Dr Kaukab Siddique | Editor-in-Chief ---------------------------------------------------------
Ramadan 8, 1426/October 12, 2005 #77
---------------------------------------------------------
Jamaat al-Muslimeen News [4 items]
P.O. Box 10881
Baltimore, MD 2123

Unique Event Planned to Support Imam Jamil

[From Br. Issa Smith.] Inshallah Juma prayers will be held on the Washington, DC Mall on Octber 14. Inshallah, Khutba will be given by Imam Musa, the famous African-American Imam. A number of speeches are expected to be given in support of the cause of Imam Jamil al-Amin, America's Imam who is in prison in Georgia.

The Juma precedes a mass march titled the Millions More March which has been called by Minister Farrakhan on Saturday, October 15.
-----------------------------------------------------------

RACIST INCIDENT VIDEOTAPED in NEW ORLEANS

The camera caught it loud and clear [October 7]: FOUR White policemen beating up a 62 year old African American man in New Orleans. Later the N.O. police claimed the old man had been drunk and threatening. The man told the media that he gave up liquor years back and does not drink liquor at all. He was left covered and dripping with blood. It looked like scene out of Baghdad.
--------------------------------------

PAKISTAN'S ANGUISH: Help the children of this bleeding Land.

A properly documented organization with tax exempt status is available to take your funds to the devastated areas of northeastern Pakistan and Pakistan-administered Kashmir.

Please send your check or money order to:

Gulf Medical Relief Fund [GMRF]
c/o P.O. Box 10402
Greensboro, NC 27404
----------------------------------------------------

Behind Sophisticated Faces, the devil of Racism.

William Bennett gave a long speech on October 10 to prove that he is not a racist and has been misunderstood. Earlier he was caught making the statement that the most effective way of dealing with crime would be to abort the babies of Black mothers.

Bennett himself is a White opponent of abortion but such a sickening statement slipped off his tongue. It might have been a moment when he was off guard. In modern America, racism is subtle and hedged with qualifiers, but it's very much there!
-------------------------------------------------------------------
New Trend's Media Monitor Reports

Pakistan's Odd Couple: "Foreigners" to Pakistan's Islamic Culture, they Went for Quake Photo Ops.

On October 10 and 11, American viewers were able to watch Pakistani TV's coverage of the quake cataclysm, thanks to C-Span. It was an opportunity to see General Musharraf and "Prime Minister" Shaukat Aziz in their natural milieu. The two appeared on CNN and other TV channels too.

What a duo!

In this hour of grim tragedy, these two appeared and talked without the SLIGHTEST warmth and absolutely NO Islamic spirit. They seemed to be foreigners presiding over the fortunes of a nation to which they do not belong and with which they have little affinity.

They dress, talk, walk, behave like non-Muslims.

Musharraf visited Muzaffarabad, the stricken capital of Azad Kashmir, and pretended to be George Bush. He took a loudhailer and start addressing the people somewhat like Bush addressed the firemen at ground zero!

No one cheered Musharraf. People were dead there or dying but this man wanted to be photographed. He seldom ventures out among the masses. Now he thougt was his chance.

[Even more weird, the official Pakistani TV man seemed to have lipstick on and was dressed as a European, talking of the horrific suffering of the Muslim masses in cold statistics.. They call such people khusras (eunuchs) in Pakistan.]
[Compare with Dan Rather of CBS on 9.11. That tough newscaster almost broke down when he reported on the twin towers crashing.]
-----------------------------------------------------

Pakistani Cataclysm.
Death Toll Continues to Rise: Balakot, Muzaffargarh, Dozens of Villages Wiped out.

First the good news:

For the first time the Pakistani army has shown that it has some good left in it. The army engineers have asuccessfully opened the main roads into the quake disaster areas.

Islamic volunteers and relief teams were the first to reach the quake stricken areas. Here are the top groups which have left the government relief work far behind:

NOW THE BAD NEWS:

PAKISTANI MILITARY'S INCOMPETENCE COMES OUT:

-----------------------------

BUSH ADMINISTRATION WEIRD INTEREST in PAKISTAN'S TRAGEDY: Worrying about "War on terror."

While Pakistanis die in tens of thousands, the Bush administration is concerned that the movement of Pakistani troops from the Afghan border to the quake stricken areas might help the Taliban. Pakistani secularist Prof. Akbar Ahmed, who teaches at American University in Washington, DC, came on the extreme right wing Fox TV to express his apprehension that the "war on terror" might be sidetracked by the earhquake.
[Prof. Ahmed is a friend of Asra Nomani and of Daniel Pearl's family.]

