Informant38

To be or not
__.__

"Being Jewish has always mattered to me, though I have never been religious. I think of myself in the category of the 'non-Jewish Jew' discussed by Isaac Deutscher. It is an identification reinforced by the consciousness, acquired at an early age, of the Jewish tragedy in Europe and, more generally, of anti-Semitism. These things have had something to do with my attachment to a Marxist universalism in ways I am aware of, that is, by a familiar, generalizing route. They may also have influenced me towards it in ways I was unaware of, since the association of Jews with the left has been a common one. In any event, my secular Jewish identity informs a more particularist concern too, a concern for the future of the Jews."

Norman Geras
interview in Imprints Vol.6 no.3_._

An obscure Marxist professor who has spent his entire academic life in Manchester has become the darling of the Washington right wing for his outspoken support of the war in Iraq.
Despite his leanings Norman Geras, who writes a blog diary on the internet, has praised President George W. Bush and says the invasion of Iraq was necessary to oust the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein.
His daily jottings have brought him the nickname of "Stormin' Norm" from the title of his diary, Normblog. The Wall Street Journal has reprinted one of his articles in its online edition and American pundits often cite his words.
But the British left has turned on Geras, a veteran of demonstrations against the Vietnam war. He has been denounced as an "imperialist skunk" and a "turncoat" in e-mails to his blog, which has up to 9,000 readers a day.
Most mornings Geras, 61, the author of such obscure books as Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind: The Ungroundable Liberalism of Richard Rorty, sits in the upstairs study of his Edwardian semi in Manchester to type his latest entry.
Last week he gave thanks to Bush, quoting an Iraqi who wants to build a statue to the American president as "the symbol of freedom".

Norman Geras profile
in The Times of London online 06.Feb.05
_._

"The opinions of the paleos [paleoconservative - as distinct from neo-conservative] matter if for no other reason than that they've largely been appropriated by the hard Left - Eric Alterman, Edward Said, The Nation - and increasingly by liberals like Michael Lind, Joshua Micah Marshall, Chris Matthews, Maureen Dowd, and Paul Krugman who shape popular perception through the elite media. All of these writers harp on a repeated theme, a small group of mostly Jewish intellectuals are manipulating a conservative president, the Republican party, and the American people for the sake of Israel and an ideological crusade. They don't all cite Trotsky's "theory of permanent revolution," but they all suggest the same thing. "What I fear is the neoconservatives," Matthews told an audience at Brown University. "They want to fight the North Koreans again. Iran. Iraq. Syria. Libya." Before long, "they'll go after China." Dowd: "Everyone thinks the Bush diplomacy on Iraq is a wreck. It isn't. It's a success because it was never meant to succeed." Marshall: "Ever since the neocons burst upon the public policy scene 30 years ago, their movement has been a marriage of moral idealism, military assertiveness, and deception."
Eric Alterman writes, "the war has put Jews in the showcase as never before. Its primary intellectual architects - Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle...and Douglas J. Feith... - are all Jewish neoconservatives. So, too, are many of its prominent media cheerleaders, including William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, and Marty Peretz. Joe Lieberman, the nation's most conspicuous Jewish politician, has been an avid booster." More Matthews, this time on Hardball: "Is there a neoconservative crowd operating within the Bush administration advancing the objectives of the neoconservative movement?" And: Why is President Bush "buying this neoconservative case for...war...is doesn't seem like an American kind of foreign policy." This isn't much different from Buchanan's much pithier references to "(Ariel) Sharon and the neoconservative War Party."

Jonah Goldberg
National Review Online 20.May.05_._

"For centuries "Jew" was the preferred pejorative term for Jewish people. For example, "Don't Jew me" meant don't haggle me down to the lowest possible price. "Dirty" or "filthy Jew" were standard parings. Benjamin Disraeli the 19th century British Prime Minister offered perhaps the most famous defense of the word when he was taunted about being a Jew in parliament. "Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon."

