Fwd: ZGram - 9/23/2002 - "Smearing the Germans"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

>Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 18:11:14 -0700
>To: zgrams@zundelsite.org
>From: Ingrid Rimland <irimland@mail.bellsouth.net>
>Subject: ZGram - 9/23/2002 - "Smearing the Germans"
>Cc:
>Bcc:
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>
>ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny
>
>September 23, 2002
>
>Good Morning from the Zundelsite:
>
>A little preface to this one:  All of a sudden my Eudora program 
>does not allow me to send out a letter that is considered 
>"offensive" - the two words being tagged as offending sensibilities 
>are "por nography" and - get this!  - "whi ne" and "whi nes".  Now 
>do you anyone who "whi-nes"? At every opportunity???

>To get this letter off to you,  I worked a little typo in...  Just 
>so you know!


=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D

>
>With attribution to Antiwar.com and Justin Raimondo - see 
>information at the bottom of this essay:
>
>[START]
>
>SMEARING THE GERMANS
>
>Pro-war political correctness: if you're for peace, you must be 'anti-Semit=
ic'
>
>The comment by the German Minister of Justice that President Bush 
>was focusing on Iraq to divert attention from domestic problems - 
>"That's a popular method. Even Hitler did that" - came in the midst 
>of an all-out propaganda offensive by the War Party to paint the 
>antiwar opposition as "anti-Semitic." On the nation's campuses, a 
>new "watchdog" group, Campus Watch, has been set up by Israel's most 
>vocal supporters to "monitor" our universities for evidence of 
>anti-Semitism. The neocon's favorite Ivy Leaguer, Harvard President 
>Lawrence Summers, has declared that anti-Semitism is on the rise, 
>not only throughout Europe and the Middle East, but also in the U.S. 
>In an ironic dramatization of the (once) conservative view that 
>foreign aid is bad because it may some day come back to haunt us, 
>Israel's amen corner in the U.S. has launched a slick television ad 
>campaign, intent on prettifying the Jewish state's increasingly ugly 
>policy of naked aggression and ethnic cleansing. (Hey, I hope you 
>enjoy the ads, because you're paying for them!)
>
>The timing of the German controversy couldn't have been better, as 
>far as the War Party is concerned, and Condi Rice was quick to snarl 
>back at Berlin:
>
>"The reported statements by the interior minister, even if half of 
>what was reported was said, are simply unacceptable. How can you use 
>the name Hitler and the name of the president of the US in the same 
>sentence? Particularly how can a German, given the devotion of the 
>US in the liberation of Germany from Hitler?"
>
>Condi's unspoken assumption is that Germans are forever to be deemed 
>morally inferior and incapable of judging their betters, namely the 
>United States. After all, we "liberated" them - after handing over 
>half the country (and half of Europe) to the Communists. The loopy 
>thesis of Daniel Goldhagen, that permanently banishes the entire 
>German race to a kind of moral purgatory, is rejected by many 
>Zionists and most Jews, but eagerly embraced by a top U.S. official. 
>If not for Condi's genuinely bigoted obtuseness, she might see the 
>rather obvious truth that the Germans are certainly well-qualified 
>to warn us of the dangers attendant to Hitlerism.
>
>Who better than a German to tell the story of Hitler's rise? Who 
>more than they know the dangers inherent in visions of world 
>hegemony? As for Condi's incredulity at the "anti-American" crime of 
>having Dubya and Der Fuehrer occupy the same sentence, it certainly 
>takes a lot of nerve on her part to whin e about the promiscuous 
>Hitler-mongering that characterizes discussion of the Iraq question, 
>and, indeed, the foreign policy debate in general.
>
>For an American official to complain about this kind of hyperbole 
>really does take the cake, since every single American President 
>since Bush 41 has invoked the Hitler specter as justification for a 
>policy of endless war. To the senior Bush, Saddam Hussein was "worse 
>than Hitler." When U.S. forces "liberated" Panama from Manuel 
>Noriega, a strongman Washington had supported for years, it was 
>suddenly "discovered" that the Panamanian dictator was an admirer of 
>- you guessed it! - none other than the man with the funny mustache. 
>As Michael Parenti relates:
>
>"The Pentagon reported U.S. troops entering Noriega's headquarters 
>and discovering porno graphy, a Hitler portrait, voodoo 
>paraphernalia, and one hundred pounds of cocaine. The porno graphy 
>turned out to be Spanish-language copies of Playboy. The Hitler 
>picture was in a Time-Life photo history of World War II. The 
>'voodoo' implements were San Blas Indian carvings. And the 'cocaine' 
>was nothing more than an emergency stockpile of tortilla flour. But 
>these belated corrections received scant coverage."
>
>To Bill Clinton, a tinpot tyrant of Slobodan Milosevic's ilk fit the 
>Hitlerian profile to a tee. When asked to justify the war against 
>the former Yugoslavia, he invoked the shade of the Thousand Year 
>Reich:
>
>"What if someone had listened to Winston Churchill and stood up to 
>Adolf Hitler earlier? How many people's lives might have been saved? 
>And how many American lives might have been saved?"
