Texas Progressives look at the rest of Merikkka

I split my version of this week's Texas Progressives roundup into two parts. The in-Texas stuff comes later this week.

Democratic insurgents are stepping front and center, as Abdul El-Sayed looks to get the US Senate nod in Michigan (as Elissa Slotkin tries to surf between the lines) and Francesca Hong (recently profiled by Klippenstein) leads the race for Wisconsin's gubernatorial nod, despite incumbent Tony Evers' meddling. It appears lessons from Maine and elsewhere are being learned slowly, if at all. And, to the degree insurgents are staking out antizionist stances, the old guard may not be learning them at all. Ken now has an update piece about both.

Matthew Cole and Max Blumenthal are in various stages of legal battles against the government on its attempts to discover sources on their electronic devices. In Max's case, the problem was instigated by the person I called "Loony Laura Loomer, lying lizard."

Your Local Epidemiologist urges everyone (Republicans) to leave Dr. Fauci alone already. I will, YLE, if he admits his many screwups, which I rounded up in writing about his not-totally-noble original Platonic lie (also calling out his defenders, which include you), a follow-up less noble yet Platonic lie about herd immunity, followed by the set of non-public, totally ignoble, less than Platonic lies exposed by his emails. Kuff, if you're going to include a link like this in your version of the roundup, it's not going to run here without being thoroughly backgrounded. Rand Paul et al are largely full of shit, but Fauci is a piece of work himself.

Electronic Intifada joins Jeff Morley, Tim Shorrock, Sam Husseini, and other JFK conspiracy theorists

This new piece would be laughable if not sad. And it is sad, because it's conspiracy theorizing. And, as I now see, Jim DeBrosse, "book" and all, is one of the leading pushers of the "Israel did it" conspiracy.

I think JFK assassination conspiracy theories in general are illogical on the rational side and fail Ockham's Razor on the empirical side. But, for one additional reason, the "Israel did it" is even worse. I'll get to that below. 

First, Jefferson Morley is NOT a "respected JFK researcher." He's a conspiracy theorist, even if he claims he's a former one. More on that below. (I've written more than once about him.)

And, Electronic Intifada is suddenly less respected by me than it was a couple of days earlier. 

But, before we go there, we have this:

Signs of Israel’s involvement in the Kennedy assassination have been ignored for more than 60 years by a mainstream media that still clings to the lies and omissions of the Warren Report, the official, but widely discredited, US government investigation into the assassination.

Well, the Intifada is officially in conspiracy theory land. 

Then we jump here: 

For those willing to look at all the facts, there is evidence of a broad conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy, led by rogue elements of the CIA, Israel’s leaders and intelligence officials, the national crime syndicate under the leadership of Zionist gangster Meyer Lansky, and the French underground army of assassins known as the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS).

Then we have the allegedly Jewish connection.

A document released in 2023 from the JFK archive reveals that Reuben Efron, a lieutenant colonel in the US Army and a Jewish immigrant from Lithuania, was reading purported triggerman Lee Harvey Oswald’s private mail years prior to the JFK assassination as part of a closely-held CIA surveillance program.

In reality, per the Times of Israel linked at "document," while he might have been ethnically Jewish, nothing ever says he was working for Mossad or any other Israeli agency. And, if Jeff Morley had the goods on that, he would have said so. 

And, from there, we loop in the CIA's top nutbar, which itself shows how uninformed this piece is:

The program was led by James Jesus Angleton, the agency’s counterterrorism chief and its liaison to the Mossad, Israel’s overseas spy agency. Efron, a Zionist whose mother died in the Holocaust, later emigrated from the US to live in Jerusalem. 

JFK assassination documents released in 2025 show that Angleton used Mossad operatives to spy on Cuba following the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

There you go. 

But, the stupidity doesn't stop there. It continues:

There were certainly motives other than the Zionist ones at play in the conspiracy to murder Kennedy. He withheld air support during the infamous “Bay of Pigs” invasion of Cuba in 1961, embittering the defeated anti-Castro rebels. There are also indications, in at least one National Security Action Memo, 263, that JFK wanted to withdraw American troops from Vietnam after his likely reelection in 1964.

Wrong, wrong and Not.Even.Wrong.

Here's the reality, as I've written, about NSAM-263. And more here, if that's not enough.

But, that's not enough for Jim DeBrosse at the Electronic Intifada, because now he gives us the "sekrut real world" of Jack Ruby:

Ruby – Oswald’s killer – was by no means the small-time pawn of organized crime dismissed by the Warren Commission. By way of the Teamsters Union and the Chicago underworld, he rose to the top of the Dallas area mob. In the early 1950s, Ruby – who used his original surname Rubenstein at the time – befriended Lewis McWillie, the manager of Lansky’s casino operation in Havana. Several months after Castro’s takeover in 1959, Ruby made an unexplained six-day visit to Cuba, where some believe he secured the release of mob boss Santos Trafficante from a Cuban detention camp.

There's no fucking way the Mob would ever have actually trusted wannabe, and Andy Warhol 15-minutes-of-fame seeker Jack Ruby that much. So, I consider that a flat lie, because it IS a flat lie. "Conveniently," DeBrosse has no links, not even to a less than fully reputable site, to try to substantiate that.

But, me? I have Gerald Posner, who explains the reality behind the increase in Ruby's phone calls in mid to late 1963. He also notes the obvious — if Oswald were the actual shooter but a "controlled" patsy, he wouldn't have been allowed to stay alive to three days and possibly spill some beans. 

And, don't go into plagiarism claims. If everything he plagiarized is factual, he still wrote facts. Second, I've never heard that claim laid against "Case Closed." That said, it IS funny that Mark Lane, yes, THAT Mark Lane, was his plagiarism attorney. 

But why stop there? Let's go into Bobby Kennedy assassination conspiracy theory too!

Lansky was connected to two gangsters closely involved in the JFK assassination plot. The first of these was Jack Ruby, who shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald before the supposed killer of JFK could testify. “I’m just a patsy,” Oswald had famously said after his arrest. 

The second was Eugene Hale Brading (aka Jim Braden). An ex-convict with known ties to a group of hitmen, Brading was also a suspected courier for Lansky. He was stopped by Dallas police for suspicious behavior in a Dealey Plaza office building minutes after the JFK assassination. Brading, who used numerous aliases and had a long criminal history, was taken in for questioning but released. 

On the night Democratic Party presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy was killed, Brading was once again found in Los Angeles just a mile from the hotel where the younger Kennedy was gunned down. RFK was not only JFK’s brother, but his attorney general.

Oof. 

It's me, boys, I did it, even if I lied, denied and waved my hands later. 

First, Oswald lied as much as Sirhan Sirhan, to get at both conspiracy theories. 

Second, to get at the reality of Sirhan Sirhan, in this case, Zionism IS involved, namely that Sirhan killed Bobby Kennedy because he rightfully thought RFK was a Zionist. THAT is the "one additional reason." And, yes, Sirhan Sirhan did it, period and end of story.

Second, Brading is so nuts he doesn't even get his own Wiki page. See the Wikipedia entry for the document "Gemstone File." 

The article goes on to call Jim Garrison a "hero" while at the same time, in referring to CIA and other documents, use the word "imply" regularly.

Jean Souetre? His actual name would be Jean-Jacques Susini, I think. Under the first name, his alleged involvement comes from the febrile mind of E. Howard Hunt.

OK, Shorrock is dealt with in that NSAM-263 link. He's great on Korean Peninsula issues, wrong and a Camelot true believer wrong, on JFK. He's not specifically, AFAIK, a Zionist conspiracy theorist.

Jeff Morley? I didn't believe him when he claimed he was no longer a JFK conspiracy theorist.

Sam Husseini, referenced above? Anti-Zionist conspiracy theorist.

Angleton? Paranoid about CIA infiltration, especially the Nosenko case, which badly damaged the Agency. 

The rest of the piece is the usual "throw shit at the wall and see if it sticks." 

Not.Even.Wrong., per my 2023 thoughts on the 60th anniversary of the assassination. 

The worst part, beyond the conspiracy theory itself, is that it actually gives reputable ammo to Zionists trying to morph anti-Zionism into antisemitism. 

