Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Israel and the Jewish Left

Consiglio di studiare accuratamente questo articolo.  Il suo contenuto è 
sostanzialmente fascista, la dove definisce gli ebrei che criticano (la 
politica di) Israele come alleati dei suoi nemici, tuttavia, come una 
sorta di guida pratica, indica le modalità con cui è possibile ribaltare 
questa definizione sui critici stornandola da sé.  Interessante.
 
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Israel and the Jewish Left
By DAVID RUBINSTEIN
08/21/2012 22:46
Jewish support for the enemies of Israel represents the triumph of 
leftism over Jewishness.
 
Among its many critics, there is a startling number of Jews who 
calumniate Israel and, in some cases, champion those threatening its 
existence.
 
Noam Chomsky heads this list, but he is hardly alone. Norman 
Finkelstein, Ilan Pappe, Richard Falk, Tony Judt, Howard Zinn, Eric 
Hobsbawm and many other Jews have joined in this project. Neve Gordon, 
head of the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion 
University, claims that “Israel resembles Nazi Germany.”
 
Gabriel Schoenfeld’s explanation of this in The Return of Anti-Semitism 
is straightforward: amid a rising tide of anti-Semitism, Jewish enemies 
of Israel are out to save their own skins, aiming “to deflect the 
poisonous arrows coming at their fellow Jews.”
 
In The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege Kenneth Levin 
asks: “Why are Jews so self-destructive? So suicidal?” He argues that 
constant oppression can lead to a variant of the Stockholm Syndrome: 
“empathy for and emotional bonding with the aggressor.” The logic of 
this “embrace by members of an abused community of the indictments of 
their abusers” is that this allows the possibility of “salvation 
[through] self-reform and concessions.”
 
In Jews and Power Ruth Wisse argues that self-blame is a Jewish 
tradition: “the very nature of Talmudic debate turns the political focus 
inward, away from the enemy and towards its own constituency.” She 
describes a Jewish tendency to respond to military defeat as “a 
consequence of God’s dissatisfactions with his people.”
 
In The War Against the Jews Lucy Dawidowicz cites Orthodox rabbis who 
saw the Holocaust as God’s punishment and called for repentance – 
teshuva – not resistance, in the belief that “because of our sins we 
have been punished.”
 
In addition to these psychological and cultural factors, it is essential 
to recognize that hostility to Israel and support for Islamic radicalism 
is mainly a phenomenon of the hard left. Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro and 
Daniel Ortega have pledged solidarity with radical Islam, the latter 
proclaiming that “the revolutions of Iran and Nicaragua are almost twin 
revolutions.”
 
THIS SENTIMENT can be found on the social-democratic left. Yasser Arafat 
was embraced by Austria’s Social-Democratic Chancellor Bruno Kreisky and 
West Germany’s Willy Brandt. Ken Livingston, former Labour Mayor of 
London, has defended Palestinian terrorism: “in an unfair balance that’s 
what people do.”
 
Those who are surprised by these examples, in the belief that secular 
leftists and fascist theocrats are natural enemies, do not know the long 
history of to-ing and fro-ing between socialism and fascism. Benito 
Mussolini, Oswald Moseley (head of the British Union of Fascism), and 
Vidkun Quisling began their political lives as socialists.
 
According to Tom Weber’s Hitler’s First War, Hitler flirted with German 
communists in the 1920s and this affinity endured. French historian 
Francois Furet cites Hitler’s assertion that “there is more that binds 
us to Bolshevism than separates us from it... the petit bourgeois Social 
Democrat and the trade-union boss will never make a National Socialist, 
but the Communist always will.”
 
This sentiment was reciprocated by the German Communist Party which 
“sought to dissociate the Nazi voters from the leaders of the movement 
so as to regain them for the Communist Revolution.” The Hitler-Stalin 
pact was not an anomaly.
 
