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No Jews Speech
The US State Department condemned this speech. The message from State was that “it is wrong to say we support ethnic cleansing when what we really want is just to see all of the Jews eliminated from the region . . . one way or another.”**
** May not be an exact quote, but it expresses the same sentiment.
Published in General
I misspoke. It is the Right of Return, which both the PA and Hamas insist on. Your position?
(The above is from an article of a year and a half ago. Abbas’ position has hardened since.) The parliament would perhaps better be referred to as a “parliament” due to the absence of elections and an actually seated parliament. That said, the majority of representatives in the whatever it is favor the “Right of Return” as does Fatah whose council is probably the closest thing to a Palestinian parliament that they’ve got. So does Abbas, and so do any of his likely successors.
@zafar, how do you stand on the Palestinian right of return?
Israel: more tolerance and diversity than progressives can endure.
Finkelstein, an admirer of Hezbollah and Hamas. Even if the Peters’ study of the data was slightly off, doesn’t mean the book’s central thesis was wrong. The land only began to prosper after the return of the Jews. Again, Mark Twain called the land a wasteland, how do you explain that?
Norman Finkelstein? You quote him? What’s next, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
Not only is all of Finkelstein’s work questionable under the CoC, both his and Porath’s arguments on Peters’ flawed but important work were substantively debunked by Rael Jean Isaac in the July 1986 issue of Commentary. Isaac’s conclusion:
@zafar: Why do you keep citing notorious antisemites and propagating their lies?
Delegitimization, double standards….
Lidens, you are a scientist. If the data is wrong, any argument based on that data is faulty. When the data is doctored, any argument based on that data is deliberately misleading. Right? The Porath article will be particularly interesting for you from that point of view.
Mark Twain is one observation point, about one place in Palestine at one point in time. How robust do you thinkit is to extrapolate that observation to make a broad generalisation, and if so on what grounds?
Morally speaking, I think they have that right.
But they don’t have the right to create another Nakba with their return.
But no right of return for Jews?
And why do you keep citing antisemites?
Seriously? You’re claiming that Norman Finkelstein is an antisemite?
Indeed. Which is what we’re for some reason talking about here.
It wouldn’t bother me, but the Palestinians might be hard to convince at this point.
I don’t believe I have.
Her study of the data was sloppy, not that the data was wrong. And stop citing antisemites.
From Isaac’s discussion of that thesis:
… not only are the Palestinian Arabs not descendants of Canaanites, it is highly doubtful that more than a very few are even descended from those who settled the country as part of the Arab invasion of the 7th century. For over a thousand years following the Arab conquest, Palestine underwent a series of devastating invasions, followed by massacres of the existing population: Seljuk Turks and Fatimid reconquerors were followed by Crusaders who were followed by waves of Mongol tribes who were followed in turn by Tartars, Mamelukes, Turks, and incessant Bedouin raiders.
In the course of the 18th and 19th centuries Palestine was essentially repopulated by foreigners, some coming from great distances. Egyptians arrived in a number of waves, with an especially large one from 1832 to 1840. Sudanese pioneered successfully in the swampy marshlands. Entire tribes of Bedouin from as far away as Libya settled on the coastal plain. Abandoned villages in the Galilee were resettled by Lebanese Christians. Coastal towns attracted Armenians, Syrians, Turks. The French expansion in North Africa resulted in waves of refugees coming to Palestine; many of the followers of the Algerian resistance leader Abd el Kader went to the Galilee, where they founded a number of villages (Samakh, Deishum). Russian expansion into the Caucasus led to the emigration of many of its Muslim peoples (Circassians and Georgians) who were welcomed by the Ottoman empire…
Norman Finkelstein claims (and demonstrates in his book) that she falsified the data.
That makes it wrong.
And he’s the Jewish son of Holocaust survivors. It’s pretty viscious to call him an antisemite because you don’t like what he says. To be honest it robs the term of meaning.
The Palestinian claim to the land isn’t based on their claimed descent from the Canaanites, it’s based on the fact that they were there, in a clear majority, in 1947 (and for several hundred years before then).
??
Did he actually challenge her data?
On Peters’ most serious errors, this:
That’s what an accusation of doctoring or faking data is.
Calling her work a fraud or a hoax doesn’t equal to challenging her data.
Decide for yourself what he did.
