The Crackpot Jew Norman Finkelstein 2

Professor Dershowitz is trying to throw a "Night of the Long Knives" party for that crackpot Jew, Norman Finkelstein.

You may read about the details in http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070521/wiener from which we excerpt:
 
"Of course Finkelstein's work--like that of all of us--is 'flawed,'" Novick wrote. The question, he said, is "whether, on balance, the positive contribution of the totality of his scholarly work outweighs its faults." His own published criticisms of Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry "reflect my values, my sensibility, who I am...but I don't confuse those criticisms with holy writ." Novick then appealed for "pluralism" in the academy: "There are those who relish the adversarial role, who delight in combat, whose greatest joy is in advancing a cause... such people are often inclined to stretch evidence to the breaking point, and occasionally beyond.... Professor Finkelstein seems to be of that number, as does Professor Dershowitz." That was not his own style, Novick said. While it would be "disastrous," he wrote, "to have a university composed exclusively of people like Finkelstein and Dershowitz," it would be "equally undesirable to have a university composed exclusively of people like me."

At this juncture, you may wonder what this all means. Well, in case you haven't noticed, there is a great debate about the Holocaust. This debate is overt and covert, explicit and implicit. I wrote about it once in my posting http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2006/12/speechless-in-gaza.html

In Ha'aretz we read that the name of Daniel Pearl has been added to a wall whereon are engraved the names of those killed in the Holocaust. There is a bit of controversy. In short, there is a tendency away from the strict theological interpretation of the Holocaust as an event divine and wordly, to a more worldy view, with the divine extended back to the past and forward to the future, but in exactly the same way the divine does for all things. You might think this is not too very interesting, but I believe it to be emblematic of a number of trends within the world. I believe it to be one of the first skirmishes of the great battles of the 21st century. Before we can get into this, I have some things to attend to, one of which is to actually write first drafts of these posts and redact in an effort to be a bit clearer. This topic will be called Future Ideologies, even though they exist right now. They are in chrysalis, as it were, and not yet fully formed. In our hearts we feel their lineaments and shudder.

Dzhugashvili Or DzhuBushvili And Non-Euclidean Geometry

Der Freischutz

I was jumped over my tasteless History of the Future post about Georgei DzhuBushvili. As if he were anything at all like Josef Dzhugashvili, or Stalin as he is commonly know. Can you imagine anyone writing a book like Animal Farm about George Bush? Hmmm. Come to think of it...all Muslims are alike, only some are more...Muslimy than others! That seems to fit in with the perceptions of the "base" to which the proponents of constant war make their appeals. So, with Levine ineffectually trying to maintain the peace, old man Steuben and I whipped ourselves into a pointless fury of political debate, consisting essentially of my profoundly deep observation that Baghdad was Bush's Stalingrad, and Steuben's snorting into his beer stein. I should mention at this point that this particular tete-a-tete, or vis-a-vis, or kitfu kitfu ( shoulder-to-shoulder for you non-Arabists out there) was held at the German-American Shooting Club, or the Deutsche-Amerikanische something something Freischutz Verein something. (I told you I lived in the midst of a variety of peoples.) The discussion became so heated that Otto the bartender removed the august head of Fritz the deer from the bar. Fritz was sort of a mascot for the Verein. A dead mascot, to be sure, and well preserved by the taxidermist's art. Fritz was the holder of stakes and the arbiter of fortunes...there was a type of deer-omancy (cervomancy?) practiced that had the decisions made by tossing rings at Fritz, and the rings that landed on his antlers and stayed there indicated the winning side. (Hey...there is drinking going on here! If you want behavior of a more cultured type, go to Dresden and visit the Zwinger and look at Kunst!) Anyhow.......... Baghdad Bush Stalingrad! No it ain't! Yes it is! That sums it up. Steuben sez "Ha! Yer so schmart! Stalin won at Stalingrad! So you mean Bush will WIN at Baghdad! Ha!" "No way", sez I. "Historic parallels are not so exact...and they follow non-euclidean geometry...parallels intersect and switch packets of DNA...and then bacteria becomes resistant to drugs and the lions will lay down with the lambs." Suddenly a shot rang out !! Well, it is a shooting club.

