"[I]f we are to honor [Martin Luther] King's message* and not merely the man, we must condemn Israel's actions: unrelenting violations of international law, continued occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, home demolitions and land confiscations. We must cry out at the treatment at checkpoints, the routine searches of their homes and restrictions on their movements, and the severely limited access to decent housing, schools, food, hospitals and water that many of them face.
"We must not tolerate Israel's refusal even to discuss the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes, as prescribed by United Nations resolutions, and we ought to question the US government funds that have supported multiple hostilities and thousands of civilian casualties in Gaza, as well as the $38 billion the US government has pledged in military support to Israel.
"And finally, we must, with as much courage and conviction as we can muster, speak out against the system of legal discrimination that exists inside Israel, a system complete with... more than 50 laws that discriminate against Palestinians - such as the new nation-state law that says explicitly that only Jewish Israelis have the right of self-determination in Israel, ignoring the rights of the Arab minority that makes up 21% of the population." (From Time to break the silence on Palestine, Michelle Alexander**, nytimes.com, 19/1/19)
[*"I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight [4/4/67] because my conscience leaves me no other choice... A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam";**Michelle Alexander became a New York Times columnist in 2018. She is a civil rights lawyer and advocate, legal scholar and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.]
Showing posts with label Martin Luther King. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Martin Luther King. Show all posts
Thursday, February 7, 2019
Friday, May 13, 2016
Introducing Rabbi Joachim Prinz
An interesting comment on the relationship between Zionism and anti-Semitism by Stephen Shenfield from the comment thread following Roland Nikles' An apologia for Ken Livingstone (What would Buber say?) at mondoweiss.net:
"Zionism... was steeped in anti-Semitism from the start. Zionists agreed with anti-Semites that the Jews were a foreign and unassimilable element in their host societies and that it was therefore natural, inevitable, and humanly understandable that they should be rejected and persecuted. They shared the anti-Semites' negative perceptions of Jews as they actually existed. That also meant that they hated themselves. Where they differed from the more thoroughgoing anti-Semites was their believe that at least some Jews could be rehabilitated and normalized through Zionist efforts. Hitler in particular did not believe this was possible; for him the only final solution of the Jewish question was extermination.
"However, Hitler cannot be equated with Nazism as such. In the 1930s there were Nazis, including SS officers, who thought Zionism could solve the Jewish question. A key figure in the attempt at a Zionist-Nazi rapprochement was Rabbi Joachim Prinz. I got hold of his book Wir Juden (We Jews), published in Berlin in 1934, i.e. under Nazi rule. The author himself apparently blocked publication of an English translation after his emigration to the US in 1937 - and no wonder. The book is a skillful synthesis of Nazi and Zionist ideas, with the 'German Revolution' presented as a model for Jews to emulate. It shows that the German Zionists did not collaborate with the Nazis for purely practical purposes - they also saw the two movements as ideologically complementary. Of all the tendencies of Jewish thought Zionism is and always was the closest to anti-Semitism. The hypocrisy of Zionists accusing other people of anti-Semitism on the flimsiest grounds is astounding."
Here's more on Rabbi Prinz by Israel Shahak:
"Dr Joachim Prinz, a Zionist rabbi who subsequently emigrated to the USA, where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading light in the World Zionist Organization (as well as a great friend of Golda Meir), published in 1934 a special book, Wir Juden (We Jews), to celebrate Hitler's so-called German Revolution and the defeat of liberalism: 'The meaning of the German Revolution for the German nation will eventually be clear to those who have created it and formed its image. Its meaning for us must be set forth here: the fortunes of liberalism are lost. The only form of political life which has helped Jewish assimilation is sunk.'