Here’s a link to his book on the subject, his bit on Rivers (oops, Peters) starts at chapter 2 (p21).
Double standards. Demonization. Delegitimization. Yes. What of it? He certainly suffered from his parents’ suffering, but yes. There were many antisemitic Jews in the various security apparatuses of the USSR. It’s not a new phenomenon. Much of the Israeli Communist party remained devoutly Stalinist even after it became known that Stalin was planning his own Final Solution.
Finkelstein was a Maoist; that means that son of survivors though he is, he was an admirer of one of the greatest mass murderers in history. As was his mentor, the academic fraud David Irving, though Irving’s object of admiration was not Mao but Hitler. The last time I looked, Finkelstein continued to defend Irving’s work.
I’m not interested in Finkelstein’s psyche or how he got to where he is, but in his actions and his associates. He frequently appears on Mondoweiss, which is an antisemitic site.
@zafar, why do you keep citing antisemites?
@ontheleftcoast – I don’t think he’s an antisemite. And I don’t think mondoweiss is an antisemitic site either.
So now we know.
Antisemitism is the belief that Jews are intrinsically different, and usually worse, than other people. Finkelstein doesn’t make that claim, and as far as I can see neither do the publishers of mondoweiss.
What do you mean when you call them antisemitic?
With the advent of the State of Israel and its enemies, the classic ethnic/religious definition that you cite is insufficient. The new antisemitism began as Soviet disinformation. And
There is no reason, no reason, anyone would get so upset about the “plight” of Palestinians in Israel and environs (y’mean, like enjoying all the rights of citizenship, including voting, serving in the Knesset and on Israeli Supreme Court, obtaining employment in Israel?) –except:
Plain ol’ fashioned Jew-hatred.
200, 000 Palestinians were expelled from their “home” , Kuwait, in 1991-2. Did anybody care, or know? Thousands of Palestinians have been killed in the Syrian Civil War. Silence.
Thank you for posting Netanyahu’s great speech.
But–could we expect this administration to admire it: Prez Omega, friend of the Jew-haters Farrakhan and Sharpton?
Okay – though even selectively upholding human rights seems hard to cast as wrong. We should uphold them more, not less.
What would you say is legitimate criticism of Israel?
Is there a way for me to express my opinion (you can guess) on, say, the Nakba that is not antisemitic?
(I agree that calling Israelis Nazis is not accurate or constructive.)
It’s certainly a double standard.
Though Israel is different from these countries for a number of reasons. To be fair, Jewishness is not even on the radar (+ve or -ve) for most people in the world, don’t you think?
Individuals have a fundamental positive right to exist. States do not.
Questioning a State doesn’t mean questioning individual rights.
That would be the Robert Fisk who became – literally – a byword for false and tendentious pseudojournalism.
Nice snark, but irrelevant to the argument. It was known to its citizens as “Rome.”
Of course, the Byzantines were killed or, mostly by coercion at first, converted to Islam. Their greatest churches were destroyed or, like the Hagia Sofia six and a half centuries ago, converted to mosques. The children of these converts are mostly Muslim today.
I let one go by: Gideon Levy again.
For Levy to dismiss this clear moral argument – founded in fact –
as “propaganda” demonstrates the bankruptcy of his views.
And most of the “settlements” are not illegal. Many of the Arab settlements are illegal. It’s just that they are paid for and defended by European governments trying to create facts on the ground.
Double standard, delegitimization…
Perhaps because dhimmi churches have historically been zealous advocates for the privileges of their Muslim overlords, and because Palestinian Christians have long identified themselves with their Muslim brethren’s political agendas. The Ottoman millet system combined dhimmitude for Christians and Jews, which included communal responsibility for an individual’s actions and a divide and rule approach to the various dhimmi religious communities. This tends to produce subject religious communities who do each other dirt to serve their overlords.
Her Royal Thighness wouldn’t like it either! Just one more reason (a biggie) not to let her get within 150 miles of DC.
There’s a reason why Barry dislikes Beebs so much. Beebs is a man.
And Barry can’t compete with that, and he knows it, so he retreats behind his massively inferior intellect and supposed moral authority to criticize someone who helps build and maintain freedom in a place where historically there has never been any, a place where both Jews and Arabs live and work together.
Barry’s too busy with other, more important things to mount the kind of intellectual workout to figure out where he’s wrong. He decided not to make those efforts long ago, because he found out he didn’t need to.