And with that, I have removed Electronic Intifada from my blogroll. 

And been banned by Libertarian Meme on Reddit for calling the last paragraph of their post on this idiocy full-on antisemitism. (They're Mises Mice fucktards, including openly calling for an end to democracy.)

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Update, Nov. 4, 2025: Asa Winstanley and compadres at Palestine is Still the Issue have joined Electronic Intifada in "platforming" Jim DeBrosse's nutbar conspiracy theory.

I have unfollowed it on Substack after calling it out, including the issue that Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby for being a Zionist! 

 

More on who Elias Rodriguez is

Ken Klippenstein, a week after posting the manifesto of alleged Israeli embassy shooter Elias Rodriguez, then getting visited about that by browbeating (and lying) FBI agents, posted a transcript of various online chats of his, along with pulling out highlights of them.

Kudos to Ken for posting this, and showing clearly that Elias Rodriguez was anti-Zionist but certainly not antisemitic.

That said, he WAS thrown off in other ways. His youthful Communist purity rants remind me of a more intense version of a Rainer Shea from the People’s Republic of Humboldt County. Even if China is no longer doing slave labor in Xinjiang, it once was. And, it does have poverty, and other social problems, like homelessness.

And Rodriguez' attitude toward an online friend whose brother has schizophrenia is repulsive. There’s no other way about it.

So, beyond the violence itself, there’s other reasons not to glorify Elias Rodriguez.

Also? Beyond its trying to browbeat Ken, there’s trillions of other reasons not to glorify the FBI, which can in general fuck off.

There's also another reason to hate on Elmo Musk. A full week after the shootings, he is having Shitter censor searches for Rodriguez by name or Shitter handle. The Dissident has details. And, given that Musk, via DOGE, is a quasi-governmental actor, this is censorship in the narrow, legal First Amendment version, per my take.

Facing some weird antizionism, politicized wrongly, on Substack

NOTE: As regular readers know, I am of course very much a Zionist myself. I am also a political leftist, albeit a skeptical one, including of claims of leftists at times. Finally, I'm a secularist with a graduate theological degree, which gets us to the facts of the matter.

I had decided to follow this Emmanuel Goldstein, which surely is not his actual name, but rather lifted from "1984," per Wiki, after some comments by him on The Dissident, followed by him following me.

I noticed many of his posts were rants without coherence. Then, a May 15 piece about Zechariah 9-14 dropped other masks, namely:

It is important to study chapters 9-14 of Zechariah as a cohesively unified narrative and not as two further-subdivided designations of “Deutero-Zechariah” and “Trito-Zechariah” argued by scoffing “higher critics” denying divine inspiration. ...

The fact all of Zechariah was authored by Zechariah the (grand)son4 of Iddo is provable, but unfortunately for brevity’s sake that’s not a topic for today. The specific canard peddled by the “higher critics” worthy of refuting here is their “Trito-Zechariah” theory positing” chapters 12-14 is completely different from 9-11.” ...

The mainstream realm of bogus “hermeneutical study” paving the way for a racially literalized Zionist-Nazi misapplication of Zech. 13:8-9 necessitates these escalating steps of unbiblically outrageous total disregard for the Hebrew Jewish scriptures inspired by the direction of Almighty God

OK, this secularist with a graduate theological degree isn't standing for that. Beyond this fundagelical being wrong (the piece comes off like he swallowed a fundagelical commentary or a non-KJV version of something like a Scofield Reference Bible), the last paragraph claiming that critical scholarship is all in the service of Zionism is bullshit.

BULLSHIT.  I did not "restack with a note," but instead, independently posted, this, with link:

I am one of those scoffing “higher critics,” and this piece may be the last straw in leading me to unfollow Goldstein again. That’s even more true where, at the end of the piece, he shows himself to be a fundagelical Christian of some sort, and “May be” has now become “will.” His writings on the current situation in the Middle East use language more turbulent than in this piece (seriously) and that last paragraph puts some of them in a new light. I suspect that he’s one of these Messianic Christians, like Joey Dauben of my long-ago knowledge, who does things like Jesus-based Passover Seders even though seders didn’t exist at the time of Jesus and also that, per some scholarship, he might not have been killed on Passover week anyway.

It drew comment from him, to which I doubled down (NOT quoting him here):

I am actually one of “those people” myself. I’m a secularist with a graduate theological degree, undergraduate degree in classical languages. Hebrew today is quite rusty, but biblical Greek not totally so (nor classical or ecclesiastical Latin).

This is not to argue that Zionism is not somewhat distorted. It is to argue that fundagelical Christianity is just as much so, to put it bluntly, without getting into arguments about various types of millennialism, or amillenialism or anything else (per fundamentalist versions of old mainline Calvinists and Lutherans vs modern evangelicals).

And, that's that.

I had, even before the "unfollow" decision, noted that the actual URL is "adversusbabylon." So, is Zionism the "beast"? Or is this guy a fundamentalist Calvinist or Lutheran for whom the papacy is the beast? I discounted that because he has nothing along those lines, at first. But I looked again. Take this piece:

The Jesuits used Freemasonic British intelligence to propagate the “Christian Zionist”/dispensationalist doctrine to the Protestants that “the Jews” must collectively gather in Palestine as a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ

So, he doesn't attack the papacy, but Jesuitical thought? Even though the Jesuits weren't created until after Brother Martin Luther's death, otherwise, that's exactly the type of shit he said. And, having seen the Lutefash eruption in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, while this guy bashes what he calls "fascism," he might actually like certain elements of actual fascism. (Actually, per this piece blathering about dialecticist issues, he's as likely, or more likely, to be a thrown-off Trot, or Hoxha-ist [think about it] as anything.)

And, while he differs from Luther and Calvin in calling the papacy the antichrist, he fuses that with elements of their thought and modern American fundagelicalism:

This second beast/False Prophet, by the way, is the United States (the first beast is the Holy Roman Empire)

And that is followed by this:

All roads lead right back to Rome.

OK, at this point, he is all over the milennialist map. That said, Luther missed a beat, with his antisemitic ravings plus his claim the papacy was antichrist, by not claiming the papacy was under Jewish control. Call this "Jewish incense burners" or "Jewish Mass transubstantiation bells" instead of "Jewish space lasers."

I am trying to relate this to his broader political stances. My best guess, per this piece, is that if you take old time paleoconservative Walter Karp and ran him through some type of libertarian political filter plus a millennialist theological filter, you'd get this guy. And, that's a hugely toxic brew.

And, per the people he recommends? Michael Ginsberg follows 9/11 "truthers." "The Straight Juice" has a "plandemic" type note at the top of their feed as of May 15.)

Beyond that? Per this piece, I don't know what he "is," but he's anti-third party. (And, Ken Silverstein accused ME of political moral purity.)  And, the rest of that piece is scary / batshit crazy, starting with the claim that "Luigi Mangione" (his scare quotes and yes he means them as such) is controlled opposition.

And, other than the above? A few additional notes.

First, posting THIS at this length at this piece:

For simplicity sake—because the philosophical word salads of Marxist and Fascist rabble-rousers are too headachingly atrocious to further sift through and dissect—all you need to know is that Hegelian dialectic is grounded on preservation of the status quo and therefore fundamentally “right-wing,” preserving the core of a reactionary construct perpetually. (this is why Fascism is based on “regular” Hegelianism in contrast to Marxism which inverts it—the two are ideologically opposed in their structural application of the dialectic) If the “standard” trajectory of Hegelian dialectic as represented in Fascism points “rightward,” then an inversion turning it “right side up” therefore points “left” on the political spectrum.

When everything you write yourself is word salad, is pots and kettles.

Second, neither Marx nor Engels was Zionist, nor religiously observant Jews. Lenin has bits of Jewish ethnic heritage, but never claimed to be Jewish either religiously nor ethnically. Stalin was totally NOTA on this. 

Third, back to the Zechariah piece? Calling the Magen David a "hexagram," by appearing to me to play on "pentagram," probably goes past anti-Zionism and into antisemitism.

