Harry’s Place

Even neo-Nazis now say they are anti-Zionist, not antisemitic. Would Silverstein believe them if a gang of skinheads stomped his kids to death? Would he call it an anti-Israel act? What a moral imbecile.

And by the way, Casablanca murders were 2003, not 2002. (Which changes nothing, its still dead Jews, its still antisemitism).

Would Silverstein care to visit Buenos Aires, tell the Jewish community there that the Iranian attack on AMIA, 1994, 85 dead, wasn’t antisemitic? Will he go preach this at the synagogues and Jewish schools that Jews are too afraid to attend or send their kids to. Actually, this is worse than moral imbecility, this is sanctioning antisemitic murder.

From Silverstein’s own blog:

“An Indian news report claims that many of the Mumbai hostages were tortured before being killed and that the Chabad hostages were tortured most brutally of all. IF (and I stress “if” because stories like this must be confirmed and reconfirmed before they are accepted as truth) this story is true, it could set back Jewish-Muslim relations years if not decades. Not to mention, that it will further alienate Israeli Jews from believing it is possible to live in peace with the region’s Muslims.

Further, if it is true, then I will have to withdraw my earlier claims that anti-Semitism was an ancillary part of the strategy involved in this attack. If the Jewish victims were tortured savagely, then it will lead me to believe that there are much stronger links to Al Qaeda than I previously believed. Until now, I’d never thought that Pakistani militants hated the west and Jews specifically as Al Qaeda does. I’d thought their cause was more locally-determined. If the news is correct, then I think Pakistan, India and the entire region have a much bigger problem on their hands then previously thought.”

Err, right, so killing Jews isn’t antisemitism, but torturing them is. Pardon??

The fact that there are blatant apologists for terrorism like Silverstein amongst some ultra left Jewish organizations is no surprise. What we need to ask is what we are to make of The Grauniad in publishing it. Seems to rank with their publication of Dilpazier Aslam’s “We rock the boat” article after the 7/7 London atrocities. We’re not talking madness here. George Orwell described exactly the same processes of head-over-heels inversions of rationality and morality in defence of the Soviet Union’s crimes by the loyalists and fellow travellers of the Communist Party back in the thirties and forties.

By the way, the story about the Jews murdered in the Mumbai massacre having been tortured has been discredited–there was never any identification of the supposed medical source, and the officials responsible for the preparations for the return of the bodies denied that there were signs of torture. The wounds they found were the product of gunfire.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1227702405844&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

And another thing; apart from the non-zionist Rabbi and his wife who ran the Chabad Centre, another victim was the actively anti-zionist Rabbi Teitelbaum, a member of the Satmar Chassidim, who do not recognise the State of Israel. So strong are their anti-zionist beliefs that his family asked the Israeli government flying the coffin home for burial to desist from putting an Israeli flag on it (which the Israeli government regrettably refused to do).

So unless you assume that all Jews are actually Israelis and/or they are all collectively responsible for answering with their lives for whatever grievances the Palestinians have against Israel, you can’t avoid defining the murders as a classic anti-semitic act.

Silverstein is another pet Jew who is invited to burble regularly on Comment is Free, toeing the anti-Israel/pro-Islamist line, which has itself to be evidence of his having several screws loose.

What else is there to add?

Let’s say it is possible to rationalize away the murder of individuals who, only a reactionary moron would think connected to Pakistani grievances, what about the 10 Kenyans killed in 2002?

“the story about the Jews murdered in the Mumbai massacre having been tortured has been discredited”

It seems impossible to get a definitive source on this - today’s NYT suggests that torture did take place http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/world/asia/05mumbai.html?hp

Jeezus, these fucking people are surreal. It’s like a bad dream.

The rabbi and his wife died for our sins, right Richard?

Mark Gardener - the answer to your question is an emphatic ‘yes’. Idiots are idiots because they are idiots not because they someday won’t be idiots. I am reminded of the original production of “War of the Worlds”, the movie in the 1950’s. Near the beginning, 3 locals drive up to the Martian ship and wave a huge white flag of peace. And are promptly vaporized. If you put a sword to the throats of the children of radical leftist Jews, they would merely remind you to make sure you didn’t accidentally cut yourself.

it could set back Jewish-Muslim relations years if not decades.

