Thursday, November 15, 2012

Where Kane Gets It Wrong

Mike L.

I notice that Kane in CA is getting something of a drubbing on Daily Kos.

In one of David Harris Gershon's heinous "diaries," taking the side of Hamas over his own people, Kane writes:
What a fucking ridiculous conclusion (6+ / 8-)

And it's a position he advocates not out of wisdom, but out of those psychological demons that still haunt us from the Holocaust - demons which magnify Jewish victimhood such that brutalizing another people becomes a justifiable, even necessary position.

You're qualified to do a psych eval on every Jew who thinks differently from you? And you know that their through process and the conclusions reached must be the result of a psychological defect? And non-Jews who come to these same conclusions are somehow superior and not victims of this same psychological defect?

There isn't much difference between the arguments I hear from both sides in this conflict. Virulently pro-Israel people tell me that i must suffer from Jewish Stockholme Syndrome if I don't recognize that Obama supports Jihad. And virulently anti-Israel people like you tell me that I must suffer from psychological demons if I think that Israel has a right to defend itself.

Because both of you KNOW the truth. And there is no other possible truth. And the only explanation for not having the crystal clear vision that you both share is mental illness. A mental illness that only affects Jews.

What utter bullshit.

You're a fucking joke.

by Kane in CA on Thu Nov 15, 2012 at 11:12:24 AM PST
The truth of the matter is that "Jewish Stockholm Syndrome," or what Kenneth Levin of the Harvard Medical School calls "Oslo Syndrome" is not a mental illness.

What it is is a coping mechanism.

He writes:
To understand the why of this situation we must look at the psychology of chronically besieged populations. Almost invariably there are parts of the population that accept the indictments of the besiegers in the hope that they can win relief and peace. This is a psychological response to being besieged, and Jews have been besieged for 2000 years.
This is one not unreasonable explanation for why it is that, despite the long history of Jewish persecution under the boot of imperial Islam, that some Jews, particularly progressive-left "liberal" Jews, tend to blame their co-religionists in Israel for ongoing Arab-Muslim violence against them.

But even if Kane is right that "Claiming someone has psychological demons is a claiming a psychological defect," it doesn't change the fact that a certain large percentage of western Jewish liberals do, in fact, as David Harris Gershon does, blame Jews for the violence against them and have absorbed the "Palestinian narrative" of perpetual Jewish guilt into the way they view the conflict.

That, in my not so humble opinion, is what counts.

People like David Harris Gershon honestly believe, despite the long history of Jewish persecution in the Middle East, that the Jews are to blame for Arab-Muslim hostility toward us.

That's the key point.

Whatever the explanation for Jewish absorption of the ahistorical "Palestinian narrative" it doesn't change the fact that many Jewish progressives have absorbed that narrative, that fiction, into their understanding of the conflict.

In any case, Kane is now getting a drubbing on Daily Kos and once they go after someone as moderate and reasonable and middle-of-the-road as Kane, you just know that room for Jewish participation on the progressive-left is greatly diminishing.

Also, of course, it is notable that progressive-left venues only became animated after Israel defended itself.  They honestly did not care so long as as Jews were the primary target.  Jewish life is worth nothing to progressive-left racists.

They only became interested when Israel hit back.

Meanwhile, they continue to justify Arab-Muslim violence against us.

25 comments:

  1. The fact that the "Palestinian Narrative," has its origins in Soviet propaganda must also be considered but don't expect "progressives," to do so. Most of them are products of said propaganda to this very day.

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    1. Mentioned in that article is one from 2006 by Ion Mihai Pacepa, Russian Footprints, that is also worth reading.

      http://www.nationalreview.com/blogs/print/218533

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  2. "They only became interested when Israel hit back."

    That should tell any sane person the whole story.

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  3. Just to be fair, I think both of these arguments are anti-semitic garbage.

    I don't disagree with you because I'm burdened with psychological defects anymore than I disagree with him because I'm burdened with psychological defects.

    And how the fuck do either of you know about my psychological defects? Who's been talking?

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  4. This -

    "In any case, Kane is now getting a drubbing on Daily Kos and once they go after someone as moderate and reasonable and middle-of-the-road as Kane, you just know that room for Jewish participation on the progressive-left is greatly diminishing."

    David "Useful Idiot" Harris-Gershon is as 'pro-Israel' as one can get at Daily Kos these days without getting into trouble. Which is of course to say that the only way one can be acceptably pro-Israel there, is to not be pro-Israel at all.

    I love that someone finally called him "virulently anti-Israel." That alone is worth rec'ing.

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    1. I'm mildly offended, btw, by that "middle-of-the-road" stuff. Peace has never been middle-of-the-road. I'm somewhere out yonder, where the buses don't go.

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    2. Ah, gotcha. Apologies.

      And the buses don't go a lot of places any more, that's one of my major pet peeves. I have to take a $20 taxi from Doylestown or Trenton just to get to Lambertville these days, bah! I swear there used to be a NJ Transit bus that ran up there.