Jonah Goldberg
Jewish World Review August 15, 2000
_._

"Which brings us to a third problem with the neocon label: the Jew thing. The problems with the all-too-popular perception that Jews are running American foreign policy are all too obvious. Abroad, America's intentions are distrusted by those who see Israel lurking in the shadows (the Arab press certainly hasn't missed the Jews are running the White House stories). At home the Jews are disproportionately blamed for unpopular moves, as Rep. Jim Moran's finger pointing demonstrated. And, of course, when things go well, the neoconservatives aren't so Jewish anymore. That's when Tom Delay and Newt Gingrich become neocons too. But when things go badly, when the neocons are to blame, suddenly they're all Jewish or pro-Israel fanatics.
[...]
Ultimately, there's literally no defining attribute one can ascribe to neoconservatism which cannot be easily and substantially falsified with numerous counterexamples. If neoconservatives are hawks who favor democracy, then most conservatives and Republicans are neocons and therefore the term is too broad to be useful. If neocons are Jews, then stop calling Max Boot, Dick Cheney, and Newt Gingrich neocons. If neocons are ex-liberals stop calling Bill Kristol a neocon and start calling the founders of National Review neocons. And so on and so on. If you mean "hawk" say hawk. If you mean "Wilsonian" say Wilsonian. If you mean "Bill Kristol" say Bill Kristol. And, if you mean "Jew," for goodness sake, say Jew.
But if you mean neoconservative, you should know what you're talking about."

Joanah Goldberg
National Review Online 21.May.05
_._

"Juan Cole claims to be a major scholar. He is a tenured professor at the University of Michigan and the president-elect of the Middle East Studies Association. You wouldn't expect such a guy to be so thin-skinned and intellectually insecure. But that's the only conclusion I can draw from his tantrum this weekend. He insists that I'm a nobody, a "maroon," and, of course, an extreme right-wing warmonger. Yawn. All of this sturm and drang was the result of a one-paragraph substantive criticism of his position. I quoted him fairly and accurately, which he does not deny and which is a courtesy he does not return. His response contained a great deal of name-calling and chest-puffing about his C.V. He didn't have the courtesy or courage to even link to my answer to his screed.
Cole seems particularly keen on reminding people that he speaks Arabic (although he doesn't speak Arabic well enough to, well, speak it). Indeed, he seems generally keen on "proving" how smart he is. What's striking about this is that most serious scholars are more interested in showing, not telling. And the irony that I'm taking the higher road in our exchanges has not been lost on some people."

Jonah Goldberg
National Review Online 07.Feb.05
_._

"Of course, even if Cole is right, it's not as relevant as he thinks, since the salient issue was not what the reality was, but whether the U.S. could take the chance that people like Cole were wrong. Cole is very comfortable, it seems, relying on the goodwill of America's enemies. I am grateful George W. Bush isn't."

Jonah Goldberg
National Review Online 07.Feb.05_._

"Let us see what has been established. First, I alleged that Goldberg has never read a book about Iraq, about which he keeps fulminating. I expected him at least to lie in response, the way W. did when similarly challenged on his book-reading. I expected Goldberg to say, "That is not true! I have read Phebe Marr's book on modern Iraq from cover to cover and know all about the 1963 failed Baathist coup!" But Goldberg did not respond in this way. I conclude that I was correct, and he has never read a book on this subject.
I am saying I do not understand why CNN or NPR would hire someone to talk about Iraq policy who has not read a book on the subject under discussion. Actually, of course, it would be desirable that he had read more than one book."

Juan Cole
Informed Comment 08.Feb.05

Not once in the Times profile of Geras cited above is it suggested that Geras is a Jew, and that that might have some bearing on his support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the U.S. military. His position is presented as a cuteness, it has a darling quality, the article bubbles with good cheer. But it's not unthinkable that Geras' Jewishness had a large part in his support for the death and destruction visited on the people of Iraq. It's possible that it didn't, but the glaringly obvious omission of the possibility of it, in an article exploring the public aspect of his support for the Bush Administration, goes far to proving it in absentia.
The gamble is that things will fall apart quickly enough there won't be any power behind the rage of those who were duped into supporting this war of aggression and revenge.
The Times is unable or unwilling to mention Geras' Jewishness, and Cole was unable to mention Goldberg's Jewishness, though in his case it isn't quite as germane, yet it seems central to the larger context in both cases. Just as Jewish control of the American media was central in the creation of public support for the invasion of Iraq - see Goldberg's last quote above, where he talks of "America's enemies"; because it is too dangerous to speak of "Israel's enemies" or even "America and Israel's enemies"; it's too clear that way, but just as with Geras' profile, its absence makes it even more obvious once you realize what's missing - and the election and re-election of George Bush.
Perle and Wolfowitz and Feith and their larger cohort are built from the wreckage of the Holocaust, by their own admission. What this makes them is something they're blind to, ultimately. They have no meaning without it, and they need it in order to be what they are - they carry it with them, they perpetuate it, and they make it necessary.

