OPINION: Who’s the dog, who the tail? — Uri Avnery

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"I don’t usually tell these stories.

Twenty-seven years ago, I was invited for a lecture-tour to 30 American universities, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Berkeley. My host was a respected non-Jewish organisation. However, the lectures were to be held under the auspices of the Jewish Bet-Hillel chaplains.

On arrival at the airport in New York I was met by an organiser. “There is a slight hitch, 29 of the Rabbis have cancelled your lecture”, he told me.

In the end, all the lectures did take place, under the auspices of Christian chaplains. When we came to the lone Rabbi who had not cancelled my lecture, he told me that the lectures had been forbidden in a confidential letter from the Anti-Defamation League, the thought-police of the Jewish establishment. The salient phrase has stuck to my memory: “While it cannot be said that Member of the Knesset Avnery is a traitor, yet...”


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[Tom Joad]

1. however it works out, its an ugly dog....

We need to confront organized lobbies for war and occupation.

[Scurrilous]

2. No, It's Not Anti-Semitic

<snip>

"During the Jim Crow era, many American communists fiercely fought racism. This is a fact. It is also a fact that segregationists and others often smeared civil rights activists by calling them communists. This technique is sometimes called guilt by association and sometimes "McCarthyism." If you think it's dead, you have not been following the controversy over a long essay about the so-called "Israel Lobby."

On April 5, for instance, The Post ran an op-ed, "Yes, It's Anti-Semitic," by Eliot A. Cohen, a professor at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a respected defense intellectual. Cohen does not much like a paper on the Israel lobby that was written by John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard University. He found it anti-Semitic. I did not.

But I did find Cohen's piece to be offensive. It starts by noting that the paper, titled "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," had been endorsed by David Duke, the former head of the Ku Klux Klan. It goes on to quote Duke, who, I am sure, has nodded his head in agreement over the years with an occasional piece of mine, as saying the paper is a "modern Declaration of American Independence." If you follow Cohen's reasoning, then you would have to conclude that David Duke and the Founding Fathers have something in common. I am not, as they say, willing to go there.

Unfortunately, Cohen's piece is not unique. The New York Sun reported on its front page of March 24 an allegation from Alan Dershowitz that some of the quotes from the Israel lobby paper "appear on hate sites." Maybe they do, but Mearsheimer and Walt took those quotes (about press coverage of Israel) from a book written by Max Frankel, a former editor of the New York Times. To associate Mearsheimer and Walt with hate groups is rank guilt by association and does not in any way rebut the argument made in their paper on the Israel lobby."


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[bemildred]

3. The method is old as the hills, and easy to spot.

Once you allow yourself to spot it. Dragging in Mr. Duke is a dead giveaway.

[Coastie for Truth]

4. Uri Avnery has more to say in this article,

Three paragraphs right out of the cite

Let’s take the Iraq affair. Who is the dog, who the tail?

The Israeli government prayed for this attack, which has eliminated the strategic threat posed by Iraq. America was pushed into the war by a group of neo-conservatives, almost all of them Jews, who had a huge influence on the White House.

On the face of it, a clear case. The pro-Israeli lobby pushed for the war, Israel is its main beneficiary. But what about the American aim of getting their hands on the main oil reserves of the world, in order to dominate the world economy? What about the aim of placing an American garrison in the centre of the main oil-producing area, on top of the Iraqi oil, between the oil of Saudi Arabia, Iran and the Caspian Sea? What about the influence of the big oil companies on the Bush family? What about the big multinational corporations, represented by Dick Cheney, that hoped to make hundreds of billions from the “reconstruction of Iraq”?

And just remember, - whether they are AIPAC or API or MoveOn or the AARP or the American Diabetes Association (reminder - did you contact your senator to vote "NO" on Senate Bill 1950? ) - and confronting API or AIPAC or the Chamber of Commerce or the National Association of Manufacturers or the North American Auto Manufacturers Association - well their lawyers and lobbyists wine and dine the staffies on "The Hill" who dot the "i"'s and cross the "t"'s in the bills - so its "Bye Bye" MoveOn and American Diabetes Association and AARP and ACLU, too (and maybe DU's Activist Headquarters)

[eyl]

5. a few comments

When we came to the lone Rabbi who had not cancelled my lecture, he told me the secret: the lectures had been forbidden in a confidential letter from the Anti-Defamation League, the thought-police of the Jewish establishment. The salient phrase has stuck to my memory: "While it cannot be said that Member of the Knesset Avnery is a traitor, yet..."

The ADL is the Jewish thought police? Unless they used threats of some sort of retaliation to uninvite Avneri, opposing his invitation - even publicly - is completely within their rights, as much as it is within the rights of black college students to oppose an invitation of a Klansman to speak at their institution*.

*I'm not comparing Avneri to a Klansman, of course, but the principle involved is the same.

In 80 pages, 40 of them footnotes and sources, the two show how the pro-Israel lobby exercises unbridled power in the US capital, how it terrorizes the members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, how the White House dances to its tune (if indeed a house can dance), how the important media obey its orders and how the universities, too, live in fear of it.

Without getting into a critique of the paper here, if that's so, how was it published? Why are the two professors still employed?

The findings of the two professors are right to the last detail. Every Senator and Congressman knows that criticizing the Israeli government is political suicide. Two of them, a Senator and a Congressman, tried - and were politically executed. The Jewish lobby was fully mobilized against them and hounded them out of office. This was done openly, to set a public example. If the Israeli government wanted a law tomorrow annulling the Ten Commandments, 95 Senators (at least) would sign the bill forthwith.

Aside from the rather laughable rhetoric at the end...I don't know who the Senator he's referring to is, but on past experience I'm assuming he Congress(wo)man in question is Cynthia McKinney. Wasn't she reelected eventually? That doesn't speak much as to the strength of the "Lobby". Not to mention that from what I've heard, there was considerably more to her campaign failure than just her anti-Israeli stand (or her father's anti-semetic remarks, for that matter).

The Israeli government prayed for this attack, which has eliminated the strategic threat posed by Iraq.

What strategic threat? True, you'll find few Israeli sad that Saddam is gone, but so long as sanctions were in place, Iraq was a decidedly minor threat to Israel.

The lesson of the Iraq affair is that the American-Israeli connection is strongest when it seems that American interests and Israeli Interests are one (irrespective of whether that is really the case in the long run). The US uses Israel to dominate the Middle East, Israel uses the US to dominate Palestine.

But if something exceptional happens, such as the Jonathan Pollard espionage affair or the sale of an Israeli spy plane to China, and a gap opens between the interests of the two sides, America is quite capable of slapping Israel in the face.

Uh..isn't Avneri undermining his own point here? It seems obvious that any lobby** should find it easy to convince the American government to do something that seems to be in its interest. The strength of a lobby would be in persuading the government to do or acquiesce to something which does not seem to be in its interest - and Avneri points out in the second paragraph that that's not so.

**ignoring for the moment those focusing on purely domestic issues.

Both societies live in a state of denial and unconscious guilt feelings - over there because of the genocide committed against the Native Americans and the horrifying slavery of the blacks, here because of the uprooting of half the Palestinian people and the oppression of the other half. Both here and there, people believe in an eternal war between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness.

OK, he's getting rather carried away.

[chevychase]

6. And may I add to your astute comments that

it appears Uri Avnery is basically using THE METHOD, alluded to by bemidred in post # 3, which, lo and behold, is utilized by not only The Other, but, also by The Self, my definition of which is where one hyperventilates nonsense about The Other, while holding The Self up to be without motivation of agenda, if not outright angelic.