CNN's observers have shown a ghoulish interest in the possibility that Osama bin Laden might have been killed in the quake. CNN embarrassed Musharraf's publicity man General Shaukat Sultan by asking him if he thought Osama might have been killed in the quake. The General, known for his delight in releasing the numbers of Islamic fighters killed by the Pakistani army, replied: "it's not relevant at this time."
--------------------------
Letter from a Christian reader

Beware of Jewish Power in U.S.: Compare Gaza with New Orleans.

Dr. Siddique,
Is it my imagination, or is this the first time in history the entire House or Rep. has been out because of Rosh Hashanah-one week? This is also the beginning of Ramadan, yet you won't find the news media even mentioning it, let alone making it a holiday. There is never mention of Christian holidays in government or schools-only Spring break and Winter break. Boy, "they" have us by the throat and we don't even know it. In one school district in Colorado Springs, they have seven Jewish holidays, no patriotic days or Christian days.

Can you tell me if the new supreme court nominee, Harriet Miers, is a j? What do you think about her? I understand 40% of the members of the Supreme Court have no prior bench experience.

I wish the media would compare the $2.4 billion going to 8,000 Gaza settlers living on stolen land, vs $2,000 each going to a few Americans in New Orleans that lost everything. I also understand that Bush is going to build two new cities in the desert of Israel. Boy, the U.S. is not his priority. He's nothing but a puppet, as was Clinton, Bush, Sr., and Reagan. If only the Americans could focus in on these details.

Be careful, Dr. Siddique, about some of the things you print. Why dwell on the holocaust, when there are so many issues at hand now that could put the blame on the Zionists for the demise of the U.S. Focusing on foreign policy and the giving away of our economy is good target. You hit a big nerve when you attack the holocaust, even though many people agree with you. Their ammunition machines are very powerful and they will ruin you-then you are powerless. Is it worth losing your job? I know where you are coming from, and I agree with what you say, but none of us are making a dent on the American people. They have us by the throat and are more powerful than ever. This isn't the first time in history this has happened, only they have never gotten this far before. We are more ignorant than civilizations that lived in the Dark Ages.
Ms. Carolyn [Florida]
-----------------------------------------------------
Montreal Perspectives [from Khanewal, Pakistan]
by
Jalaluddin S. Hussain

"Nazim" Elections in Pakistan: A Farce Supported by U.S. Muslim Countries Should Help our Earthquake Survivors

Dear readers of my column, I am temporarily on a visit to Pakistan. Since September 29, 2005, when I arrived in Karachi, till the time of writing this column, in the city of Khanewal, Punjab, the thought of Montreal and Canada, is naggingly persistent in my mind although I have a soft corner for my country of identity.

I am upset at many things which I have observed so far. Starting with the grassroots "Nazim" elections, I must say it was total sham and farce and unfortunately outside observers group, including that of the United Nations, have however in effect, commented that it was "fair and transparent". One only wonders why the United Nations as a political organization has given its stamp of approval on everything, including Nazim elections, which has the backing of the United States and some Western powers.

The Presidential elections in Egypt, where Husne Mubarak won for the fifth time, was also not objected to by any UN monitoring agency. It is feared that if this trend continues, the 2007 Presidential and Assembly elections in Pakistan may also get "clean bill of health". So long as the Pakistani President toes the Bush line on "fight against the global terrorism" every thing seems to be kosher!

I constantly remember Montreal also because of cleanliness and orderly traffic there. On the other hand, I am amazed at the chaotic traffic in Karachi and the garbage dumps at places where food items are also displayed. It is hypocritical that from the mosque's pulpit our religious leaders talk about "cleanliness as an integral part of Muslim faith" , while in the day-to-day living they tolerate uncleanliness and unsanitary conditions! I wish we Muslims are as clean here as we make an effort to be in Montreal!