The collaboration between the radical left and the radical right has 
included radical Islam. Amin al-Husseini, despite his virulent 
anti-Semitism, was supported by the Palestine Communist Party until he 
joined the Nazi cause. The Muslim Brotherhood was funded by the Nazis. 
Arafat was sponsored by the Soviets and the Iranian Communist Party 
supported the Khomeini revolution that soon devoured it.
 
This intertwining of communists, fascists and Islamists explains why “in 
Germany, neo-Nazis and radical leftists wearing kaffiyas march together 
in anti-American demonstrations and chant the same slogans against 
globalization and waving the same Hezbollah flags.”
 
Redmond O’Neill, a senior aide to “Red Ken” Livingstone, suggested that: 
“Muslims and the left must and can come together because we have the 
same enemies – imperialism, colonialism, and racism.”
 
This outreach has been reciprocated. Recommending the writings of Noam 
Chomsky, Osama bin Laden has said: “The interests of Muslims and the 
interests of the socialists coincide in the war against the crusaders.”
 
Paul Berman argues in Terror and Liberalism that the radical left and 
right are drawn together by millennialism, the belief that that “the war 
of Armageddon – the all-exterminating bloodbath” is the path to utopia. 
The holy warriors of radical Islam strike a chord with these impulses.
 
Anti-Semitism – “the socialism of fools” – also draws elements of the 
radical left to Islamofascism.
 
Racial and religious anti-Semitism is anathema to the left. But Islamic 
radicalism offers a new wineskin for some very old wine.
 
The radical left and right also share disdain for the materialism and 
competitive individualism of capitalist society. Echoing the left, 
Hitler decried America’s “grasping materialism and indifference to any 
of the loftiest expressions of the human spirit.”
 
Sayeed Qutb, a theorist of the Muslim Brotherhood, was similarly 
appalled by America’s “mixture of materialism, lust, and egoistic 
individualism” and denounced “the maldistribution of capitalist 
societies.” Articulating themes that the left calls alienation, he 
decried “the miserable split between material excellence and spiritual 
fulfillment.”
 
IF WE add to these affinities the aim to empower a privileged elite – 
the vanguard of the proletariat, the Aryan race, or Islamist theocrats – 
the left-Islamist alliance is not the anomaly it appears; they are 
brothers under their rhetorical skin.
 
Mussolini et al. moved from socialism to fascism and Chomsky has moved 
from support for Pol Pot to advocating for Hassan Nasrallah, head of 
Hezbollah.  Carlos the Jackal, imprisoned for political murders as a 
Marxist, became a Muslim in prison in the belief that revolutionary 
Islam “attacks the ruling classes in order to achieve a more equitable 
redistribution of wealth.”
 
The legacy of oppression and the tradition of self-blame described by 
Levin and Wisse have eroded the barrier that being Jewish ought to have 
created against joining their comrades in assaulting the Jewish state. 
In some cases, like Chomsky’s collaboration with holocaust deniers, what 
Schoenfeld describes as “the murky waters of the psychosocial” must play 
a role.
 
But the core of Jewish animus towards Israel emerges from the left. As 
much as the fear of anti-Semitism adduced by Schoenfeld, Jewish enemies 
of Israel fear the opprobrium of their comrades. As Robert Wistrich has 
put it, on the left: “Israel-bashing is clearly the contemporary key to 
acceptance.”
 
The peculiarities of Jewish history and culture have combined with the 
left’s attraction to totalitarianism – left or right, secular or sacred 
– that has now been stripped of the veneer of progressive values. Jewish 
support for the enemies of Israel represents the triumph of leftism over 
Jewishness.
 
The author is professor emeritus at the Department of Sociology, 
University of Illinois at Chicago.
 
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-EdContributors/Article.aspx?ID=282076&R=R1
 
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Sostieni Rete ECO
 
http://rete-eco.it/it/sostienici.html
 
 

 politica di) Israele 
 
No, leggi meglio
 
 
-- 
Io non gufo l'Inter. Le spacco le corna.

 No, leggi meglio
 
perché mai dovrebbe, potendo autonomamente elaborare?