Mark, I don’t think they have left 570 AD yet!

Great article on Engage about the Antisemitic Art BTW

South Park last night could have been about Silverstein, people so smug the enjoy smelling their own farts.

Look, since Silverstein is a Jew then as far as The Guardian and its readers are concerened he is 100% right and these Jews had it coming!

some posters at CiF are wise to Silverman’s inadequate arguments

usini:

“Clearly if one attacks and murders people because of their religion or race …then one is a racist or a religious bigot and in this case an anti-semite.

If someone killed a Jew in London because of the actions of the Israeli Government that would clearly be anti-semitic.” [my emphasis]

Richard Silverstein’s comment in as much as they offer excuses for the gruesome attacks in Mumbai should be treated as if they came from some Jihadi spokesksguy.

Here is what the NY Times wrote about the attack today:

“More Mumbai Links to Pakistan and Signs of Hostage Abuse ”

By JEREMY KAHN and SALMAN MASOOD

“MUMBAI, India — The Mumbai police on Thursday identified a second Pakistani terrorist as an engineer of the bloody assaults on the city last week and confirmed that they were investigating whether a Mumbai man arrested on terrorism charges had scoped out some of the high-profile targets the attackers struck, leaving more than 170 dead.

Gruesome new evidence also emerged Thursday suggesting that some of the six people killed at the Jewish center in Mumbai had been treated savagely. Some of the bodies appeared to have strangulation marks and wounds on their bodies did not come from gunshots or grenades, the police said….”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/world/asia/05mumbai.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=print

Even the NY Times gets its.

Now, suppose the Jihadists were not antisemites they just hated all Muslims (especially Americans, Israelis and Hindus) because they oppress Muslims. Does that give them the right to torture and kill people?

People who pretend to speak in the name of Tikkun Olam end up doing more rending than mending of the world.

Seems like John Bowis MEP needs a bit of recalibration. According to MPAC UK he wrote this letter:-

I got a response from John Bowis MEP:

Thank you very much for writing to me about Palestine and Israeli actions there. I very much agree with many of the points you make.

You may perhaps not know I am a member of the European Parliament’s Palestine Delegation. I was there a few months ago and saw for myself the cruelty of the wall and the impact of the financial and trade freeze on that country.

I was also in Gaza the day Israel resumed its indiscriminate bombardment there and I had earlier visited the main hospital with the WHO representative and seen the appalling wounds of men, women and children, including the evidence that experimental weapons had been used against them. The actions of the Israeli government are wholly disproportionate, as they were when they conducted brutal assaults on civilian targets in Lebanon and in the whole ethos of the wall and the ghettoisation policy throughout Palestine.

I voted yesterday to take the Israel proposal off the agenda and we were successful in this.

With best wishes
John Bowis MEP

http://www.mpacuk.org/content/view/5126/103/

David T, has he got form on this?

Richard Silverstein’s Christmas Present http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Strange-News/Lego-Like-Islamic-Terror-Militant-US-Toy-Company-Makes-Muslim-Terrorist-Bandit/Article/200812115172332?lpos=Strange_News_First_Home_Article_Teaser_Region_7&lid=ARTICLE_15172332_Lego-Like_Islamic_Terror_Militant%3A_US_Toy_Company_Makes_Muslim_Terrorist_Bandit

Ref: The coments about Palestinian Suffering, which always transposes to “The Starving Palestinians of Gaza”.

BBC radio reporter from Gaza today made some interesting point:-

1. UNWRA provides food for one month at a time. While the food warehouse is currently empty Israel today opened the crossing depite still getting rockets and mortars.

2. The paranoia of Gazans is that the food for the next month won’t arrive. That is why Israel is allowing the warehouse to be replenished.

3. Quote: “There are no starving Palestinians”. Yes, he said it! He observes “hardship” and “despair” with no jobs - but who’s fault is that?

Message to die-hard lefty internationalists: Islamism is not Catholic ‘Liberation Theology’ by other means. Mien Kampf is the proper philosophical touchstone for comparison.

