[Peace-discuss] Urbana City Council meeting last night

[C. G. Estabrook]

An excellent and insightful comment, showing the time and attention 
David has devoted to the matter.  --CGE

David Green wrote:
> Robert, have you ever had to attend a Bar Mitzvah?
>  
> I'm sorry to state the obvious regarding Monday night below. I do this 
> fully aware that what I say will end up circulating in the Jewish 
> community, and indeed there's no reason why it shouldn't.
>  
> What is it that motivates the most right-wing, pro-Israel members of the 
> local Jewish community to obsess about "hate speech" late at night on 
> UPTV? It' an open secret that elites in this country exploit the 
> Holocaust and anti-semitism in order to justify and cover for arming 
> Israel and invading the Middle East, not to mention their desire to bomb 
> Iran. Would people like Lee Melhado and Paul Weichsel, the latter 
> featured on the N-G front page and the most virulent of the local 
> Zionists, be doing what they are doing if they were not blindly 
> self-righteous regarding their support for Zionist bigotry, apartheid, 
> and ethnic cleansing? It's only the golden opportunity they see for 
> asserting Jewish victimhood and innocence in the face of the brutal 
> realities of occupation and ethnic cleansing (and increasing criticism 
> of Israel) that gets them to watch UPTV rather than reruns of Seinfeld.
>  
> It isn't just that anti-semitism is trivial and to no effect in our 
> culture, or about questionable views of what constitutes hate speech and 
> its alleged consequences, or about freedom of speech. It's that 
> anti-semitism has to be inflated and featured in order to stigmatize any 
> discourse about what the U.S. and Israel are doing. The pea of 
> anti-semitism absolutely must be felt both by the faithful and our 
> entire culture through a thousand mattresses, to justify what we all are 
> doing in the Middle East.
>  
> (Incidentally, it would be a mistake to think that any of these people 
> are actually concerned with the well-being of Jews, especially poor Jews 
> in Israel who suffer from economic policies related to militarism and 
> racism. Moreover, there happen to be 20,000 Jews in Iran, that is, 
> Iranians, living peacefully with Muslims, who are put in danger by U.S. 
> and Israeli threats directed at that country. The CUJF crowd represents 
> elite interests more than "Jewish" interests. Indeed, their conflation 
> of the two contributes more to whatever anti-semitism there is left.)
>  
> It's not about Israel wagging the American dog. Silly assertions like 
> that only allow local Zionists to write "poor innocent us" letters to 
> the N-G proclaiming their powerlessness, shooting fish in a barrel in 
> order to assert their benign innocence, while they promote the most 
> brutal policies, and shout down those who protest, experienced 
> personally by me at Hillel on April 1st. If you want to experience the 
> public expression of virulent hatred, you missed your opportunity--both 
> with my detractors and with the speaker, in terms of the content of his 
> talk. One of the recent letter writers, Ehud Yairi, somehow lost his 
> sense of humor when he walked toward me and berated me while I tried to 
> ask the speaker what he thinks the U.S. response would be if Canada 
> invaded Montana and established Canadian-only settlements with 
> Canadian-only roads. Perhaps he didn't get the analogy, and it's 
> understandable that he wouldn't.
>  
> In that regard, I'm being completely serious when I say that the speaker 
> that evening, David Makovsky, could not express his ignorant and hateful 
> views anywhere on or near this campus except at Hillel, where he 
> summarized a century of Zionism by saying that "the Jews came in peace, 
> but the Arabs wanted war." Try to find one Palestinian in the world who 
> would not take this in the hateful and racist manner in which it is 
> intended. I would admit that perhaps a half dozen of a billion Muslims 
> might agree with this.
>  
> This whole affair is about exploiting historical Jewish suffering in 
> order to suppress criticism about what's going on. Could it be more 
> obvious that CUJF's concerns are expressed in a larger political 
> context? It's not by accident that those Jews most concerned about this 
> silly program are those who most avidly support Zionist atrocities.
>  
> This is not only about the suppression of speech, but the support of 
> U.S. militarism and Israeli aggression. You can't separate the two, and 
> you shouldn't.
>  
> It seems to met that those who want to protect UPTV as a local resource 
> ought not to waste their energy on legalistic debate and hate speech, as 
> if the Melhados and Weichsels are truly hurt and aggrieved by this 
> program. That's handing them too much. These people don't need to be 
> debated, they need to be shamed.
>  
> DG
>  
> 
>     What the hell is that supposed to mean David? That is a real sick
>     comment!
> 
>         ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>         Date: Tue, 15 Apr 2008 10:29:52 -0700
>         From: davegreen84 at yahoo.com
>         Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Urbana City Council meeting last night
>         To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net
> 
>         How ridiculous. Brumleve is a crackpot, of course. But suffice
>         it to say that if there was a show that told the awful truth
>         about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, from 1948 to the
>         current day, then the same folks would be labeling that "hate
>         speech" too.
>          
>         What really is sad is that because of their hyper-sensitivity
>         and complete lack of perspective, the local Zionist self-pity
>         partyers put everyone else through an evening that sounds like
>         having to go to three Bar Mitzvahs. Now you know what we have to
>         deal with.
>          
>         DG
> ...