And with that, I've wasted more than enough time on this dude and will probably block him at some point in the near future. (In case his degree of cyberstalking is more than it first appears to be, I didn't do that immediately.) 

Dude never did answer about his actual religious beliefs, but, yeah, I could see him being in the same neighborhood as the Lutefash.

I don't owe Sam Husseini COVID apologies after all, because he's kind of a nutter

Let's go back three-plus years, to September 2021. I wrote about Husseini's take on the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and his apparent willingness to equate gain of function research to bioweaponization of the COVID-19 virus. To say I was skeptical puts it mildly.

Move forward not quite two years, to June 2023, when I said I might owe him an apology. That said, in a comment to the piece six months later, I said that I had become more skeptical again, and that bioengineering is not bioweaponization.

The kind of a nutter? Being a full-on Zionist conspiracy theorist about the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy over Zionism issues. That includes uncritically citing Whitney Webb and linking to pieces like this.

I jokingly said a year ago, on the JFK assassination 60th anniversary, that Mossad whacked Jack over Dimona. Note the word "jokingly."

I seriously said earlier this year, building on previous writing, that Sirhan Sirhan killed Bobby because he was a Zionist.

As for his take that Karen Silkwood was whacked by Mossad because she discovered that high-grade plutonium was being smuggled out of Kerr-McGee's plant by the CIA to Israel, who was then reshipping cuts of it to Shah-era Iran? Also laughable, IMO.

First, Rolling Stone notes the difficulty of smuggling 100 pounds of plutonium out of Hanford. Could it have been intercepted in transit to Kerr-McGee's plant? Yes.

More likely, per that, and per this piece from a researcher in Silkwood's case is that, given the massive management and safety clusterfucks at Kerr-McGee, this plutonium was indeed "lost" in some way. Also per that piece, it was 40 pounds, not 89 claimed by Husseini, that was originally missing, and half of it was discovered soon thereafter. The remaining 20 pounds? Enough for two Nagasaki bombs. Something, but NOT "all that."

The reality? French help in building Dimona included a reprocessing plant. India got the material for its first bomb that way.

This isn't quite antisemitism, but it's a type of conspiratorial anti-Zionism that gets very close to that.

Did MLK cut blank checks for Israel? Do today's anti-Zionists claim too much?

Probably not, according to Martin Kramer, though he elsewhere, in a Jewish magazine, tries to modify himself. Actually, he expands upon his earlier writing, and does so enough that I added the second half of the header as a second rhetorical question, once I started reading.

First, from page 8 of the 15-page PDF at that first link, the famous Seymour Martin Lipset quote:

One of the young men present happened to make some remark against the Zionists. Dr. King snapped at him and said, “Don’t talk like that! When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism!”

Kramer goes on to defend that it was indeed said, and was said in 1968, not 1967.

That said, on page 5, he notes what King said approximately 9 months earlier, shortly after the end of the Six Day War:

I mean the very survival of Israel may well depend on access to not only the Suez Canal, but the Gulf and the Strait of Tiran. These things are very important. But I think for the ultimate peace and security of the situation it will probably be necessary for Israel to give up this conquered territory because to hold on to it will only exacerbate the tensions and deepen the bitterness of the Arabs.

He then puts that into larger context, noting that King had a quasi-evangelistic tour of Israel previously planned, but realized he would now be a political target whatever he said. He delayed any announcement above officially cancelling, but a couple of months later, he did pull the plug.

I know that other anti-Zionists have seen the second sentence of that paragraph before. Maybe they haven't seen the first, or else have ignored it.

What King is saying, it seems to me, is NOT a moral judgment but a political one. Let us remember that he was a Baptist minister, not an AME one. I've not read anything about what thoughts he had on the "end times," but, as a Baptist and not a Methodist Episcopal, he was surely open at least to some variety of futurist millennialism, as well as politically supporting Israel's future, and supporting it for SCLC reasons, too. Many of his top supporters were Jewish. His right hand man, Stanley Levinson, was, though he was not a Zionist.

But, we're not done. Kramer then puts King's Harvard statement into context — very important context.

There is plenty of room to debate the precise meaning of King’s off-the-record words at the Cambridge dinner. Was he only referring to the clearly antisemitic meaning of “Zionists” in the rhetoric of SNCC militants? [This is discussed by Kramer, the background, on the previous couple of pages.) Or was he making a general statement? We will never know. And just how much weight should be accorded to words spoken privately and never repeated publicly? (Had Lipset not written an article more than a year after the event, King’s words would have been lost forever.) My own view is that this dinner table remark can’t always bear the oversized burden imposed on it.

Food for thought a plenty.

Then, on page 12, Kramer talks about King's "balancing act." That deserves quoting of Kramer himself in some depth:

(I)t is an offense to history, if not to King’s memory, whenever someone today summons King’s ghost to offer unqualified support to Israel or the Palestinians.

There you go.

As for the second link? It's not so much modifying himself as extending himself.

Kramer cites new background material on King's 1959 visit to Israel, including above all, West Jerusalem. Let us remember this being after the Nakba (a word not mentioned by Kramer) but long before the Six Day War and any occupations. 

Kramer's take on King's visit then, including a private dinner with top Palestinians, and his later comments are that, while not dismissing Palestinian concerns, they were on a back burner for him. Kramer notes that he had visited India, laden with poverty, just before.

Then, there's this:

Years later, in 1968, King would allude to this demand as indicative of the weakness of the Arab approach to the conflict, an approach he described as “a stubborn effort to reverse history.”

Well, that does mention, in King's words, the right of return. And, his disinterest in it AFTER the Six Day War.

Kramer then notes that while the Israel-Palestine conflict was national, and to a degree then (tho less than today) religious, it was not racial. And, Israelis calling Palestinians names aside, it really wasn't.

Finally, Kramer speculates that the thought of Reinhold Neibuhr was having an influence on King. He cites this as his top reason King wasn't more emotionally invested in the Palestinian cause. This, because it shows Niebuhr's own Zionism, deserves its own quote:

Given his influence upon King, it’s important to recall the vigor with which Niebuhr supported both the establishment of Israel and its right to defend itself. He had expressed sympathy for Zionism as early as 1929, and in 1942 he founded the Christian Council on Palestine, a pro-Zionist association that grew to include thousands of (mostly Protestant) clergymen. In 1946, he testified in favor of a Jewish state before the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry on Palestine. “The fact that the Arabs have a vast hinterland in the Middle East,” he said there, “and the fact that the Jews have nowhere to go, establishes the relative justice of their claims and of their cause.”

In 1948 and again during the Sinai campaign of 1956, Niebuhr defended Israel’s military actions and chastised American policymakers for not standing firmly behind “our only secure bastion in this troubled area.” The Arab refugees, he believed, would have to be resettled elsewhere than in their former homes: “The Jews cannot absorb [them] except in small numbers without imperiling the security of their nation.” In 1967, he justified Israel’s preemptive action in what would become known as the Six-Day War: “Obviously a nation that knows that it is in danger of strangulation will use its fists.” Shortly after the war, he backed Israel’s unilateral unification of Jerusalem.

Basically, if one goes on to read the next page or two of that piece? Niebuhr had swallowed whole the Jewish and British Imperialist mix of opinion about Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular, without caring to look at any background. He also viewed all of this through a Cold War lens.

That's pretty serious. Especially if you tie it with my speculation about King's millennialist theology.

As for what stance he might have taken today? He didn't even live to the First Intifada. He would have been nearly 60 when it happened, and perhaps "on the bench" of day-to-day civil rights activity by then, had he not been assassinated. Given the stresses of his life, he might have had a heart attack by then.

That said? If we're doing research, we're doing all of it. Kramer is a neocon, teaches at Tel Aviv University, is tied to neocon think tanks, specifically, the AIPAC-connected Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and likes to hate on Palestinian refugees. He is surely right about the King of 1967-68, including via his own connections to neocon nutbar and Zionist supremo Marty Peretz.

Had King lived past the First Intifada, I think he would have realized that, for his legacy if nothing else, his "balancing act" would have to shift to a different center of gravity.