The daily, "Dawn" Karachi's editorial of October 9, 2005, entitled, "Earthquake tragedy", rightly calls for using "all possible resources to get those trapped, especially those in the remote regions that lives may be saved. Hospitals, government as well as those in the private sector, should be co-opted to treat the injured and the emergency should be sounded for blood". It is important that the efforts of the Pakistan government and the private non-governmental organizations, are supplemented by generous donations of foreign governments, including that of USA, UK, Canada, France, Italy etc. It is essentail that all Islamic countries, Russia and China, help in the Herculean task of rescue work.
-------------------------------------

Jewish Intellectual Opposes Israel: Two nation Solution Cannot be justified

by Seth Farber,Ph.D.
Institute of Mind and Behavior
NYC NY
212 560-7288

After the invasion of Jenin, while the Left in America debated whether the Israeli Army had committed a "massacre" or just an ordinary war crime, I decided that I wanted to protest against the crimes committed by the "Jewish state." Thus I prepared to begin work on a book of interviews with anti-Zionists and non-Zionist Jews. The book is titled Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers:Conversations with Jewish Critics of Israel (Common Courage Press, 2005). I was keenly aware that the most well known American Jewish critic of the 1967 Israeli occupation is Michael Lerner, editor of the left-wing magazine Tikkun-- I was not impressed by Lerner's effort to separate the decades long occupation, dispossession and persecution of the Palestinian people from the mythic and ostensibly innocent era of Israel's origins and youth, thus legitimating the Zionist project. I decided to put together a book that would serve as an introduction to the anti-Zionist faction of the Jewish anti-occupation movement, much as Lerner's book Healing Israel/Palestine made the argument for the Zionist wing of the anti-Occupation movement.
In 2002 I also joined Jews Against the Occupation (JATO), a NY group that supported the Palestinian right of return as guaranteed by UN Resolution 194 "that is, the right of all Palestinian refugees to return to the land they fled or were expelled from in 1947/8."

My first two interviews were with the prominent leftist scholar Norman Finkelstein, whose most recent book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History, is a searing deconstruction of Alan Derrshowitz's book The Case for Israel (and thus of his case), and Ora Wise, a young spokeswoman for JATO whose father was a Conservative rabbi. After I found a publisher I resumed work on the book.

One phone call I made in 2004 lingers in my mind because my exchange with the Jewish scholar to whom I spoke symbolizes for me the problem with the Jewish left in the US today. He is a member of Jewish Voice for Freedom (JVP), and a non-Zionist scholar. I told him of my plan for my book and asked if he would agree to an interview. He raised his voice and stated: "You are dividing Jews. What is your political rationale for doing this book?" His tone put me on the defensive. I mentioned that he sounded angry. He did not modulate his voice but repeated "I am merely asking you what is your political rationale for dividing Jews. Why are you writing this? Tell me what do you hope to accomplish politically! Otherwise how could I agree to an interview."

There were a number of thoughts that were clamoring in the forefront of my mind but I decided not to express them because the tone of his voice was forbidding, not genuinely inquisitive.
I could not predict the political effects of my book : how can one ever do that with any degree of certainty? I wanted to make the anti-Zionist argument ( against current Israeli policies) known to a larger public because it is the strongest, most cogent, and the most moral argument for opposing the Israeli occupation and thus for becoming active in the pro-Palestinian movement. Whether it would succeed in mobilizing opposition to Israel of that I had no way of knowing. But it was an argument that deserved to be heard.

How could there be any adverse effects from telling the truth? The Zionist argument that Israel's cause was noble and was corrupted in 1967 was a falsehood. Why should my book accommodate those whose advocacy was based on illusions? Why should I not tell the unvarnished truth, as ugly as it was?

