billaricaydickey is lying when he says I “blamed Jews for their role in the slave trade.” This is simply not true in any way, shape or form.

billaricaydickey is being entirely disingenious by suggesting that only New Nation under my editorship supported lifting the ban on Louis Farrakhan. New Nation took that position long before I joined them, and The Voice have also long taken the same stance too. There are a number of reasons for this, which I am happy to debate at length, but its essentially about free speech; the fact that Farrakhan is quite respected in the States; that NoI do a lot of good; that Farrakhan has variously clarified and apologised for hurt and misunderstandings caused by his speeches, many of which have been taken out of context; the fact that Farrakhan can visit every other country in the world and has met/held talks with Jews in several countries, including Israel; and its also about understanding the context in which the ban was originally made – ie. in the aftermath of the inner city disturbances of the early 1980s.

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are not anti-Semites.

billaricaydickey is being entirely disingenious when he says I “supported the entry into this country of “murder music” Jamaican performers.” All I have done is sought to contribute to the debate over how best to deal with homophobia in dancehall music, which I believe is not simply by using British authorities to ban gigs. Instead, it is to win hearts and minds by holding a dialogue with the artists and fans of the music genre; and by understanding the culture and dynamics that has contributed to the music scene in order to improve it; and by not misrepresenting particular words, or by singling out decade-old tracks that are no longer popular; or by exaggerating the extent of homophobic attacks.

billaricaydickey is lying when he says I have “completely ignored the contribution of African rulers in the sale of their own people”. I have written extensively exploring this issue. He probably just disagrees with my conclusion, which is that too many white Europeans seek to divert attention away from the transatlantic slave trade by pointing Africans raiding other tribes villages on behalf of European slave traders. My conclusion is that the finger should continue to point fairly and squarely at the perpetrators until reparations are given.

You said: As reader of the Guardian and a user of CIF I find the article above outrageously distorted.

I reply: criticism is one thing, but “outrageously distorted” is a strong accusation. I tried to be reasonable, so what’s your problem? Lets see your reasoning:

You said: The “critique” of Zizek is both misplaced and childish. Misplaced because becuase it is not anti semitic to draw parralels between certian actions of the Isreali state and the Nazis and I have seen this done by survivors of the camps. Can anyone really listen to the hate speech of Avigdor Lieberman and not be reminded of the rhetoric of the Nazi’s.

I reply: I specifically never said it was antisemitic, & there were two reasons for that. One, because I think its too simplistic to make such a blanket accusation; and two, because I suspected that the idiot knee jerk reaction to my article would be to accuse me of making such an accusation.

Here is what I wrote – “this is not so much because the content might be misconstrued as explicitly antisemitic, but rather because it employs loose, crass and offensive langauge that should have no place in as influential an institution as the Guardian.”

(And no, Lieberman doesn’t remind me of a Nazi, because when I see an Israeli I don’t think Jew, and when I think Jew I don’t think Holocaust. I compare Nazis to Nazis, or neo-Nazis; I compare racists to racists; I compare nationalists to nationalists.)

You also wrote: The “critique” is childish in taking a figurative speech “wake up one morning” and responding to it as if intended literally.

I reply: this is an article that accuses Israel of removing Palestinians from their land. It employs Nazi terminology (“concentration camp”; “palestinian-frei”) to that end. When you use Nazi terminology it must be because you mean it to be true, doesn’t it? I mean, after all, you wouldn’t use Nazi terminology just to goad Jews and/or get the subconscious antisemitic juices of your readers flowing, would you? Either its Nazi – which means no Palestinians left, or its not Nazi. You (and Zizek) can’t have it both ways.

My own family history is as good a refutation of the Polish myth of “Soviet-Jewish collaboration” and Zydo-Komuna (Judeo-communism) as any pseudo-scientific argument disseminated by Gross’s critics.17 Both of my parents sympathized before 1939 with the Polish democratic left as a result of the increasingly rampant antisemitism in Polish society. Like many Jews, they had little reason to admire the Polish Republic, after having lived for two decades under its discriminatory practices. In the Soviet Union, they naïvely believed, Jews were not second-class citizens but enjoyed genuine equality. However, shortly after encountering the Soviet system in Lviv in 1940 my parents were rapidly disillusioned by its mendacity, corruption and ruthlessness. My father discovered that his “bourgeois” class origins made him suspect in the eyes of the Soviet authorities, as did the social background of many Jewish merchants, traders and professional people in eastern Poland.