      Oh, sorry for the digression...

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    3. Jay, there are NO pro-Israel voices at dKos at all. The best it gets is pro-Leftist-Israel IMHO.

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    4. Well, there's a few. MBNYC pops to mind, along with a handful of others. But yeah, something tells me if they were to do even half of what Useful Idiot and the others do on a regular basis, from a pro-I side, they'd be kicked out of that place in a matter of days.

      Like I was, and Mike, and you, and so many others...

      How long would someone posting Latma videos and whatnot every week be tolerated, do you think? In fact, I recall someone got banned for posting just one in a comment once.

      Yet FriendlyStranger is still doing their weekly PressTV video clip compilation, and whatever else it is that they're up to these days, for how long now?

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    5. Which is precisely the problem. You can be pro-Israel there, as long as you largely keep it quiet most of the time.

      On the other hand, it's considered totally cool to be a David Harris-Gershon or a Lefty Coaster or a heathlander type. They don't have to be quiet at all, about anything, ever.

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    6. And you can be Pro Israel as long as you don't have anything but a bonafide leftist position. Like say you got crazy and suggested maybe settlers weren't evil fanged monsters totally destroying all by themselves any chances for peace.

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    7. What we need to do is open some space for dissent.

      The anti-Israel / anti-Jewish voices on the left... and, I'm sorry, but they are mainly on the left... think of themselves as the bold cutting-edge.

      They think of themselves as speaking truth to power. Needless to say, the Nazis thought just as highly of themselves in the 1920s. They were also outspoken idealists who wanted nothing more than "justice."

      You guys should take a gander at the original Nazi platform. Much of it was really quite progressive in the current sense of that word.

      My point, of course, is that they are not the least bit cutting edge. They are the polar opposite. What they actually represent is this generation of malicious Jew hatred.

      Every generation we are found guilty, including this one. The difference is that today the poison is coming out of our own political home. The progressive-left is my movement and a worm has nestled right into its core.

      Anyways, as Jay says:

      You can be pro-Israel there, as long as you largely keep it quiet most of the time.

      Yep.

      The progressive-left is fine with Jews so long as those Jews do not stand up for Jewish issues. All other groups are very much encouraged to have their say. It's the very basis of progressive politics since the Civil Rights Movement and the rise of the New Left. But if we stand up for our fellow Jews in Israel we are reviled and disdained as hard-right, Zionist war-mongers... even by left-wing Jews.

      The Arab-Muslim majority in the Middle East can spit hatred at us day and night, but if we even so much as notice it aloud it means that we're the bad guys.

      And, yeah, Doodad, the "settlers" are the Jews among Jews.

      I have no doubt that the great majority of those people are perfectly fine human beings simply trying to live a decent life in the world.

      The fact that so many Jewish progressives despise them pisses me off to no end.

      Because it's not just.

      We need to be fair to ourselves, goddammit.

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  5. Kane is accurate that too many on the Right use the same black-white approach. It litters the comments, no less than at Dail Kos. It's too bad because the Right seems to have the better of the argument for how to see the threat to Israel and Jews, not to mention America.

    That said, the particular author is a propagandist, with more affinity for the Leftist ideology than anything else, utterly predictable and practiced in the ways of manipulation. It is quite transparent what he does, but there is a willing audience.

    Others there, many of them regular commenters, include out and out haters of Israel, holding it to a standard of perfection reserved for no one else. They are blind to see how this morphs into antisemitism. They are, of course, too tolerant and sensitive, at least in the abstract, to care about how they treat others that do not agree with their superior intellect and morals. How dare one question them or their motivations!

    It is just a small group at DKos from my observation. The larger wrong is that much of what is said is met with indifference. There is also the neglect of greater wrongs. The use of civilians by Hamas and its indiscriminate targeting of civilians, both of which are obvious and evident war crimes, is but one of many examples. Not much mention, either, of the manner in which abusers manipulate the international system for bad purposes. The abusers are, after all, to be excused because we Westerners made them that way.

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  6. My 'favorite' comment in that thread was from PeterHug, the guy who fiercely loves him all the USS Liberty conspiracy theory he get, saying that he read the diary twice and was totally not offended in any way.

    .

    .

    .

    Color me completely shellshocked.

    Yet I'm sure Useful Idiot will continue to pretend that he's something other than what he so obviously is.

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    1. The USS Liberty crap is far right wing yet how often do we see supposed Progressives spouting it? Strange, isn't it?

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    2. Yeah, it's one of those things where the extremes come together. I'm sure there are quite a few similar things Cynthia McKinney, David Duke and a significant number of Daily Kossers all agree upon.

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    3. Anti-Jewish hate brings all low base evil people together.

      And Re: "extremes":

      The Nazi-Soviet Pact.

