#the jewish onslaught

[eretzyisrael]

by Mark Oppenheimer

Black Classic also offers numerous books by the late Hunter College historian John Henrik Clarke (1915-1998), who shared Welsing’s homophobia. Clarke’s detractors often mention his antisemitism, but his homophobia is sometimes overlooked. On YouTube, you can see him cheered on as he tells an audience that Africans “had a healthy attitude toward things other people made unhealthy and made filthy and dirty.” Scornfully, he denies the possibility of gay Africans in antiquity. “Show me one case of sexual deviation before the coming of foreigners!” Elsewhere, Clarke, who blamed the “Jewish educational mafia” for multiculturalism, wrote an introduction to an edition of Michael Bradley’s 1978 book The Iceman Inheritance, which argues that white people are genetically predisposed to higher levels of racism and aggression than other groups, and speculates that Jews might be the ultimate “Neanderthal-Caucasoids.” 

He also wrote the foreword to Bradley’s 1992 work Chosen People from the Caucasus: Jewish Origins, Delusions, Deceptions and Historical Role in the Slave Trade, Genocide and Cultural Colonization. This last work argues that the people known as Jews today are descended from eighth-century converts to Judaism, having usurped the tradition from a group that had been practicing Judaism for more than two millennia; these late-arriving Jews, including today’s Ashkenazi Jews, have uniquely high levels of Neanderthal aggression, which has helped them dominate other groups.

In 2001, Clarke told an interviewer that “the European uses this religion”—Judaism—“as the handmaiden of his imperial desires. I strictly mean the Europeans who answer to the word Jew. He reads the word Jew into ancient history, where the word didn’t exist. When the European Jew didn’t exist.” In an interview you can find online, Clarke told an audience, “If Jews want to dominate something, it’s very easy to dominate us. So that’s what they do.”

The idea that “white” Jews, whether Ashkenazi, Sephardi (Iberian), or Mizrahi (Middle Eastern and North African), are somehow impostors or usurpers—with the “real” Jews coming from the Nile River Valley or other parts of Africa—is a poisonous myth deployed to subvert the ancient connection of the Jewish people to the land of Israel. It’s a lie presented as a given within a certain strain of Afrocentric thought, and embraced not only by Clarke but by the aforementioned “Dr. Ben”—Yosef A.A. ben-Jochannan—who, like Clarke, is well-represented in the offerings of Black Classic Press, which publishes 12 ben-Jochannan titles. These include We the Black Jews: Witness to the “White Jewish Race” Myth and African Origins of the Major “Western Religions.”

In 2015, shortly after ben-Jochannan’s death at 96, The New York Times reported that for decades he had deceived employers about his credentials, telling Cornell and other institutions that he had degrees from Cambridge, in England, and the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. Neither school had a record of his enrollment. “ ‘People condemn me for not being an intellectual of the Ph.D. type,’ Mr. Ben-Jochannan once said, reacting to questions later raised about his résumé,” the Times wrote. “While he used the ‘white man’s credential’ to go ‘certain places,’ Mr. Ben-Jochannan said, he refused to ‘let the white man certify’ his work.”

As far as I can tell, Coates has nowhere discussed the allegations against ben-Jochannan, his longtime intellectual partner—and a writer who remains a source of revenue for the press. To the contrary, Coates has always spoken of ben-Jochannan with reverence. “In 1978, when we started publishing, three elders were inspirations and gave their support—John G. Jackson, John Henrik Clarke, and Yosef ben-Jochannan,” writes Coates on the Black Classic website. “His books have revolutionized the way Black people relate to Africa and the Nile Valley.” After ben-Jochannan’s death, Coates told the Times, “I consider Dr. Ben the greatest of the self-trained historians.” Ta-Nehisi told the Times that ben-Jochannan’s example “runs through everything I do.”

Along with Clarke and ben-Jochannan, one of the authors best represented in Black Classic’s offerings remains Tony Martin. The Jewish Onslaught may be gone from the website, but several of his other books are still there, including a pamphlet, published in 1998, containing the text of a lecture given in Trinidad called The Progress of the African Race Since Emancipation and Prospects for the Future. Although largely about the Afro-Caribbean experience, Martin takes time to explain that “[p]seudo-scientific racism had been around since at least the 4th or 5th century AD when the Jewish holy book, the Talmud, pioneered the notion that Africans were recipients of the curse of Ham.” The Talmud makes no connection between Noah’s son Ham and Africa—that is a later, mainly Christian tradition, seen in early church theologians like Eusebius of Caesarea (CE 260-340) and Bede (CE 673-735). 

But Martin, though a professor at Wellesley for many years, isn’t making a scholarly argument. He is making an indictment. This is also what he is doing when he writes:

“When President Clinton becomes president, he goes to Geneva and he bows down before the World Jewish Congress. When the African American woman Myrlie Evers-Williams became head of the NAACP the other day, she went straight to Geneva and bowed down before the World Jewish Congress.” This is fiction, of course—neither of them went to Geneva to genuflect before Jews—but hardly surprising coming from Martin, who elsewhere in his pamphlet calls the World Jewish Congress “a body organized on a racial or religious or whatever-the-Jews-are basis.”