My mother was more fortunate since the Soviets put her in charge of a horticulture institute in Lviv, which made a pleasant change after being denied employment as a “Jewess” in pre-war Poland. But like other inhabitants of the region, she learned that Soviet rule meant rapid “proletarianization” of all living standards and exposure to completely arbitrary decrees. Subsequently, my parents were deported eastwards, experiencing conditions identical to those of Poles in the Soviet Gulag. They arrived in Kazakhstan in 1942, where my father was twice imprisoned by the NKVD – the second time on fabricated charges of “anti-Soviet” propaganda. I mention this in order to illustrate the misleading character of the Polish myth of Judeo-communism whose extraordinary tenacity was once more revealed in the Jedwabne affair. Out of the 3.2 million Jews living in pre-war Poland, no more than several thousand were members of the outlawed Communist Party. Moreover, after 1945 even those who loyally served in the Party and its security apparatus did so as Communists not as Jews. They did not serve any “Jewish” interest. Yet the antisemitic stereotype has survived the war and continues to flourish, revived by historians such as Strzemboscz, Marek Jan Chodakiewicz and the head of the National Remembrance Institute Board Dr. Slavomir Radon, who openly wondered to what degree the motive for the murders at Jedwabne was revenge for the Jewish population’s “collaboration” with the Soviet authorities.”18

Another familiar bogey resurfaced in the Jedwabne debate – that of “anti-Polonism,” this time in the guise of an organized conspiracy to lay responsibility for the Holocaust at Poland’s door. Jerzy Robert Nowak writing in Nasz Dziennik (May 2000) crudely dismissed Gross’s book as “the usual propaganda to get out of the Polish government money for the crimes committed in Poland by Germans, Soviets and criminals [Kryminalistow].”19 This was echoed by Leszek Czajkowki in Nasza Polski and by others writing in the right-wing, Catholic-nationalist and antisemitic press, which reaches hundreds of thousands of readers.20

The American Jewish radical Norman G. Finkelstein, in an unbridled and slanderous attack on Gross’s book, which appeared in an abridged form in Rzeczpospolita (20 June 2001), added his own inflammatory gloss to the Polish debate. He claimed that Gross was merely a pale caricature of Daniel Goldhagen, and that his writing bore “the unmistakable imprint of the Holocaust industry” – supposedly out to exploit the Jewish genocide for political and financial gain. What particularly aroused Finkelstein’s onslaught was the chapter on stolen Jewish property which Gross linked to Polish antisemitism and the Holocaust. Gross’s suggestion that Poles must deal with the moral and material consequences of the past was (according to Finkelstein) especially offensive and cynical, since he had no right to lecture Poland from the comfort of New York City. “What sacrifices will he [Gross] suffer if the Holocaust industry bankrupts Poland?” – Finkelstein rhetorically asked his Polish readers. According to Finkelstein himself, no American professor who was silent about US crimes and no Israeli who failed to denounce Zionist “crimes against peace” had the right to confront the Poles with their past.

Were it not for this pitiful level of argument, the spectacle of Norman Finkelstein echoing the most reactionary Polish antisemites in his diatribes against the “Holocaust industry,” might almost be amusing. But for xenophobic chauvinist Poles, such a critique confirmed their fury at the “malicious” propaganda campaign (its center in Manhattan) to have Poles, rather than Germans, identified as Holocaust perpetrators. For the radical right, the “lying Jewish enemy” of Poland (supported by treacherous Polish lackeys) can never change his spots – driven as he is by relentless greed, hatred of Poles and willingness to employ blackmail to squeeze reparations from its “innocent” prey.21

17. On the historical background to this myth, see André Gerrits, “Antisemitism and Anti-Communism: They Myth of ‘Judeo-Communist’ in Eastern Europe,” East European Jewish Affairs 1 (1995), pp. 49–72.