      ----

      On the Orwellian use of the terms ‘left’ and ‘right.’ - And on the dangers therein to Israeli politics., by Franciso Gil-White

      "Introduction

      "The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are widely used to designate political positions, but they are now much abused in common parlance and in the media, and as a result the online resource Wikipedia writes: 'Despite the prevalence and durability of these terms, there is little consensus on what it actually means to be Left or Right at the present time.' When there is a breakdown in the meaning of words that are widely used in one domain of social life, one solution for the social scientist is to invent new technical terms. In this particular case, however, I predict that whatever connotations of ‘left’ and ‘right’ the reader was using would immediately be mapped to whatever terms I chose to innovate, abolishing any benefit. So, given that my purpose is to rescue the -- still surviving -- main meanings of these words, I have concluded that what I must do is confront the current confusion head on: I will keep the terms and I will explictly defend my way of using them as the most sensible.

      "Despite the breakdown in meaning, the original uses of these words are not in doubt. In its list of possible meanings of ‘left’ and ‘right,’ Wikipedia gives the following first:

      "'Support for the economic interests of the less privileged classes as part of the left, or of the more privileged as part of the right. …this issue of class interests was the original meaning of the dichotomy.'

      "Where did the dichotomy arise? At the time of the French Revolution. Wikipedia states:

      "'The terms Left and Right have been used to refer to political affiliation since the early part of the French Revolutionary era. They originally referred to the seating arrangements in the various legislative bodies of France, specifically in the French Legislative Assembly of 1791, when the moderate royalist Feuillants sat on the right side of the chamber, while the radical Montagnards sat on the left.'

      "So, in the context of the French Revolution, which gave birth to these terms, the opposition of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ had a rather clear meaning, which I sense is still the main meaning, despite the modern confusion. I have therefore chosen to isolate these meanings from other meanings in order to clean these words up and turn them into useful technical terms for the practice of social science.

      "My definitions are as follows:

      "Left : defends the interests of the many against the interests of the wealthy few.

      "Right : defends the interests of the wealthy few against the interests of the many.

      (continued)

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    4. (from continued)

      "Notice, first, that the above definitions are broad, so they admit of all sorts of qualifiers, such as ‘radical leftist,’ ‘extreme right-winger,’ ‘center-right,’ ‘moderate left,’ etc., but the basic contrast remains. Thus, for example, if you are on the ‘moderate right’ you do not favor sadistic oppression of workers, but neither do you want the workers to be in power; if you are on the ‘moderate left’ you favor reforms that will improve the lives of the workers, but you are not calling for revolution. The most extreme right-wing system will be a slave-making state run by a tiny, sadistic, and wealthy aristocracy. The most extreme left-wing system will be a state where the working and middle classes are not merely free to make choices in every domain of life, but where they also constitute the overwhelmingly dominant force in politics. Further, since my definitions are broad and identify merely whose interests one supports, they do not say a thing about one’s proposed solution to a perceived problem. In other words, for example, my terms in no way require that a leftist opposes private property and market economics, or that a rightist favors them. I think this is a sensible way of speaking, because disagreements about proposed solutions are secondary to the question of whose interests one is trying to advance.

      "Second, my terms are descriptive, not normative. In other words, the above definitions do not say that the left is ‘good’ and the right ‘bad,’ though if you are a leftist you will naturally tend to map this normative equivalence to the terms, because your politics are always, inevitably, about your values. Conversely, if you side with the wealthy few, then the left will be ‘bad.’

      "Third, it is possible to be on the left -- as per my definitions -- and simultaneously to tell people that you are on the ‘right’ because the way these terms are now abused in common parlance and in the media has affected you, or because you wish to spread disinformation about yourself or about the thing you are supporting or opposing. The converse -- being on the right but saying that you are on the ‘left’ -- is likewise possible. This is the most important point here, so I will rely on a few historical examples to make myself clear, before moving to the case of Israel, my ultimate quarry.

      "The Soviet Union

      "I claim that the Soviet Union was an extreme right-wing system. Why? ..."

      http://www.hirhome.com/israel/left_right2.htm

      More by Franciso Gil-White on the situation that Israel and the Jewish people are in:

      Articles on antisemitism and the Arab-Israeli conflict
      http://www.hirhome.com/israel/guide-israel.htm

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    5. Thanks for the links, Dan. I have them bookmarked for the weekend. At a glance, I particularly like his point about the US.

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  7. Stuart,

    thank you for dropping in and I do owe you an apology for suggesting that you are not welcome here.

    Of course, you are, and I was wrong to suggest otherwise.

    We need alternative viewpoints (to cut our teeth) and we need you as a person, just because of your essential human decency.

    I regretted that comment since I made it and I just want you to know that.

    Besides, in blog years, I've known you since I was a tiny, little Zionist.

    :O)

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    1. Apology accepted. I think it was even before you were even a tiny little zionist. you were just a chain smoking pot head getting high with gang-bangers in the back of public transit buses. I wasn't planning on going away anyway :P

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    2. Smokin' with my homeys at the back of the bus.

      Good times.

      {Laurie was horrified.}

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