One has to ask: Why is Coates selling this? 

[queer-scots-geordie-dyke]

Every single person who has refused to condemn or stayed silent in the face of the onslaught of rising global antisemitism, your silence is deafening and now we’re at the point of pogroms in European cities.

Never Again is Now.

I stand with the Jewish people in solidarity, today, every day, proudly, unhesitatingly and unapologetically.

[a-very-tired-jew]

I've seen Ta-Nehisi Coates touted as an authority for years, and I honestly never looked into his background.

As he has all the attention of Jumblr and the Jewish community right now, I decided to actually do a cursory look.

Bruh.

Someone who is touted and lauded as a great expert and authority by the Left actually has no credentials whatsoever?! He went to Howard for 5 years and then dropped out to start his journalism career.

Coates states that "Howard trained him intellectually" and just.. no. No it did not.

You didn't finish an undergrad degree my guy. That's barely giving you any training in intellectual thinking and rigor.

It honestly appears that Coates has been given an "authority" pass because he is speaking as a Black Man on Black history and Black issues that currently effect or have effected Black people.

But now?

Now he's taken that "authority" and is using it to speak on issues that he has no relation to beyond traveling to the area for a small amount of time in 2023. He has no understanding, relationship, or education on anything relating to Israel, Palestine, or the Levant. It's reminiscent of Nobel Disease, where an well regard authority in one subject matter starts talking out their ass about something else (e.g. Linus Pauling and vitamin C).

Now, some of you are going to attack me for this because something something privilege and academia and I'm talking about someone who is arguable well regarded. But I'm sorry, dropping out after 5 years to pursue your career, not even have the credentials for said career, and now take that uncredentialed pseudo-expertise and apply it to something you have no relationship to at all?

That's just asinine.

I honestly think this tweet by Montefiore sums it up nicely.

Let's also not forget that Ta Nehisi Coates was taught by his father, Paul Coates, to be antisemitic and literally view this entire situation through America's Issues. Paul Coates was a member of the Black Panthers, which for all the good they did do and have done you also have to remember that antisemitism is baked into the group. The BPP was influenced by the Nation of Islam and Marxism-Leninism and Mao, so they were literally influenced by some of the most antisemitic organizations, groups, people, and rhetoric in the 20th Century outside of Nazis. This means that Ta Nehisi Coates likely grew up with antisemitic rhetoric and conspiracy being prevalent and accepted throughout his life. For example, take this excerpt from his book The Message:

Now also consider that his father's publishing company was also caught republishing an extremely antisemitic book that spreads conspiracy, hate, and misinformation.

So yeah.

Sorry folks.

But Ta Nehisi Coates is just spouting NOI and Tankie antisemitic conspiracy and rhetoric wrapped in progressive pseudo-academic professional language.

[chanaleah]

So this is a great example of a fundamental misunderstanding of history!

In 1948, the land that is now Israel/Palestine was controlled by the British Empire. It wasn't owned by either Jews or Arabs in its entirety, and additionally there had not been an independent state in the land since the Jewish Kingdom of Judah was conquered by the Roman Empire in 63 CE.

Secondly, the pre-State of Israel agreed to a UN partition partition plan in 1947 that guaranteed an Arab state and Jewish state in the borders shown on the map below:

On May 14, the State Of Israel declared independence within the borders shown in blue on the map. Rather than accepting an Arab state and a Jewish state, the armies of surrounding Arab states, including Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, attacked the nascent State Of Israel with the intention to destroy it in favor of an Arab state in the entirety of the former British Mandate of Palestine.

Before it was attacked, the State Of Israel had no intention to fight the Arab states or hurt the Arabs living in the borders of Israel. This is shown clearly in Israel's Declaration of Independence.

WE APPEAL — in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months — to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions. WE EXTEND our hand to all neighboring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighborliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East.

Direct quotes from Israel's Declaration Of Independence.

However, during the 1948 War* the majority Palestinians living in Israel fled out of fear or were kicked out. Similarly, all of the Jews living in Judea & Samaria/the West Bank were kicked out by the Jordanian army.

Massacres were committed by both sides during the war, including the Deir Yassin massacre, in which many Palestinians were killed by right-wing Zionist militias and the Gush Etzion massacre in which many Jews were killed by the Jordanian army.

Both Palestinians and Jews had to flee/were kicked out of places in which they had resided for centuries - some examples being Lydda/Lod (for Palestinians) the Old City of Jerusalem, specifically the Jewish quarter which was later looted by the Jordanian army (for Jews).

Israel ended up winning the war -- and winning more territory than had originally been given to them. This was what the map looked like after the Armistice Agreement at the end of the 1948 war:

At the end of the war, Egypt occupied Gaza and Jordan occupied Judea & Samaria/the West Bank. There was no Palestinian state.

During and in the aftermath of the 1948 War, 700,000 Palestinians became refugees from Israel, and between 17,000 and 40,000 Jews became refugees from Judea & Samaria/the West Bank and Gaza, and about 1 million Jews became refugees from the rest of the SWANA region.

