JayinPhiladelphia
On this night, 49 years ago, three American civil rights workers, one African-American and two Jewish-Americans, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi for having the temerity to insist upon equal rights for all. And to dare actually work towards that ideal.
James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner have all now been at rest for more than twice the amount of time they were each alive, yet their legacy and their memory will stay with us forever. They will all three ultimately live amongst us here in the US as long as we remember and respect what they fought, and ultimately died, for.
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Real liberals and progressives should recognize these ideals, and respect them wherever they are found, regardless of the fashion of the day.
(Lynching civil rights activists was the fashion of the day in certain quarters of Mississippi society 50 years ago, after all.)
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~~~Religion can often take a backseat in Israel when it comes to security, as brothers Muhammad and Milad Atrash, two Muslim member’s of the Israel Defense Force’s Golani Brigade, can attest to.“While still in high school I asked my family, ‘Why don’t we, the Muslims, enlist?’” Milad, 19, told the IDF blog. “‘Why do the Jews, the Druze and the Bedouins enlist, while we don’t?’ They explained to me that Jews serve because it’s their country, that the Druze [community] had signed agreements with the IDF and that we have a lot of Islamic movements that oppose military service in the IDF.”Milad’s response? “I told them I don’t care about that. I want to join the army to protect my village, my country.”
Following up on Mike's earlier post, and touching on my comment therein, I would like to think everyone in the region, regardless of ethnicity or religion, can, if they're being completely honest, admit that Israel is one of the very most tolerant and liberal societies on earth, even considering its own special circumstances which are forced onto it by its rather genocidal-leaning neighbors.
This is the homeland of the most historically persecuted people in history, still taking in and providing a better life for even those of its citizens who are not Jewish.
This is the very exact ideal 'progressives' claim to pine for, but for some reason it just doesn't count when Israel does it. And make no mistake. In their region, Israel and Israel alone is the only nation which does this.
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The brothers say that they’ve enjoyed their experience thus far and have faced no racism from their fellow soldiers. This isn’t the case, however, with how they have been received back home.~~~
Here's hoping that one day soon irrational hatred of all kinds will come to an end, nations which actually violate civil rights of all sorts will be called to account, and the ideal world so many claim to fight for will actually come into being.
49 years ago today, James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner took action to try to create that world. Would that more folks today, particularly those who claim to care about these issues right here and right now, yet who for some reason focus like a laser on denying only just one particular group of people in the world (i.e. - Jews) their right to national self-determination in our historical indigenous homeland, would decide to at least respect our righteous claim and stick to their proclaimed, alleged, values, in all cases.
Even those cases involving Jews.
49 years ago tonight, James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner paid the ultimate price for their beliefs.
Z"l.
My hope is that today's keyboard progressives can one day decide to honor their legacy for all peoples, and not only just for those who are fashionable to 'defend' at the moment.
I find it astonishing that Jabotinsky wrote "The Iron Wall" 90 years ago and while everyone has run around gushing words and theories and looking for solutions ever since, it's always been right there in the brief stunning honesty of 8 pages.
ReplyDeletePeople are good or bad, or in between. It's of no matter either which way. Countries are the expression of mass movements and reflect their own realities on the ground at all times. There will never be conciliation with the Arabs outside of Israel. Never. Not in 50 years or 500 or 5000. Never.
I read today that IEC is thinking of cutting off the juice to the PLO and Gaza. The PLO gets 75% of their electricity from Israel and Gaza, 90%. They are hundreds of million of shekels in arrears and they have no intention of ever paying their bills and yet Israelis are looking at rolling blackouts this summer while mass murderers get electricity for free.
I read this week that Israel recycles more than 75% of their wastewater and has firm plans to put 2 desalination plants online very soon. While Egypt threatens to go to war with Ethiopia over the Nile water.
David "Spengler" Goldman wrote this week in the Asia Times that Egypt and Syria can't be fixed, they're dying. They will eventually cease to exist as nations or if they do it will be in the same sense that eastern Congo is technically part of Congo and not a genocidal hell hole of perfect anarchy. These are countries that began making terrible choices decades ago never changed them. And the worse things got the more they resisted change. This is emblematic of the 'palestinians'. Permanent failure.
You can't 'fix' countries that want to head off in the other direction, backwards. There is no conciliation with people who want you dead because you're not dead. You can't haggle with someone who hates you BECAUSE you want to settle with them not in spite of it.
