Where Does Your Alma Mater Stand On Genocide?

There, I fixed it for you. 

An airplane towed the original distorted message through the skies all week, including over the Army-Navy football game in Boston and several campuses besides Harvard. Because narrative control that began with the NATO proxy war on Russia in Ukraine has grown exponentially with the need to whitewash genocide in Gaza by the U.S. and Israel.

In the topsy turvy world of status quo message management, those who oppose Zionism are now deemed Nazis. So, Hasidic Jews, gen Z Jews, secular Jews who did not fall for Israelism -- are all Nazis. Got it?

President Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania fell to the witch hunt and has resigned following charges in Congress that her fealty to free speech no matter how odious makes her a Jew-hater.

My own alma mater, tiny little Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, was working overtime on narrative management last Saturday as hundreds of students and supporters gathered demanding alumnus Sen. Angus King work for a permanent ceasefire now. Photographers and media were told by campus security that no photos and no reporting would be allowed.

But an open air rally on the steps of the art museum ought to at least be reported in the Orient, right? As the oldest student newspaper in the U.S., the Orient has lately become hampered in its ability to report the truth if that truth is deemed inconvenient by the wealthy who serve on its board of directors (think Jes Staley of Barclay's who stepped down over allegations that he enabled Jeffrey Epstein's child rape and blackmail scheme). I know because, while the Orient used to publish my occasional op eds or letters to the editor, that all came to a screeching halt over my dissent from the official Ukraine narrative i.e. Russia bad, Ukraine not infiltrated by literal Nazis.

The compare and contrast between Friday's rally at General Dynamics and Saturday's rally at Bowdoin reveals very similar messaging but a subdued tone at the college up until the march began. 

In a nutshell, Bowdoin speakers said things like, "according to the New York Times" as if they lack the understanding that the NYT and NPR (also cited) are part of the problem of genocide whitewashing. There was little if any crowd response except, interestingly, when a speaker mentioned the name of Gaza journalist MoTaz.

In Bath, the crowd responded continuously until hours in the cold and then gathering darkness quieted them down. The final speaker was well-informed but most of us oldsters thought it was TMI; I noted from my spot on the pavement that they actually got a cheer from the crowd for using the phrase "historical revision." In other words, my kind of people.

At Bowdoin, the similar sized crowd of about 300 finally got loud as they marched with scrolls recording the names of the first several thousand people killed in Gaza. 

https://youtu.be/qdEa1K79YQI

My friends who went on the mile and a half march reported the energy remained high throughout a reading of a letter to King signed by 1,500 members of the Bowdoin community (me among them). The marchers also left the scrolls with names of those slaughtered on King's doorstep -- in other words, right where they belong.

King has voted for funding genocide in Gaza before, and he probably will again. May he not know a moment's peace when he's at home a few blocks from campus in a house with a Ukraine flag out front in the small town of Brunswick.

How To Explain U.S. Empire's Support For Israel Right Or Wrong?

This morning came word that the Biden administration will next try to tie funding for Ukraine to funding for Israel, Taiwan, and more fortifications along our bipartisan wall on the Mexican border. Good luck with that grouping -- Ukraine funding fatigue is so strong at the moment that it was used to oust the Speaker of the House.

I had already been mulling a blog post on the question of why every politician, elected official, and talking head in Western media seems wedded to the concept of Israel right or wrong. Especially when it's wrong.

This morning I saw a Scottish Twitter account ask the question more succinctly:

https://twitter.com/celtjules66/status/1712257601314898158

One who replied shared this visual of Western politicians paying homage at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem (Trump's hair was not made for a yarmulke LOL).

https://twitter.com/gomiriam63/status/1712288114016657646

The answers to this question are many, and what relative importance to assign each is up for debate. I'll list them in rough order of importance as I see it, but you may have other thoughts.

• Israel was created as the U.S./NATO outpost in the oily region. Despite certain knowledge of the Holocaust unfolding (known by U.S. government but not the general public), it was allowed to proceed until the Soviet Army began liberating the concentration camps. The Holocaust was then tremendously useful as it underpinned the charge of antisemitism against anyone who dared to criticize Israel.

Meanwhile, actual Nazis were whisked away to found NASA, head up NATO, and populate Canada and the U.S. midwest with staunch anticommunist immigrants.

• Israel was allowed to develop nuclear weapons, which is common knowledge but has never been admitted by either Israel or its enablers. PM Golda Meir reportedly jacked up President Nixon over sending war materiel he was withholding, threatening to nuke Russia and make it look like the U.S. did it. She got the ammunition.