This post is in no way an exhaustive or authoritative history, but it shows clearly the history of the 1948 War is much more complicated than "forcefully took that land from them".

If you would like me to make a post about history pre-1948 I can do that as well.

*I chose to call this war the 1948 war so as to be impartial as possible. Other names used include the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Israel's War Of Independence, and the 1948 Palestine War.

Keep reading below the cut for sources.

SOURCES:

[ind1g3n0us-lev1t3]

Just a friendly reminder that within Israels Declaration of Independence, there is these paragraphs:

"WE APPEAL — in the very midst of the onslaught launched against us now for months — to the Arab inhabitants of the State of Israel to preserve peace and participate in the upbuilding of the State on the basis of full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its provisional and permanent institutions.

WE EXTEND our hand to all neighbouring states and their peoples in an offer of peace and good neighbourliness, and appeal to them to establish bonds of cooperation and mutual help with the sovereign Jewish people settled in its own land. The State of Israel is prepared to do its share in a common effort for the advancement of the entire Middle East."

Source: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-declaration-of-the-establishment-of-the-state-of-israel

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Title correction: Palestinian students get attacked by zionist students sponsored by Israeli lobby on Concordia University campus. Israeli lobby covers for them and the harassment they subject Palestinian students to.

[...] There are countering points of view emerging as to how the situation devolved into violence.

Sarah Shamy says she stopped by before the confrontation started to buy a scarf from students who had a pro-Palestine kiosk set up to raise money for a charity. Shamy said that a group of pro-Israel people came barging in and began screaming anti-Palestianian slogans and slurs at them.

Pro-Palestinian students then surged in to counter-demonstrate, and it quickly led to violence, Shamy said. She said many pro-Palestinian demonstrators were attacked and she, along with others, have submitted evidence to police to that effect.

"I think it just goes to show how Palestinian and pro-Palestine students have been faced with an onslaught of harassment and discrimination and doxing, which we can see is happening as we speak in this incident," she said.

In a joint news release, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) and the the Federation CJA said a group of Jewish students from Concordia University were trying to raise awareness about the 242 hostages held by Hamas militants in Gaza when they were were confronted by an angry crowd who harassed them verbally and physically.

The Jewish students had set up a table with posters of the hostages and other materials in a common area reserved for such activities. Jewish students were pushed around, harassed and faced a barrage of hate speech, including slurs, the release says. [...]

Note from the poster @el-shab-hussein: I have eye-witness accounts that were on campus when this happened. Security took down the postsers they had put up to intimidate the Palestinian students and the fundraiser and the longass line-up of supporters who'd shown up to spend money to help Ghazzans enduring genocide. The zionist students screamed at the security guards and nearly attacked them in response. Israeli lobby is covering for them and CBC continues to be complicit.

[antisemitism-us]

This is what happens when politicians and the media support the protesters calling for the murder of Jews, instead of treating them as the vile blood-thirsty antisemites they are.

--- A Pakistani man was arrested in Canada this week and accused of plotting a mass shooting at a Jewish center in Brooklyn on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 onslaught that sparked the war in Gaza, federal authorities in the United States announced Friday.

The would-be attacker had shared with undercover agents his plans to attack a Chabad center in Brooklyn, where the Hasidic sect is headquartered.

US Attorney General Merrick Garland said Muhammad Shahzeb Khan had attempted to travel from Canada, where he lives, to New York City with the “stated goal of slaughtering, in the name of ISIS, as many Jewish people as possible.”

[gael-garcia]

Writers Against the War on Gaza (WAWOG) is an ad hoc coalition committed to solidarity and the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people. Drawing together writers, editors, and other culture workers, WAWOG hopes to provide ongoing infrastructure for cultural organizing in response to the war. This project is modeled on American Writers Against the War in Vietnam, an organization founded in 1965.

Statement of Solidarity

October 26, 2023

Israel’s war against Gaza is an attempt to conduct genocide against the Palestinian people. This war did not begin on October 7th. However, in the last 19 days, the Israeli military has killed over 6,500 Palestinians, including more than 2,500 children, and wounded over 17,000. Gaza is the world’s largest open-air prison: its 2 million residents—a majority of whom are refugees, descendants of those whose land was stolen in 1948—have been deprived of basic human rights since the blockade in 2006. We share the assertions of human rights groups, scholars, and, above all, everyday Palestinians: Israel is an apartheid state, designed to privilege Jewish citizens at the expense of Palestinians, heedless of the many Jewish people, both in Israel and across the diaspora, who oppose their own conscription in an ethno-nationalist project. 

We come together as writers, journalists, academics, artists, and other culture workers to express our solidarity with the people of Palestine. We stand with their anticolonial struggle for freedom and for self-determination, and with their right to resist occupation. We stand firmly by Gaza’s people, victims of a genocidal war the United States government continues to fund and arm with military aid—a crisis compounded by the illegal settlement and dispossession of the West Bank and the subjugation of Palestinians within the state of Israel.