"The victory of Nazism rules out assimilation and mixed marriages as an option for Jews. 'We are not unhappy about this,' said Dr Prinz. In the fact that Jews are being forced to identify themselves as Jews, he sees 'the fulfilment of our desires'. And further: 'We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honoured and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind. Having so declared himself, he will never be capable of faulty loyalty towards a state. The state cannot want other Jews but such as declare themselves as belonging to their nation. It will not want Jewish flatterers and crawlers. It must demand of us faith and loyalty to our own interest. For only he who honours his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honour towards the national will of other nations.'
"The whole book is full of similar crude flatteries of Nazi ideology, glee at the defeat of liberalism and particularly of the ideas of the French Revolution, and great expectations that, in the congenial myth of the Aryan race, Zionism and the myth of the Jewish race will also thrive." (Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, 1994, pp 71-72)
Compare the above with the following account of Prinz from the promotional website of the 2013 documentary, Joachim Prinz: I Shall Not Be Silent:
"In Berlin in the 1930s, the civil rights of Jews were systematically stripped away. A young rabbi refused to be silent. His name was Joachim Prinz and he set out to restore the self-esteem of the German Jews. Knowing the Nazis were monitoring his every word, and despite repeated arrests, Prinz continued to preach about the value of Judaism. He saved many lives by encouraging Jews to emigrate from Germany. Expelled from Germany in 1937, Prinz arrived in the United States, the land where democracy had supposedly triumphed over bigotry and hatred. Here, he witnessed racism against African Americans and realized the American ideal was not a reality. As rabbi of Temple B'nai Abraham in Newark, NJ and later as President of the American Jewish Congress, Prinz became a leader of the civil rights movement. Prinz worked to organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, declaring, 'bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.' Moments later, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech. Throughout his career, Prinz spoke out for justice, unconcerned with the popularity of his positions. He identified with the prophets, writing in a 1975 letter, 'Remember the Biblical adage, 'For the sake of Zion, I shall not be silent'." (Prinz's Story, prinzdocumentary.org)
Returning to earth:
"Said Rabbi Joachim Prinz, President of the American Jewish Congress in a resolution he introduced at the closing session of the group's biennial national convention in Miami Beach on May 18, 1958: 'We call upon the United States to take the lead in solving the Arab Refugee problem by pressing for the resettlement of the bulk of the refugees in the sparsely populated land of their Arab kinsmen'." (The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time, Moshe Menuhin, 1969, p 142)
"Zionism... was steeped in anti-Semitism from the start. Zionists agreed with anti-Semites that the Jews were a foreign and unassimilable element in their host societies and that it was therefore natural, inevitable, and humanly understandable that they should be rejected and persecuted. They shared the anti-Semites' negative perceptions of Jews as they actually existed. That also meant that they hated themselves. Where they differed from the more thoroughgoing anti-Semites was their believe that at least some Jews could be rehabilitated and normalized through Zionist efforts. Hitler in particular did not believe this was possible; for him the only final solution of the Jewish question was extermination.
"However, Hitler cannot be equated with Nazism as such. In the 1930s there were Nazis, including SS officers, who thought Zionism could solve the Jewish question. A key figure in the attempt at a Zionist-Nazi rapprochement was Rabbi Joachim Prinz. I got hold of his book Wir Juden (We Jews), published in Berlin in 1934, i.e. under Nazi rule. The author himself apparently blocked publication of an English translation after his emigration to the US in 1937 - and no wonder. The book is a skillful synthesis of Nazi and Zionist ideas, with the 'German Revolution' presented as a model for Jews to emulate. It shows that the German Zionists did not collaborate with the Nazis for purely practical purposes - they also saw the two movements as ideologically complementary. Of all the tendencies of Jewish thought Zionism is and always was the closest to anti-Semitism. The hypocrisy of Zionists accusing other people of anti-Semitism on the flimsiest grounds is astounding."
