The Golden Age of Blogdom
Well, I haven’t been around these parts in awhile.
A few of you guys may recall my name, I suppose... maybe.
I wrote something like
170 opinion pieces for the Elder between 2014 and 2020. 170. I can’t even
believe it, myself.
I got dragged into the legal process because of one of them.
I started the H-Net group "H-1960s" when I was graduate
student at Penn State University. I participated on Daily Kos and Maryscott
O’Connor’s defunct My Left Wing as “Karmafish,” as well as my own little joint, Israel Thrives.
Those blogs were not so different from this one, actually.
They came up around the same time, just as the political blogs were coming into vogue, and all got overshadowed by the big social media sites.
It was the Golden Age of Blogdom before the Giant-Corporate-Evil-Mega-Blogs
like Facebook and Twitter / X and TikTok and Fuq-Dash sucked the heart and soul out of the
baby… while strangling it in its crib!
It represented the transitionary period between the widespread introduction of the internet to the mainstream, in the early-mid 1990s, until domination by the big social media sites.
But what to make of that initial period of the small, transitional political blogs in the history of social media
has yet to be written, as far as I know, but for me it basically lasted
from about 2004 until I joined Facebook, maybe 5 years ago.
I knew joining Zuckerberg’s thing was probably a bad idea,
but naturally I did it anyway.
I liked the early blogs, prior to the rise of the Techno-Spider-Borg,
because there was a level of intimacy, community, and discussion that you
almost never see on the giant platforms.
There was also a strong sense that one no longer needed to be a member of the mainstream media to have a say in the public discussion. The possibilities seemed wide-open and to my eyes, at the time, like a step forward in the history of the western progressive-left.
The Rise of Progressive-Left Antisemitic Anti-Zionism
But, sadly, the main thing that I got from the
leftwing blogs, on places like Daily Kos, was an introduction to
progressive-left grassroots/netroots antisemitic anti-Zionism. That is to say,
I became intimate with the primary form of contemporary Jew Hatred which, today, just ooozes out of the Democratic Party and its progressive-left base.
This had a distinct influence on my thinking.
I was a very leftwing guy, a graduate of San Francisco State University, and a member of the Green Party in the early 00s.
Since then a number of former friends have wondered aloud, "What the hell happened to Lumish?"
The answer is that I became aware of the toxic anti-Zionism masquerading as "social justice" at the heart of the Democratic Party which seemed to grow in inverse proportion to the erosion of its core liberal values.
The liberal values eroding before our very eyes in the Democratic party are obvious.
They include urinating all over the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement by honoring biological race over individual character.
They include a disregard for the essential ideal of freedom of speech as Antifa and BLM brownshirts threatened violence toward Milo Yiannapolis and Ben Shapiro at UCAL Berkeley.
Correlation does not imply causation, but it doesn't suggest mere happenstance either.
As progressive-left and Democratic Party antisemitic anti-Zionism seemed to grow, so the core liberal values seemed to erode.
Daily Kos under Markos Moulitsas, back in the day -- prior to the rise of woke-cultural Marxism in the United States -- was an up-and-comer in Democratic Party politics. We squabbled among ourselves, but many of us supported candidates like Howard Dean and
Ralph Nader and Hillary Clinton. Almost all of us supported the street activists years before
the rise of Black Lives Matter and Antifa. Many of us championed the ridiculous idea that defunding the police would make lives better for the urban poor.
We helped lay the semi-psychotic
groundwork for the violent and ignorant frenzy that swept the country following
the suicide of George Floyd on a Minneapolis street in the Spring of
2020.
Daily Kos represented the base of the party
and was, to use the cliché, like a mansion with many rooms. The signs on
the various doors as you walked down the hallway read “Feminism” or “Environmentalism”
or “Racial Justice” or “Economic Justice” or “Anti-Colonialism” or “Veganism”
and on and on and on.
But there was one door down the hall and around the corner
that had a rather unpleasant smell coming out of it. This door, hanging from its
hinges, with rats scurrying to-and-fro and cockroaches climbing on the walls, was a problem for Markos and it was a room he almost never entered.
The sign on that door read “Israel-Palestine.”
It was there that I really came to learn the nature of contemporary-left antisemitic anti-Zionism. I was working on my dissertation at the time and had
never come across this level of anti-Zionist fervor before.
Certainly, nobody in the real world ever said to me, “Heya,
Mike, you’re a Jew, right? A Zionist, maybe? Well, Jeez, don’t you know that
Zionism is a white, racist, colonialist, imperialist, oppressive system of
oppression on land brutally stolen from the indigenous Palestinians by
Euro-Jews? Huh? Dontcha know that?”
Jeez, if only I had known that’s what we are.
The Question of Indigeneity
So, it was through my experience with social media that I
came to learn the extent of antisemitic anti-Zionism crawling the hallways and
houses of the progressive-left and the Democratic Party.
Anyway, I’ve been on sabbatical, so to speak, for the last
year and dropped off social media almost entirely. There are a number of trends in the current conversation around the Long Arab / Muslim War that I hope
to discuss in these pages going forward.
The first of these is the question of
indigeneity.
The hatred directed at Israel from left-leaning social media,
as you guys are well-aware, is grounded in the idea that the Jews are
interlopers on the land of the “indigenous Palestinian” population.
This false and toxic notion lurks behind virtually every contemporary
anti-Zionist argument despite the fact that it is an obvious ahistorical
fantasy. We need, remarkably enough, to always remind people that in the
history of humanity there has never been a “Palestinian” nation. We need,
remarkably enough, to always remind people that in the history of humanity
there has never been a “Palestinian” state.
We need to remind them that the very words “Palestine” and
“Palestinian” are Euro-Roman colonizer terms that refer to an Aegean seafaring
people, the Philistines. We need to remind them that the very word
“Palestine” was not created by Arabs nor did it refer to Arabs and,
until after the ’67 War, it was not even accepted by the local Arabs to refer
to themselves.
However, if we are to now accept that there is a
newly-created “Palestinian” nation -- as conjured by Arafat and the Soviet
Union in the early-mid 1960s – just how does this “Palestinian” nation or ethnicity
or people differ from the rest of the Arab world?
If they share the same religion, language, and culture of
all the other Arabs in the neighborhood, what is it that makes them a
distinct ethnicity?
The answer is that they
represent the spear-point in the Long Arab / Muslim War against the Jews of the
Middle East.
And that is also why no one will allow the Gazans to flee
the war. They are needed where they are. Their entire reason to be, from the Nazi-like perspective of the Palestinian-Arab national movement, is to be flung at the Jews.
They are there so that their “friends” in the Arab world, and
throughout the western-left, can lap their blood while pointing the trembling
finger of blame at the cruel "Zionists."
1,200 of our brothers and sisters were slaughtered on Oct 7 and 250 taken captive. On that day I noted in my journal that the western-left was going to blame Israel -- i.e., the Jews -- for that attack upon our people.
What I did not understand was the intensity with which they would do so.
This is a very scary moment.
I have zero intention of making aliyah, but every intention of looking into it.
As Twain famously is said to have said, history doesn't repeat itself... but it sure as hell rhymes.