We stand in opposition to the silencing of dissent and to racist and revisionist media cycles, further perpetuated by Israel’s attempts to bar reporting in Gaza, where journalists have been both denied entry and targeted by Israeli forces. At least 24 journalists in Gaza have now been killed. Internationally, writers and cultural workers have faced severe harassment, workplace retribution, and job loss for expressing solidarity with Palestine, whether by stating facts about their continued occupation, or for amplifying the voices of others. These are instances that mark severe incursions against supposed speech protections. Specious charges of antisemitism are leveled against Zionism’s critics; political repression has been particularly aggressive against the free speech of Muslim, Arab, and Black people living in the US and across the globe. As was the case following the September 11th attacks, Islamophobic political fervor and the widespread circulation of unsubstantiated claims has galvanized a US-led coalition of military support for a brutal campaign of violence.

What can we do to intervene against Israel’s eliminationist assault on the Palestinian people? Words alone cannot stop the onslaught of devastation of Palestinian homes and lives, backed shamelessly and without hesitation by the entire axis of Western power. At the same time, we must reckon with the role words and images play in the war on Gaza and the ferocious support they have engendered: Israel’s defense minister announced the siege as a fight against “human animals”; even as we learned that Israel had rained bombs down on densely populated urban neighborhoods and deployed white phosphorus in Gaza City, the New York Times editorial board wrote that “what Israel is fighting to defend is a society that values human life and the rule of law”; establishment media outlets continue to describe Hamas’s attack on Israel as “unprovoked.” Writers Against the War on Gaza rejects this perversion of meaning, wherein a nuclear state can declare itself a victim in perpetuity while openly enacting genocide. We condemn those in our industries who continue to enable apartheid and genocide. We cannot write a free Palestine into existence, buttogether we must do all we possibly can to reject narratives that soothe Western complicity in ethnic cleansing. 

We act alongside other writers, scholars, and artists who have expressed solidarity with the Palestinian cause, drawing inspiration from the Palestinian spirit of sumud, steadfastness, and resistance. Since 2004, the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has advocated for organizations to join a boycott of institutions representing the Israeli state or cultural institutions complicit with its apartheid regime. We call on all our colleagues working in cultural institutions to endorse that boycott. And we invite writers, editors, journalists, scholars, artists, musicians, actors, and anyone in creative and academic work to sign this statement. Join us in building a new cultural front for a free Palestine.  

Signed,

WAWOG Interim Organizing Committee

Hannah Black

Ari Brostoff (Senior Editor, Jewish Currents)

Elena Comay del Junco

Kyle Dacuyan (Executive Director, Poetry Project)

Kay Gabriel (Editorial Director, Poetry Project)

Kaleem Hawa

E. Tammy Kim

Shiv Kotecha

Wendy Lotterman (Associate Editor, Parapraxis)

Muna Mire

Perwana Nazif

Brendan O'Connor

Alex Press (Staff Writer, Jacobin)

Sarah Nicole Prickett

Dylan Saba

Zoé Samudzi (Associate Editor, Parapraxis)

Jasmine Sanders

Claire Schwartz (Culture Editor, Jewish Currents)

Janique Vigier

Harron Walker

Chloe Watlington

Gabriel Winant (Department of History, University of Chicago)

Audrey Wollen

Hannah Zeavin (Founding Editor, Parapraxis)

Signed, In Solidarity

Fatimah Warner (Noname)

Saul Williams

Susan Sarandon

Janeane Garofalo

Gael García Bernal

Danez Smith

Ocean Vuong

Aria Aber

Saidiya Hartman

China Miéville

+ full list here

[girlactionfigure]

Soldier killed in friendly fire saved woman’s life with bone marrow donation at beginning of war.

Daniel Hemo, who was one of the five IDF soldiers killed in a friendly fire incident in northern Gaza yesterday, donated his bone marrow to save a woman’s life toward the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war, the Ezer Mizion Jewish bone marrow registry reveals. Hemo was found to be a match for a woman in her 60s, days before the war’s outbreak. On October 7, he was supposed to be discharged from the army in order to begin the process of the donation, but it was put off due to the Hamas onslaught. On that day, his 202 Paratrooper’s Battalion fought off Hamas terrorists in Israeli border towns in the south. Later that month — while he was fighting in Gaza — the condition of his intended recipient worsened and his commander agreed to discharge him so that he could go through with the donation and save the woman’s life. The donation went forward successfully on October 26. Hemo eventually returned to fighting in Gaza where he was killed yesterday.

Times of Israel

[eretzyisrael]

Tomorrow, Saturday the 27th of January, is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Today, we pay tribute to the people of Denmark, incredible people whose courage, resilience and defiance in the face of the Nazi onslaught saved many thousands of Jewish lives. THANK YOU 

Likud UK

[bsof-maarav]

Editor’s Note: Sanne DeWitt is a microbiologist, geneticist, researcher, and author of a memoir: “I Was Born In An Old Age Home”. She has lived in Berkeley, California since 1957, where she moved for advanced studies in microbiology and genetics, and worked there until her retirement. The views expressed here are those of the author. View more opinion on CNN.CNN — 

In 1957, I moved to Berkeley, California: a bastion of American liberalism that squarely aligns with my progressive values, and a hub of American scholarship that nurtured my academic quest and professional growth. I came here for advanced studies in microbiology and genetics. Since then, I have lived, worked as a scientist and retired in this community.

