On Anti-Semitism and Superhumans
Children of a Lesser God
In Berlin, the high and mighty, including U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, German President Johannes Rau and Israel's president, Moshe Katsav, gathered for a Conference of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) dedicated to the struggle against anti-Semitism. They proclaimed that “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is serving as a cover for worldwide anti-Semitic sentiment” as Ha'aretz reported today. I was not invited to this gathering, but if I had been, I would have presented them with the following talk.
Your Excellencies, this conference is indeed an extremely important, historic event, to be compared with Constantine's Edict of Milan or with the Nicene Council of the Church. I am not sure that all of you fully understand what you are doing, What is the meaning of the code-words 'Struggle against anti-Semitism'.
Let us say first what it is not. Your “struggle against anti-Semitism” is not a defence for a persecuted small nation; if it were, you would defend the besieged Palestinians. It is not a struggle against racism, for you support racist apartheid in Palestine. It is not a struggle against anti-Jewish discrimination, for there is none, and from Moscow to Paris to New York, Jews occupy the very pinnacle of power.
It is not defence of Jewish life, for the only Jew wounded of late in Europe cut himself with his own kitchen knife in an attempt to incriminate a Muslim. It is not defence of Jewish property, for Jews are the only people on earth who have regained every piece of property their ancestors ever claimed from Berlin to Baghdad. Your “struggle against anti-Semitism” has nothing to do with long-dead historic anti-Semitism or anti-Jewish racial theory. There are Semites and descendants of Jews on both sides of the battle.
Your 'struggle against anti-Semitism', theological in concept, relates to the centuries-old dilemma: “Are all people born equal, equally important and equally close to God? Or are Jews a cut above, special in God's eyes, designating the rest of humanity as the children of a lesser God?” The first alternative was affirmed by St Paul. The second was the banner of Caiaphas. St Paul was 'anti-Semite' in the eyes of Caiaphas for he denied Jewish superiority.
The new religion brought over to Europe from across the ocean, with American tanks and dollars and movies, the neo-Judaic religion of a Chosen few, of man-made landscapes, of economic freedom; of alienation and uprooting, of denying solidarity and sacrality to non-Chosen. The Judaic ideas and values are the foundations of the New World Order.
Today, Excellencies, you made your choice, and as Pontius Pilate in his time, you preferred to stand by Caiaphas. It does not matter that the Palestinians are being immured alive behind the 25-foot concrete wall or that the olive groves are erased and wells demolished; what is important is that “Israel or its leaders should not be demonized or villainized” in the words of your colleague, Colin Powell. It is not a question of policy anymore, but of theology, for belief in Jewish superiority is the official faith of Pax Americana, like Christianity was that of the Roman Empire in the days of Constantine the Great. To stress the point, you forbade using Nazi symbols in connection with Israeli policies, but allowed superimposing the swastika onto the Cross of Christ.
In your eyes, it does not matter that the Palestinians are being immured alive behind the 25-foot concrete wall; that the olive groves are erased and wells demolished; what is important that “Israel or its leaders should not be demonized or vilified”.
You submitted to the new religion brought over to Europe from across the ocean, with American tanks and dollars and movies, to the neo-Judaic religion of a Chosen few, of man-made landscapes, of economic freedom; of alienation and uprooting, of denying solidarity and sacrality to non-Chosen. You proclaimed today that the Judaic ideas and values are the foundations of the New World Order you are committed to uphold rather than the Christian ideal of solidarity and equality. You brought Europe back into the Arian heresy defeated at Nicaea, and demeaned Christ. Your excessive and abnormal care for the wellbeing of Jews is a symbol of your submission.
Probably you consider yourselves 'realists and pragmatists' who care little for this religious mumbo-jumbo. If you were realists and pragmatists, you would consider what this acceptance of Jewish superiority means for you, if you do not care for Palestinians or Iraqis. I open the Jerusalem Post of April 22, 2004, and read the words of your new superiors. Matti Golan, former editor-in-chief of the leading Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, and of the Globes, the paper for the Jewish economic elites, writes:
“My problem is not only with Germany. It is with everything German, anywhere. I neither argue nor get upset. I have simply wiped Germany and its people off my globe.”