Here's more on Rabbi Prinz by Israel Shahak:
"Dr Joachim Prinz, a Zionist rabbi who subsequently emigrated to the USA, where he rose to be vice-chairman of the World Jewish Congress and a leading light in the World Zionist Organization (as well as a great friend of Golda Meir), published in 1934 a special book, Wir Juden (We Jews), to celebrate Hitler's so-called German Revolution and the defeat of liberalism: 'The meaning of the German Revolution for the German nation will eventually be clear to those who have created it and formed its image. Its meaning for us must be set forth here: the fortunes of liberalism are lost. The only form of political life which has helped Jewish assimilation is sunk.'
"The victory of Nazism rules out assimilation and mixed marriages as an option for Jews. 'We are not unhappy about this,' said Dr Prinz. In the fact that Jews are being forced to identify themselves as Jews, he sees 'the fulfilment of our desires'. And further: 'We want assimilation to be replaced by a new law: the declaration of belonging to the Jewish nation and Jewish race. A state built upon the principle of the purity of nation and race can only be honoured and respected by a Jew who declares his belonging to his own kind. Having so declared himself, he will never be capable of faulty loyalty towards a state. The state cannot want other Jews but such as declare themselves as belonging to their nation. It will not want Jewish flatterers and crawlers. It must demand of us faith and loyalty to our own interest. For only he who honours his own breed and his own blood can have an attitude of honour towards the national will of other nations.'
"The whole book is full of similar crude flatteries of Nazi ideology, glee at the defeat of liberalism and particularly of the ideas of the French Revolution, and great expectations that, in the congenial myth of the Aryan race, Zionism and the myth of the Jewish race will also thrive." (Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, 1994, pp 71-72)
Compare the above with the following account of Prinz from the promotional website of the 2013 documentary, Joachim Prinz: I Shall Not Be Silent:
"In Berlin in the 1930s, the civil rights of Jews were systematically stripped away. A young rabbi refused to be silent. His name was Joachim Prinz and he set out to restore the self-esteem of the German Jews. Knowing the Nazis were monitoring his every word, and despite repeated arrests, Prinz continued to preach about the value of Judaism. He saved many lives by encouraging Jews to emigrate from Germany. Expelled from Germany in 1937, Prinz arrived in the United States, the land where democracy had supposedly triumphed over bigotry and hatred. Here, he witnessed racism against African Americans and realized the American ideal was not a reality. As rabbi of Temple B'nai Abraham in Newark, NJ and later as President of the American Jewish Congress, Prinz became a leader of the civil rights movement. Prinz worked to organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, declaring, 'bigotry and hatred are not the most urgent problem. The most urgent, the most disgraceful, the most shameful and the most tragic problem is silence.' Moments later, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his 'I Have a Dream' speech. Throughout his career, Prinz spoke out for justice, unconcerned with the popularity of his positions. He identified with the prophets, writing in a 1975 letter, 'Remember the Biblical adage, 'For the sake of Zion, I shall not be silent'." (Prinz's Story, prinzdocumentary.org)
Returning to earth:
"Said Rabbi Joachim Prinz, President of the American Jewish Congress in a resolution he introduced at the closing session of the group's biennial national convention in Miami Beach on May 18, 1958: 'We call upon the United States to take the lead in solving the Arab Refugee problem by pressing for the resettlement of the bulk of the refugees in the sparsely populated land of their Arab kinsmen'." (The Decadence of Judaism in Our Time, Moshe Menuhin, 1969, p 142)
Wednesday, August 28, 2013
A Palestinian Martin Luther King
The dumbed-down Sydney Morning Herald on Monday carried yet another opinion piece by Vic Alhadeff, chief executive of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies.
Wearing his Jewish liberal - as opposed to his Israel lobbyist - hat, Baruch O'Farrell's recently-appointed NSW Human Rights Award judge took advantage of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous 'I have a dream' speech to bask in King's reflected glory.
Inevitably, Alhadeff got around to quoting King's ringing admonition that "individuals should be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character."
All I could think of was Israel's discriminatory, Jews-only Law of Return, and a Palestinian Martin Luther King saying: 'Individuals should not be judged by the Jewishness of their mothers, but by their actual - not imagined - connection to the land of Palestine.
