I am not a victim

Michael Lumish

I'm trying to figure out just what irks me about this whole "Jews are not white" thing with the attendant MENA question in the States.

I think that what it is is the suspicion that we're trying to join the victimhood club.

Black people are victims. Women are victims. Muslims are victims. Gay people are victims.

Fuck that.

I have no desire in the least to join the victimhood club.

They don't want us on their team, to begin with, and I would not want to wear that t-shirt anyway.

Let other people go be victims.

Tell me why I am wrong.

American Racism

Michael Lumish

I don't want to get maudlin, but this is a very sad moment.

When I look at the "legacy press" it is practically all racism all the time, now.

What pisses me off more than anything else, tho, is the fact that between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Barack Obama the United States did a terrific job of moving beyond the kind of toxic racism that gave us Jim Crow and the Klan.

All that was basically dead.

Everyone knew that there were some hard-core white supremacist types still out there. When I was growing up they seemed to have congregated in the Pacific Northwest.

But we were so beyond all of this.

I gotta tell ya, I was damn proud to vote for Barack Obama in 2008.

It seemed to me, and millions of other Americans, that we were finally, seriously, moving beyond the old crusty racism of the past.

And the thing of it is, we were.

The United States, along with West, more generally, is actually the least racist part of the planet but Americans are so insulated and egotistical that they cannot see it.

The question that is foremost in my mind is the degree to which this racism was just there and to what extent was it politically constructed?

This Week on Nothing Left

Michael Lumish



This week Michael Burd and Alan Freedman start with an interview with former Obama US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro who is visiting Australia as one of the keynote speakers at the JNF gala dinners in Melbourne and Sydney, and then speak live with Daniel Mandel from the Zionist Organisation of America on General McMaster (albeit truncated because the line dropped out unexpectedly).

The fellahs are also joined in the studio by Yosef Drever from Achdut HaLev, an organisation he started to promote aliya to Israel, and then they hear from Dr Martin Sherman on his "humanitarian"option for resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs.

3 min Editorial: Islam

9 min Dan Shapiro, former US ambassador to Israel (JNF Gala)

29 min Daniel Mandel,[LIVE]  ZOA on General McMaster

47 min Yosef Drever, from Achdut HaLev on aliya to Israel

1 hr 2 Martin Sherman, "humanitarian" solution to conflict

The podcast can also be found on the J-Air website.

Or its Facebook page.

NOTHING LEFT can be heard live each Tuesday 9-11am on FM 87.8 in the Caulfield area, or via the J-Air website www.j-air.com.au

Contact Michael and Alan at Nothing Left:

michael@nothingleft.com.au

alan@nothingleft.com.au

Someone who recognizes what the challenge is

Sar Shalom

Fathom Journal has a new interview up with Israeli Brigadier General (res.) Yossi Kupperwasser. Kupperwasser's major theme is that the chief impediment to the peaceful resolution is the Palestinians' insistence on a narrative in which the Jews are not a people and that the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel is a fiction. Of particular note is that Kupperwasser responds to the notion that Naftali Bennett's opposition to a Palestinian state shows that he is opposed to any viable peace agreement by noting,

when these people say ‘we don’t want a Palestinian state’ what they are actually saying is: ‘We don’t believe the Palestinians are going to change their narrative. And as long as the Palestinians don’t change their narrative we don’t want a Palestinian state, because it is going to constitute a threat to Israel.’

If there was a change in the Palestinian narrative, ..., Israelis would see this as a wonderful move and be more forthcoming on the issue of peace.

The one flaw in Kupperwasser's understanding of the situation is he sees the momentum behind the Taylor Force Act, which would bar payments to the Palestinian Authority (PA) as long as the PA maintains on its books the law that pays salaries to those held in Israeli prisons for terrorist acts, as evidence that the United States, both the Administration and Congress, is starting to recognize that peace depends on a new narrative. This is not a criticism of the Taylor Force Act and ending US support for PA payments to terrorists is definitely to be praised, even if it is side effects of causing the PA to collapse. However, imposing consequences for supporting terror is not insistence on a new narrative. To see why, ask whether the Taylor Force Act would impose any consequence on the PA if it stops all payments to prisoners and then sends a resolution to UNESCO declaring that the ground underneath the Knesset is an Islamic heritage site and calling on Israel to give the "Islamic site" due deference.

In order to force the Palestinians to change their narrative, it will be necessary to demand the Palestinians ... change their narrative, and impose consequences if they fail to do so. As I have written previously, the Palestinians could demonstrate that they have a new narrative by making the following three-fold declaration:

• The Jews are a people
• The Jewish people are deeply connected to the Land of Israel in general and Jerusalem in particular
• The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a forgery

If the Palestinians were to make that declaration, any subsequent bringing of resolutions to UNESCO declaring Jewish holy sites as exclusively Muslim would show that the declaration was insincere and thus justify revoking any privileges that were conditioned on making it. Anything short of making the declaration should be regarded as maintaining the narrative and result in treating the PA as a pariah.

A tale of two NY Times stories

Sar Shalom

The New York Times has two stories today that can be summarized in the following manner: [A] says the [B] is engaged in violating fundamental democratic rights of [C] because of [C]'s exercise of free speech.

One of those articles appears on the home page of the Times' website and you can fill it in with [A] = the alt-right, [B] = Google, [C] = James Damore, the Google engineer who was fired for writing a memo attributing low levels of women in leadership positions to lower capabilities of women. The other story appears in the Opinion section and can be filled in with [A] = Sherif Mansour, the author of the op-ed piece, [B] = Israel, [C] = reporters who write negative things about Israel.

I hardly need to explain to this audience about the malfeasance committed by most of the press corp in Israel and the abuse of freedoms granted that led Israel to draw a line which will lead to consequences if crossed. It is all well and good to point out that case, and eagerly wait to read responses to Mansour along those lines. However, a parallel point is that the malfeasance committed by the media in Israel is to critical coverage of Israel as Damore's memo is to raising legitimate questions about affirmative action policies. In turn, Mansour in covering Israel's response to the most egregious demonization of itself as though it were censorship of criticism of any kind, and the Times in giving a platform to every Tom, Dick, and Harry leveling such charges against Israel, are acting like the alt-right in its defense of the likes of James Damore.