Matti Golan is not a firebrand; he is not one of the Jewish religious fanatics who deny goyim even descent from Adam. Indeed, I could fill hundreds of pages with similar – and worse – quotes from Khabbad books or Cabbala wizards. But Golan is not a Cabbalist or extremist but one of the sane, non-religious mainstream influential Jewish intellectuals. When this article was discussed on IsraelForum.com on the internet, a typical Jewish response was this:
“Matti Golan is a prominent journalist and columnist. He represents ideas held by the vast majority of Israeli Jews in this subject. My opinion included.”
If I were a German, I would have second thoughts before providing Matti Golan's country with nuclear-capable submarines lest he 'simply wipe Germany and its people off our globe.'
In my view, Golan sounded a call for racist hatred and genocide. You could discuss it; but you would rather condemn Mahathir or a peace activist who fights for equality in Palestine. Your colleague, German President Johannes Rau, said:
“Everyone knows that massive anti-Semitism is behind criticism of the Israeli government's politics over the last decades.”
He said it a week after four-year-old Asma suffocated of Israeli tear gas inside her room in Gaza on April 23, 2004 and a year after Rachel Corrie was crushed by an Israeli bulldozer. Whoever says 'anti-Semitism' agrees with the murder of Asma and Rachel?
You cause contempt, and it is dangerous for you. In a mass-circulation Israeli daily Maariv (April 24, 2004), Dan Margalit, a superstar of Israeli journalism, writes of the man who tried to warn you of the grave danger of Israeli nuclear potential:
“Vanunu posed himself as suffering Mel Gibson, a new Jesus, who suffers in jail for his conversion to Christianity. I must admit he was discriminated on religious grounds, but positively discriminated. Vanunu remained alive for his treason, spying and baptism notwithstanding, Israel treated him as a Jew. Everyone knows what the Israeli Mossad would do to him if he were a German nuclear technician on a service of an Arab state – The names of those sorts are carved on gravestones in the cemeteries of Europe.”
(Do not look for this sentence on the Maariv English-language website: it is sanitised.)
German Blood will flow, as soon as the supplies of Palestinian blood stop!
Its message is clear: blood of a goy, especially of a German goy, is of less value than blood of a Jew. And you brought it upon yourselves.
Israel boasted that her assassins murdered German technicians and scientists – but Germany never complained. A brave and noble American Jew, John Sack, published a book on Jewish atrocities committed against innocent ethnic Germans in late 1940s – but Germany did not investigate the grave accusations and did not demand the trial of the criminals; the first edition of Sack's book in Germany was even destroyed right after it came from the printers as a result of political pressure on the publisher. Jews admitted mass poisoning of German POWs and an attempt to murder millions of German civilians – Germany did not investigate it, but transferred more money and military hardware to Israel.
You accepted your second-class status of children of lesser god. Not today – but when you elevated Auschwitz and disdained the fiery holocaust of Dresden. When you wept over deportations of Jews and ignored deportations of ethnic Germans by the Zionist-ridden governments of Poland and Czechoslovakia. When you pushed for disarmament of Iraq and supplied nuclear equipment to Dimona. When you locked up and extradited Palestinian fighters but did not demand extradition of Israeli citizen Solomon Morel who tortured and killed thousands of Germans. When you tried publishers of Norman Finkelstein's Holocaust Industry and allowed agents of ADL (Anti Defamation League) to march streets of Berlin with Israeli flags and portraits of Bomber Harris. You agreed that your blood is cheap. Do not be surprised if it will flow after the supply of Palestinians will dry up.
Personally, I am rather grateful for what you did. Until now, the struggle for equality in Palestine was hindered by well-meaning women and men who did not question the Jewish supremacy in Europe and the US but were horrified by the genocide of Palestinians. While fighting against the Wall, or against devastation in Gaza, they were worried by accusations of 'anti-Semitism'. They thought the argument against Israeli apartheid was legitimate in the New World Order. Now you have removed this obstacle by proving that what happens in Palestine is not a local aberration but the foundation stone of Pax Americana.
