What do Left and Right Mean Today?

UPDATING 2-22-2009 see at bottom

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools.

Comments on the meaning of "left" and "right" today. Do they mean anything? Has today"s Left become the natural heir of yesteryear's "right-wing" Judeophobes?? What's the diff between today's Left --most of it-- and yesteryear's Nazis?? My thoughts here were prompted by a discussion on Augean Stables.

These labels like "left" & "right" can be very elastic in meaning. Marx after all was intelligent and well-informed, without my necessarily agreeing with his noxious theories. Unfortunately today's Left is exceedingly ignorant, and often proud of it, and often incapable of reasoning. What else does post-modernism mean if not deliberately overlooking or minimizing empirical facts and rejecting reason??

Today's "left" calls itself such without having any link or even knowing what the Marxist criteria of analysis were, it seems. After all, Lenin defined imperialism as finance capitialism, grosso modo. The definition can be questioned, but that's what Lenin said. Now, who has really big capital today yet is not criticized as imperialist? Good guess. Yes, it's the Arab oil sheiks. They possess billions and billions, just like American, European, other Western and Asian rich. But nobody notices the degraded labor conditions in Kuwait and the rest of those Persian Gulf emirates and in Saudi Arabia that are imposed on foreign workers coming in from Pakistan, India, Bengladesh, Philippines, etc. If that situation were given the attention it deserves, it would arouse outrage and indignation in the West, but it is precisely the "left" that ignores it. They would rather attack Israel for making it more difficult to smuggle rockets into Gaza.

That's how we know that we are dealing with Judeophobes, that Judeophobia is their prime motivation, not any loyalty to what used to be considered socialist goals. They focus on wrongs done by Jews, real or invented, and overlook wrongs done by the Jews' enemies. Of course, there's a lot more to say on this issue. Maybe we'll come back to it.

UPDATING2-22-2009 A historical sketch of how the British Empire and the Communists both contributed to building up Arab nationalism & 20th & 21st centuryIslamic jihad
[print version - full version with comments], Jerusalem Post 2-18-2009.
Previous post on Emet m'Tsiyon about Bolsheviks for jihad & genocide.

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools.

The Fashion Trend Is & Was to Cover Up Islamic Judeophobia

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools.

The Petro-Diplomatic Complex has long promoted a benign, innocuous vision of the Arabs in history, of Islam in history, and of Arab-Islamic treatment of Jewish subjects in the Muslim state. This falsification of history goes back as far as Muhammad's persecution and massacre of Jews in Medina and Khaybar at the very origins of Islam. I have shown in an earlier post that Prof William R Polk, a capable scholar when he wants to be, made such falsifications back in the 1950s. An embellished or edulcorated view of Arab Islam and its treatment of Jews in particular is found in many books, such as Friends in Palestine by Christina Jones [1944], an account of Quaker [Society of Friends] mssions in Israel. The case of Polk is significant because he wore another, much more influential hat in his career. Besides university teaching, he became a member of the State Dept Policy Planning Committee in charge of the Middle East. Jones' book is significant because it influenced the very politically influential Quaker religious community, many of whom have held high posts in the US foreign policy Establishment [State Dept, CIA, etc], and often serving in the Middle East. The undeservedly famous Arnold Toynbee of the Royal Institute for International Affairs [an imperialist, dare we say?] and Carl Brockelmann, the German historian of Islam, have both been guilty of whitewashing Islam and Arab history.

In his recent compilation of scholarly studies and Muslim sources on Muslim Judeophobia, Andrew Bostom has rightly complained of how the whole historical picture of Muslim & Arab/Muslim oppression of Jews has been distorted in recent journalism and supposed historical works. Shmuel Trigano points to this specific problem in his review of Bostom's very important book. Trigano points to the problem not only in the United States or in the UK, which I believe sets the pattern for the USA in this field, but in France and even Israel where the so-called "leftist" academics become enraged over efforts to write truthful history. Trigano, by the way, comes from a family that left Algeria, a country where Jews had been very much oppressed throughout history, as Jews were throughout the Arab-Muslim lands since the Arab-Muslim Conquests of the seventh century.

Trigano writes of Bostom's book [I am not happy with the translation and may modify some parts]:

I have deliberately employed the notion of “historical-philosophy” to characterize this editorial act. In effect, a strange (and understandable) phenomenon, both ideological and scientific has been produced in the domain of the history of Antisemitism in the lands of Islam: this history is quite simply eluded or ignored in the name of what an Israeli historian of Sephardic Judaism once defined to me as a “consensus among the community of historians:” the thesis of “Judeo-Arabic symbiosis.”

