This piece of Majority Report that started with a phone call from a recent Israeli immigrant to the United States pointing out that the Israeli-fascist government is doing exactly the same kind of appeal to anti-Jewish paranoia that the Republican-Nazis are doing here. It is something that I've been watching develop for the past three decades, starting in the 1980s but which, clearly, some Israelis saw coming as early as 1967.
Amos Oz got it wrong again. It’s not neo-Nazis. It’s Judeo-Nazis. Scions of a unique group which Yeshayahu Leibowitz Prophesized so well immediately after the great victory of 1967. Racism, murderousness and profound hatred originating in a religious-messianic worldview that is fueled by the occupation and settlement enterprise.
Of course at this stage, they’re on the margins. But history has proven that the question is how the center responds to the margins. In the wake of the most recent outbreaks of Kristallnacht-inspired rioting, the settler right hastened to label the rioters disdainfully as “graffiti-scribbling youth.” In the buses, more and more stickers are cropping up in Hebrew and Arabic with the warning: “Don’t even dare think about a Jewish woman!” Posters and articles warn not only against “assimilation” but also against Arab employment and housing. Behind this perception there are people, arbiters of halakha or Jewish religious law, organizations, and political movements. Is anyone bothering to investigate, to arrest, to judge? Israel will never be the Germany of 1942, but there is a moral obligation to prevent it from becoming like the Germany of 1932.
The caller talks about Yeshayahu Leibowitz's prediction of the rise of "Judeo-Nazism" and how the American-fascist billionaire pimp Sheldon Adelson is a figure in the rise of that bizarre Judeo-Nazism in both countries. As can be seen from the examples given in Haaretz, the language of these Zionists is almost identical to that the Nazis used against Jews, the ideas are merely translations into another form of ethnic supremacy against a different group of Semites, and Christians.
It is one of the reasons I didn't cite the figures that the Anti-Defamation League and others gave for the indisputable rise in antisemitic incidents in the United States because the definition of "antisemitism" being pushed by many Zionist groups an individuals would turn such observations into acts of "antisemitism". The relevant text as given by the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance lists as such an act:
Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis
Well, as can be seen, that's something which Jewish intellectuals IN ISRAEL have been doing for fifty-one years, something which Jewish intellectuals in the United States have been doing since 1948, specifically around the political movement that now and has long governed Israel noting the relationship between Israeli-"Judeo-Nazis" and conservative American Zionists.
Among the most disturbing political phenomena of our time is the emergence in the newly created state of Israel of the “Freedom Party” (Tnuat Harerut), a political party closely akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties. It was formed out of the membership and following of the former Irgun Zvai Leumi, a terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist organization in Palestine.
The current visit of Menachen Begin, leader of this party, to the United States is obviously calculated to give the impression of American support for his party in the coming Israeli elections, and to cement political ties with conservative Zionist elements in the United States. Several Americans of national repute have lent their names to welcome his visit. It is inconceivable that those who oppose fascism throughout the world, if correctly informed as to Mr. Begin's political record and perspectives, could add their names and support to the movement he represents.
Unless the people who track antisemitic incidents in the United States specifically reject those parts of the "definition" of antisemitism that act as a cover-up for what Liebowitz, not me, called Judeo-Nazism, I can't trust their figures as accurate. As I pointed out several months back, the ultra-Zionist sentences in that new definition of "antisemitism" have to be removed before anyone can trust the use of the term. And as the events of last week prove, we really need to be able to trust it because the term is needed. Desperately needed.
As for that immigrant who called the show, Israel's loss is our gain. I wouldn't mind having a few million more Americans like him.
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