"For those of us who are involved in foreign and defense policy today, my generation, the defining moment of our history was certainly the Holocaust," former Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman Richard Perle, a central figure in the U.S. neoconservative network, told BBC as U.S. forces drove toward Iraq two years ago.
To Perle, who like many neoconservatives is Jewish (although most U.S. Jews are not neoconservatives), the Holocaust is irrefutable proof of the existence of "evil" – a word that recurs frequently in their discourse. World events are viewed as a perpetual battle between, as one of their heroes Reinhold Niebuhr called it, "the children of light" and the "children of darkness."

Jim Lobe
antiwar.com 28.Jan.05

The madness of their position is that to them evil is not an abstractly describable thing, it's not definable by either actions or their effects, and in a spooky inside-out way it's a return to the original, pre-religious idea of evil, as a biological threat - the predator leaping from the darkness. Evil is what attacks us, and anything we do to stop it is by definition good, even if that means destroying the world.
What's being practiced is an ending to universal morality, to the idea of human rights, to the idea of morality as centered outside the self.
The Christian sins, the Seven Deadly Sins of Christian theology, can be distilled to one thing - selfishness. All of them, Pride, Envy, Lust, Greed, Sloth etc. are an elevation of the self. Statute crime can be simplified that way as well. The placing of the self above something outside the individual, something that is greater, and of greater importance.
It's the mystery of reproduction, too. Maternal care, paternal sacrifice. The present individual package of genetic material surrendering its chances for immediate gratification to ensure the continuity of a larger self.
Love.
The miracle of that gratifying surrender of the individual desire to the less definite but very real continuity of existence is easily dismissed, now - after three or four generations of pandering assault and in-home seduction. In Christian tradition selfishness is the consummate evil, and it's embodied in the persona of Satan, a Jewish word meaning "enemy".
Moral systems have goals, all of them do, and the goal of Christianity is the reunion of the individual with God, or it was, and the official institutional goal still is. So it's telling that much of contemporary Christian proselytizing is based on an appeal to the self, stressing the benefits to the individual of Christian practice. The idea that someone could sacrifice themselves, entirely, for the good of others, or something other, is anathema to that contemporary Christian morality. Except that that's the essential nature of the Christ. The idea that people might be called upon to sacrifice now, and that the longer it's delayed the greater the sacrifice that will be required, is foreign to most American Christians, who've been convinced that nothing of this earthly existence matters.
The money-changers have driven Jesus out of the temple, in Barbara Erhenreich's apt phrasing.
Morality is slipping away from the center of things, turning into something more atavistic, biologically-oriented and focused on the present, even as people clamor for its spiritual reassurances; and it's getting easier and easier to see morality as a kind of system, an invention that makes things easier for those who use it. But as with any system - capitalism or communism for instance - there are those who use it, and those who are used by it as well.
That Christianity has been seen by some Jews as worship of "vapor" - or as a franchise of Judaism for the less-endowed - is another taboo aspect of all this.

"One Nitel custom in the Diaspora was to recite the entire "Aleinu Leshabe'ah" prayer out loud. The prayer includes the phrase "those who bow down before vapor and emptiness," customarily uttered in a whisper throughout the year, so that gentiles would not hear the words. On Nitel Night, it was customary, after it had been ascertained that no non-Jews were around, to loudly utter the forbidden phrase."

Shahar Ilan
Haaretz

It can't be mentioned or discussed publicly, just as Geras' Jewishness can't be mentioned publicly as a cause of his support for Bush; or when it is mentioned, when any of these taboo things are mentioned, they're immediately transformed into a blanket condemnation of all Jews - anti-Semitism! - and the discussion stops.
The important thing is that the discussion stop, or better yet, that it never begin.
But it's clear that the disdain for the audience that permeates most television programming, the cynical disregard for the well-being of the great majority of "common" Americans shown by the elite generally, and the enthusiastic, albeit strategic partnering with fundamentalists the Zionist/neocons have pursued - even as fundamentalist end-time prophecies call for the extinction of all but a relative handful of Christianized Jews - all have in common an hypocrisy, the duality of an expendable preterite and a manipulating, invisible elect, and a moral compass calibrated only to the self.