18. M.J. Chodakiewicz, “Kłopoty z kuracją szokową,” Rzeczpospolita, 5 Jan. 2001; for Slavomir Radon’s comments, see Slawomir Majman, “Jedwabne,” The Warsaw Voice, 4 March 2001.

19. J.R. Nowak, “Kto falszuje historie,” Nasz Dziennik, 13–14 May 2000.

20. Leszek Czajkowski, “Jedwabny interes,” Nasza Polska, 16 Jan. 2001

21. Leon Kalewski, “Prostujemy Klamstwa o pogromie w Jedwabne,” Nasze Polska, 10 May 2000.

http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2001-2/wistrich.htm

Dear dear, when you dismiss the work of reputable historians because it grates with your ideological impules is hard to have any discussion.

You are obviouly dangerously ignorant of the vocabulory of the BNP which is of no help to Jews in England.

If you look at the immigration debate in the UK you will quickly come across the vocabulory of the BNP.

In the hatred fostered against Muslims many jump unthinkingly onto the bandwagon.

It should be always kept in mind that immigration debates in the UK have always been shot through with racism. The first immigration laws in England were passed in 1905, the Aliens act. That law was passed after anti semitic campaigns that demonised Jews much as Muslims are today.

In their anti Islamic fervour many fall for the BNP poison which is a danger to all minorities including Jews, one of their new MEPS cut his teeth torching synagogues. If you lable everyone who has a different opinion to you as BNP then you are doing them a service.

Even your vocabulary is of the BNP. How do you differ from them?
Passing off antisemitic propaganda as facts doesn’t work.

I think you need to learn that posting links to web sites that purvey the same distortion of fact that as you in no way consitutes persausive evidence.

As that link itself demonstrates there was extensive protest within and without De Paul university at Dershowitz’s involvement. The letter that supposedly proves Dershowitz was invited to comment is clearly a demand on him to produce evidence for his claims. The claims in question are from the campaign he had been conducting to deny tenure. The letter clearly refers to propaganda against Finkelstein previously sent by Dershowitz.

There seem to be a few favoured sources on the web that for you constitute the facts, like looking in a mirror.

http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2007/04/dershowitz-was-asked-to-comment-on.html

Israel has no immunity to criticism, moral immunity to criticism, because of the Holocaust. Israel is a sovereign nation-state, and it should be judged by the same standards as any other state.

Spot the falsehood!

Or – make it falsehoods!

I am afraid your account is simply not true, The Political Science facultty members at De Paul voted 9 to 3 to give Finkelstein tenure and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Personnel Committee 5 to 0.

The overwhelming support among academics for gving Finkelstein tenure was overridden by the administration for non acedemic reasons, pressure from the Dershowitz lobby.

Raul Hillberg, whose historical study of the holocaust was long considered the definitive text on the subject, backed Finkelsteins and the integrity of his sources.

It is quite simply a falsehood to say that De Paul invetigated his work and found it lacking. It was Finkelstein who ripped apart and demonstrated the poverty of sources, mainly IDF records, in the book by Dershowitz defedning Israel’s human rights record.

The letter from De Paul university to Finkelstein aknowkedged the quality of his work and stated the main reason for denying tenure to be his provocative style and ad hominen attacks.

Many believe this was the result of lobbying by Dershowitz who had also tried, unsuccessfully, to pressure Finkelsteins publisher into withdrawing Finkelstein’s citique of Dershowitz’s tendentious work.

I must say that the BNP could find no better friends than you and some of your fellow posters. When you debase the charge of anti semitism by aggresively hurling it at anyone who does not support Israel’s actions in Gaza and label anyone off your message as BNP then you muddy the waters and inhibit clear vision of what that despicalbe organisation actually stands for.

Given the racist attitudes towards Arabs that liberally sprinkle these posts I would say there are others here who are ideologically moe akin to the BNP.