>
>This overblown and over-used analogy has been the knee-jerk response 
>of American officials to each and every adversary we've faced since 
>the real Hitler perished in the flames of his own Gotterdammerung. 
>Referring to Saddam as a Middle Eastern Hitler has become the common 
>parlance of all wings of the War Party, and even some anti-war 
>commentators eager to prove their anti-Saddam bona fides.
>
>As if an impoverished, militarily weak, left-socialist dictator 
>sitting out in the middle of the desert equaled the industrial and 
>military might of the Nazi empire at its zenith! Outside the U.S. 
>and Israel, it's too absurd a comparison to be taken seriously, 
>except as war propaganda of the crudest, most unconvincing sort. Yet 
>it is uttered by an American President and high government officials 
>almost as a kind of mantra, a magical invocation designed to ward 
>off evil spirits - in this case, anyone who dares to question their 
>policy of perpetual war.
>
>A desire to end the discussion, rather than begin it, prefaces the 
>public pronouncements of the War Party these days. Condi Rice's 
>smearing of the Germans was taken a step further by William Safire, 
>the New York Times columnist and American Likudnik, who reports the 
>alleged remarks of Rudolf Scharping, the former defense minister, as 
>evidence of a "bigoted analysis" of international politics. At a 
>meeting in Hamburg, Scharping was asked why Germany was breaking 
>with its American allies on the Iraq question. As Safire would have 
>it, this was the occasion for at least a partial reawakening of the 
>Blonde Beast:
>
>"Rudolf Scharping reported that he had answered that very question 
>in a Schr=F6der cabinet meeting: it was all about the Jews. Bush was 
>motivated to overthrow Saddam by his need to curry favor with what 
>Scharping called 'a powerful - perhaps overly powerful - Jewish 
>lobby' in the coming U.S. elections. Jeb Bush needed their votes in 
>Florida as George Pataki did in New York, and Congressional 
>redistricting made Jewish votes central to control of Congress. 
>Germany, the discredited minister said proudly to his discomfited 
>audience, had rejected such pandering."
>
>Does anyone deny the importance of Florida and New York in American 
>politics? Does anyone really question that Israel's lobby is among 
>the most powerful in Washington? American commentators routinely 
>make precisely these points without being accused of a hate-crime. 
>In analyzing the internal political dynamics of a slavishly 
>pro-Israel foreign policy, and George Dubya's rush to war, Scharping 
>was merely repeating what Robert Novak and Chris Matthews - to cite 
>just two examples - say to millions of American viewers and readers 
>all the time. Are they, too, guilty of promulgating a "bigoted 
>analysis" - or is this just another way of describing anyone who 
>doesn't toe the Likudnik party line?
>
>The goal of this ongoing propaganda campaign is to equate virtually 
>all expressions of opposition to the war as "anti-Semitic" 
>outbursts, a strategy firmly rooted in the real meaning and politics 
>of the coming conflict, which are just as Scharping described. For 
>Israel will indeed be the chief beneficiary of the conquest of Iraq, 
>which is why their American supporters have become the vanguard of 
>the War Party. Those "weapons of mass destruction" we keep hearing 
>about, if they exist, have a limited range: Tel Aviv is Saddam's 
>target, not Texas, but George W. Bush seems to have lost track of 
>the difference. To rationalize our President's embarrassing 
>geographical confusion, his supporters have taken to smearing anyone 
>who points out the difference as an "anti-Semite."
>
>Not since the "Red Decade" of the 1930s has a foreign government 
>commanded the absolute loyalty of a significant political faction, 
>one capable of engaging in fierce political combat in concert with 
>its overseas overlords. The essence of the old Stalinist spirit was 
>the fanatic desire to stamp out all opposition, to isolate and 
>defame it, and drive it out of politics altogether; today the same 
>militance animates Israel's neoconservative cheerleaders. The 
>sinister group that calls itself "Campus Watch" keeps "dossiers" on 
>professors deemed too critical of Israel. What next - will they 
>follow in the footsteps of the real loonies and post an "enemies 
>list"?
>
>If you were opposed to Russia during the war years, you were a 
>"fascist fifth columnist"- an epithet the Commies of yesteryear used 
>to refer to the isolationist and Trotskyist opponents of Roosevelt's 
>drive to war. Now the "ex-"-leftist turned rightwing nut-ball David 
>Horowitz describes the antiwar movement as a "fifth column" in the 
>service of the Iraqi Hitler. In true retro fashion, Horowitz has 
>started a "Defend Israel" "war chest," and regularly pleads for 
>money from his brainwashed followers just as the old Communist Party 
>unconditionally defended the Soviet Union - no matter what 
>atrocities it committed - and took up contributions on behalf of the 
>Workers' Fatherland.
>
>The idea that an alliance of Christian fundamentalists and their 
>Jewish equivalent has taken hold of the Republican party and what 
>used to be the conservative movement is not all that surprising. But 
>the War Party has made far more gains of late, even establishing a 
>beachhead at Harvard. The President of that august institution, 
>already having won the hearts and minds of everyone from Hilton 
>Kramer to Norman Podhoretz (a narrow spectrum, that, but a 
>significant one), has now stepped forward to denounce the divestment 
>movement that has bedeviled Israel's amen corner on college campuses 
>across the nation. It was bad enough, he says, when people like Pat 
>Buchanan and Russell Kirk descried Israel's undue influence on 
>American politics,
>
>"But where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israeli 
>have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated 
>right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly 
>finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and 
>thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are 
>anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent."