• Meanwhile AIPAC got busy facilitating the funding of election campaigns and running free trips to Israel for newly minted congressmen and women. It lobbied hard on college campuses knowing that one's brand loyalties are typically set in place rather early in life. 

A young man told me that the Jewish community he grew up in did not agree with AIPAC, however, they felt guilty for emigrating to New York instead of Israel after WW2. And, their guilt encouraged them to never criticize Israel, buying their silence about the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba and the following decades of violent occupation and apartheid. And allowing the perception that AIPAC spoke for them.

• Young Jews in the U.S. were raised to defend Israel right or wrong. Groups like Birthright also worked the demographic angle, taking teenagers on trips to Israel to socialize with IDF soldiers.  See the recent documentary ISRAELISM for more details on this.

Prince Andrew's mum paid out an undisclosed large sum to Virginia Guiffre who was underage when she was trafficked by Maxwell (far right) and Epstein.

• We've not seen the black book of Jeffrey Epstein's contacts which was used in his procuress Ghislaine Maxwell's trial. As many have speculated, the federal government isn't going to release the names in Epstein's black book because they are the names in the book. What we have instead is some fierce investigative reporting by Whitney Webb and the artifact that is the flight log for the Lolita Express. Flying outside the U.S. on a plane used to traffic underage girls for sex is bad for a powerful man's reputation, so why would Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and Bill Gates (among many others) do so? I can't answer that but Melinda Gates had some choice things to say about her ex-husband's participation.

Webb reported that a mansion in Manhattan heavily equipped with surveillance devices was gifted to Epstein before the island scheme came into play. It's also known that Maxwell's father, Robert, and other family members worked with Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency.

• Finally, this list would be incomplete without mentioning narrative control. In our day this looks like inflammatory claims of beheading babies both quickly debunked and repeated endlessly even after debunking. After President Biden claimed to have seen the pictures (his staff says no, he didn't see any such pictures). Similar playbook to the false claim that Iraq's army threw babies out of incubators in Kuwait. Also, calling it Israel's 9/11 sure sounds useful for tightening up internal security.

It also looks like governments, including the unelected EU, leaning hard on social media companies to toe the pro-Israel line as the Al Aqsa Flood seriously challenges Israel's control. And several governments including in France, Germany, and Australia began banning rallies in support of Palestine .

 

Good luck with that, too.

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New subscribers, welcome! Maybe some of you have signed up for my talk on Full Spectrum Dominance: What is it really?

To register you can use this link.

Wednesday, October 18, 2023 at 7:00 PM ET Join the World BEYOND War Florida Chapter & Veterans For Peace Chapter 136 - The Villages, FL for this webinar featuring activist & organizer Lisa Savage to discuss the U.S. military's policy of Full Spectrum Dominance.  When Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD) became U.S. Pentagon policy in 1997, we may have disagreed with their goals but we thought we knew what they meant: military power projection over 100% of the land, oceans, and air of the planet we all share, and outer space as well. But before long the quest for Full Spectrum Dominance would be expanded to include cyberspace.  With the advent of the 21st century, Pentagon ambitions have been revealed as even more pervasive and chilling. It's now clear that Full Spectrum Dominance extends to communications as a quest for Electromagnetic Spectrum Superiority, to information control, and narrative control. FSD includes the oceans and outer space where low earth orbit is rapidly filling with tens of thousands of U.S. satellites intended to crowd other nations out to wage war in and from space.

Movie Review: ISRAELISM

A long-awaited documentary on the generational shift in perceptions of Israel by U.S. Jews came to the Maine International Film Festival last night. Seven years in the making, ISRAELISM combines searingly honest interviews with archival material to tell the story of the profound absence of the Palestinian point of view in the training of young Zionists. (Full disclosure: I donated to an early fundraising round for the film, and director Eric Axelman is a childhood friend of one of my kids.)

As he conducts a tour through the occupied West Bank, Baha Hilo of To Be There tells the camera crew, "Jewish Americans would tell me things like, We like you but we don't like Palestinians. Even though I'm the only Palestinian they know."

Animations for recalled incidents reminded me of the Israeli film WALTZ WITH BASHIR depicting tormented recollections of the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres by a traumatized IDF soldier who participated. Forty years on, this week's IDF and settler attacks on the Jenin refugee camp will produce the same result: trauma for the Palestinian survivors and for their oppressors. The turning point for young idealists in the IDF who find themselves on the wrong end of a gun is a major theme in both films. And although no one in ISRAELISM uses the term "moral injury" it's clear that it affects even non-soldiers who witness the brutality of occupation firsthand -- in one case, by exiting a Birthright tour funded by older Jews who have made it their life's work to train kids to be Zionist.