This will cheer everyone up……http://www.theonion.com/content/news/long_standing_conflict_ends_as

Out of people who’ve done the sensible thing and stopped buying the Guardian, when did you make that decision and never look back? For me I think it was in 2002 after reading in the Observer sport section’s letters someone saying that the crowd at the French Open were right to boo the Williams sisters because they hadn’t publicly condemned George Bush.

Believe it or not I found HP thanks to the Guardian.

I hadn’t even heard of “Harry’s Place” and Eustonites until “Norman Johnson” started blithering on about it in his Saturday column - a bizarre in-joke that only about 5 people would get.

And in a nice twist, HP is almost entirely responsible for me subsequently coming to my senses.

I no longer buy the Guardian.

Nice work Catherine Bennett.

Judy

Not sure about this story being discredited. The NYT is now reporting:

Gruesome new evidence also emerged Thursday suggesting that some of the six people killed at the Jewish center in Mumbai had been treated savagely. Some of the bodies appeared to have strangulation marks and wounds on their bodies did not come from gunshots or grenades, the police said.

So its no longer the anonymous doctors who are being quoted on this, but also the local police.

“wardytron
4 December 2008, 9:32 pm

Out of people who’ve done the sensible thing and stopped buying the Guardian, when did you make that decision and never look back?”

I suppose I should say that I’m a conservative voter who dabbled with the Lib Dumbs and Bliar’s NuLanbour. So actually I’m a slightly rightish whore. But I’ve read the Grauniad for about 10 years, more or less, every weekday. And the Observer on Sundays, hangover permitting.

Why?

Well that’s because at school I had a wise old History teacher who always advised us to read a paper every day with which we disagreed. I spent many years reading the Telegraph for that reason. It made reading the Sun for mail-bonding sports bullshit reasons easier at university. Well, at least easier to live with! And yet then, while as a Conservative Student, I started a decade long affair with the Gaurdian.

For many years I disagreed with most of it, though I always loved the Steve Bell cartoons from my childhood in the 80s! Then I started to agree with it during its opposition to the Iraq war. Having fought against radical Islam at university in the early 1990s, long before it was fashionable, I understood the folly of such an unprepared, uncomprehending strike at such a precipitous time. This is not to say that toppling Saddam should not have been done; my personal opposition was to the method and the timing and the geopolitical cost in terms of secularism versus theocracy. I am unconvinced that I was wrong to be concerned.

And yet *still* I read the Guardian. My instinct was now more to argue with it and its lazy assumptions, however. And now in 2008 when the moneyed Polly Toynbee is basically arguing that only the wealthy have aspirations, a notion that flies in the face of my own transition from council house child to house-owning adult, surviving with MS, working my way through life, that I am forced to question why I still pay for it. I mean, I can still read it online, after all, for free!

Hmm, pause for thought!

Shaun, I’d say you were right about Iraq, on sound pragmatic conservative grounds which occasionally surface in the Guardian but which you’d find articulated more generously and eloquently by Matthew Parris in the Times. You also get Giles Coren’s peerless restaurant reviewing, Caitlin Moran’s winsome genius, AA Gill, Andrew Sullivan, David Aaronovitch, and of course Michael Winner. Switch, Shaun, switch.

“Not sure about this story being discredited. The NYT is now reporting”: Manasseh

I quoted the NY Times story above.

It doesn’t matter if pro Hamas leftists will try to discredit the story.

That’s to be expected. In Israel though many former skeptics about anti Zionism being antisemitism have now come to realize that there is an intimate connection.

Read “The Jihadi as Nazi, from 9/11 to Mumbai”

By Bradley Burston

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1042960.html

The hideous torture inflicted on the Jewish prisoners has already burned itself into the consciousness of the Jewish community the way say the tortures of the Spanish inquisition or the anti-Jewish Cossack pogroms had in the past.

And just as these other atrocities had been justified (or denied) in the past by antisemites I expect that same will be done this time.

From Maven’s link:
“The toy mini-figures, made by American Will Chapman, includes a masked terrorist bandit with an assault rifle, grenade launcher and belt of explosives.”