Had I made such a statement on the phone I suppose the JVP scholar would have repeated: "You are not taking responsibility for the effects of presenting only one side of the argument against the occupation and you are placing a divide in the middle of the Jewish left." But I had a response to that also: "I do not care. It is irrelevant to me that many left-wing Zionists will feel attacked. I believe that one of the virtues of the anti-Zionist argument is that it will appeal to many Palestinians and many Arabs and Moslems who believe quite rightly that the Zionist argument is disingenuous. It is Palestinians and Moslems who are the victims here, and I care more about making an alliance with them on the basis of an acknowledgment of the wrong-doing committed in our name, the name of Jews, than I do about presenting a united front of Jewish leftists to the world. This went through my mind in the few minutes I was on the phone, and I could imagine his voice crescendoing to a vociferous rage. Thus I beat a polite retreat and managed to terminate the conversation.
But I think both of the responses I did not make would have met with the agreement of the persons I interviewed for the book. When I asked JATOite Ora Wise in 2003 ( printed in my book) what kind of solution she supported to end the oppression of Palestinians, she responded, " I will follow the lead of my fellow Palestinian activists and intellectuals and the Palestinians living under occupation. I know right now... [that] so many Palestinians living under occupation ..just need to get the boot of the Israeli military off their neck -- that they're simply calling for an end to the Occupation. And so I will follow the lead of Palestinians and their communities....[H]owever, I believe that a two-state solution will never lead to true justice or equality." The yardstick for the rectitude of Ora's public statement and advocacy concerning a peace settlement is not what do other American Jews think, but what kind of settlement do Palestinians want-"within the parameters of a recognition of human rights for all parties." Although all of the persons-- all Jewish-- I interviewed for my book believe that a Jewish state cannot be fully equitable, they uphold the right of Palestinians to determine their own future. It is the Palestinians who were the victims of Israeli colonialism. It is thus the Palestinian to whom we owe our primary political allegiance, not other Jews. The question-- what will other Jews say?-- is irrelevant.
As progressive Jews our concern should be entering into an alliance with Palestinians, not with reaching an agreement within Jewish ranks( first) of what Palestinians should be offered, or what face Jews should present to the world.. More than any other group on the left Michael Lerner and Tikkun promulgate this latter approach. One has the impression that Lerner is talking in Tikkun only --or primarily-- to other Jews. Since from Lerner's perspective Jews had the right to set up a state in Palestine in the first place, there can be no question of expressing remorse for the dispossession of Palestinians in 1948. Self-respecting Palestinian and Arabs are not interested in an alliance with Lerner since he defends the "original sins" by which Israel came into existence. Tikkun represents an interest group for progressive Jews, and it thus sets the standards for most non-Jewish progressives of what is acceptable criticism of Israel. (Although Tikkun does publish writers with more radical perspectives than Lerner's.) The fly in the ointment is that Jews do not need yet another interest group. We need groups that demonstrate to the world that Jews too can place the exigencies of justice over that of bargaining for our "interests" however progressively defined.
The problem lies within Zionism. Jacqueline Rose, author of the recent book The Question of Zion, would agree. However she confuses matter by referring to those Jews in the 1930s and 40s who opposed a Jewish state as "Zionists". They were indeed called Zionists at the time, but to call them Zionist now is misleading. Rabbi Judah Magnes,the renowned Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, and the binationalist "Zionist" labor organization Hashomer HaTzair did not support a Jewish state. Today anyone who opposes a Jewish state is considered anti-Zionist. Bi-nationalists were called Zionists before Israel was founded because they were adherents of cultural Zionism, the idea that a Jewish homeland in Palestine would become a center for Jewish culture and fructify Judaism and Jewish culture among diaspora Jews. This vision has been destroyed by the militarism, racism and consumerism of Israeli society. The only Zionists today are political Zionists and, in Israel-- religious Zionists. But political Zionism resulted in the ethnic cleansing of over 3 quarters of a million Palestinians in 1947-8. And all of the people interviewed for my book believed that the expulsion of Palestinians and the consequent refusal of Israel to re-patriate them was a moral evil. (Israel reneged on its agreement to let the refugees return as mandated by UN General Assemby Resolution 194-- which Israel originally accepted as a condition for its admission to the UN.)
The persecution of Palestinians by Israel today and historically is rooted in the theory of political Zionism which posited that the land of Palestine belonged to the Jews, and that every Jew was a member of a race and a nation (constituted by Abraham in the Bible) which had a right to create a Jewish state in Palestine. "The Bible is our Mandate," Ben-Gurion, ironically an atheist, stated. The political Zionists had no moral qualms about ethnically-cleansing the land of Arabs, and thus they had no motive to reach an accord with the Palestinians. After the Arab revolt of 1929 Hans Kohn wrote that the Zionist settlers "have not even once made a serious attempt at seeking through negotiations the consent of the indigenous peoples" (cited in The Question of Zion).