Arabs outside of Israel have one goal - no Israel, no Jews. We need to recognize that and cut them lose to pursue whatever half insane Bronze Age destiny they have planned for themselves.
Trudy,
Deletewhat I am going to do with you?
I agree with much that you write, yet at the same time you put things in such strong and definite terms that it makes me wary.
"There will never be conciliation with the Arabs outside of Israel. Never. Not in 50 years or 500 or 5000. Never."
5,000?
Really?
5,000 years?
Look, you may be right. Who knows? But 5,000 years is an awful long time.
Do you think that people never change?
"Arabs outside of Israel have one goal - no Israel, no Jews."
C'mon.
There is something close to 400 million Arabs in the world, Trudy, and I am pretty sure that among them they have more than one goal.
They might even have two or perhaps 2,000 or 200,000 or, at any given moment, 400 million.
I will admit, naturally, that among those goals is ending Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. In fact, I will go so far as to say that genocidal anti-Semitism is rife throughout the Muslim Middle East.
But I am just wary of overstating the case.
From my perspective - despite the success of Israel - the Jews in that part of the world represent a tiny, traditionally persecuted minority surrounded by a much larger hostile majority.
What I want to do is help change the general perception in the west which tends to operate under the opposite false assumption. Our friends and neighbors throughout the United States, and throughout the west, more generally, tend to think of Arabs as victims and Israeli Jews as oppressors.
That's the Big Lie and we can counter that lie.
We are countering that lie and we do not need to be absolutists in order to do so.
Am I wrong?
Jay,
ReplyDeletethis is a very poignant post.
You write of Israel:
This is the homeland of the most historically persecuted people in history, still taking in and providing a better life for even those of its citizens who are not Jewish.
This is the very exact ideal 'progressives' claim to pine for, but for some reason it just doesn't count when Israel does it. And make no mistake. In their region, Israel and Israel alone is the only nation which does this.
Nonetheless, Israel is despised, and not least by western progressives.
I find it so unjust and galling that it makes me want to vomit - to put things in disgustingly frank terms.
The Jews are among the most persecuted people within recorded history and, yet, the western political movement that we helped create - as Goodman and Schwerner would obviously agree - and that is supposed to favor universal human rights, singles out the lone, sole Jewish state for condemnation.
Y'know, I apologize if I sometimes put things in terms that are rather harsh, but as far as I am concerned they can just go to hell.
The left is dead.
Dead. Dead. Dead.
And the reason that it is dead has much to do with the unspoken, unacknowledged tension between the ideal of multiculturalism versus the ideal of universal human rights.
The former won out and the latter has gone down the toilet.
As far as I am concerned the progressive-left, today, stands for virtually nothing.
I suppose things move in cycles, and I would hope that, eventually, the fad of 'progressives' supporting those who are against all that they claim to stand for, and of relentlessly attacking those who display the values they claim to support, will come to an end, and these characters will rightly be pushed back onto the fringes where they belong.
DeleteHow long will that take, if it even does ever happen, though?
"And the reason that it is dead has much to do with the unspoken, unacknowledged tension between the ideal of multiculturalism versus the ideal of universal human rights.
The former won out and the latter has gone down the toilet."
Hopefully not for good. People can come to their senses. It does happen every once in a while. ;)
Having stood together with blacks to end the era of "No Dogs, Blacks or Jews" signs, we now have people like Alice Walker and Jeremiah Wright calling for Jews to choose between Zionism and acceptance in the Progressive camp they once fought for.
ReplyDeleteNow, before anyone jumps on me for taking black Americans to task, it's not about that. I don't think it's a black problem, I think it's a general Far Left problem. There are plenty of pro-Israel blacks like Allen West, Herman Cain and the late and truly lamented Martin Luther King. But you should note how high a proportion of those blacks happen to be conservatives, exactly like the correlation found in other sectors of the American population. Even more importantly, I think supremacists like Jeremiah Wright are traitors to MLK's vision of "Content of their character," color-negatives of David Duke who want for signs saying "No Dogs, Whites or Zionists" to be acceptable in a vision of racial revenge and sustained hatred.
Like Mike said, those liberal values the Jews once fought for are dead, dead, dead. And I'd also add to that: As dead as MLK, of the same cause as he—assassination. The advocates of racial hatred and sympathizers with shariah imperialism have taken over.