Bottom line? To riff on Kramer, I won't claim that King "really" would have been pro-Palestinian today if his Zionist fellow travelers will follow his own words and stop making much more out of King's comments in Boston than is warranted.

Be furious AT Claudine Gay, as well as FOR her

Even before I saw a couple of pieces at Mondoweiss, one with exactly this framing, that was my thought.

There was a raft of McCarthyist (the original one and the guy just booted as Speaker, both) type of original cancel culture behind the recent House hearings by Rep. Elise Stefanik, the ones that hung Gay out to dry. Stefanik, herself arguably actually antisemitic, basically gaslighted Gay and two other university presidents at her hearing.

Gay, along with Penn's Liz Magill and MIT's Sally Kornbluth, offered Stefanik plenty of rope for the self-lynching, Mondoweiss notes, by not challenging her absurdity that "from the river to the sea" is genocidal. 

That said, this was nothing new.

For that, we also go to Mondoweiss.

Rather than than tolerating antisemitism, back in November she was trying to censor "from the river to the sea" being used on campus. A month before that, the Harvard Grad Union called on her to get doxxing of Palestinian activists and other anti-Palestinian activities to stop.

Her response? No support for them, but further tilting toward Zionism.

Then, the day after Gay's resignation, a new guest commenter at Mondoweiss, Aaryan Morrison, a South African-American and fellow Black American, noted she was both furious FOR Gay for being the target of racial and/or sexual related bullying and also furious AT Gay for putting up with ongoing blatant anti-Palestinian activities at Harvard and even, arguably enabling them. She notes the doxxing affected the safety of Black students at Harvard, among others.

This:

Let me be clear: President Gay was forced out not because she is antisemitic and/or anti-Zionist but because she is not Zionist enough. The Congressional hearing on December 5 was little more than political theater in which right-wing leaders created and seized an opportunity to undermine core tenets of liberal arts institutions and divert attention from the genocide in Gaza.

What else can you say? Well, you can say, as I did above, that all three presidents gave Stefanik et al the rope to hange them after gaslighting them. And as linked via Mondoweiss, Gay's post-resignation inked NYT op-ed STILL doesn't push back against this.

It's even worse than Michael Arria's one quote at Mondoweiss. Per the linked piece above by Aaryan Morrison, Gay's column is groveling to Harvard. 

This, a different quote than Arria's:

Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument.

Indicates how she doesn't get it. The antisemitic smears were of a piece with and intertwined with the racist ones. Gay simply doesn't get the whole issue of weaponized Zionism.

That said, Gay was stringing out the self-hanging noose long before the Stefanik hearings.

This afternoon, NPR was discussing the Gay resignation, through an interview with the editor of the Harvard Crimson. And, got almost nothing correct, or at least, hid the reality of Gay's last two months.

And, tying the two issues together? At The Nation, Dave Zirin says that DEI's lack of objective metrics and such allows Zionists to claim they're being picked on whenever a Palestinian flag is waved in their direction.

#AbandonBiden and other new Israel-Gaza thoughts

#AbandonBiden is the hashtag a group of Muslim-Americans are trying to get trend, and not just trend on social media, but trend in the real world 11 months from now.

For the dickheads like Marc Elias or your average neighborhood #BlueAnon, an undervote in the presidential election is no more a "vote for Trump" than a vote for presumed Green Party nominee Jill Stein, independent leftist Cornel West or wingnut Robert F. Kennedy is a "vote for Trump."

That said, could these people undervoting (I hope they vote elsewhere rather than undervote) increase the likelihood of Trump winning? Yes.

And, the organizers fully know that, and fully accept that.

So, fuck off Marc Elias et al.

And take note that Amed Khan is the first larger-level Muslim-American donor to abandon Biden financially.

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Remember: If you hear an Israeli claim they're concerned about their government, they're probably lying. 94 percent say that either the IDF is using enough firepower against Gaza or not enough.

Other findings? Only 10 percent support pauses in fighting to negotiate for hostage releases. And, 27 percent said no negotiations period. (The rest want negotiations during fighting.)

And, it extends to Israel's relations with the Palestinian Authority. Only 25 percent want their government to talk to them.

Again, on Twitter and elsewhere, you hear about liberal Zionists. Exactly. They're still Zionist, and usually deep-fried, at end. Leftist Israelis, who by using that phrase themselves, indicate they're not Zionist? Much rarer birds.

==

Yes, per Ryan Grim, it may be a trap, but I will never, never, vote for any Democrat who supports House Resolution 894, which officially claims that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. Vote "present" if you feel you have to. But if you vote "yes," I can never support you. Contra the resolution's language, teh IHRA definition of antisemitism is NOT widely supported. Search Mondoweiss if you don't believe me. OR let me do it for you, where you'll find out that, shockingly, Tex-ass was the first US state to adopt the IHRA definition, and that #GenocideJoe thinks it's the gold standard. (It's not widely supported because it enables Zionism in multiple ways, and while not directly calling anti-Zionism antisemitism, certainly pushes people that way.) In addition, the resolution, while listing anti-Israel hate crimes, says nothing about anti-Muslim or anti-Palestinian hate crimes. And, it repeats the usual Zionist bullshit about "from the river to the sea." Mondoweiss has more.

It has passed with 311 yeas. One Republican, Thomas Massie, which actually does not shock me, voted no. About half of Democrats did vote "present," while 13, including, to his credit, Jamaal Bowman, who will reportedly be primaried for not kowtowing to Israel enough, voted no.

==

Leaders of both duopoly parties are talking about pressuring other Middle Eastern states to sign off on Israel's ethnic cleansing by talking about tying their foreign aid to how many Gazan refugees they accept. Naturally, the idea of accepting Gazan refugees in the US simply isn't on the table.

==

Monday morning, via NPR, I heard on the BBC World Service about Israel's attempt to prevent Gazans from getting bomb blasted. It includes a smartphone alert system, even with a QR code! How high tech! Partial information on that from the AP. And, via Mondoweiss, here's an update on the 2,000-grid system.)

I was reminded of a couple of things.

One is Wallbuilder Joe's Title 42 lite smartphone-based application for asylum. First, how many Guatemalan migrants have smartphones? Second, how good of reception do they get in deserts near the Mexico-US border? The BBC presenter raised similar questions during an interview of a doctor at the Europe Hospital in the Gaza Strip.

Two, sadly, is the old joke about what to do in case of a nuclear attack, with the list of instructions finishing with "and kiss your ass goodbye."

==

Remember that even during the cease fire, Israel shelled southern Lebanon, southern Syria, and had troops active in Palestine/West Bank. 

And, Israel has a LONG HISTORY of targeted assassinations.

PsyPost: Weaponizing psychology against anti-Zionism

PsyPost is often interesting, sometimes good. And, occasionally crap. And, on my blogroll. (For now.)

When I saw the piece Friday morning with the header "Left-wing antihierarchical aggression emerges as as the strongest predictor of antisemitism, study finds," I clicked. I'm a leftist, at least for Merika. I'm generally antihierarchical. I'm not antisemitic, but I thought, I'm curious as to what the signs are.

The "signs" are nothing.

Other than the usual bullshit of conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism, with a nice dollop of strawmanning in the second half:

The Antizionist Antisemitism subscale focuses on extreme and irrational anti-Israel positions that are, in essence, a form of disguised antisemitism. For example, holding Israel to different standards than other countries or assuming that supporters of Israel have undue influence over global affairs.

As I told PsyPost on Twitter, just for an opener:

I call bullshit on PsyPost conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism while pretending it's not. YOU .@PsyPost — this piece is bullshit and an insult to leftists, including liberal and leftist Jews.

And, after seeing this, knew I had to google the authors, beyond their listed academic affiliations.

And a hit, right on Wikipedia, on Hirsh!

David Hirsh (born 29 September 1967) is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and co-founder of Engage, a campaign against the academic boycott of Israel.

So, he's fighting against what is, essentially, a British academia version of Boycott, Divest, Sanctions, or BDS.

But wait, the details get better, or worse, and DIRECTLY pertain to PsyPost's piece.