Wearing his Jewish liberal - as opposed to his Israel lobbyist - hat, Baruch O'Farrell's recently-appointed NSW Human Rights Award judge took advantage of the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous 'I have a dream' speech to bask in King's reflected glory.
Inevitably, Alhadeff got around to quoting King's ringing admonition that "individuals should be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character."
All I could think of was Israel's discriminatory, Jews-only Law of Return, and a Palestinian Martin Luther King saying: 'Individuals should not be judged by the Jewishness of their mothers, but by their actual - not imagined - connection to the land of Palestine.
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Israeli Propaganda Week
"To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction." (The Purpose of Education, Martin Luther King, Morehouse College Student Paper, The Maroon Tiger, 1947)
Zionist propagandists will grasp at any straw to bolster their faltering case. The most recent example here has been an Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) poster barrage targeting the 8th Annual Israeli Apartheid Week on campuses across the nation.
One such poster features a photograph of Black-American civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King with an accompanying, unsourced, though presumably genuine, quote. Google the quote and one of the first entries to emerge is the following from jewishvirtuallibrary.org:
"10 days before his assassination, at the annual convention on [sic] the Rabbinical assembly, Dr King said: 'The response of some of the so-called young militants does not represent the position of the vast majority of Negroes. There are some who are color-consumed and they see a kind of mystique in blackness or in being colored, and anything non-colored is condemned. We do not follow that course... Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect her right to exist, its territorial integrity and the right to use whatever sea lanes it needs. Israel is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security, and that security must be a reality'. Source: I.L. Kenen, Israel's Defense Line, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY: 1981, 266"
[NB: I have highlighted in the above quotation the part which accompanies the photograph of King.]
What, I wonder, would the average Australian university student make of King's alleged words?
Putting to one side any analysis of the quote's content, one would hope that any students reading it would have the critical wherewithal to ask themselves (or AUJS) the following obvious questions:
1) Why is the quote not sourced as are those on AUJS's other 2 posters?
2) What is the source of the quote?
Assuming that any students were sufficiently interested as to google it and so access the above extract, one would hope that they would then have the nouse to ask two further questions:
1) Who is I.L. Kenen?
2) Is there any other source for the quote?
In answer to question 1) Isaiah Leo 'Si' Kenen (1905-1988) was the founder of the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs (AZCPA), the forerunner of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful component of the US Israel lobby, whose conferences provide the (candle-lit?) backdrop for American presidents' de rigueur declarations of undying love for the state of Israel. The full title of Kenen's book is Israel's Defense Line: Her Friends & Foes in Washington.
In answer to question 2) I can't find any other source on the net. (If anyone can find it in some volume containing say King's complete speeches, I'd be more than interested to hear from them.)
With these 2 answers in mind, I would therefore hope that such students would take the quote with the proverbial grain of salt.
Now assuming that King did say what has been attributed to him by Kenen, I would hope that students would then ask such questions as:
1) Is King, like the Pope, infallible?
2) Just how much did he know about the issue at the time?
To which, I think the following answers would have to be: 'no' and 'probably not much'.
I would hope as well that they would take into consideration the context in which it was said, that is, in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which the Zionist propaganda mill conned Americans into believing was a war for Israel's very survival, with President Nasser of Egypt cast in the role of the new Hitler gearing up to drive Israeli Jews into the sea. With so many Americans sucked in by the myth of an Israeli David overcoming an Arab Goliath, why not King?
Finally (and again I hasten to add if these are indeed King's words), I would hope that students would marvel at the grotesque spectacle of a renowned campaigner for the rights of his own oppressed people so blind to the colonial dynamic at play in Palestine as to prattle on about the security of the coloniser and his supposed transformation of a "desert land" into an "oasis of brotherhood and democracy." The cliched, propagandist desert/oasis metaphor suggests that King (?) hadn't the foggiest idea about the geography of Palestine, let alone what had really been going on there since 1917.