>
>Yes, even liberals and "progressives" (i.e. parlor pinks and 
>outright commies) are shamed by the sight of the American giant 
>being led around by his nose. Ariel Sharon says "jump!" and the 
>President of the most powerful nation on earth wants to know "how 
>high?" We pay more tribute to the Israelis than any conquered 
>province paid to their Roman overlords - and still it is never 
>enough, as the price of this "special relationship" continues to 
>skyrocket. It is a price that is measured, not only in dollars and 
>cents, but also in political and moral capital.
>
>Politically, the American-Israeli symbiosis means that the "war on 
>terrorism" is unwinnable, and therefore eternal. Osama bin Laden 
>couldn't wish for more. Morally, it means every time Sharon's 
>helicopter gun-ships mow down a few more Palestinian kiddies, the 
>American government and the American people must bear the burden of 
>partial responsibility for these crimes. A divestment campaign is 
>one way to ameliorate the moral dilemma of being an American citizen 
>who continues to uphold the foreign policy of the Founders, which is 
>precisely why Summers and the Israel lobby oppose it so vehemently. 
>Summers pontificates:
>
>"Hundreds of European academics have called for an end to support 
>for Israeli researchers, though not for an end to support for 
>researchers from any other nation. Israeli scholars this past spring 
>were forced off the board of an international literature journal."
>
>But surely the boycotters were making a point when they singled out 
>Israel and not other nations: that the policies of its government 
>are unacceptable. As for Israeli scholars being barred from 
>international journals, it depends on the views of those scholars. 
>As Summers says later on in his sanctimonious tirade, "We should 
>also recall that academic freedom does not include freedom from 
>criticism." We should indeed, which is precisely why an academic 
>boycott, based on the expressed views of individuals, is a 
>legitimate weapon in the war of ideas, and not the act of 
>anti-Semitic hooligans. And I would like to know if Summers was 
>among those who protested the European Union boycott of Austria when 
>the Freedom Party came into the government: if not, then I must 
>politely ask him to shut the heck up.
>
>Summers whi nes that Israel is not universally beloved:
>
>"At the same rallies where protesters, many of them university 
>students, condemn the IMF and global capitalism and raise questions 
>about globalization, it is becoming increasingly common to also lash 
>out at Israel. Indeed, at the anti-IMF rallies last spring, chants 
>were heard equating Hitler and Sharon."
>
>Like is tough, isn't it? Here you regularly invade, occupy, 
>humiliate, and systematically destroy an entire society before the 
>eyes of the whole world, and what kind of appreciation do you get? 
>None! Zero! Zilch! According to Summers, it's okay for the 
>anti-globos to attack capitalism, free trade, and modernity - but he 
>draws the line when it comes to Israel. Each to their own hierarchy 
>of values=8A.
>
>Like all neocons, Summers is a potential police agent, a one-man 
>Cheka whose nose for political correctness always translates into a 
>hunt for treason:
>
>"Events to raise funds for organizations of questionable political 
>provenance that in some cases were later found to support terrorism 
>have been held by student organizations on this and other campuses 
>with at least modest success and very little criticism."
>
>To hear Summers tell it, the Osama bin Laden Defense Fund and 
>Marching Band is operating right there in Harvard Yard. Well, then, 
>who are they? Why didn't he name these organizations "of 
>questionable political provenance"? This is the favorite tactic of 
>the new Chekists: to announce, loudly, that there are traitors in 
>our midst who, it is implied, ought to be immediately arrested, 
>without being too specific. That way suspicion falls on everyone who 
>dissents from the pro-Israel party line, spreading evenly over the 
>landscape like radioactive fallout, poisoning the atmosphere and 
>choking off debate.
>
>The Germans are already apologizing, and the scrappy Justice 
>Minister has been forced to resign: the commissars of political 
>correctness made an example out of her, as if to warn any German - 
>or American - politician that they will only be pushed so far.
>
>The very real divergence of American and Israeli interests will 
>eventually lead to a general denunciation of the old-line foreign 
>policy establishment, and the vast majority of high-ranking American 
>military, since they, too, oppose a war whose sole beneficiary 
>(aside from Big Oil) is Israel. It will be pointed out that the 
>so-called "chickenhawks" are mostly Jewish, and that to criticize 
>these militants is to reenact Kristallnacht.
>
>There is only one proper answer to that, but it isn't printable in a 
>family website such as this one. Suffice to say that criticism of 
>Israel is likely to rise in exact proportion to efforts to suppress 
>it, especially among college-age and high school youth. Instead of 
>whi ning about the alleged rise in anti-Semitism, Summers should 
>spend his time addressing the main cause of it in the twenty-first 
>century - the policies of the government of Israel.
>
>-Justin Raimondo
>
>
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>[END]