Over the 65 years that I have called this beautiful area home, I have occasionally encountered antisemitism, but these one-off incidents never succeeded in destroying my spirit. When I was four years old, Nazis burst into my bedroom and sent me and my family to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. We were soon released and I was smuggled out of Germany by a Christian woman. After this harrowing experience, not much in the Bay Area could scare me.

But since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the hatred towards Jews that I have seen in Berkeley terrifies me more than anything I have experienced while living here. I am still reeling from being called a liar at a Berkeley City Council meeting, where I asked for a proclamation to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day and spoke about October 7. The Jews at that meeting were circled and called “Zionist pigs” by menacing protesters.

We are approaching the holiday of Passover, which commemorates the freedom of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery and our formation as a free Jewish people in our own land. But this Passover is like no other in recent history, with scores of hostages still held in Gaza and Jews worldwide fearful for our future — including Jews in the US. We are facing the worst global antisemitism since the Holocaust and while it is not state-sanctioned as Nazism was, it is a threat going unchecked in California’s East Bay.

It is incredibly painful to see my neighbors vilify Jews, tear down posters of Jewish hostages in Gaza and not believe Jewish rape victims. In this hotbed, hatred and hostility have become normalized. Families have moved their children out of public schools. Jewish businesses have been vandalized and boycotted. And lies about Jews and Israel have gone unchecked and unchallenged in our public forums. Our local Jewish community is both horrified and petrified.

This onslaught of Jewish hatred cannot become the new normal. This epidemic must be treated as seriously as all other hatreds that our society is confronting, such as racism and homophobia. We need more education about Judaism and how the long, sordid history of antisemitism ties into other forms of hatred in our public schools.

We need colleges and universities to unequivocally denounce hate speech and actions directed at Jews. We need public officials to urge mutual respect, understanding and civil discourse during city council and town hall meetings.

I have seen where unchecked antisemitism can lead, when people will do nothing — or worse, join the mainstream, such as our German neighbors during Nazism. This Passover, I resolve with whatever time I have left in this world to fight for the safety of the Jewish people, in Berkeley and around the globe.

During Passover, we are commanded to tell the story of the exodus out of Egypt to our children. We believe in the lasting power of sharing this history with younger generations and reflecting on this hopeful new beginning. There is also lasting power in sharing my history as a Jewish refugee — and I invite my Berkeley neighbors to hear my story. Without understanding and acceptance, we are enslaved by our biases.

The hatred, violence and bigotry against the Jewish community cannot continue — for our shared future, we must confront it and root it out.

[autolenaphilia]

The average tumblr queer hates fascism and terfs, and they should, but because they have zero understanding of what those ideologies actually is, they end up repeating such ideology anyway.

They have zero understanding that it is the transmisogynist bioessentialism that makes radfemism so poisonous. So they call trans women mentioning the words "misogyny" and "patriarchy" a terf, while their use of "afab/amab" reveal that they haven't unlearned any bioessentialism and transmisogyny. I've written about this at length before.

And this intellectually lazy acceptance of reactionary thinking goes far beyond that.

Criticize the institutions of religion and the family on this supposed queer communist site, and you'll get massive cries of protest from these queer leftists. And in content if not form they are basically indistinguishable from fascist rhetoric about how "queer leftists who read too many jewish writers (like Marx and Hirschfeld) are trying to eradicate the vital institutions of tradition, religion, family and community with their soulless materialist globohomo." (Note that the link is to a critical glossary of the alt-right on rationalwiki, so there are slurs galore)

And yes, that is what i'm doing, and I'm very proud of it. Abolishing religion and the family, and all of their sanctified traditions is a very important part of the communist project. The main Jewish writer who convinced me of this is Marx, read him.

"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness." Literally read The Communist Manifesto, which openly calls for the abolition of the family. A lot of suppose leftists repeat what the manifesto calls "The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child"

It's especially ironic to hear such things from self-described queers, as if family, religion and tradition aren't the most common tools used to oppress queer people.

A lot of reactionary garbage with a superficial anti-capitalist veneer has gotten into the left, which is not new. The just mentioned manifesto spends a whole chapter criticizing reactionary forms of socialism. I have myself used Marx's still valid analysis as my basis to criticize reactionary anti-capitalism.

There has been so much nationalist garbage absorbed by the left at this point that fascist thinking crop up all the time in the left. This is because planting the roots of 19th century romantic nationalism tends to bear the same fruit. And tumblr leftism is the most intellectually lazy kind of leftism.