Rare have been the historians who have ventured down this road that would have merited them (still today) the disapproval of their colleagues. Thus some great Orientalists have resolutely neglected or minimized, if not erased, this history, and have been followed by their disciples, creating a veritable false historical truth, attested to by academia, to the point that any contestation of this dominant story finds itself censured or stigmatized, taxed with being “unscientific”. Here I mention only the Israeli and American historians interested in Jewish history, but there are also straightforward Orientalists.

The ideological motivations of both are varied. Critiques of colonialism pretend that the colonized were innocent of any fault over an eternity – but that is not the only reason. The contempt of the history and memory of the Sephardic world has played its part, in a game of seesaw between Christian antisemitism and the Holocaust, stigmatizing one in order to exalt the other, by a pre-set contrast. Some of those involved were not blameless, in this constant seesaw between Zionism and colonial guilt. Thus the “neo-Sephardic” extreme Left in Israel has invented a marvelous Arab past in order to better strike out at Zionism.

This book precisely by its massive length and accumulation of documents and theses – a veritable encyclopedia – permits attributing “ideological motivations” to this historiographic current, which are even inscribed in academic forums. The thesis of Judeo-Arabic or Judeo-Islamic symbiosis simply does not resist this avalanche of proofs that contradict it. Here we have massive historical evidence that has rediscovered its contemporary character with the unfurling antisemitic wave that has been shaking the Arab-Islamic world for several years – which is in fact very well documented (but in French). Between these two periods, in effect, lies another history altogether: the colonial period was in fact for Jews the experience of a very great freedom and of astronomic social progress.

This is why I called historical philosophical the turning point this book represents. It modifies our whole perspective on the issue, even more than it re-writes the history, this historiography of what remains to be done and what it opens up. One will no longer be able to invoke scattered and forgotten authors to contest the dogma on the subject, but be able to refer people to this book. Then will begin the real work of writing the history of antisemitism in Islamic lands,...
[a review of Bosrom's book, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism, published in French in Controverse Sommaire, 9 Novembre 2008]

Hence, it is no wonder that an anti-Israel body of public opinion has developed in Western countries, and even in Israel among the "left." People whose basic beliefs or knowledge about Arab-Israeli affairs, Jewish-Arab relations, are so inaccurate, so much based on prejudice, cannot produce reasonable opinions.

Obama's Secret Dinner with Behind the Scenes Movers & Shakers [mainly white folk]

Obama's secret dinner with behind the scenes movers and shakers, including Lee Hamilton of the notorious Baker-Hamilton Report, requested by George Bush Jr.

Accounts in
American Thinker
Silobreaker
Foreign Policy

Seems obama needed to work out a destructive foreign policy strategy with Hamilton, a Democratic ally of the Republican James Baker. Maybe Zbig got too much bad publicity to be useful.

NGO Hypocrisy Makes "human rights" a Tragic Joke

Dishonest attacks on Israel and its operation in Gaza to stop Hamas from terrorizing the Israeli population in the south by frequent shooting of rockets and mortars were made by EU politicians and journalists, by the prime minister of Turkey [with its unadmitted oppression of and genocide of non-Muslims and non-Turks], and by a host of falsely labelled "non-governmental organizations." That is, part of the fakery of the "NGOs" is that in fact most are funded directly or indirectly by --governments!! Indeed, I would say that all or almost all of the most prominent, most influential NGOs are government-funded or funded by very wealthy, very politically influential individuals. Hence, these bodies are not "non-governmental" at all.

One of these bodies unfairly criticizing Israel was the so-called "Human Rights Watch." This led to a criticism of HRW's position in the Jerusalem Post, written by Gerald Steinberg of NGO Monitor. Then Kenneth Roth of HRW sent his dishonest rebuttal. Links to these opinion articles are found here on the Augean Stables blog. Rather than get bogged down in the specific charges and countercharges regarding Israel's just defensive operation in Gaza against the Nazi-like Hamas, it is more important now to take up the basic problem represented by the NGOs. First is the comment by "Nelson," otherwise anonymous, on the Augean Stables. Following that is my response to Nelson.