Let them both fall together – the local and the global scheme of Judaic supremacy – so Jews and Gentiles will be able once again to live like equals in Palestine and elsewhere.
Dogs and Foxes
When the red-jacketed British gentlemen ride after fox upon green hills of Surrey, they call “yoicks” to encourage their dogs; the Jews cry “anti-Semitism” to encourage theirs. “Yoicks” terrifies the fox; “anti-Semitism” terrifies the opponents of the New World Order. It is their equivalent of a Papal bull proclaiming the crusade against heretics.
Like a contagious disease, their hate spreads farther and farther afield. Iraqis supported Palestinians, and their country was invaded. The Zionists' latest enemy is France, for the French dared to object to their plans of taking over Iraq. On the tree-lined street I live on, a big, parked Chevrolet carries the sticker “After Iraq, Chirac.” Israeli newspapers are full to the brim with dozens of anti-French reports and features. And whenever the Jews do not get what they want, they raise the spectre of their adversaries' “anti-Semitism.”
Now the riders received an unexpected support from a noted Cuban intellectual, Lisandro Otero.[1] One would expect that a writer from the Island of Freedom would call for solidarity with the people of Palestine, Iraq, and France. He should understand that the talk about French anti-Semitism is orchestrated by the same forces that just a few months ago led their anti-Cuban campaign.
But Otero preferred to pursue with the dogs, rather than run with the foxes. In an article disseminated by Cuban media, the ex-dissident writer repeats the standard accusations of Zionists against France. After paying standard left-Zionist lip service to “the policy of extermination of the Palestinians practiced by bloodthirsty Ariel Sharon,” he writes:
“The attacks against the Jews have increased in an alarming way in France. Many of these acts of aggression are carried out by Muslims, of which there are in France between four and five million.”
This is not very politically-correct, but a rather outright racist generalisation. Indeed, Noam Chomsky correctly stated:
“Anti-Arab racism is so widespread as to be unnoticeable; it is perhaps the only remaining form of racism to be regarded as legitimate.”
So legitimate that Otero uses it without noticing.
Just in case the Cuban writer Otero is a sincere man who was misled by the Zionist media, we shall briefly refer to his charge. No Jew was killed or severely wounded in France over the past ten years, though in the same period of time Zionist paramilitary gangs of Beitar[2] established by Mussolini-worshipping Jewish fascist Jabotinsky attacked and wounded dozens of anti-Zionists and Muslims on the streets of Paris and Marseille. In France, hundreds of Muslims were wounded and killed in racist attacks often led by the Zionists' fascist allies.
In the Jewish state, Muslim Palestinians are prevented from worshipping in the holy site of al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem; Christian Palestinians were prevented from coming to the Holy Sepulchre this Easter by the Jewish army. But in France, not only is Jewish worship protected; French Jews even celebrate the bloody 'achievements' of the Israeli army.
The mosques in France and elsewhere in Europe are frequently raided by police and 'anti-terrorist' squads; it would be a bloody miracle if the synagogues would provide total immunity for the Zionists. It could happen if the synagogues would stick to their religious practice and avoid political involvement, but the Jewish community centres and synagogues in France are used by Zionists as their recruiting grounds. There they collect moneys to build the Wall, and there they mobilise the French Jews to fight for the Jewish state and to support the US intervention in Iraq.
Lisandro Otero could read the revealing article A Happy Compromise by the Jewish Canadian philosopher Professor Michael Neumann,[3] who compares media coverage of attacks on Jewish property and attacks on non-Jews:
“On March 16th, when Jewish homes were spray-painted with slogans. You had to notice because The Globe and Mail put the story on about a third of page one, with a photo taking up over half the space above the fold. The story continued on page 8, where it was tastefully paired with two articles on possible antisemitism at a Toronto golf club. […]
On March 25th, a [sic] Islamic centre in the Toronto area was spray-painted with slogans and set on fire. Tables were destroyed and chairs thrown outside. The story (March 26th) made the bottom of page 12. (The top contained a much longer story, with photograph, about a hairdresser who'd won an African-Canadian Achievement Award.) […]
On April 6, a front-page story about the start of the Shia revolt in Iraq was utterly dwarfed by another: at 2:30am, the United Talmud Torah elementary school in Montreal had been firebombed, and its library heavily damaged. […] The two stories and accompanying photograph about this event occupied the entire front page above the fold, and about a quarter of the page below the fold. The headline is a large banner across the whole top, something the Globe and Mail doesn't do very often. It has the Prime Minister proclaiming: 'This is not our Canada'. (If he proclaimed anything about the Pickering arson, we never heard about it.) The stories continue on page 8, occupying the entire print area, about 7/8 of the page above the fold.”