Like your average pseudo-leftist position on nations is basically ethnopluralism, a neofascist ideology originating in the European "New right" that is trying to sell the old wine of blood-and-soil nationalism in new bottles for a postcolonial world. It's creator Henning Eichberg spent decades trying to sell his Völkisch ideology to the left. With some success, it seems like. Like the neofascist in ethnopluralist clothing position that "every culture has the right to preserve their own culture and tradition from the onslaught of global capitalist culture" is something that you'll see all the time regurgitated by supposed leftists. The one 19th century european/western concept that is seen as universally applicable is nationalism. It's bleak.

I can't even say the far-left cliché of "read theory", because a lot of theory is garbage. Not all of it though. This list comes from my libertarian marxist/"councilist" biases but Nationalism and Socialism by Paul Mattick is good, as is "Third-worldism and Socialism" an excerpt from an early 70s pamphlet by the British organization Solidarity, and the 1989 essay The Universality of Marx by Loren Goldner.

[battleangel]

WHY DOES ISRAEL WANT TO DESTROY GAZA?

2008 - 2009: Gaza massacres.

2012: Gaza massacre.

2014: Gaza massacre.

2018 - 2019: Gaza massacre.

2021: Gaza massacre.

2023 - Ongoing: Gaza massacre.

Chevron also supports Israel’s lobbying effortsfor the construction of the Eastmed Pipeline, a massive, EU sponsored fossil fuel infrastructure project that would exacerbate the climate crisis and whose feasibility is widely contested.

EastMed is a mega pipeline that would carry fossil gas from the disputed waters of the Levantine Basin (Cyprus, Israel and potentially Palestine) to Italy.

It would be one of Europe’s longest pipelines, and, reportedly, the world’s deepest.

The Israeli government is one of the most enthusiastic proponents of the EastMed pipeline, as it would secure a European export market for Israeli gas reserves.

The EastMed continues from Israel to Cyprus, where important offshore gas reserves are located.

Siemens was awarded the contract for building the EuroAsia Interconnector, a  subsea cable that will link Israel’s electricity grid with Europe’s, allowing its illegal settlements on stolen Palestinian (and Syrian) land to benefit from Israel-EU trade of electricity produced from fossil gas.

The Biden administration has been working to give Israel over $14 billion to buy more weapons. This is on top of the $3.8 billion the U.S. already gives to the Israeli military annually. Israel is required to use this money to buy U.S.-made weapons.

This is a form of corporate welfare not only for the largest weapons manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin, RTX (Raytheon), Boeing, and General Dynamics, which have seen their stock prices skyrocket, but also for companies that are not typically seen as part of the weapons industry, such as Caterpillar, Ford, and Toyota.

As Israel intensifies its Gaza onslaught, focus turns to the controversial Ben Gurion Canal Project, originally proposed in the 1960s as an alternative to the Suez Canal.

Named after Israel's founding father, David Ben-Gurion, the project, conceived in the late 1960s, sought to create an alternative route to the Suez Canal, the primary shipping route connecting Europe and Asia.

Understanding the motivations behind the proposal requires exploring the complex history of the Suez Canal, the Tripartite Aggression of 1956, and the unexpected shocks to world trade resulting from its closures.

This backdrop underscores the potential strategic importance of an alternative canal, controlled by Israel, in the ever-evolving dynamics of the region.

David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973) was a prominent Zionist leader from Poland, who was known as the founding father of Israel.

He was described as a ruthless man who gave orders to Zionist militias to see the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their lands and facilitated the influx of  Jewish immigrants from all over the world into Palestine. He served as the first prime minister of Israel in 1948.

The Ben Gurion Canal project was a proposal in the 1960s by Israel to connect the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea through the southern end of the Gulf of Aqaba. The route was planned via the port city of Eilat and the Jordanian border, through the Arabah Valley for about 100 kilometres between the Negev (Naqab) Mountains and the Jordanian Highlands and veered west before the Dead Sea basin, and heading through a valley in the Negev Mountain (Naqab) Range.

It would then head north again to circumvent the Gaza Strip and connect to the Mediterranean Sea.

However, a connection between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea already exists through the Suez Canal - an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt that offers vessels a direct route between the North Atlantic and the northern Indian oceans, reducing journey distance and time.

The Suez Canal provides the shortest sea route between Asia and Europe and currently handles roughly 12 percent of the world's trade.

Timeline of the Suez Canal

1858 – French Suez Canal Company formed to build the canal with 99-year lease

1868 – Suez Canal opens

1875 - The Suez Canal Company comes under French-British ownership after the UK buy 44% shares

1888 - Constantinople International Convention guarantees free use of the canal

1956 - Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalises the Suez Canal Company

1956 – The Suez Crisis results in closing the canal after the Tripartite Aggression

1957 – The Suez Canal reopens

1961 – The Nasser Project begins, allowing for the transit of bigger ships

1967 – Egypt closes access to Suez Canal after the start of the Six-Day War with Israel

1975 – Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat reopens Suez Canal

The Constantinople International Convention - signed in 1888 by the great European powers of the era - once guaranteed a right of passage via the Suez Canal to all ships during times of war and peace.

However, after the Suez Canal was nationalised in 1956 by then-Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt closed off access to the canal on several occasions following the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the violent displacement of Palestinians, also known as the Nakba.

