Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Answer Number One to the Namavaran Network Corporation

Mike L.

I agreed to do an e-mail interview with a Mr. Iman Soleimani of the Namavaran Network Corporation, which is an Iranian media outlet that is clearly hostile to the Jewish State of Israel.  He has eight questions that I will take one by one over the course of the next week, or so.  My expectation is that, much like this interview by Mr. Soleimani, it will be published verbatim.

Here is the first question:
1- Who are Zionist and what are the Zionist lobbies in US policy?
 A "Zionist" is anyone, from the latter part of the nineteenth century through the middle part of the twentieth century, who worked for the establishment of a Jewish state on historically Jewish land in what was a small slice of Ottoman territory before their defeat by the European powers during World War I.

I do not, actually, consider myself a Zionist at all given the fact that the movement fulfilled its purpose in 1948.  A better question, perhaps, is what do enemies of the Jewish people and the Jewish State mean when they use that word?  In the vocabulary of contemporary anti-Zionists the word "Zionist" means a racist, imperialistic, colonialist, apartheid-loving, Arab-hating, pro-Israel militarist.  This is what that word means to those with an irrational disdain for the Jewish people and for Jewish sovereignty on Jewish land.

The word "Zionist," within the anti-Zionist lexicon, has become a toxic epithet that is spit at Jewish people who care about the well-being of the tiny Jewish minority among the hostile Arab and Muslim majority in the Middle East.

As for "Zionist lobbies," they are weak.  The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) is the strongest among them, but AIPAC does little more than encourage comity between the government and people of Israel and the government and people of the United States.  If "Zionist lobbies" had any actual power over the US government then the United States would have recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel long ago.

This obsessive concern among racist anti-Zionists - both western and Islamic - concerning the "Zionist lobby" or the "Jewish lobby" or the "Israel lobby" is an anti-Semitic hangover from an earlier era that was given new life by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their 2007 book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

What Mearsheimer and Walt (shamefully) did was resurrect the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion in a form that is user-friendly for the contemporary west.  In the early-middle of the twentieth century this defamation helped bring about the Holocaust in which one third of the entire Jewish population on the planet was slaughtered, including almost the entirety of my father's side of the family.

I have considerable faith that it will not have a similar effect in the twenty-first century and much of that faith is due to the fact of Israel, itself.  Unlike one hundred years ago, the Jewish people are now in a position to defend ourselves and defend ourselves we will.

12 comments:

  1. I guess the interview with this champion at life seems to indicate where things will go from here.

    Quick question, just out of curiosity. I really have never heard of these people before, so how mainstream is this media outlet over there?

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    1. I have never heard of NNC, myself, but then I know nothing of media outlets from the Czech Republic, either.

      In a certain kind of way, I suppose, it's an exercise in meta... and I love meta.

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    2. What interests me is why they chose to interview you in the first place? After glancing at the previous "Q&A" entries at their site, I think it's fair to say you don't fit in amongst the profile they usually go for. To say the least. Heh.

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    3. I honestly do not know why I was contacted.

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  2. Oh, and good answer Mike, though I'd tend to dispute that Zionism's job is 'done.' As long as there are 'anti-Zionists,' we must stand up to oppose them. I am a Zionist, for the record. ;)

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    1. Word, Jay.

      It's disgraceful that a real nation's right to self-determination on its own land is up for grabs. Anti-Zionism is an affront and, as you say, an indication that there's still work to be done.

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  3. Really nice job Mike.

    (my anti-virus software won't let me open the link. Is that your interview or one that is similar to what you expect yours to be like?)

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    1. It's a previous interview with someone else that seems to be, more or less, a verbatim transcript.

      I honestly do not know who these guys are, but it's not every day that you get contacted by a writer from an Iranian media outlet.

      We've got one question down and seven more to go and I'll answer these questions at my leisure.

      And, in truth, for all I know, Mr. Soleimani may be a terrific human being. Nonetheless, the Namavaran Network Corporation is hateful toward the Jewish people and toward the Jewish State.

      That much is obvious.

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    2. By the way, Stuart,

      I owe you an apology. I think that I was both harsh and unfair to you in our most recent talk.

      You know that I respect you, but you also frustrate the hell out of me.

      That's a fact.

      Do you honestly not understand that the Jews of the Middle East are a people under siege?

      It's the most fundamental, basic concept concerning the Arab-Israel conflict and even pro-Israel Jews do not seem to get it.

      I think that you do get it, but you certainly do not want to discuss it.

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    3. I do get that, and I don't think I've ever expressed any disagreement with you on that point.

      And no apology necessary. Rhetoric isn't a blood sport, but neither is it a process that always lends itself to polite disagreement. If done correctly, we all end up a little smarter in the end.

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    4. Stuart, that is a fair answer, but what exactly is at the core of our disagreement?

      You see yourself as a progressive-left Jew, yes?

      I have specific criticisms of the Jewish left because I come out of the Jewish left.

      These criticisms either contain merit or they do not.

      I have these criticisms embedded on the right side of this blog entitled, "THE FAILURES OF PROGRESSIVE-LEFT ZIONISM."

      So, where are our disagreements?

      What I have argued, thus far, is that the Jewish left generally refuses to discuss the Islamist threat, that it whips up hatred toward their fellow Jews in Judea and Samaria, that it is forever playing defense against the anti-Zionist left, that it constantly employs the moral equivalency canard, and that it tends to ignore 13 centuries of Jewish persecution on Jewish land by the great Arab majority that outnumbers us by a factor of 60 or 70 to 1.

      These are, thus far, my central arguments and I would like to know just where you think that we disagree.

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  4. Stuart - in case you still haven't been able to get onto the site, there's about two dozen other similar interviews there, all of which read pretty much the exact way you'd expect them to, considering the source.

    Which leaves me to wonder if maybe there's another internet writer who shares Mike's name, and is essentially Bizarro Mike on these subjects, and they ended up interviewing the wrong one. Which seems rather unlikely, but now that I think of it, that would be a pretty cool plot for a short story or something...

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