Neumann concluded: the reports on hate crimes against Jews and other ethnic groups imply that the Jews are important, the rest are not.
In other words, the hullabaloo of 'French anti-Semitism' is made with mirrors, with the magnifying and distorting mirrors of the heavily Jewish media. Nothing new about that: a hundred years ago, amidst a storm of 'Russian anti-Semitism' reports, a Russian writer Alexander Kuprin, a friend of Jews, wrote in a letter to his fellow-writer:[4]
“A ten-thousand-strong native tribe in the Far North cut their own throats for their deer died. Peasants of Samara eat earth out of starvation. Poland has been devoured, charming Crimea turned into a whorehouse, the ancient agriculture of Central Asia ruthlessly devastated, but amid this ocean of evil, injustice, violence and sorrow we, the Russian writers, scream about limitations imposed on Jewish dentists”.
Lisandro Otero ventures to sum up two thousand years of Jewish-Christian relations according to the Zionist gospel:
“With accent of Christianity, Emperor Constantine prohibited Judaic practices under penalty of death. Justinian prohibited the construction of synagogues. The triumph of Christianity in Europe institutionalised the racial segregation of the Jews”.
Be reasonable, Lisandro! The Church squashed in blood Albigensian and Arian heresies, destroyed Druids and other non-Christian cults in Europe, baptized Slavs and Balts by fire and sword; do you think it wouldn't have been able to eliminate the Jews if it wished to do so? The concept of 'racial segregation' was totally foreign to Christianity, and many Jewish converts became bishops and saints of the Church, from Torquemada to St. John of God. On the other hand, racial segregation is a precept of Jewish faith, which forbids its adepts to mingle with non-Jews. We see it in the Jewish state, where non-Jews are walled up beyond Sharon's Wall and intermarriage is not permitted.
The Zionist idea of 'endless persecutions of Jews' was invented in order to subdue the descendants of the medieval Jewish caste and to mobilise them for the goals of the Jewish elites. It caused paranoid tendencies among Jews. If you are a friend of Jews, do not encourage this paranoia. Anti-Semitism does not exist, Lisandro. The Jews are safe everywhere, as safe as anybody else on this unsafe planet; as safe as you are in blockaded Cuba, much more safe than Palestinians in Palestine, Iraqis in Iraq and Arabs in the US or France.
The Jewish fate does not worry me, for it is safe. Cuba's future worries me much more. Your letter is a scary sign of the Cuban intelligentsia's readiness to submit to the New World Order. I saw this in Gorbachov's USSR, where the dismantling of socialism began with talk about 'anti-Semitism'. Promoters of this paradigm had built relations with Israel, with the Jewish establishment in the US, and eventually brought Yeltsin to power. Western journalists based in Moscow had barraged their readers with reports of 'growing anti-Semitism' and of forthcoming pogroms. The Soviets could not even understand the accusation, for the USSR never knew racism of any sort. But the Soviet Jews were scared by the baseless but constantly repeated reports. Over a million of them formed a beeline in front of the Israeli embassy; now they build the wall to imprison the children of Bethany. Their flight facilitated the collapse of the Soviet Union, and gave the national wealth of the Soviet people to the gang of predominantly Jewish Mafiosi in full liaison with their American kin and kith.
The same phenomenon was observed in other East European socialist countries. A Mossad agent of influence, media lord Robert Maxwell, supported their cultural elites. At first, they talked about anti-Semitism, then about the holocaust; in the end their privatised national assets were bought by George Soros, Marc Rich and Vladimir Gusinsky, while their soldiers were sent to kill Iraqis in Faluja.
