I WAS AWARE that Susan Abulhawa has expressed anger at someone else on the antizionist side I've cited in the past month, the American scholar Norman Finkelstein over the context of the Oxford Union debate where she delivered the speech I posted the other day. I read her speech and listened to what of the other things that were said in it, especially the speech delivered by her colleague Muhammed el-Kurd which is well worth hearing. I also read her angry comments about Finkelstein, I understand them even if I think they were unfair in one regard and probably not that helpful. Also, I'd never criticize her for saying what she did on any basis but the very last point.
I can understand Palestinians being upset about how the media seems to have reacted to the presence of Norman Finkelstein who, apparently, instead of appearing at the debate which Susan Abulhawa suggested he be invited to participate in, wanted a solo speaking occasion, instead. Her angry comment that he considered himself the "savoir" of Palestinians, the white-savior, at that, is something I can understand even if I think it was too harsh. But I'll start by saying I have no standing to accuse her of being too harsh, it was her opinion which I get, just as I have none to criticize Muhammad el-Kurd saying he didn't care what those of us in the white-unattacked, not under active genocide west thought of his thoughts on the attempts to destroy his People, the expulsion of his family from Jerusalem, the theft of their property by the apartheid-genocide state of Israel. I hope to find a text of what Muhamed el-Kurd said because his point about the tactic of talking about this an abstract terms instead of the actual facts written in the blood and bodies of those who are being slaughtered is brutally right. His and Susan Abulhawa's angry impatience with such focus on abstractions is right, it is more than simply justifiable and it is entirely understandable. Such abstractions can easily turn into a major tactic of distraction in order to facilitate the very real mass murder that is ongoing, such has been the tactical use of the UN, international courts, even the ICC which FINALLY issued warrants for the arrest of Benjamin Netenyahu and only one of the others is engaged in the continuing genocide - though that gesture is, itself, hardly effective for reasons I won't go into now, even as western governments rail against the injustice of issuing such a warrant against another white-western genocidalist. My eyes have been opened as to the reality of judicial processes in the past four years in a way it never was before, I can understand how People of Color and others on the lower end of inequality can be less than impressed with those now.
This issue of blood and flesh reality as opposed the the abstractions that academics and lawyers and judges and media enablers of genocide deal in is always important to keep in mind.
I can understand Norman Finkelstein, someone close to my age, who has been one of the few western academics who has been exposing the crimes of Israel against the Palestinians for the past forty years and who has taken a lot of hits for it his entire adult life. Though by "hits" I would never want anyone to believe I in any way equate what he's had aimed at him with what both Susan Abulhawa and Muhammed el-Kurd have experienced for both themselves and their families and fellow Palestinians have experienced. I don't know if Norman Finkelstein has addressed the dispute but I can both respect and cite what he says and respect Palestinians who demand the right to be considered the primary deliverers of testimony in the case against Israel in regard to the genocide against their own People. I don't have to take a side and wouldn't because I think both sides are valid in what they say. Finelstein is an academic, though one who has cared about the flesh and blood reality more than the greatest majority of them, I can understand his role in this even as I can understand the impatience or anger at it by those whose lives are what his academic activity is made of.
I can understand both, I know that the lives, the flesh and blood and minds and souls and conscious experience of Palestinians and the victims of violence are what is primary and must always come first. Though all of it is important, some of it is more important than some other.
My motive in what I've been presenting is to cut through the weaponization of the accusation of "antisemitism" which is pervasive in the West, especially intensified in the past five years through that "official" definition produced by IHRA which, as I noted, even one of those who came up with it criticized its weaponization to protect Israel from criticism, but which has become a legal weapon to use against even the most justifiable criticism of the war crimes and genocide and apartheid of Israel. As I've noted, that use of the word went way past the absurd stage as it has regularly been used against Jewish critics of Israel and zionism from well before IHRA decided to use its former credibility to protect Israel in that way. I don't consider it a credible entity due to that dishonest and cynical act.
Cutting apart that use of the accusation of "antisemitism" is as important to cutting off the zionist war machine as any of it.
