14. Untouchables?
18th April 2006
Posting 14. to The Jewish-Israeli Lobby, by Bill Templer
Blankfort’s latest article, on racism in DC in Counterpunch, “The Touchable and the Untouchable. A Tale of Two Members of Congress and the Capitol Hill Police,” deserves reading: http://www.counterpunch.org/blankfort04172006.html But its subtexts boggle the mind and point up the discursive and analytical dilemma we face. The article focuses on the rotten racist treatment accorded Cynthia McKinney by the DC police, and the total disregard of terrible behavior by Tom Lantos in a traffic accident six years ago — and builds a PURELY FICTIVE BOND between these two ‘cases.’ Loaded with undertones that I hear as anti-Semitic.
UNTOUCHABLE TOM?: Blankfort alleges that Tom Lantos is ‘untouchable’ by the DC police. Why? Because he is [quote]: “white, Jewish, Hungarian born and portrays himself as ‘the only Holocaust survivor ever elected to Congress.’ He is an unabashed supporter of Israel. That makes him, of course, an ‘untouchable.’”
Notice the expression ‘of course,’ common in Blankfort’s syllogisms. Is this an argument? Blankfort also suggests, almost in an ‘aside,’ that Lantos and his tale about the behavior of the Iraqi army in Kuwait was significantly responsible for the decision in Congress to back the 1991 Gulf War. Again, a Jewish Holocaust survivor helps ‘engineer’ the Gulf War?
And Lantos, of course “is also the ranking Democrat on the powerful House International Relations Committee, which provides him with unusual opportunities to help Israel. He sponsors repressive legislation targeting the Palestinians and Israel’s Middle East adversaries […] Lantos made his first trip to the Jewish state in 1956 and has been there nearly 60 times since. And all along you thought his first concern was the voters in his district.”
On and on, a portrait of Mr. Untouchable in an article mainly on McKinney and her current plight. The pith of the article is about DC racism and the failure of the Congressional Black Caucus to properly back McKinney. This is important, relevant to the racist society America remains. Yet the article foregrounds Lantos in that its whole first section is about him, not McKinney and the racism she is suffering. Why is an old traffic incident connected with Lantos dragged into this? To build a connection with the ‘Jewish Lobby’ where none exists? To construct such a nexus in readers’ minds? To ‘upfront’ this baggage in a piece of serious journalism, as a false ‘portal’ to the article’s kernel?
As Blankfort states early on: “McKinney, of course, is African-American, and one of the few members of the Congressional Black Caucus who has not been cowed into submission by the Democratic Party and the only one who has refused to genuflect to the Israel lobby. But, again, this story isn’t about Israel, although its specter and that of its lobby seem ever present.”
Note the last sentence here! “Seem ever present” — in the writer’s mind, or down at Counterpunch might be more accurate.
Discussing McKinney, Blankfort says: “The Democrat Party leadership was overjoyed when McKinney was defeated for re-election in 2002. After she had served five terms, AIPAC decided to make an example of her for having criticized Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. That led to a stream of money flowing to her opponent, Denise Majette, from wealthy out of town Jewish donors.”
So the McKinney-Lantos (read: ‘African-American’ vs. ‘Jewish-Zionist’) contrast is reinforced. “Out of town Jewish donors” were Cynthia’s real nemesis. Perhaps the same “donors” who support Lantos in California? Is that the insinuation?
The last 40% of the article and its conclusion do not contain a single further reference to Lantos (!), and build toward a strong critique of the CBC and racist attitudes pervasive in DC. But I guess the editors at Counterpunch liked the extraneous and insidious bridge to the ‘Jew’ Lantos as resonant innuendo. It is much harder to construct that span to the two more dovish ‘Jewish Zionist’ senators from California, Feinstein and Boxer, but that too is ‘of course’ possible.