Anti-Semitism talk is not about Jews at all: it is the dominant ideology of Pax Americana. A Cuban who speaks about anti-Semitism paves the road for the triumphal return of Meyer Lansky's heirs to his island. You, Lisandro, left Cuba for a while as a political émigré and later came back, for you understood the misleading sophistry of Western media campaigns and said:
“From afar, one sees better how things really are: the small things are small, and the big ones are big”.
Have you changed your mind again? Do you wish your country to become another Haiti or Guatemala, a floating bordello off the shores of Miami? Visit the former Soviet republics, and you will find the end of the road that begins with talk of anti-Semitism. Even if you do not care much for the fate of workers and peasants and care only about intellectuals, you will learn that in these impoverished countries, writers and filmmakers can't survive unless they obtain a grant from the Soros Corporation.
The life of intellectuals in the socialist states is much better than that of their brethren in the 'privatised' Third World. A good hairdresser, masseur, car repair mechanic or indeed a whore may look forward with hope towards post-Castro Cuba. For a writer, scientist, thinker in the Pax Americana there is no hope – you will queue for American visa or sell bootlegged cigars. Instead of being called a dissident, you will be called 'a terrorist.'
Your misplaced concern for the Meyer Lansky and Mort Zuckerman, Bernard-Henri Levy and Cuban Zionist Jacobo Machover friends of Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres will bring a new Batista to your island, unless stopped by some latter-day Barbudos.
The time will come, rather sooner than later, when the American Empire will be defeated and dismantled, and with it, the paranoid talk of anti-Semitism will be gone for good. Then the descendants of Jews will live in peace and harmony with descendants of Spanish hidalgo, American rednecks and Palestinian fellahin. Your task, and the task of the Cuban intelligentsia, is to bring the good ship of independent socialist Cuba into the safe harbour of future. For this purpose, steer clear of Zionist rocks.
Son of Dogs & Foxes
With great anticipation I waited for a response from Lisandro Otero. I waited for a clear answer to why the Cuban writer repeated accusations against France and French people voiced by enemies of Palestine and Cuba, from President Bush to the head of ADL, Abe Foxman. Why did he subscribe to Zionist-led pro-American discourse of 'growing anti-Semitism'? And he replied, but, alas, Socrates would dismiss Otero from his feast for lack of logic in his reply.[5]
1. I told him there is no anti-Semitism and that Jews are safe everywhere. He replied that Jews suffered in the days of Caligula. In a similar way, if I would tell him there is no slavery in Cuba, he could reply that there were thousands of slaves just two hundred years ago.
2. Otero rolled out familiar Jewish martyrologue from Roman days to Isabel the Catholic to Hitler. It is truth, but not the whole truth; and half truth is as bad as a lie. Jews knew hard days, yes; for being human, Jews lived on this earth and suffered as much as anybody. Less than natives of Cuba and other Caribbean islands who were exterminated. Probably less than their neighbors, ordinary Spaniards or Poles, for Jews were always free, usually prosperous and never knew slavery or bondage; but certainly they suffered too. Just take it in proportion: Jews did not suffer more than any comparable group of people.
Jews as a rule belonged to the exploiting classes; that is why Jewish Quarters are located next to the Royal palace in Seville and Paris. From time to time they suffered from the fury of exploited classes or their competitors. So did aristocracy. Thousands of French aristocrats were slaughtered during the peasant wars or the Great Terror of 1793. Russian aristocrats were killed or expelled during the October Revolution of 1917. Many of them were innocent, for class war can be as cruel as any war. Why does not Otero bewail them?
Jews fought wars like anybody else. If Jews were killed in Alexandria, in the same time Jews massacred non-Jews in Jaffa and Antioch. Friends of Jews were often fiends for the rest of population: Cromwell brought Jews to England, but in the same time he massacred Irish peasants and enslaved Ireland.
Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, but Moors were expelled too at the same occasion. Why does Otero not lament the bitter fate of Alhambra and Giralda's builders? Jews actually fared much better: those that remained were fully integrated, married into the best Spanish families and occupied positions of prestige and power in Spain.