It’s time to admit it: the so-called era of human rights is over. The UN, HRW, Amnesty International, the Red Cross, hundreds of NGOs and so on have, with their hipocrisy, their willful blindness, their selective rhetoric transformed the whole idea of human rights into a tragic joke. They have shown, for instance, that they cared more for the fate of the Rwandan Huttu génocidaires than for their hundreds of thousands of Tutsi victims. They have much more time for the terrorists imprisioned in Guantánamo than for the relatives of the victims of 9/11.
The whole talk about human rights has become little more than a empty slogan, a whip with which to blackmail Western democracies and a shield to be used in order to protect the perpetrators of large scale crimes from the punishments they richly deserve.
With human rights reduced to a sorry farce, there’s no option but to return to old fashioned concepts of justice, of crime and punishment, things that can only have any kind of meaning within the borders of really functioning national states.
Like socialism, social justice, internationalism or the brotherhood of men, the very concept of human rights, a utopic dream to begin with, became its opposite: a pathetic nightmare.
[Comment by nelson — January 26, 2009 @ 3:36 pm]

Here is my response to Nelson with some changes and amendments:
Nelson said the important things about the “human rights” and “humanitarian” and “peace” NGOs that have to be said. I agree with just about everything that he wrote.
Now, these NGOs are not really “non-governmental” for the most part. Most are funded by govts, or groups of govts [like the EU] or by very wealthy individuals. For instance, the ICRC [international committee of the red cross / Comite International de la Croix Rouge] is a Swiss govt agency that decided --during WW2 & the Holocaust-- not to broadcast the early information that they had about the Holocaust [especially from Swiss physicians who had cared for the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front]. They claimed then that they had no legal mandate to interfere in such matters. Then --during the Holocaust-- they were legalistic against the Jews. They’re still legalistic against the Jews. Now, they take part in accusing Israel of war crimes, along with UN spokesmen, other NGOs, anti-Israel govts, hypocritical European politicians, Western and Arab psywar experts, etc. These accusations are usually based on false interpretations of international law.

Anyhow, NGOs serve political purposes. They are not meant to serve the abstract ideals and lofty ends that they profess. They are instruments –indeed weapons– of diplomacy, of what Lenin called “political warfare.” Now, we know what Clausewitz said about diplomacy and war. War is an extension of diplomacy, he said. I would turn that around and say that diplomacy is also an instrument of war, and so is the propaganda produced and disseminated by the NGOs.
In their book on the UN, A Dangerous Place [which preceded Moynihan’s book of the same title], Abraham Yeselson and Anthony Gaglione wrote that the UN has about as much relevance to peace as a battleship or an atomic bomb. The UN is a weapon of nations in conflict, they wrote. Likewise the NGOs. The propaganda emanating from them is often an insult to the intelligence and often produces results opposite to what they claim to work for. Everyone should explore the site of Steinberg’s NGO Monitor which reports –inter alia– on the sources of funding of many NGOs.
For instance, B’Tselem, mentioned in an earlier post by Richard Landes [of Augean Stables], has received funds from jimmy carter’s Carter Center in Atlanta. The Carter Center has in turn received funds from the Bin Laden Group [Yes, Osama’s family firm] and –years ago– from the BCCI bank, mainly owned by the Sheik and govt of Abu Dhabi. So these NGOs are not so innocent, although some of their activists may be truly naive and ignorant and/or deluded, indoctrinated, brainwashed. So Mr Roth seems to be playing a role in international diplomacy, whether or not he is aware of his role.

Abu Yussif, apparently an Arabic-speaking Christian commenting on the Roth-Steinberg exchange on Augean Stables, makes this comment:

i'm not getting why ken roth would want palestinian civilians to be condemned to subjugation under the worst cynical and callous islamic masters. it is one thing to microscopically contest military tactics, but another to serve as a “defender of human rights” to [= for] the worst abusers of human rights.

suppose mr roth gets his wish and israel is punished, censured, whatever. all he has accomplished is giving an extra meansure of breathing room and a freer hand to hamas to brutalize and terrorize their own population (and let’s not forget what they do to israelis at the same time). he has just cemented palestinians in more misery and removed any hope that the civilian population might experience any of the human rights mr roth and his group are supposed to be “watching”.

why does mr roth care so little about palestinian civilians in their day-to-day lives under terrorists who plainly admit they have no intention of doing anything other than enslaving the masses?
it’s not for the sake of “human rights”, i’m sorry to say. maybe it’s because he loathes the palestinians and wants to ensure their suffering is maximized. if so, he’s doing an excellent job.
[Comment by abu yussif — January 26, 2009 @ 9:29 am]

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Coming: More on Zbig's schemes, Obama's dishonesty, the "Left's" lies, Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, archeology, propaganda analysis, peace follies, etc