In 2005, he co-founded the Engage website, a resource for those working to oppose the boycott of Israel.[4] Hirsh took a leading role during 2005-07 in opposing boycotts of Israeli universities proposed by British academics.[6][7] Hirsh told The Guardian, "It may not have anti-semitic motivations, but if you organise an academic boycott of Israeli Jewish academics but no-one else in the world, that is an anti-semitic policy".[8]

His 2017 book, Contemporary Left Antisemitism, which combined narrative and case study with sociological analysis and theory to understand the controversial and contested phenomenon of antisemitism on the left, was published in 2017.[3]

He developed, with Daniel Allington, the AzAs (Antizionist Antisemitism) Scale, for quantitatively measuring antisemitism as expressed in relation to Israel and its supporters.[9]

One more tidbit.

Hirsh originated the term "Livingstone Formulation", named after Ken Livingstone, as the claim made by those accused of antisemitism that the accusation is made in order to delegitimise their criticism of Israel;[11] he says it is accusing Jews of playing the race card.

In other words, Israel can do no wrong and saying it can is racism. Including, I presume, if Jews say that.

In other words, PsyPost is either ignorant dupes or willing participants with a skilled and devious practitioner of hasbara, and probably, reading between the lines, willing to propagate the British version of the "self-hating Jew" meme. He's the type of Zionist in the UK who I'm sure that was affiliated with the campaign to hound Jeremy Corbyn out of Labour leadership and replace him with Der (Keir) Starmer. Der Starmer ... think about it, think about it.

And, given the amount of explanatory material around direct quotes and references to Hirsh's studies, explanatory material like this:

The study challenged the simplistic notion that antisemitism is exclusive to either the left or right ends of the political spectrum. Instead, it highlighted the complexity of political ideologies. Antisemitism is not limited to any particular political group but can be found among individuals across various ideological spectrums.

I'm filing PsyPost under "willing participants," not "ignorant dupes." You have to go looking to run stuff like this. Especially since it was written by founder Eric Dolan, not someone else. (PsyPost has four other "contributors" listed on its website.)

And, since he's on Twitter?

So, per your Wikipedia page and many other things, are Jews who call out Israel's wrongs, instead of conflating anti-Zionism and antisemitism like you do, racists? Is a Philip Weiss, founder of Mondoweiss, a racist? A self-hating Jew? What about Norman Finkelstein?

There you are.

More about Hirsh, from Wiki?

His parents were Trots, it says. I'll bet dollars to donuts that like US Jews with similar parentage, he became a full-on neoconservative.

And, "congrats" to Dolan for getting me to add "hasbara" as a tag to this post and to the blog, as it's the first use, though I will "backtag."

Neither Dolan nor PsyPost has responded on Twitter.

Academics too timid on Palestine? Too dismissive? Too MUCH? Zionist academics are still far more too MUCH

After a brief Twitter spat Saturday, I offer a qualified "yes" to all first and second semi-rhetorical questions, while framing the third within the context of the statement that makes up the second half of the header.

Qualified in that I was talking PURELY about tenured faculty.

I was NOT talking about tenure-track but not yet tenured. I was definitely not talking about including non-tenure track. I absolutely was not including adjuncts.

At a major university? Teaching undergrad classes, actual tenured faculty are what, 10-15 percent of total instructors? See first link below.

That said, at the grad level, they're surely at least one-third. And, that's where you get visibility, anyway.

Within that, professors in the humanities are arguably either:

A. Too timid:

B. Despite all their otherwise professed librulizm, too dismissive of the Palestinian cause.

The main person dismissive of me? A grad student. 

It's true that she has a long road to hoe. But, I wasn't speaking of her.

Being actually tenured is not a guarantee against dismissal, but it does require it be done for specific reasons and include a sort of due process.

As of two years ago, non-tenured faculty were about 75 percent of four-year colleges. So, those teaching at grad level only were probably about 50 percent; maybe more at elite  universities in elite programs.

As for the likes of Steven Salaita?

As I've discussed, he IMO went into hate-speech territory, and second, since his contract had not legally been confirmed (and if it had, it was a new job, and if on tenure track not yet tenured) on legal thin ice.

It is true that, in a case like his, donors may threaten to withhold money. But, as with UT alumni chastising black athletes for refusing to salute "The Eyes of Texas," we have two questions:

1. What percentage of university donations do these people make up?

2. Will they actually stop giving if you call their bluff?

And, per that link, an Illini emeritus professor, and also former president of the American University of University Professors, agreed with me on the legal angle — Salaita had not yet been hired, let alone tenured.

There was otherwise ugliness all around, especially from Bobby Kennedy son Christopher, on the Illini board of regents. Ugliness followed Salaita to American University of Beirut and disputes over his hiring process there. And, that former AAUP prez Cary Nelson is himself a Zionist. On the fourth hand, his book about BDS and related issues on campus claims that many BDSers DO turn anti-Zionism into antisemitism, and that Salaita himself .... at least pushed the envelope. More here.

On the FIFTH hand? Those two reviews of Nelson's book are by Commentary and Tablet, which themselves have motive to smear the entire BDS movement with the worst problems of its worst supporters. After all, Mondoweiss comes immediately to mind of a pro-BDS and anti-Zionist organization that is DEFINITELY not antisemitic. 

On the SIXTH hand?

Having run into a Zionist bullshitter on Twitter last night?

1. The Khazar hypothesis IS at least somewhat real. (Related: language is not ethnicity and Rhineland Jews have little connection to those from the Pale; Jews and goys intermarried in medieval Europe far more than Zionists like to admit; Hanukkah has pagan roots; the Revolt was about religion only, not about Hellenism; and other things.)

2. For both Christian Zionists, Zionists who read beyond the Tanakh and rightist Catholics, Daniel, as well as First and Second Maccabees, are steaming shitpiles of legendary pseudo history.

3. The Maccabees had a strong mix of military luck and good PR scriptwriters.

4. Beyond those links? While Zionists in American academia always call on Palestinian-supporting academics to call out the likes of Salaita, I've little doubt that a Cary Nelson has never called out Bibi Netanyahu.

This is clearly an Idries Shah issue:

First, as I have said here and elsewhere, the enemy of my enemy may simply be an ally of convenience. That's another side right there. I used that exact phrase in a post last fall talking about Twitter cleanup, inspired by Julian Assange issues.

Or, the enemy of my enemy may also be an enemy to me on other issues, or even on the issue at hand, just via a different track. 

To move to the finish line? Assange may well be a good analogy for Salaita. Both with some good initial actions, though carrying the seeds of their own self-destruction from the start. Then, through sniffing their own press clippings too much and other things, they started fertilizing those bad seeds with their own bullshit. 

But, per what I said above, I wouldn't publicly repute a Salaita to a Zionist's face unless they agreed to some of their own repudiation at the same time. And I wouldn't hold my breath over that, given that wingnut Erick Erickson has demonstrably lied about what the AP did and did not know about its (alleged by the IDF) landlord, per AP CEO Gary Pruitt himself.

Top blogging of 2019

It was an interesting year this year. No heavy thread of refuting conspiracy theories, unlike my top blogging of 2018. And, several of the top posts, including two baseball-themed ones, came from the last few months of the year.

One post was a repeat from a previous year, and one was a "throwaway" from a decade ago.

Let's start with that.

The most read blog post here in 2019 was "Could an Iranian bomb LOWER tensions?" As a generally erratic President Donald Trump listens to his neocons and tightens the screws ever more on the Islamic Republic, and as our Saudi allies and other Gulf Arab states descend into further butchery in Yemen, and as Trump panders to Zionists ever more while also encouraging antisemitism more (to those who know the history of Zionism, and know early Zionists themselves did that, that should be no shock) it seems that a lot of people wonder if a Tehran with a nuke or two, as much as proliferation is a no-no, might be better than the current situation.

No. 2, speaking of Zionism and antisemitism? That was me defending Ilhan Omar from charges of antisemitism — even as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, no less, shoved her halfway under the bus. (As I also noted there, it wasn't the first time — nor was it the last — for AOC's reality to fall several steps short of her rhetoric.)

No. 3? On to actual racism. And other things of the past at Augusta National Country Club. I called The Masters "A tradition of bullshit unlike any other."