And now to the capital H. During World War Two, millions of Russians, Germans, Poles, Japanese perished. Among them, there were Jews, civilians and soldiers, too. Thus my Jewish uncle Abraham was killed by a German bomb during the defense of Leningrad next to his Russian buddy Ivan. Auschwitz was inhuman, indeed, but so was Hiroshima. But for a Jewish ideologist such a comparison is sacrilege for it compares the divine people of Israel with subhuman Japanese.
3. The Jewish discourse of unique martyrdom and victimhood is based on a racialist denial of the full and equal humanity of non-Jews; that is why Jewish ideologists are obsessed with counting Jewish victims and discounting suffering of non-Jews. We see the result of this approach in Palestine, where every Jewish victim of war receives a place of honor on the front page of newspapers, while non-Jewish victims are hardly mentioned at all. Everybody, including Otero, knows and refers to Jewish victims; but hardly anybody – and again it includes Otero – has heard, for instance, the names of Mona and Christina, two little Palestinian girls murdered recently by Jewish soldiers.
Dorothy Naor, an enlightened Israeli woman, writes:
“Today's killing of a 34 year old Israeli woman and her 4 daughters is indeed tragic. Of the English language newspapers that I have checked, it has been reported widely – in the USA by the NY Times, the Washington Post, the SF Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, the Herald Tribune; in England by the Independent, and the Guardian; in Australia by the Sidney Morning Herald (May 3); and in Toronto by the Globe and Mail. By contrast, of the above newspapers, only today's New York Times reported yesterday's killing of an 8 year old Palestinian boy by the IOF. Every such death is tragic. But today's killing of an Israeli woman and her children has to be seen within the context of the Palestinian child killed yesterday, of the Palestinian mother of 10 killed last week and of the statistics that I cited a few days ago: i.e., April saw 59 Palestinians killed and 345 injured.”
The US fully adopted the Judaic discourse; that is why American Jewish-dominated media exploded with fury when four American professional killers were killed by people of Faluja and ignored the killing of thousands of Iraqis. In full agreement with Judaic doctrine of massive retaliation Americans massacred six hundred civilians of Faluja. Judaic inspiration is very dangerous for us.
On the other hand, during the Crusades, the Muslim warriors and Christian knights made friends between the battles and actually liked each other. Don Rodrigo was called by the Moorish name of El Sid; Torquato Tasso made a beautiful Muslim woman, Clorinda, a heroine of his Gerusalemme liberata. At the siege of Kerak, Saladin ordered a cease fire during the wedding in the castle; while the queen mother sent him a slice of wedding cake. Thus Muslim and Christian attitudes are very different from the Judaic: people may fight, it is human; but they should treat each other as fully human and equal.
Otero's problem is that he swallowed the Jewish discourse hook, line and rod and took it for a true description of reality instead of what it is: an ideological propaganda tool aimed at stopping and reversing the normal process of Jewish assimilation and keeping descendants of Jews in fear of the goyim and subservient to Jewish elites. He even adopted the racialist Jewish point of view, and calls Marx, Mendelsohn and Heine – Jews (though born of Jewish parents, they were baptized, did not consider themselves Jews and would not be allowed to settle in Israel, by Zionist laws). Indeed, Lisandro: if Marx were a Jew, would he have said:[6]
“What is the worldly reason of Jewry? The practical need, self-interest.
What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Haggling. What is his worldly God? Money.
Well then! Emancipation from haggling and from money, that is, from practical, real Jewry would be the self-emancipation of our times.
An organization of society, which dissolves the prerequisites and the possibility of haggling, would have rendered the Jew impossible. His religious awareness would dissolve like a stale mist in the reality of the air of life of the society. On the other hand: if the Jew recognizes this his practical nature as invalid and would work on its dissolution, he works from within his past development for human emancipation itself and turns against the highest practical expression of human self-alienation.
Thus, in Jewry we recognize a general present anti-social element, which was driven to its current height by a historical development, to which the Jews have diligently contributed in this bad relation, onto a height, where it has to dissolve itself inevitably.