In 1937 Ben-Gurion wrote to his adolescent son:: "We must expel the Arabs and take their places...and...if we have to use force--not to dispossess the Arabs...but to guarantee our own right to settle in those places--then we have force at our disposal" ( cited in Masahla, Nur, p66 Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought, Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestinian Studies) At the same time, 1937,that Ben-Gurion was writing this privately, publicly he denied any intention of creating a Jewish state because he believed, he said "the Palestinians have the right not to be at the mercy of the Jews" (cited in Noam Chomsky, Middle East Illusions, p.34). Rabbi Judah Magnes genuinely believed in bi-nationalism, as did Buber and others. As Magnes put it "The slogan Jewish state is equivalent to a declaration of war by the Jews on the Arabs." Thus the bi-nationalist "Zionists" advocated negotiations with the indigenous Arabs for a binational state. The reason the negotiations never occurred, I believe, as Magnes believed, is because Ben-Gurion sabotaged these possibilities. The bi-nationalists believed that the indigenous people of Palestine had equal or greater rights to Palestine and that it was morally incumbent upon the Zionists to negotiate, to reach an accord with the Palestinians. In 1946 Magnes wrote in The New York Times that the political Zionists, notwithstanding Ben-Gurion's public statements to the contrary, "want a Jewish state, dominated by Jews"(cited in The Jewish State, by Yoram Hazony p.248). In the beginning of 1948 Ben-Gurion told an audience of Zionists that the war would in effect allow the Jews to steal the Palestinians' land, "The war will give us the land... The concept of "ours" and "not ours" are peace concepts only, and in war they lose their whole meaning" (cited in Masalha, 1992, p.180).
Aharon Cohen ( Israel and the Arab World, 1976, NY: Beacon Press). agreed that negotiations did not take place because Ben-Gurion did not want to compromise with the indigenous Arabs, "the Palestinians.. When the Palestinian Arab Adil Jabr and the Zionist binationalist Haim Kalvarisky drew up a program for bi-nationalism in 1940-1 which they wanted to present to Arab leaders for discussion, Kalvarisky first tried to secure the approval of Ben-Gurion at the end of July 1941. Ben-Gurion got angry and called it "an abomination." A few weeks later, Sharett, Ben-Gurion's right-hand man and future Prime Minister of Israel, wrote that the draft was not acceptable unless it was revised to include a Jewish state. Cohen concluded that the "bottleneck" to negotiations with Arabs was Ben-Gurion's refusal to accept a bi-national Palestine based on political parity. Of course this was not known at the time because Ben-Gurion publicly favored binationalism until the early 1940s. The obstacle was not I quote Cohen who was a participant at the time, "the oft heard complaint that there is no one to talk to in the Arab camp."( This alibi is a stark reminder that history repeats itself.) Jacqueline Rose is correct:. "For a brief moment Zionism [she includes here the bi-nationalists] had the chance of molding a nation that would not be an expanded ego, but something else" (p86). That is, it could have been a nation based on the kind of genuine cooperation between Jews and Arabs that was advocated by Buber, Magnes. Hannah Aredt, Albert Einstein and others.(See my interview with Chomsky in Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers.) Lerner implicitly denies this possibility and ignores the initial internal dissent that attended the victory of political Zionism.
Michael Lerner faults the Palestinians for not accepting the UN 1947 partition plan, about which they were not even consulted-- but he fails to mention that Israel did not accept it entirely either: It did not accept its provisions for an independent Palestinian state. Furthermore in his book Lerner ignores the efforts made by binationalists for years to get the Yishuv leadership to sit down and talk with the indigenous Arabs, and glibly and pompously dismisses Buber, Magnes and the binationalists with the comment, "Most Jews felt these idealists were out of touch with reality..."(p.52) "as if he was rendering history's verdict. For Lerner, the Palestinian leadership were equally responsible for the Zionists' ethnic cleansing of 3/4 of a million Palestinian refugees, and the recent exposure by scholars of the Zionist leadership's long-harbored design to expel the Palestinians from Israel ( see Nur Masalha, The Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of Transfer in Zionist Political Thought ) is not acknowledged by Lerner as a validation of Palestinians' openly expressed fears and resistance to the Zionists.
The possibility that the Zionist leaders may not have genuinely represented the interests of Israelis is not even considered by Lerner. In Lerner's mind the conflict is between "the Jews" and the Palestinians. It is this vestigal notion that governs the gatekeepers of the movement today. Thus Lerner depicts the Zionist leadership as the legitimate representative of the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, despite the fact that no one elected them to such a position, despite the fact that the historical record shows that throughout WWII they consistently subordinated the goal of rescuing European Jewry to that of creating a Jewish state(see Boas Evron, Jewish State or Israeli Nation, and the works of Lenni Brenner)" even though at many points, these goals were in conflict. Michael Lerner provides his own specious answer to the question of what the Palestinians could have been done to prevent the Zionists from expelling them from their country--which they were determined to do to make room for the ingathering of hundreds of thousands of Jews who the Zionists expected (unrealistically) would all move to Israel with the support of American and Soviet imperialism. The Palestinians should have turned to "the Jewish people" (Lerner obscures the fact that the decisions were not made by "the Jewish people" but by the Zionist leaders "and that furthermore most of the Jews who escaped to Israel would have emigrated to the US had the Zionists not prevented them from being given a choice) with a "simple plea.": " Give us an opportunity to prove we can live as loyal citizens and a minority within a Jewish state and that we can show you that we can do so and acknowledge the validity of your having created such a state" ( Lerner in Healing Israel/Palestine, p.69). (!)