No. 4? After making the Top 10 of 2017, but missing the cut last year, my ever growing biography of Twitter guru in the mind of himself, when alive, and his cultists still today, "Who Is Alan Smithee, aka Actual Flatticus?" (answer: misogynist, possibly racist, abusive Florida lawyer Chris Chopin) is back in the Top 10 this year.

No. 5? Yeah, everybody else doing political blogging wrote about it too. But! My "What's next for Trump after the Mueller Report?" was written from a position that clearly rejected twosiderism. That became more and more of a theme here the second half of 2019, with allegedly outside the box journos, but actually stenos to a certain form of twosiderism, like Aaron Maté, Matt Taibbi, Max Blumenthal, Mark Ames, Ben Norton, Yasha Levine et al repeatedly engaged in.

No. 6? For the first time in years, Texas news cracked an annual Top 10 list. The tragic fall shooting in Greenville, an arrest of someone eventually cleared de facto if not de jure, the omerta that leaves the case still unsolved, and cultural issues surrounding that all drew my attention.

No. 7? Texas news a second time, and in my backyard. I called out the Dallas Observer (which hasn't responded for months, and is one of several things that has led me to look at it with a more jaundiced eye than before) for doing a hit job on a planned wind farm. The site is on the Fort Worth half of the Metromess so why was the Observer writing? The reporter clearly understands nothing about the oil and gas world, and gas motives behind some opposition, to boot. (A follow-up post is coming shortly.)

No. 8? The first of two baseball posts. This was about who the Veterans Committee should and should not vote into the Hall of Fame. Veterans got it wrong, IMO, on not admitting Lou Whitaker and Thurman Munson. They got it OK on Ted Simmons, though Munson should have gone in first. And they definitely got it right on not selecting Dale Murphy.

Skipping a bit, No. 10 was paired. Comparing his career to Dave Parker, Juan Gonzales, Roger Maris and others, I explained in more detail why Murphy is not a HOFer.

No. 9? Connected to Jeffrey Epstein. I looked at some of the various Epstein-related sleaze that is connected to John Brockman, creator of The Edge Foundation and, until this year, its annual "the big question."

Goodbye to all that, Jezza Corbyn

Were the antisemitic smears against Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn real? Hell yes. I just blogged about the disgust of Bomis founder, and creator of this W-thing, Jimmy Wales, pushing them.

But sorry, US pergressuves, while the antisemitic and other smears were real, as was media bias, they weren't the only reasons Corbyn lost. Corbyn refused to take a firm stand either way on #Brexit, whether #Leave or #remain, and refused to accept this was the center of the campaign.

The same was true with Corbyn in 2016, even though the Parliamentary Labour Party and the unions both took a strong #Remain stance. Corbyn only timidly spoke for Remain the last weekend of the #Brexit referendum.

A caucus vote, as I see British parliamentary politics, on an issue like #Brexit, is like a triple-line-whip vote in the Commons. If Corbyn couldn't ardently support #Remain in 2016, he should have stepped down as party leader back then, no matter his desire to reform Labour.

And, this is nothing new from me. I said all this at the time of the referendum. Three and a half years ago, I called him a British Tom Mulcair, and if anybody knows what I thought about Canada's then-New Democratic Party leader, they know that's a slam indeed.

In this way, and not just on #Brexit / #Remain / #Leave, the New Statesman may be half right about Corbyn. Beneath the surface, perhaps he's a trimmer on some issues. Even Just.Another.Politician.™

And, yes, I’m serious. Frankly, I think Corbyn himself has been, and remained, a closet Leaver. In 2016, he said just enough pro-Remain at the end of the campaign to keep from getting turfed as party leader.

But, then, in the 2017 election, and in the just ended election, while he had no problem calling out Tory lies on other issues, he never would  call out — at least not ardently and as a full laundry list — the laundry list of Tory lies about Brexit.

And that would make him Just.Another.Politician.™

In turn, it would make the campaign to defend his conduct as party leader another example of twosiderism. And regular readers of this blog know I loathe that.

I also, to some degree, love seeing it, because it gives me an easy opening to be a deliberate contrarian, at which I’m damned good.

Anyway, it’s already out there. Some Berners are touting this.

Someone who definitely knows better, the allegedly outside the box steno Aaron Maté, is also already pushing this line.

Why not just admit that part — not all, but part, and not a small part — of the problem with Jeremy Corbyn was Jeremy Corbyn, and his stance on Brexit?

Maybe some part of it was Corbyn the campaigner. That said, per Zoe Williams' description of this issue, I think it folds up into Corbyn the closet Leaver. (More here, linked off that article, with some Labour losing candidates in that election calling out leadership, if not Corbyn by name, for "facing two ways" on Brexit.)

There’s one other issue.

In refusing to accept the 2016 PLP vote on Remain, Corbyn comes off as trying to make the parliamentary election system more like the American presidential-focused process.

Just like Corbyn’s Labour BFF stood accused of doing.

Congrats, Jeremy. You’ve finally caught up with Tony Blair on something.

In the nonce, per the title, and Robert Graves, let's see how bitter the parting is.

So, I don't feel sorry for Corbyn as ex-party leader.

I do feel sorry for British Labour, which is now going to have New Labour say that it's right after all, and unionism wondering if it's going to become almost as dead as its American version.

 I feel sorry for the British people, who are now going to be governed for five years by an uncouth elitist-populist toff and yob who will have an ironclad majority to do whatever he wants to the NHS that he and Farange lied about and many other things. I feel doubly sorry because your economy is likely to crap out.

I feel sorry for Scotland, where its Remainers from its independence vote of a few years ago will surely now have buyers' remorse, even as Johnson blocks any attempt at a second referendum.

I feel sorry for Northern Ireland / Ulster, which is going to get royally screwed simply because Johnson will continue to not accept that he can't force the EU to do what the EU doesn't want to do. Since the DUP lost seats, it's weakened anyway, even more so with Johnson in a strong majority, not a coalition.

 

==

 

Four and a half years on from this, Labour is finally in power again, led by Keir Der Starmer, the man who shivved Corbyn. Corbyn's still in parliament, as an independent. And, with the margin of Labour's victory, arguably even more marginalized than he was a month earlier.

Jimmy Wales: Zionist-backing Corbyn slanderer, lover of Blairite dictator friends AND Randian Objectivist

Turns out Jimmy Wales, whether because he hates Labour's anti-neoliberal turn under Jeremy Corbyn, or he really does believe that antizionism is antisemitism, has promoted the recent smears running around Corbyn. And even signed a group op-ed in The Guardian about that.
When I called him out on Twitter, he claimed to not be conflating the two, but posted a new piece from Medium that did just that.

I responded with:

Read this: https://t.co/Ee7X737yqf
And this: https://t.co/gzXf8OSK6u
And this: https://t.co/t7w3unLI7j
Maybe you just hate Corbyn and a non-#neoliberal Labour?

— reallyDonaldTrump  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) December 10, 2019

And he blocked me.

Because he went to private prep school in the US, the dual-citizenship Wales may be a New Labour version of a Tory toff as much as anything. That still doesn't excuse him. Oh, Jimmy? The Guardian piece I link has about 5x the signatures of yours.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg of sleaziness in the name of Wales and his empire. That link is longform, but WELL worth reading. Wales personally seems to have a decade-plus of sleaziness that means his Corbyn smears are par for his course. No, it does more than that.

 Blair is a close friend of Wales, whose wife Kate Garvey previously worked as his diary secretary. Wales is fiercely defensive of his famous friends, and Blair’s own Wikipedia entry barely mentions Blair’s vast financial wealth (37 homes — 10 houses and 27 flats — worth £27 million, plus millions of pounds distributed through a network of companies); his PR work on behalf of dictators and human rights abusers in Kuwait, the UAE, Colombia, Egypt, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan; his utter failure to support Palestinian rights during his time as Middle Eastern peace envoy; and the human consequences — over half a million civilian casualties — of the Iraq invasion he continues to defend.

Well, there you have it. Read on. There's lots of good stuff about him palling around with dictators, stiffing winners of prizes he has created, and more. (You can skip most of the last one-quarter; the author's pretty much wrong about alt-medicine, most of which is actually pseudomedicine. The rest, though, is spot on.)