Egypt blocked Israeli vessels from accessing the canal from 1948 until 1950, affecting its ability to trade with East Africa and Asia, and hampering its ability to import oil from the Gulf region.

Access to the Suez Canal was closed to all international shipping in 1956, following the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt, which involved an alliance between Israel, the UK and France who sought to regain control of the Suez Canal and remove Nasser from power.

The canal was effectively closed during the conflict, and the situation escalated into a crisis with international and economic ramifications.

The Suez Canal was also closed for a staggering eight-year period in 1967, at the beginning of the Six-Day War, also known as the Arab–Israeli War, which was fought between Israel and a coalition of Arab states (primarily Egypt, Syria, and Jordan).

When all land trade routes were blocked by Arab states, Israel's ability to trade with East Africa and Asia, mainly to import oil from the Persian Gulf, was also severely hampered.

The closure of the canal was also a significant and unexpected shock to world trade and disrupted global commerce.

An alternative to the Suez Canal, especially one under the authority of key Western ally Israel, would eliminate the potential use of the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran as leverage by Egypt against Israel or its allies.

The Suez Canal has been critical in driving Egypt’s economy forward. It earns revenues through tolls and transit fees collected from vessels that pass through the canal.

In 2021, some 20,649 vessels flowed through the Suez Canal - an increase of 10 percent over 2020. In 2022, annual revenue stood at $8 billion in transit fees. The Suez Canal set a new record with an annual revenue of $9.4 billion for the fiscal year that ended 30 June 2023.

The Ben Gurion Canal, if constructed, would rival the Suez Canal and cause a major financial threat to Egypt. 

If it goes ahead, it would be almost one-third longer than the current 193.3km Suez Canal, and whoever controls it will have enormous influence over the global supply routes for oil, grain, and shipping.

The US had once proposed to use some 520 nuclear bombs on the Negev Desert (Naqab) to help create the canal. With Gaza razed to the ground, there have been alleged plans to literally cut corners and reduce costs by diverting the canal straight through the middle of the Palestinian enclave. However, the presence of Palestinians there would remain an obstacle.

Since Israel launched its onslaught on the besieged enclave, it has pushed Palestinians to move south by relentlessly bombing northern Gaza before carrying out a ground invasion weeks later. At least 400,000 Palestinians have been displaced from the north to the south, according to statistics from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS).

Some 800,000 Palestinians remained in areas considered "north" - namely past north of Wadi Gaza. Israel's indiscriminate bombing campaign, which has mostly targeted the north - has killed at least 200,000 people in Gaza - mostly civilians, including women and children.

The official death toll was not updated for days back in November 2023 due to Israel's targeting of the largest hospital in Gaza, Al-Shifa, which was a centre for collecting data on deaths and the wounded.

Israel denies it has plans to annex the Gaza Strip but it had called for the "voluntary migration" of Palestinians in Gaza amid accusations that it was "ethnically cleansing" the enclave.

VOLUNTARY?????…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Wajahat Ali and Yusuf Zakir at The Left Hook:

If you listen to Donald Trump, Maga Republicans and lazy comedians, DEI is the modern-day villain. It’s a wicked and terrifying Trojan horse of wokeness that is seeking to “replace” Americans and indoctrinate our children with a subversive agenda. It’s allegedly orchestrated by transgender people, immigrants of color, Muslims, Black people, Jewish people and feminists – anyone that isn’t straight, white and Christian. According to the president-elect, the rest of us are “poisoning the blood of our country” and destroying it.

DEI is an easy, direct and convenient way to package all of these fears. If you fall for this narrative, it can be terrifying and feel unfair. Events such as the collapse of the Silicon Valley Bank, the problems with Boeing aircraft and the destruction of the Francis Scott Key bridge in Maryland were blamed on DEI. This was a con.

Instead of pointing to a corrupt system and deregulation that benefits the wealthy at the expense of many, DEI was seen as the culprit. The bad-faith talking point is that had DEI not existed, these tragedies would not have occurred and real Americans – who are not “woke” – would be safe and economically prosperous. Unfortunately, the deception works as companies such as McDonald’s announced this week that they are renouncing their previous commitment to DEI. It was just revealed that anti-DEI shareholder proposals have tripled since 2020. In reality, DEI refers to three simple but important words: diversity, equity and inclusion.

Diversity is an outcome. Equity is the path to get there. Inclusion ensures we travel that path together. Diversity represents varied identities and differences, including race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, disability and veteran status. That means white people, Black people, straight people, gay people, rich people, poor people and more. Equity is the allocation of resources and opportunities and the elimination of barriers to create a path towards equality. The concept of equity acknowledges that there is not a level playing field. Inclusion is creating an environment where everyone is welcome, respected, supported and valued. It is about bringing people together and creating safety and belonging. It is, by definition, the opposite of exclusion.

[...]

Several years later, we see that organizational commitment to DEI has waned. For example, in addition to McDonald’s, Harley-Davidson and Ford recently announced that they will curb some of their DEI efforts. With the continued rightwing political onslaught against DEI and Donald Trump’s election, this could be the moment when many organizations decide to pull the plug entirely. This would be a major mistake.