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Strange-News/Lego-Like-Islamic-Terror-Militant-US-Toy-Company-Makes-Muslim-Terrorist-Bandit/Article/200812115172332?lpos=Strange_News_First_Home_Article_Teaser_Region_7&lid=ARTICLE_15172332_Lego-Like_Islamic_Terror_Militant%3A_US_Toy_Company_Makes_Muslim_Terrorist_Bandit

Why am I not surprised that Muslim organization are more outraged by cartoons and toys critical of Islamic terrorism than they are of the murders committed by their fellow Muslims in the name of Islam?

I’d say you were right about Iraq, on sound pragmatic conservative grounds which occasionally surface in the Guardian but which you’d find articulated more generously and eloquently by Matthew Parris in the Times.

Only if “sound pragmatic conservative grounds” = not giving a shit about brown people.

Having said that, I do read the Saturday and Sunday Times - excellent papers! Even if Caitlin Moran is annoying. I do enjoy the Stuttaford Sex Double Act column especially.

Oi - don’t slag off Caitlin Moran!

Mark T, believe it or not, I found this place due to a *positive* review at the Graun.

Should not the Guardian itself be held responsible for:
* publishing such rabid tripe justifying anti-Semitic murders?
* waging a years-long jihad against the Jewish state and people?

It was Voltaire’s Priest what got me here. Nice bloke, for a Commie.

“Only if “sound pragmatic conservative grounds” = not giving a shit about brown people.” - M o r g o t h

Laughable. It is easy to argue that had we not invaded Iraq and continued to contain Saddam, less Iraqi’s would’ve died (although the ones that did die would do so in unpleasant, predictable, sadistic ways), a secular country wouldn’t have descended into competing Islamist theocracies of the Sunni and Al Qaeda and the Iranian-backed Shia like Al Sadr. That on its own, needs to be looked at properly.

Additionally the military and political resources thrown at that adventure could and perhaps should have been properly used to address the situation in Afghanistan, which was the source of the problem. The additional resources could’ve critically altered the nature of the conflict from an unwinnable game of cat-and-mouse with a semi-Insurgent Taliban and an unsecured Pakistani border.

And then one of the principle criticisms of *both* military actions is that Rumsfeld managed to have absolutely no plan at all for the post-conflict environment. That was a clear example of not ‘giving a shit’ about the quality of life of the survivors of the war for whom we had a legal responsibility towards as occupiers.

So do we really want to have a conversation about what would’ve saved the lives of what you straw-man characterise as ‘Brown people’?

“Message to die-hard lefty internationalists: Islamism is not Catholic ‘Liberation Theology’ by other means.”

Well, the salient difference is that 100% of ‘Liberation Theologists” were atheists who got their views from Marx and dressed it up in some biblical buzzwords, wheras Islamists seem to have some religious conviction.

In their desire to turn the world totalitarian they are identical.

If killing random Jewish people in a random Jewish building in a random country is anti-Israeli, not antisemitic, then there really is no difference between the two; which I don’t think is what Silverstein is trying to demonstrate.

Rich, I think it’s only the colour of his belly button fluff which Silverstein is trying to communicate.

Dave Rich.
Exactly.

It is to be remembered also that most forms of antisemitism never attack Jews “as Jews”. They are always attacked as “symbols” of something else; i.e. as symbols of capitalism, as the embodiment of Christ-killers; and now as symbols of “imperialism”, of “colonialism” and of “Zionism”.

No, most liberation theologians were misguided Jesuits who irredeemably compromised themselves and their honourable Catholic Christian faith with things of this world (aided and abetted by the spirit of the age, and by wilful misinterpretations, at the highest levels of the church, of some of the decisions of the Second Vatican Council).

it is precisely because of their religious liberalism that the poison of pseudo-marxism was able to gain some kind of wholly pernicious influence within the church in certain countries, above all in Latin America - although the leftist poisons have remained evident elsewhere too, to this day, probably, in Europe, above all in Austria, but certainly also in England & Wales too.

At least now there is a Pope who is committed to reversing some of this post-1960s idiocy.

Oi - don’t slag off Caitlin Moran!

Oh, I wouldn’t throw her out of bed for farting, but I find her incredibly facile. There were a couple of topics a while back that she entreatied that she knew a lot about, only she didn’t have a fucking clue.

venichka

I think you should approach this matter more carefully and with a more open mind.