Sounds like Jimmy Wales never really moved beyond his Bomis roots.

Finally, since today is the day of Britain's snap election, let's hope Wales has failed, while acknowledging he may not have. (How much Labour slumps based on Jezza's schwaffling on Leave/Remain is an issue itself, of course.)

New twist! Britain arguably really does have a deep state far worse than Trump Train riders claim in the US. BUT ... it's anti-leftist, and Grayzone Project claims it was behind many of the smears.

==

While we're here? If you see anybody touting WT:Social as an alternative to Facebook, or replacement? Don't fall for it. It's Wales-founded and likely has Wales grifting issues behind it. Details here.

 

https://socraticgadfly.blogspot.com/2019/12/jimmy-wales-zionist-backing-corbyn.html 

AIPAC (and AOC, Pelosi et al) vs. Ilhan Omar (updated)

In early February, I was kind of saddened that Rep. Omar backed down on her "Benjamins" comment about AIPAC. It was NOT anti-Semitic. (David Bruce Collins notes that "Benjamins" COULD be understood that way. I suppose; my thought was rather that it was a question of whether Omar was talking about $100 bills or Netanyahu. Either would be correct, and neither would be anti-Semitic. Some people could still chose to infer that; I didn't and I don't.)

And, so, we must first STIPULATE what is clearly true — anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.
Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.
Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.
Anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism.

This — the using of anti-Semitism claims to smear anti-Zionists — is of course, nothing new from AIPAC supporters. As Jacobin details, the attempts to smear Walt and Mearsheimer are more than a decade old. And, as Mondoweiss notes, at bottom line, these actions are gaslighting.

But, when even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez throws you under one side of the bus:

Unlike this President, Rep. @IlhanMN demonstrated a capacity to acknowledge pain & apologize, use the opportunity to learn abt history of antisemitism,+grow from it while clarifying her stance.

I’m also inspired by Jewish leadership who brought her in, not push her out, to heal. https://t.co/ONRegDJK2S

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) February 12, 2019

What choice do you have, I guess? Especially when a number of alleged "progressives" who aren't full-blown Donut Twitter rush to AOC's defense.

Besides, this isn't anything new from AOC anyway:

Per Rania, let's not forget that AOC halfway folded her tents last year on the issue of #BDS. (Omar didn't fold on that issue, at least not then.) https://t.co/8Wj9Dxc1VW https://t.co/wlxx32IcXR

— AF-CC Esq  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 12, 2019

I remembered that as soon as I heard about her driving the Omar bus.

===

Update, March 5 — AOC is still doing it, hence the "updated" in the header:

“Calling out” is one of the measures of last resort, not 1st or 2nd resort.

We do it when repeated attempts to “call in” are disrespected or ignored. And I believe that Ilhan, in her statement a few weeks ago, has demonstrated a willingness to listen+work w/impacted communities.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 5, 2019

Still pretending to side with Omar while actually throwing her halfway under the bus.

Given that it's part of a thread that also includes this:

I often think about how I work with white or male allies when they say something insensitive.

The 1st thing I do is pull them aside + say “hey, you may not be aware of X thing regarding Latinx people, but here is the history and it’s hurtful. If you want to learn more, read Y.”

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 5, 2019

This is not hard to interpret.

And, it's a bad analogy. Essentially, AOC is letting herself be read between the lines as saying she believes Omar engaged in anti-Semitic talk.

Correct analogy, as I told AOC on Twitter? It would be if Omar called out the right-wing goverment of Honduras while noting that many Latinx citizens of Honduras agreed with her.

Or, from another blog post, here's a better analogy from Euro-American history vis a vis American Indians to explain what's happening in Israel and Palestine.

And, on this round as on the initial Tweets, as I told someone on Twitter March 4, I'm far from alone in interpreting AOC this way. (Whether that person will rethink or not, I don't know. I do care, to the degree that, if they don't, they're still buying into the legend of AOC, as well as possibly engaging in the same game on anti-Zionism being anti-Semitism lite as AOC is.

To be fair, AOC has now called out the anti-First Amendment idiocy of Rep. Juan Vargas:

I‘m curious if Rep. Vargas will further explain his stance here that it’s unacceptable to even *question* US foreign policy.

Plenty of Dem members have asserted that discussion + debate on this issue is fair and merited. Is this stance a departure from that? https://t.co/2tcelsxFCU

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) March 5, 2019

OTOH, how much choice did she have? After being called out herself for eating burgers and with her chief of staff  under FEC investigation, image kicks in at some point.

Updating this March 5 update, Ocasio-Cortez has seemed to find a little more spine on Twitter since then. Bernie Sanders found even more. And, AOC is off the hook for now with the House dropping its plans for a statement against anti-Semitism when the Black Caucus and the alleged Progressive Caucus woke up. See, AOC? First, you use your House website to issue an actual press release or statement longer than Twitter's 280 characters. You give it a minute to craft it out.

And, having little spine but plenty of pander, prez candidate Kirsten Gillibrand threw Omar all the way under the bus, accusing her of anti-Semitism.

===

Here's another hot take on AOC:

Its the least of her concerns, if you havent noticed from her tweets. This is all about US internal politics. Its complete nonsense to allow some ppl to critizes something and forbid the same thing, if ppl with different backgrounds do the same. Its intellectual dishonesty.

— Jodocus Quak (@JodocusQuak) February 12, 2019

Is AOC at Just.Another.Politician.™ stage yet? She's moving there. Like Dear Leader eight years ago. Remember this?

People saying "Oh, we should be kind to AOC, because .@AOC  was just trying to do her best here," and we shouldn't push her from the left?
Remember when Dear Leader Obama said "Push me from the left," then got mad when people actually did that?

— AF-CC Esq  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 12, 2019

Yep, yep, yep. AOC herself hasn't yet pushed back against criticism from the left. But, let's wait and see. What will the DSA roses as an official organization say?

Anyway, here's my hot take back:

So ... AOC is throwing Ilhan just under the left-hand wheels of the back of the bus, not both sides? Hey, AOC, I'll keep an eye on you to see if #AIPAC cuts you a campaign finance check. https://t.co/k7l8hNsPz7

— AF-CC Esq  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 12, 2019

Meanwhile, the House is debating a new anti-Semitism resolution, analyzed in detail at The Baffler. Omar is being scapegoated without being mentioned by name, all while Miss Nancy Pelosi tiptoes through tulips and landmines, probably unsuccessfully.

Should this come to a vote, I'd like to see a roll call rather than a consensus vote. Put AOC on the record.

==

All things Batya Ungar-Sargon

And, at The Forward, Batya Ungar-Sargon is simply shit-stirring now, if one wants a phrase, not an analogy.

@bungarsargon No, "The Left" is not "making Jews choose" anything. Jews who choose to conflate anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are doing so of their own free will. What rot. https://t.co/dWyXhJP9nW

— ATrealDonaldTrump 🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) March 6, 2019

Here's more shit-stirring:

Kevin McCarthy @GOPLeader has the absolute gall to be out here thanking Eliot Engel for standing up to anti-Semitism after McCarthy himself tweeted a disgustingly anti-Semitic ad. "We take action" - he has the chutzpah to flat out lie. pic.twitter.com/lz2737nbtc

— Batya Ungar-Sargon (@bungarsargon) March 7, 2019

This is simply not an anti-Semitic ad. It nowhere mentions that any of the three (Soros, Steyer and Bloomberg) are Jewish. So, no, YOU are the flat-out liar.

In case the art of the parent tweet doesn't load, and besides, we need to see it again:

Again, not anti-Semtic. And, despite BUS's self-labeling, it's not "progressive" to claim that it is.

And, I think I feel a separate blog post, something like "Batya Ungar-Sargon, shit-stirrer," coming up.

What else is there to say?

Well, I can say that BUS isn't a unified op-ed voice at her own magazine. Peter Beinart, in a piece last month, refutes her conflation of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

==

But, let's move beyond AOC.

We need hot takes on AIPAC!

The just convicted El Chapo?