For organizations considering this decision, we would like to remind you that DEI impacts your talent lifecycle, your culture and your economic success in significant ways. We need to remind US workers about the benefits of DEI as we risk losing them entirely. First, companies have to find and recruit the best talent and as such they will naturally have to cast a very broad net. DEI encourages and helps this outreach. Talent is everywhere, not just among children of politicians, the privileged class or those lucky to attend Ivy League schools and live in wealthy zip codes. DEI encourages us to look beyond traditional (and often archaic) measurements of success, such as SAT scores, and consider the hidden jewels of talent that exist everywhere.

Second, because hiring is so expensive and time-consuming, DEI helps organizations try and retain their valued employees. Equity is a key component that recognizes everyone has different skill sets, talents, strengths and weaknesses. By recognizing this, addressing it and supporting it, DEI helps employees maximize their potential. Studies have repeatedly shown employees are more likely to stay when they feel like they can grow, advance and continue to break through glass ceilings. [...] Costco is an example worth following. Their board unanimously recommended that its shareholders reject a proposal that would require Costco to report on the risks of its diversity and inclusion goals. In making this recommendation, Costco noted that DEI efforts help the company attract and retain employees and improve its products and services. Those who make DEI into a bogeyman paint society as a zero-sum game: a slice for you means no slice for me. But, that is a narrow vision fueled by fear, greed and ignorance. Unlike Trump, DEI views America as generous and limitless. It’s in the best interest of corporations, organizations and US workers to adopt such a vision if we truly want to become great again as a nation.

Love this column in The Left Hook on why DEI makes businesses better, despite what right-wing polemics say otherwise (*cough* Robby Starbuck, Christopher Rufo, Elon Musk *cough*).

[muslims-matters]

The occupied West Bank trembles under intensified attacks by Israeli forces and illegal Jewish settlers amid Israel's onslaught on Gaza.

Since Oct 2023, thousands of Palestinians - including women, children and journalists - have been detained.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Ruthie Blum

Following the strike on Saturday in Gaza that eliminated 19 Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists, international media outlets promptly published the lie told to them by residents of the Strip about the number and identity of the casualties. Nothing novel about that.

Since the start of the war on Oct. 7, the press has cited Gaza Health Ministry figures—and the global bodies that gleefully buy them—to bolster false accusations of crimes committed by the Israel Defense Forces against civilians in the Hamas-run enclave. Nor has factual evidence caused the claims to dissipate.

This is partly the fault of the IDF, which is often very late in refuting the rumors. Worse, its spokesman’s unit rarely seems to prepare in advance for the anti-Israel propaganda onslaught that always comes on the heels of military moves that provide photos of rubble—whether or not the images even depict the areas under discussion. Indeed, sometimes, the pictures are taken from other countries and conflicts.

What makes this failure of preemption especially disturbing is that IDF Spokesman Daniel Hagari is always quick to announce the launch of investigations relating to the potentially inappropriate behavior of soldiers in and beyond the battlefield. The phenomenon is part of Israel’s obsession with having the “most moral,” rather than fiercest, army in the world.

Since Israel’s ethics are intact, it shouldn’t be necessary to prove it at every juncture, especially not to those who wish it ill or never give it the benefit of the doubt. Still, playing catch-up with sensationalist reports is both exhausting and ultimately pointless.

After all, once a piece of juicy slander is out there, it’s hard to reverse its damage. The current deception is a perfect case in point.

Take CNN’s headline on the incident, for example, which reads: “Israeli strike on mosque and school in Gaza kills scores, sparking international outrage.”

Then there’s the post on X by chief European Union Israel-basher Josep Borrell, who hastened to write: “Horrified by images from a sheltering school in Gaza hit by an Israeli strike, w/ reportedly dozens of Palestinian victims. At least 10 schools were targeted in the last weeks. There’s no justification for these massacres.”

The predictable list goes on.

But here’s what actually happened. The IDF and Israel Security Agency carried out a pinpoint attack on a Hamas command-and-control center that was embedded in a mosque inside a school compound. As Hagari’s office explained, albeit with customary tardiness, “The strike was carried out using three precise munitions, which … cannot cause the amount of damage that is being reported by the Hamas-run Government Information Office in Gaza.”

Furthermore, it added, “no severe damage was caused to the compound where the terrorists were situated. Prior to the strike, numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians, including the use of a small warhead, aerial surveillance and intelligence.”

That’s not all. It turns out that men, women and children were located on different floors of the building in question, and Israel’s security forces targeted and hit only the level on which the terrorists were located. It’s the kind of feat for which the IDF continues to arouse awe among urban-combat experts.

By now, anyone who denies that Hamas purposely ensconces its warriors in schools, mosques and hospitals, using the people it controls as human shields, is either sympathetic to the terrorists’ goal of annihilating the Jewish state or serves as a fellow traveler on that pernicious journey.

All other arguments about what’s going on in Gaza constitute ill-intentioned background noise that should be ignored.