Liberation theology is a spectrum that includes died in the wool Marxists with a catholic flavour (in that they occaisonally foundthemselves in church) to the other end which reaches back to the deepest routes of Catholic humanism and laicist engagement with the suffering of the poor and oppressed especially in the traditions of Franciscans, dominicans and Jesuits.

For most Liberation theology is a critical dialectic between the need for earthly social transformation an the transformation of the individual human spirit.

If you read Paolo Freires ‘Pedagoguey of the Oppressed’ in the introduction he says something like ‘ by now I hope i have written enough to unsettle noth Christains and Marxists but i woul hope thatI have said enough for both to keep reading.

Its rather like (in the material plane) calling Maynard Keynes a Marxist or even a Socialist (and many do from the right) or a bourgoise evisionist (as many did from the left) he was emphatically neither but engaged in a dialectical critique of both.

And by dialectic I am using an Hegelian (non specifically materialis) the-philosophical concept.

I remember years ago joking with a young Cambridge graduate who was a Dominican off to central America.

I said look I a a lefty I can understand liberation theology but you have to see the Popes point the Church has never promised Heavan on Earth’

To which he replied ‘no perhaps not. but the Church has never permitted Hell on Earth either’.

I leared Portugese in a covent ‘a collegia da Asuncao’ on a hill above the Rio slums one of the greatest concentrations of living hell on earth.

I loved those sisters learning Portugese to go out into the base communities and to fight for basic human dignities, to face death squads.

The Catholic Church in Brazil especially but elsewhere in South America is simply one of the great estates and close to the people and the struggle for a living for landless peasants and the disposessed of urban favelas and barios they have acheived amazing things.

I have very little respect for a distant reactionary grand inquisitor with the keys to St peters trying to undo this in the name of doctrinal orthodoxy, for pity’s sake.

Apparently Ratzinger is happier with a smaller Catholic Church.

He had better be because if he pursues a blind ideology in the name of pursuing a blind ideology then the evangelical tide sweeping latin America will sweep away an irrelevant and distant pious and hierachical church, leaving Bishops and the urban uppermiddle clases.

“Liberation theology?”

They sure as hell didn’t liberate anyone in Castro’s Cuba? Has any liberation theologian ever written an attack on Castro’s treatment of political dissidents?

Is this a trick question? as we used to say Richard Silverstein is Nuken Futs

Silverstein’s “argument” reminds me of those people who blame a Muslim woman who was raped: “why did she not wear the traditional clothes.

You know, I am beginning to see why it’s called Comment is Free. It’s to remind us that you get what you pay for.

Regards,

Inna

I was heartened at Jenny-any-dots comment (deep in the comment thread): “As I read this article the thought running through my mind was, if it waddles like a duck and quacks like a duck then it must be a hippopotamus.”

What Silverstein said was the kind of stupid you have to go to college and maybe grad school to learn and appreciate. Jenny clearly went to vo-tech and got a welding certificate. She clearly gets irony — and for that matter, reality.

I’d hire her.

Karl Pfieffer

“Silverstein’s “argument” reminds me of those people who blame a Muslim woman who was raped: “why did she not wear the traditional clothes.”

Or a Palestinian killed/expelled from their land “well they were on the land given to us by G-d”

Or a Palestinian killed/expelled from their land “well they were on the land given to us by G-d”

Why a Palestinian, HPBNP? Should one follow the lead of the people you shill for and just kill any Arab to hand, no matter where they lived?

I like the G-d bit. I now see why you equate HP with the BNP: neither is anything like antisemitic enough for you.

The Islamophobia and sexism of many of these posts don’t help what is a serious point.

Little Dickie Silverstein is one of the worst anti-Semitic bloggers on the web, widely referred to as a kapo. A site that exposes him is now at http://www.kapodickie.blogspot.com

The Little Dickie Silverstein Marching Song

I am a little kapo,
It makes my mommy mad,
Cause when I am a kapo,
Those Zionists get sad!

I celebrate the jihad,
and terror all the while,
I fill my blog and web page,
With loud salutes of Sieg Heil!

I want to see them Zraelis,
All dumped out in the sea,
My swastika a waving,
Cause everything’s bout me

Richard KapoDickie Silverstein is an immature self-hating Seattle anti-Semite pretending to know something about Judaism