Reminder that El Chapo took billions in US drug sales money, but not a dime from AIPAC! Reminder that El Chapo, like other international drug lords, may have been a CIA asset at one time, but never an AIPAC asset!

— AF-CC Esq  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 12, 2019

In response to someone fauxgressive on being anti-Zionist

So, "the Benjamins" is an anti-Semtic trope? What about calling out the Democrat Party for "writing blank checks to AIPAC"? Is any negative mention of AIPAC and money in the same sentence an "anti-Semitic trope"?

— AF-CC Esq  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 12, 2019

In response to neoliberal insurers' whore Howard Dean:

Hey, Howard Dean? You need to to STFU and go back to whoring yourself out for insurers instead of whoring yourself out for AIPAC.

— AF-CC Esq  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 12, 2019

Since yesterday was Lincoln's Birthday

#TuesdayThoughts Abraham Lincoln never took a dime from AIPAC

— AF-CC Esq  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 12, 2019

Quote-tweeting about Robert Francis O'Rourke:

#FuckBeto as well as AIPAC https://t.co/DcOEhNcKMI

— AF-CC Esq  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 12, 2019

One of several shout-outs to/against Nancy Pelosi and the even more odious Chelsea Clinton:

.@SpeakerPelosi Is Noam Chomsky spreading anti-Semitic tropes? Hell, maybe we need to hashtag #AntiSemiticTropes. .@ChelseaClinton what about it? You ready to attack Chomsky next? And, is this on behalf of Mommy Dearest's foundation? https://t.co/QBU0uRzK3v

— AF-CC Esq  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 12, 2019

And a deserved second one to Chelsea:

That goes for you, too .@ChelseaClinton. You can once again butt out, stay butted out, and STFU. If Democrat (sic) nat'l leadership is going to write .@AIPAC blank checks, .@SpeakerPelosi (Oooohhh, is "write AIPAC blank checks" anti-Semitic?) I am doubling down on #VoteGreen

— AF-CC Esq  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 12, 2019

And a shout of support to Rep. Omar plus another callout to Pelosi, along with Pelosi, and with all the Russia collusion nutters.

Dear .@IlhanMN, I wish you had NOT apologized to .@SpeakerPelosi. Legitimately calling out AIPAC for its MASSIVE lobbying spending is NOT anti-semitic, nor the use of an anti-semitic trope. First, it's true https://t.co/uGfYlqEkHW

— AF-CC Esq  🚩🌻 (@AFCC_Esq) February 12, 2019

There.

Finally, per Mondoweiss, librulz need to stop lying when they blame the Religious Right, well, the Xn Religious Right, for the rise of AIPAC. Per Mondoweiss, Democrats have been focused on the Jewish domestic vote since FDR. Truman mentioned that as part of his recognition of Israel. Israel as a nation-state became part of the Cold War's legacy, speaking of.

==

Tropes and tropesplaing

Speaking of Mondoweiss ... and that piece is from publisher Philip Weiss himself ...

Per someone on Book of Face, with whom I did a modest status adjustment, I'm a "leftist goysplainer."

First, I thought this person was a leftist, not a librul. Second, I didn't think he had dived in any way into the SJW shallow pool. I have been wrong before on judging others, in person as well as in cyberspace, and guess I'm wrong again.

That said, non-goys (and non-leftists) Glenn Greenwald (mentioned by said person) and Peter Beinart and Weiss (not mentioned by said person) also basically said that Omar shouldn't have apologized.

Oh, and in the same general vein, let's add Ken Silverstein, who posted at Washington Babylon a free online copy of "The Occupation of the American Mind."

Norman Solomon. Norman Finkelstein. And others. (Several of them on that documentary.)

Maybe they are all ... to use a phrase ... "self-hating Jews."

Phyllis Benis, who actually overheard Omar, must be another self-hating Jew.

As might be David Samel, who points out this is not the first time Batya Ungar-Sargon has made facile anti-Semite claims. Or Mondoweiss editors, who note the Tweet chain of a Ha'aretz reporter about Bibi working to get the remnants of Meir Kahane's Kach party — outright racists and once considered terrorists by the US Government, and by that of Israel, too — into the Knesset.

Or else, like this German Jewish group supporting Palestinians, they're "the wrong kind of Jews."

And, I'm sure Roger Waters is a goysplainer. (Page-Lieberman, in one last post of his I saw before blocking him, called Greenwald the "David Clarke of Jews." So, even if he didn't like me using that phrase, he indulges the idea himself.)

Let me also add that, besides the known-by-group-name Marranos of Spanish history, many a goy may not know their whole family history. Some goys (ahem) have at least guesses in that area. Also, especially from medieval Spain and conversions, that "sangre azul" cuts both ways. It does among Rhineland German Jews too.

THAT in turn leads to the issue of religious Judaism vs ethnic Jewishness. Whoopi Goldberg is the former, but, as far as I know, not the latter.

As for non-leftist Zionism-defending Jews who choose to conflate or confuse (yes, it's a choice) anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism? I have no problem pointing to the Tanakh, specifically, the Nivi'im, and reminding you of Yahweh ordering the Holocaust of the Amalekites.

Those last two paragraphs together get back to Biblical times. Even if half the nations listed in the Torah as living in Palestine promised to Abraham and Moses are fictitious, the other half aren't. Given the actualities of how Israel arose vs myth of the Torah and the Former Prophets in the Nivi'im, there is no pure Jewish bloodline.

I add in the number of post-Return Judahite males Ezra told to divorce. I presume that not all did and that many had kids.

Add in the Idumeans converted at Maccabean swordpoint. The house of Antipater and Herod weren't the only ethnic Idumeans intermarrying with ethnic Judahites.

And, on the leftist vs liberal angle? I again reference Doug Henwood, saying that being a leftist means avoiding unwarranted white liberal guilt.

And, after further back and forth with Mr. MJ (he posts to "public" on Facebook, so not breaking confidences, but I shouldn't have posted back for that reason) ... I've blocked him, after his added response to me of saying I'm 14 and a 4Chaner. Screw you. And your SJWism. Yet another bit of insight as to why I continue to call myself a skeptical leftist, not just a leftist.

As for the issue at hand?

The bottom line is this, per DBC:

1. Not all Jews are Zionists.
2. Not all Zionists are Jews.
3. Not all Jews live in Israel; not even all of them want to.
4. Not all inhabitants of Israel are Jews.
5. Not all inhabitants of Israel — Jewish, Muslim, or other [many Palestinians are Christian, my note] —support the current Israeli government or its actions.
6. Criticizing Israel's government is not the same criticizing Jews.
7. Even criticizing Jews, whether as individuals or as groups, is not the same as hating them, let alone wanting to see them dead.
8. Criticizing an organization that represents the Israeli government is not anti-Semitism.
9. Criticizing a legislator who takes campaign contributions from such an organization is not anti-Semitism.
10. Criticizing wealthy Jewish donors to these organizations is not anti-Semitism.
11. Refusing to bow to pressure to pledge loyalty to Israel is not anti-Semitism.
12. Supporting a group that opposes the Israeli government and its actions is not anti-Semitism.
13. Muslims (e.g., Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and Keith Ellison) are not anti-Semitic just by virtue of practicing Islam.

Per Point 5? Many Palestinians that the Religious Right likes to throw under the bus are Christian. Like Yasir Arafat's wife.

Otherwise? Even many commenters on a page for a site as left-liberalish as Jezebel don't get it. Or don't want to get it. Omar has consistently said "Israel," not "the Jews" throughout. And, contra liberal concern trollers, has condemned Saudi Arabia and other places, too.

Maybe those commenters don't know better. None of this is new, San Husseini notes.

Nor are anti-Palestinian tropes. More on Twitter.

Also not new is confusion and fusion of Judaism as religious practice and Jewishness as ethnicity. I take a deep dive here, primarily on the latter and how "Jewishness" claims have no more standing than any other ethnicity claim that stretches back 2,000 or more years.

==

And, actual anti-Semitism? It's more common among Tories than Labour, more common among Republicans than Democrats. You know, like Mel Gibson and his porn-violence fetish movie.