Certainly, the PR people behind the MLK poster, would naturally be banking on our students simply suspending their critical faculties and taking the quote at face value. In which case, their propaganda campaign will have been successful. Let us hope that our students are up to the challenge. And as for MLK, I think he'd be turning in his grave.
Zionist propagandists will grasp at any straw to bolster their faltering case. The most recent example here has been an Australasian Union of Jewish Students (AUJS) poster barrage targeting the 8th Annual Israeli Apartheid Week on campuses across the nation.
One such poster features a photograph of Black-American civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King with an accompanying, unsourced, though presumably genuine, quote. Google the quote and one of the first entries to emerge is the following from jewishvirtuallibrary.org:
"10 days before his assassination, at the annual convention on [sic] the Rabbinical assembly, Dr King said: 'The response of some of the so-called young militants does not represent the position of the vast majority of Negroes. There are some who are color-consumed and they see a kind of mystique in blackness or in being colored, and anything non-colored is condemned. We do not follow that course... Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect her right to exist, its territorial integrity and the right to use whatever sea lanes it needs. Israel is one of the great outposts of democracy in the world, and a marvelous example of what can be done, how desert land can be transformed into an oasis of brotherhood and democracy. Peace for Israel means security, and that security must be a reality'. Source: I.L. Kenen, Israel's Defense Line, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, NY: 1981, 266"
[NB: I have highlighted in the above quotation the part which accompanies the photograph of King.]
What, I wonder, would the average Australian university student make of King's alleged words?
Putting to one side any analysis of the quote's content, one would hope that any students reading it would have the critical wherewithal to ask themselves (or AUJS) the following obvious questions:
1) Why is the quote not sourced as are those on AUJS's other 2 posters?
2) What is the source of the quote?
Assuming that any students were sufficiently interested as to google it and so access the above extract, one would hope that they would then have the nouse to ask two further questions:
1) Who is I.L. Kenen?
2) Is there any other source for the quote?
In answer to question 1) Isaiah Leo 'Si' Kenen (1905-1988) was the founder of the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs (AZCPA), the forerunner of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most powerful component of the US Israel lobby, whose conferences provide the (candle-lit?) backdrop for American presidents' de rigueur declarations of undying love for the state of Israel. The full title of Kenen's book is Israel's Defense Line: Her Friends & Foes in Washington.
In answer to question 2) I can't find any other source on the net. (If anyone can find it in some volume containing say King's complete speeches, I'd be more than interested to hear from them.)
With these 2 answers in mind, I would therefore hope that such students would take the quote with the proverbial grain of salt.
Now assuming that King did say what has been attributed to him by Kenen, I would hope that students would then ask such questions as:
1) Is King, like the Pope, infallible?
2) Just how much did he know about the issue at the time?
To which, I think the following answers would have to be: 'no' and 'probably not much'.
I would hope as well that they would take into consideration the context in which it was said, that is, in the wake of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, which the Zionist propaganda mill conned Americans into believing was a war for Israel's very survival, with President Nasser of Egypt cast in the role of the new Hitler gearing up to drive Israeli Jews into the sea. With so many Americans sucked in by the myth of an Israeli David overcoming an Arab Goliath, why not King?
Finally (and again I hasten to add if these are indeed King's words), I would hope that students would marvel at the grotesque spectacle of a renowned campaigner for the rights of his own oppressed people so blind to the colonial dynamic at play in Palestine as to prattle on about the security of the coloniser and his supposed transformation of a "desert land" into an "oasis of brotherhood and democracy." The cliched, propagandist desert/oasis metaphor suggests that King (?) hadn't the foggiest idea about the geography of Palestine, let alone what had really been going on there since 1917.
Certainly, the PR people behind the MLK poster, would naturally be banking on our students simply suspending their critical faculties and taking the quote at face value. In which case, their propaganda campaign will have been successful. Let us hope that our students are up to the challenge. And as for MLK, I think he'd be turning in his grave.
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