Philip Weiss writes:
Toward the end of Ethan Bronner’s appearance at Vassar last night, a woman in the aisle melted down yelling at him. “What I’m hearing from you is only one side. Your son is in the IDF. You are Jewish… The way you talk is totally pro-Israel.” Then Fanny Prizant of Woodstock demanded, What is it about the New York Times? Why don’t they have someone else to at least put across the other side of the story?
Prizant was quite upset, and I found myself nodding in agreement. It had been a bizarre evening. It was like a lecture in a Hitchcock film, the setting a gaunt Edwardian-era hall at an upstate NY college, and only a few people in the room are in on the story and the man on the stage is clueless. Prizant’s was the third or fourth hostile question. I wondered why Bronner went through with the lecture to begin with. He must be a little masochistic, or he has a strong sense of journalistic duty. That is how he came off, as a dutiful New York Timesman, a little hectic, with little sense of the new American scene. When the story of his son being in the Israeli army broke, I said it was going to dog him and the Times, and you can see that that is happening.
The problem isn’t the son. It’s Bronner’s degree of identification with Israel. I kept looking at my watch waiting for him to say One Palestinian Name. Finally it came at about minute 45: university president Sari Nusseibeh. I’m pretty sure it was the first mention of any Palestinian he knows. The world according to Bronner is a Jewish one. There was the friend who invited him to an orthodox Westchester congregation. His writer friend in Israel who counseled him to tell Jewish audiences back here that Israel is an apartheid state (and to tell college audiences the opposite; Israeli dissimulation). There was a string of Israeli generals and officials’ names. Meridor, Ben Gurion, Barak, Netanyahu. And Michael Oren–favorably of course.
This happens to Bonner everywhere he goes. It’s not just his fault. You are seeing a failed solution to that old question from post-WWI tune: “HOW ARE YOU GOING TO KEEP THEM ON THE FARM AFTER THEY’VE SEEN PARIS?” answered by those who think putting on a yarmulke is putting your head in a mental prison. It’s an endless war between Jewish open-mindedness and the desire of Jewish leaders to hold Jews in a cult-like bond. As Foxam of ADL recently said to excuse not having fought for Zionism: “WE WERE TOO BUSY FIGHTING ASSIMILATION!” The Jewish shepherds through history have been obsessed over the dispersal of their flock. First came the “GOD’S CHOSEN PEOPLE” bit– in the words of FOXMAN: THE REASON FOR THE HOLOCAUST WAS BECAUSE THE GOYIM WERE JEALOUS THAT WE’RE GOD’S CHOSEN PEOPLE. Then there’s the “lost-tribes” blood line argument in support of boomeranging back to the “Jewish Homeland” over two millennia. Alas, history and genetics both prove that today’s Ashkenazi Jews are foreign converts, not lost tribes. This purity argument didn’t work because Jewish men were attracted to shiksa girls in droves and “Jewishness” is matrilineal. Then came the notion that even though we like outsiders, the outsiders hate us…hence the Holocaust Industry flourished. But long before that, according to Medieval Rabbinical texts Jewish leaders were paying off European Kings and Lords to kill goyum suitors that Jewish girls fell in love with. Bonner is not worth the attention because he is part of a generation of Zionists for whom the Holocaust–>Israel–>endless Christian blood debt–>Israel as a European finger invading Mideast–>etc. are all hasbara that have backfired and turned many of these propagandists into objects of polite quiet ridicule. But having repeated it so often, they can who can no longer distinguish their hasbara from reality. This Zio-psychosis is beyond any Zionist narcissism. It has now become a profitable madness allowing them to go from Zionists to Zionazis without ever suffering pangs over their gross violation of Jewish Ethic that refutes their predatory behavior, not only in dealing with Muslims, us “dumb goyim” and reality but also in screwing fellow Jews as if they were “other.” Madness pays off– but only so far!
“Bonner is not worth the attention because he is part of a generation of Zionists for whom the Holocaust–>Israel–>endless Christian blood debt–>Israel as a European finger invading Mideast–>etc. are all hasbara that have backfired and turned many of these propagandists into objects of polite quiet ridicule.”
This is a problem for justice, as polite ridicule has no place in dialogue and discourse when innocent people are being murdered by those who are so psychotically damaged as Zionists and their apologists. It is time that outrage over Israel’s continuing war crimes and theft of lands is expressed voiciferously at every opportunity until all otherwise good people, “get it” about the REAL, not the mythical, Israel.