Black Coffe And America's Kingdom

The Blog qahwasada ( qahwa sada or qahwa sawda' = black coffee ) has an excellent series of postings on America's Kingdom by Robert Vitalis. This is a history of our relations with Saudi Arabia. http://www.qahwasada.com/ excerpt: "America’s Kingdom is most basically about the organization of the labor process in the oil industry in Eastern Saudi Arabia during the time when the private U.S.-owned company known as ARAMCO was charge of exploration and production, starting in the 1930s. My book identifies the racist order built by ARAMCO in Dhahran and the other company campsites for what it is, a Jim Crow system, meaning that its white American executives pursued a purposeful, planned project of discrimination and forced segregation. I show that firms generally in the U.S. mining industry organized the labor process in this way in, among other places, what was then Indian territory, Arizona, “New” Mexico, and so on, beginning in the 1860s and 1870s in the copper industry, and, a decade or two later in the newly emerging oil industry, and when American oil firms move beyond the Caribbean Basin (Mexico, Trinidad, Colombia, Venezuela) and start to explore for oil in the Gulf and its surroundings. At stake was what I call the “racial wage.” All firms paid miners, drillers, and other skilled and unskilled labor different wages according to race. And ending the racial wage became the issue that pitted the subordinate races against not only the white owners and managers but also the privileged caste of workers in strike after strike across the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The full panoply of Jim Crow institutions—segregated housing, differential access to services, let alone the degradation and humiliation of white supremacist thought—worked to buttress the labor control regime. The system was exported everywhere U.S. firms went, although it has not been noticed anywhere by anyone writing about oil in the past few decades, with one important exception. The historian Miguel Tinker Salas has been working on a similar project in the case of the Creole (Exxon’s subsidiary) camps in Maracaibo, Venezuela, when oil exploration began there in the 1920s. I also explain the causes for, in this case, the halting and partial steps to dismantle the Jim Crow order inside the kingdom, which happens during the brief moment of a Saudi labor movement in the 1950s and what I call an incipient challenge to the hierarchy of the camps, the world oil market, and American hegemony launched for different reasons by a set of progressives in government and their allies in the royal family."

Hammorabi

This is excerpted from Hammorabi's most recent posting. I have been reading him since the inception of the Unending War in Iraq. His outlook has changed considerably. George W Bush and Iraq http://hammorabi.blogspot.com/ GWB is one name for two; the father and the son. Both of them share two main things; namely the war in Iraq followed by destroying this country. However the means of destructions are different. GWB the father was and will remain criminal towards Iraq and the Iraqis. He destroyed Iraqi infra-structures in 1991 war and called to support the Iraqis if they revolt against Saddam yet he deceived them and withdraw his support. He left Saddam to crush the Iraqis in one of most historic mass graves which was later discovered. GWB and his ministers then forced the UN to impose and maintain one of the most criminal sanction on Iraq for 12 years which killed at least one million Iraqis most of them are children. Most of deaths among these children happened from the use of depleted uranium during the 1991 GWB the father's war. His secretary of state Madeline Albright, once answered a question for a reporter about if it is worth to kill half a million children in Iraq; she replied; yes it is worth it! The Iraqis will never forget this woman with blood in her hands and the hands of her boss. She and her GWB without any doubt will stand in front of God to be judged about the blood of the Iraqi children and other Iraqis killed in 1991 and during the sanction. GWB the son share with his father that he is a USA president and share the war and destruction of Iraq afterward. His father forced UN sanction after his bloody war while GWB the son left Iraq after 2003 war and for the last 4 years a country without proper and un-armed forces, police forces armed with simple rifles which are much less than the terrorists arms, and destruction of every thing in Iraq. Iraq is now a destroyed country without services or structures and no real arm forces or security forces with terrorists every where and using every thing to kill. Above all the American forces and its British and other allies care not about the security of the people. Not only that but they release most of the criminals that they capture. On the other hand they prevent and hinder the security forces of Iraq to do their work properly. They keep for themselves the right to veto the Iraqi authorities' decisions including the top government... It puts things into perspective.