I think we have to cut through that word in order to tell the truth about what Israel does and what it is. I think we have to cut through a lot of words to tell that truth because Israel and zionists have weaponized language, calling the engines of genocide and zionist-Lebensraum, a "defense force" and "settlers." It wasn't before the past decade that I started understanding that has been a tactic of zionist nationalism just as it has been in most nationalist movements which involved the theft of land and territories around the world. I don't feel qualified to tell some of that truth such as Norman Finkelstein can when he talks about the American billionaire "Jewish supremacists" who, as he says, are largely ignorant of what they fund but who have the chauvinistic attitude that "Jews can do no wrong." That is a major force behind what distorts American politics, why Democrats know it would be political suicide to practice consistency when it comes to the arming and support of the fascist Israeli government which is and has been committing genocide and practicing Lebensraum since before 1948.
American Democrats, a party which has the support of a very large majority of Jewish, AS WELL AS MUSLIM VOTERS, whose party is under active attack by Israeli zionists AS THEY SUPPORTED DONALD TRUMP, knows it must support Israel as it commits war crimes and crimes against humanity, because of the Israel lobby funded by American billionaires who supported Donald Trump. That is how seriously fucked up this whole situation is. I can understand that because I've watched American politics for my entire life, I can understand young People who have not done that being furious with Joe Biden and Kamala Harris though I can't understand how they could not know that by not voting for them they were handing power to far worse, a man whose family is, I am sure, looking to be rewarded by the Israeli fascist government with major real-estate deals in what used to be Gaza - PROBABLY AFTER THEY SEND OUR TAX DOLLARS TO CLEAR THE RUBBLE AND BODIES IN THE TERRITORY THE ISRAELI FASCIST GOVERNMENT IS STEALING RIGHT NOW.
I have been trying to expose the danger of the Supreme Court - ACLU created "right to lie," the Supreme Court -ACLU maintenance and extension of the basic corruption in our elections and politics, from well before there was an internet. This situation is a creation of the Courts and the lawyers and, ultimately, the very badly written Constitution, written by slave-holders, genocidal land stealers and financiers for whom a "right to lie" was very servicable. The lamented truth, which it has been noticed is dying if not dead in the ambient conditions that gave us Trump, has never been much valued in our putrid, secular, civic religion and nationalism. I think that's something that always comes with nationalism, chauvinism, the various supremacies. Perhaps it always comes whenever an anti-egalitarian political system is in place or fallen into.
All of these reach its fullest expression in the area of Palestine under zionist occupation and fascist expansion and the impossibility to cut through the lies that support that. Money and the lying mass media has everything to do with that. Norman Finkelstein has been trying to cut through that for more than forty years, now, he admits that he was pretty naive about much of what was already in place when he started this with his exposure of the zionist lies in the bestselling book by Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial. He said that the older and already well-seasoned critic of zionism, Noam Chomsky told him that his academic career would be ruined by his exposure of a large swath of his fellow academics as supporters of that fraud - indeed, when it became an issue with Finkelstein's later debunking of Alan Dershowitz's copying of Peters' book, Dershowitz successfully sank Finkelstein's bid to get tenure at the university he was working for. That is a minor, white-American detail as compared to the real goal of the lies told in the west, the destruction of the Palestinian People and the theft of their property, something that has been going on since the first zionist attacks and atrocities which the zionist campaign explicitly stated was part of their program from well back into the 20th if not the late 19th century. Zionism is just another Western imperialist, colonialist campagin of the kind that succeeded best in the Western hemisphere but which have been ongoing throughout the long, violent, criminal history of humanity. It is in no way morally superior to any of them, it is, if anything, as ruthless as the worst of them, in the way of such amoral individuals and movements, limited only by what they calculate they can get away with at any given time. It has been the goal of American and other supporters of zionism - AND MOST OF THOSE HAVE NOT BEEN JEWS - and the media they buy off or intimidate to let Israel get away with mass murder and theft from the start of it. That effort has used American elections and our political calendar in their planning and tactics, I think the explainations of that as given by Norman Finkelstein are some of the most insightful I've ever heard. He pointed out that when Harry Truman supported the illegal self-declaration of Israel as a state in 1948, and immediately recognized Israel, it was an American election year in which Truman expected to lose the election. If he had been attacked by the Israel lobby then, he would almost certainly have lost the campaign. Something which certainly was relevant to the election this year.
I would never hold that last thing, what Muhammed el-Kurd would call a abstraction or a distraction beneath the primary reality of the slaughter, the genocide, the apartheid, the Lebensraum policy of Israel, both the official government, their storm troopers and the unofficial gangs and criminals who spearhead that in the "settlers" but as American and Western support for that fascist government is created by the manipulation of American and western political life, it is as important to the ability of the Israeli government to commit its crimes against humanity, its war crimes and its apartheid.