The emancipation of the Jews in their last meaning is the emancipation of humanity from Jewry.”
Rosa Luxembourg equally hated to be considered Jewish.
This misunderstanding of the Cuban writer is revealed when he writes “old plague of mankind, anti-Semitic racism”. Far from being 'an old plague' it did not exist until the second half of the 19th century, and lasted considerably less than hundred years. Paradoxically, it was caused by the proliferation of Jewish racialist discourse. Now, Jewish attitudes were and remain racialist, for Jews – like Indian Brahmins – believe in their inborn high qualities. Until Jewish influence emerged as a powerful keynote of modernity in the mid-19th century, the racial approach was quite foreign to Europeans. The Church was never racist towards Jews; and every descendant of Jews could become a Christian and a full member of society.
The Church's fight against the Jews was a fight between the ideology of equality versus the ideology of racism. The Jews fought the Church, too, but when they had an upper hand – for instance in AD 128 and in AD 614 in Palestine – they were not satisfied with expulsion but slaughtered every Christian they could get their hands on. But Otero does not understand this and claims that anti-Judaic attitudes were 'racist.' He says there are good and bad Jews; little he knows that even this trite statement is considered anti-Semitic in present climate. A Jewish American journalist, Klinghoffer wrote in Forward:[7]
“A writer who wants to divide us [Jews] in half, some for praise, others for scorn, may not be an antisemite – but he's not our friend either.”
Beware, Lisandro![8]
About the Author
Israel Shamir (50) is a Russian-Israeli intellectual, writer, translator, and journalist, and a father of two sons.
A native of Novosibirsk, Siberia, a grandson of a professor of mathematics and a descendant of a Rabbi from Tiberias, Palestine, he studied at the prestigious School of the Academy of Sciences and read Math and Law at Novosibirsk University. In 1969, he moved to Israel, served as paratrooper in the army and fought in the 1973 war. After his military service he resumed his study of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, but abandoned the legal profession in pursuit of a career as a journalist and writer.
He got his first taste of journalism with Israel Radio, and later went freelance. His varied assignments included covering Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the last stages of the war in South East Asia. In 1975, Shamir joined the BBC and moved to London. In 1977-79 he wrote for the Israeli daily Maariv and other papers from Japan. While in Tokyo, he wrote Travels with My Son, his first book, and translated a number of Japanese classics.
After returning to Israel in 1980, Shamir wrote for the Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz and the newspaper Al Hamishmar, and worked in the Knesset as the spokesman for the Israel Socialist Party (Mapam). He translated the works of S.Y. Agnon, the only Hebrew Nobel Prize winning writer, from the original Hebrew to Russian.
As the first Palestinian Intifada began, Shamir had left Israel for Russia, where he covered the eventful years 1989-1993. While in Moscow, he reported for Haaretz, but was sacked for publishing an article calling for the return the Palestinian refugees and the rebuilding of their ruined villages.
In response to the second Palestinian Intifada, Shamir has abandoned his literary occupation and resumed his work as a journalist. In the midst of the endless talk of a “Two State solution”, Shamir, along with Edward Said, has become a leading champion of the “One Man, One Vote, One State” solution in all of Palestine/Israel.
Notes
Reproduced with friendly permissions by Israel Shamir.
[1] | Cf. www.israelshamir.net/shamirImages/Shamir/Lisandro.htm. |
[2] | Beitar was founded by Mussolini-fan Jabotinsky. |
[3] | www.counterpunch.org/neumann04152004.html |
[4] | www.pycckie.com/word/kuprin.htm |
[5] | www.rebelion.org/palestina/040502lis.htm |
[6] | Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Werke, Dietz, Berlin, 1976, vol. 1, pp. 372f.; www.mlwerke.de/me/me01/me01_347.htm |
[7] | www.forward.com/issues/2002/02.12.27/oped3.html |
[8] | The last two points of Shamir's response were not reproduced here, because they do not add much to what has already been said. |
Bibliographic information about this document: The Revisionist 2(3) (2004), pp. 316-322
Other contributors to this document: n/a
Editor’s comments: n/a