THE ‘JEW’ FEINSTEIN: Here is something pretty gross from discussion on Feinstein from elsewhere on the Internet: “Diane Feinstein was on the Intelligence Committee and she stated, along with Bob Graham and Nancy Pelosi, that there was no sign of an imminent threat from Hussein. Unlike Pelosi and Graham, however, Senator Feinstein voted to approve the attack. Why? Because Iraq was seen as a threat to Israel if not to the US, Because wealthy San Francisco millionaire and Democratic fund raiser Walter Shorenstein has always been a strong supporter of Israel, and because when Shorenstein says ‘Shit!’, Diane Feinstein squats and starts making grunting noises.” The same writer goes on: “It is not anti-Semitism to point this out. My quarrel is not with Jews — it is with wealthy men and their whores in Congress who have brought disaster upon my country for no good reason. It is with people who manipulate and deceive the American voters.” And, he might add: who ‘happen to be Jewish.’
Sound disturbingly familiar? Their ‘whores’ in Congress? The ‘conspiracy’ in which Shorenstein is a major player.
Among Dianne Feinstein’s most vociferous enemies, attacking her inter alia as a ‘Jew,’ are the gun lobby (look at http://www.freerepublic.com ). Here’s another, an acme of vituperation against both Feinstein and Boxer, “the Lady MacBeth and Baby Jane of the Upper Chamber”: http://www.etherzone.com/1999/lieb111799.html As Norman Liebmann states there: “It should not be necessary to remind us all, guns have a long and honorable history of keeping thieves, despots and officious yentas like Boxer and Feinstein from sending jack-booted people to break down doors in the dead of night and cart away other folk’s property. Guns can prevent that. An AK-47 is not only a means of defense, but also an effective confiscation deterrent.”
ELIOT COHEN’S TAKE: Cohen is a prof. of polisci at Johns Hopkins (School for Advanced International Studies). I don’t agree with his positions on most issues, and most esp. Israel, but Cohen’s article in a San Diego paper on Mearsheimer/Walt is worth brief reading: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060407/news_lz1e07cohen.html
He says something about anti-Semitism I can second: “If by anti-Semitism one means obsessive and irrationally hostile beliefs about Jews; if one accuses them of disloyalty, subversion or treachery, of having occult powers and of participating in secret combinations that manipulate institutions and governments; if one systematically selects everything unfair, ugly or wrong about Jews as individuals or a group and equally systematically suppresses any exculpatory information – why, yes, this paper is anti-Semitic.”
ON A PERSONAL NOTE: I’ve been a pretty outspoken critic of Israeli ideology and policy most of my life. I put forward positions of Matzpen in the 1960s that were considered truly anathema. I have many articles around on Israeli fascist voelkisch policy, including two recently on the Hamas breakthrough.
I was blacklisted as a teacher in Israel for my politics and work with the Bedouin and with Palestinian social scientists. I’m opposed to Lantos’ politics on virtually all issues, and to the ADL positions on Israel and West Asia. Yet the ADL is in the forefront of open struggle against attempts to ‘Christianize’ America. I think they are right on about that. The ADL was a leader in the struggle against the KKK over generations and on the front lines of fighting racism in American life since 1913. Are they part of a ‘world Zionist conspiracy’ and reducible to that figment? More nuance is badly needed.
I can’t accept anti-Jewish innuendo on the American left wrapped in neo-con and ‘Lobby’ critique. It really disgusts me. I have no doubt it is there. Qui bono?
I thought our struggle is against Capital and how it controls society and politics, not ‘Jewish Capital.’ Struggle against a ruling class in Israel, whose core is some 15 interknit families, that wants violence to continue. The spiral of that bloodshed is being tightened even as I write. This struggle should have no truck with demonizing working masses in Palestine or Israel. Or Jewries anywhere in the world.
V FOR VENDETTA What we need in Israel and Palestine and California is clear:
“Anarchists envision a society without government, nations, law or capital, and where hierarchy, coercion, and competition have been replaced with voluntary cooperation and sharing of resources. Organized into ‘collectives’—non-hierarchal volunteer groups—anarchists oppose war, racism, sexism, economic injustice, and fascism, and defend animals
and the environment against corporate exploitation.
Instead of petitioning governments for reform, anarchist create concrete alternatives — grassroots media as an alternative to corporate media, building industrial unions where workers agitate for their rights directly rather than ceding power to union bureaucrats.”
[ www.ainfos.ca/en/ainfos17952.html ]
Work for that and ‘lobbies’ will be in the dustbin of Capital’s history.