Fuchs does is to foreclose certain options from his poll in order to obtain the answers that he wants. Lichfield points out: "When there’s only one option on the table, on the other hand, you’re asking them to choose between doing that and doing nothing." Lichfield concludes:

In short, what the two polls taken together say is that if the people could run the government, and had a range of options for dealing with Gaza, more of them would go with a military option. However, if the government says it’s going to talk to Hamas, 64% of the public would support it (though Fuchs thinks the number now would be a little lower than three weeks ago)

The trick that Fuchs used to skew his poll is common and widespread throughout the world. Before accepting the results of any public opinion poll as genuine or meaningful, you have to know what questions were asked or what options were supplied. If you know the questions asked and the options supplied, then you also know what questions were not asked and what options not supplied. What do you do if you are queried by a poll which supplies several options but not any option that you agree with?? What do you do if you disagree with the premises of a poll's question?? This has often happened to me. It is especially annoying if no Other or Don't Know option is supplied. For an example of disagreeing with the very premises of a question, suppose you are asked, as an Israeli, Should Israel negotiate with "the palestinians"?? I and many others reject the very notion of a "palestinian people" [as do many Arabs]. But the poll does not allow us to assert that disagreement. Furthermore, suppose someone agrees that there is a "palestinian people." Then the issue arises, staying with the same poll question, Which "palestinians" do you think fit or unfit to negotiate with? The answer could be "the palestinians" [Arabs] living in the "West Bank" [Judea-Samaria] and their elected representatives [this answer could have been relevant before the Oslo accords and the subsequent establishment of the "palestinian authority"]. Today, one might choose between Fatah or Hamas or both or "palestinians who are not part of any terrorist group such as Fatah or Hamas." By not allowing disagreement with the premises of a question, the pollster is obtaining agreement to those premises from those who answer the question, even if in fact the questioned person does not accept the premises.

As to Hamas, there are good reasons for not negotiating with it but rather destroying it as an organization. This is because the Hamas charter is genocidally anti-Jewish in character [consider Article 7 in particular, which advocates killing off the Jews as such, albeit not until Judgement Day, which in practice encourages killing Jews at any time and place]. What is there to negotiate with such an organization?? It is ridiculous to claim, as many hypocritical Western politicians do, such as Tony Blair, that negotiating with Hamas would "moderate" its actions and its goals. Neville Chamberlain claimed, after pressuring Czechoslovakia to concede territory to the Nazi Germans, to Hitler, that he had brought to Britain, "peace in our time. . . peace with honor." In fact, he brought neither peace nor honor. Tony seems cut from the same cloth.

Negotiating with a genocidal outfit like Hamas gives it undesirable acceptance and prestige in world public opinion. Indeed, such negotiation gives genocide in principle a certain acceptance and legitimacy.
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Coming: English prof who writes for the Nation, lies on Obama's behalf, and looks to the State Dept for authority; more on Jews in Jerusalem & Hebron; archeology in Israel; peace follies; propaganda, etc.

Scholar of Arabic, Yehoshu`a Porat: The Arabs Don't Want a "palestinian state."

The weakly argued claim by the White House-State Department crowd that what they call a "palestinian state" will bring peace between Israel and the Arab world, is belied by Professor Yehoshu`a Porat, one of the outstanding Israeli specialists on the Arab world, Arab culture, and Arab politics. Porat discussed this issue with Haggai Segal of Maqor Rishon [14 III 2008].

Porat was a leader of the "leftist" Merets party until he learned about the 1993 Oslo Accord, an agreement made with Norwegian mediation, by the way [I add parenthetically that Norwegian involvement is usually disastrous, as Sri Lanka has also learned]. Porat did not trust the PLO leadership nor did he like the terms of the Oslo Accord. He belonged to Merets because of his arch-secularist views, not because he believed in "peace" with the PLO. Responding to the interviewer's question, he laughed at those Israeli politicians, particularly ministers in the present government, who believe that the PLO and/or Hamas and the palestinian Arabs generally really want a "palestinian state," as George Bush, Condoleezza Rice [riso amaro], Tony Blair & the Washington & London gangs repeatedly claim.

I don't believe that there is a chance --or that there ever was a chance-- that a palestinian state will arise.

The interviewer adds that Porat thinks that the "palestinians" don't want a separate state so much. Porat asserts:

There is no palestinian identity in itself. Their identity is Palestinian-Arab. Above all, they want the country to be Arab. Therefore, they are attached to the Arabic literary language which, like Latin, is not a living language but rather a symbol of the unity of the Arab nation. If you would propose to them that Palestine be a part of Syria, and if they believed that thereby they would get rid of us --they would not refuse. Not one of them would be opposed [to that proposal].

Of course, this is obvious to anyone who has carefully read the PLO Charter. Its first article goes:

Article I: Palestine is the watan [homeland, fatherland] of the Palestinian Arab people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.

It is obvious from this article and the rest of the PLO charter or covenant that the PLO is a pan-Arabist body. It really does not represent an aspiration to a separate state, as Porat points out. Moreover, PLO and Hamas spokesman have pointed out clearly that they do not aspire to political independence separate from the Arab world as a whole. Zuhayr Muhsayn [Zuheir Muhsein] stated this in 1977 in an interview published in the American weekly Seven Days and the Dutch paper Trouw. Mahmud al-Zahhar, a Hamas leader, stated this quite recently to the Economist, not exactly a pro-Israel publication. So when Bush & Condi & Tony & Javier Solana and any other politicians or diplomats rant on about a "two-state solution" or a "palestinian state," then they are either fooling themselves or --more likely-- fooling those who listen to them.

By the way, when Yehoshu`a Porat compared literary Arabic to Latin he was making a historical-political argument. Latin was spoken in the many parts of the Roman empire in Europe. These places included Dacia [Romania] in the east, the Iberian peninsula [Spain & Portugal] in the southwest, Gaul [France] in the northwest, and Italy in the south. When the empire collapsed, the Latin language developed into what is called Romance and many Romance dialects. Several of these dialects developed into national languages that became identified with nation-states [French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian, etc.]. Classical Arabic also broke down into dialects, that is, spoken vernaculars, such as Iraqi, Syro-Palestinian, Egyptian, Mughrabi [North African]. However, most Arab states insist on the primacy of classical, literary Arabic. And that's the form of the language that they teach in their schools, although this teaching of a language that the pupils do not speak retards the pupils' development of command of any written language, leaving many kids semi-literate [as in Algeria]. The refusal of the PLO & Hamas leadership to give up the classical, literary language is an assertion of a desire for political unity, for pan-Arabism, a pan-Arabist single Arab state. Anyhow, the palestinian Arabs are said to speak the same dialect as the Syrians, so developing a form of language separate from the Syrian form/dialect would be artificial. The PLO & Hamas insist on the pan-Arab identity of the palestinian Arabs.

Porat is the author of the definitive history of modern palestinian Arab politics, The Palestinian Arab National Movement [or similar title].
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Coming: English prof who writes for the Nation, lies on Obama's behalf, and looks to the State Dept for authority; more on Jews in Jerusalem & Hebron; archeology in Israel; peace follies; propaganda, etc.