Jewish identity in my lifetime has often focused on issues of justice and equality. When these traditional ethics of Judaism confront apartheid, land and water theft, and violent suppression, it creates friction. Holocaust trauma does not, for many young Jews, justify brutality against the indigenous people of Palestine.

Anchored by the recollections of two young Jews, the film centers Simone Zimmerman and Eitan. We hear Eitan recount why he enlisted in the IDF and how his experiences tormenting Palestinians while "just following orders" turned him against the occupation. We see Zimmerman give details of the indoctrination she experienced in her Jewish day school and summer camps, producing a 10% IDF enlistment rate among her U.S. high school graduating class. 

We also see Zimmerman, co-founder of the organization If Not Now, touring the West Bank with Sami Awad of Holy Land Trust. And headlines about how she was hired as Jewish outreach advisor to Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential campaign and fired only days later for a past social media post critical of Israeli PM Netanyahu.

It's not the only brush with U.S. presidential politics in the film. Coincidentally, current Green Party candidate Dr. Cornel West appears giving a talk on his views on the spiritual dimensions of Israeli apartheid. (Not incidentally, the pro-Israel views of Democratic primary challengers Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Marianne Williamson have eroded support for both among leftist opinion leaders in the U.S.)

The film succeeds in part because it maintains a sharp focus. It could have widened to include many related topics: why so many politicians and other power brokers in the U.S. are beholden to AIPAC and Israel (cf. Epstein's black book). The complicity of the corporate media in pushing pro-Israel narratives. The intifadas and ongoing Palestinian resistance could have been covered in more detail. And the film could have addressed the constitutional crisis of the alleged "only democracy in the Middle East" enforcing segregation and ethnic cleansing.

It could have delved into the role of settlers, many of whom are from the U.S., as the opportunistic Zionists who serve as colonizers. One of the most poignant clips in the film is one I'd seen elsewhere: a Palestinian woman confronts a settler saying, "You are stealing my house!" He responds in a U.S. native speaker accent, "And if I don't steal it, someone else is gonna steal it." So much for his Jewish ethics.

To my mind Zimmerman gets the last word:

What we've been told is the only way that Jews can be safe is if Palestinians are not safe. 

The more I learned about that, the more I came to see that as a lie. 

Israelism, Upcoming Documentary On The Strange Relationship Of American Jews And Israel

Last night I had the rare good fortune to be part of a group in Skowhegan, Maine premiering clips from Eric Axelman's upcoming documentary, Israelism. The film's working title used to be 70 Years Across the Sea: American Jews and 21st Century Zionism and its facebook page still is for the time being.

As a half Jewish man raised as a Jew, Axelman is fascinated by how devotion to Israel replaced devotion to Judaic teachings for so many of his and his parents' generations.

To kick off his documentary, Axelman took a free trip from the Zionist organization Birthright Israel, bringing along camera and recording equipment. He was amazed at the extent of apartheid in Israel, and returned even more fired up to continue the project.

Then, he scored an interview with Noam Chomsky early on that helped immensely with fundraising. Clips of the interview are incorporated into the first trailer for the film, which you can see here.

A salient Chomsky quote from the interview:

Loyalty to Israel simply meant whatever they do, we support it -- even if we don't know what it is.




Other notable interviews already in the can include one with Cornel West on "the battle for public opinion" so that "AIPAC doesn't take up all the air in the room." 

Also activist Issa Amro of occupied Hebron in the West Bank. A new trailer shows Amro  blindfolded and arrested for the umpteenth time for nonviolent resistance to settlements crowding out Palestinian families in what the UN said in 1948 was supposed to be Palestine.

Also Rabbi Alissa Wise, the first rabbi banned from entry to Israel because of her support for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement to support Palestinian rights in the occupied territories.

Also Simone Zimmerman, a Jewish outreach coordinator who was fired quickly by Bernie Sanders' campaign for a social media post where she called the Israeli PM (Bibi) Netanyahu an "arrogant, deceptive, cynical asshole" and wrote, "Fuck you, Bibi...

He does not speak for me as a Jew, an American, and as a thinking person."

In the clips I saw last night, Zimmerman in particular details how the ugly truth of Israel's human rights abuses was hidden from her as she was growing up. "My questions about Israel were met with radio silence," she told another interviewer. Not surprisingly, Zimmerman began to wonder what was so awful that it had to be so carefully hidden.

All great stuff, and I cannot wait to see the finished film in a year or so.

Pushed Learning and Media is producing the film,  a non-profit that Axelman co-founded while a student at Brown University. Their stated mission: We use performance and multimedia to start conversations about privilege, identity, and oppression.

Donate at www.gofundme.com/70years to help finish post-production on Israelism.