Despite the fact that Israel had not accepted the United Nations provision for a Palestinian state, despite the fact that Ben-Gurion was welcoming a war as an opportunity to steal the land owned by the Palestinians (Lerner knows this) and to ethnically cleanse the large minority of Palestinian who inhabited the land that was the basis for the new Jewish state that the UN created by fiat, Lerner assures readers that if the Palestinians had meekly submitted to the theft of their own land, "it would have certainly changed the politics of Israel" (p[69). He does not add " to the Palestinians' further detriment." Presumably he means this passivity would have prevented Palestinians' expropriation from the new Israel, although obviously not from their own homes and land. But there is no reason to believe that contention, considering the massacre of the villagers of Deir Yassin (to pick one of many examples) who had made a peace agreement with their Israeli neighbors--much to the indifference of the Irgun ( the Israeli terroirist group that played a major role in the 1947-8 vwar) and the Israeli Army, the Hagannah.. Regardless, thus do colonizers preach sanctimoniously to their victims, reassuring them that if only they submissively accept the yoke of colonialism everything will be best for all concerned.

This view--that Palestinians share responsibility for their expropriation-- is common on the Jewish left. Perhaps this is why the Jewish Left has failed to establish fraternal relationships with the "enemy," why little effort is made by larger Jewish anti-Occupation groups to ally with our Arab/Moslem brothers and sisters. To put it another way, why does the largest Jewish left-wing magazine publish very few articles by Palestinians?? Why do certain Jews insist that because my book is anti-Zionist it undermines the Jewish left? And why is it that my book is being ignored by large left-wing publications, most of which have a significant editorial representation by Jews-- despite the fact that it is the only recent anti-Zionist book intended to be intellectually accessible to persons unfamiliar with these issues and that the book was endorsed not only by leading scholars like Tanya Reinhart and Naseer Aruri, but by Rev Daniel Berrigan who called it "a ray of light amid the darkness that lays claim to our world, from Tel Aviv to Washington"? In fact the only groups or individuals who responded to me and said they would review my book are 2 Moslems (one an editor of a magazine), one Palestinian Christian (Mazin Qumsiyeh, author of Sharing the Land of Canaan) and 1 anti-Zionist Jewish conservative Allan Brownfeld. The left-liberals prefer to ignore my book and, I predict, many of them will ignore Norman Finkelstein's important dissection of Deshowitz and of Israeli propaganda.

Most importantly should not the priority of the Jewish Left be to resume the dialogue with Arabs begun by binationalists during the 1930s--which Magnes and Buber stated in the 1930s and 40s was a precondition for a moral Jewish polity in Palestine? And if, as the binationalists argued, unilaterally establishing a Jewish state was wrong in 1948, if establishing any kind of Jewish polity without first negotiating with the indigenous Arabs was wrong in the 1940s" and was declared as such by significant voices within the movement defined then as Zionism-- by what act of moral gymnastics can this deed, the establishment of Israel by military conquest, be declared justifiable today in hindsight? And what can justify many left-wing Jews' insistence on giving priority to creating a united front of Jewish critics of Israeli policies, rather than to reaching out without calculation to our Palestinian comrades to support them in their battle against Israeli colonialism and state-terrorism?
Seth Farber, Ph.D.

Seth Farber, Ph.D is an anti-establishment psychologist who believes mental illness is a myth. A radical since he became an anti Vietnam war activist in high school, his first book Madness, Heresy and the Rumor of Angels contains a foreword by Thomas Szasz. His current book Radicals, Rabbis and Peacemakers(Common Courage, 2005) is mentioned above. His memoirs will be published next year; they are entitled Lunching With Lunatics: Adventures of a Maverick Psychologist.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

click here to email a link to this article

2005-10-12 Wed 18:33ct
NewTrendMag.org