{"id":61758,"date":"2012-12-09T13:21:46","date_gmt":"2012-12-09T13:21:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=61758"},"modified":"2012-12-12T08:37:34","modified_gmt":"2012-12-12T08:37:34","slug":"not-the-wisest-phil-around","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/?p=61758","title":{"rendered":"Not the Wisest Phil Around"},"content":{"rendered":"

Gilad Atzmon \u2013 giladatzmon.co.uk Dec 9, 2012<\/h1>\n

\"\"<\/a>God bless Philip Weiss, the progressive Jewish blogger brave enough to admit in public those things other Jewish ethnic activists prefer to shove under the carpet. A year ago, Weiss was brave enough to confess to me that it is \u2018Jewish self interests\u2019<\/span><\/a> that stands at the core of his pro Palestinian activism. Also, a few weeks ago, the same Weiss was honest enough to announce that his Jewish \u2018progressive\u2019 internet journal, Mondowiess, changed its comment pol<\/span>icy<\/span><\/a> and \u201cwill no longer serve as a forum to pillory Jewish culture and religion as the driving factors in Israeli and US policy.\u201d<\/h5>\n
But this week, the very same Weiss published a new polemic on his website. He now thinks that \u201cit\u2019s time for the media to talk about Zionism<\/span><\/a>.\u201d So, now Weiss is happy to join with the rest of us in talking about Zionism \u2013 so long as we avoid discussing \u2018Jewishness\u2019. Well, I\u2019m afraid that Philip Weiss may have missed the train since, by now, many of us have already grasped that the time is ripe to talk about Jewishness and the role of \u2018Jewish culture as the driving factor in Israeli and US policy.\u2019<\/h5>\n
Weiss\u2019 logic is no doubt fascinating. This Jewish ethnic activist does provide us with an insight into the level of deceit that is, unfortunately, inherent to Jewish left politics.<\/h5>\n
Weiss thinks Jews should ask themselves whether they really are \u2018unsafe\u2019 in America. Well, Weiss must know plenty about \u2018safety\u2019 since it was he himself who felt that it may be \u2018risky\u2019 to discuss Jewish culture and religion on his own Mondoweiss.<\/h5>\n
\u201cZionism,\u201d he continues, \u201cdraws on a person\u2019s worldview and has a religious character, it supplies meaning to his or her life.\u201d Well again, Weiss should know because, like all Zionists, both overt and covert, he operates within a Jews-only political cell namely \u201cJews Voice for Peace\u2019 (JVP). For some reason, just like his less enlightened brethren, this very \u2018progressive\u2019 activist prefers to surround himself with members of his own tribe.<\/h5>\n
Weiss well knows why the media avoids discussing Zionism, \u201cit would involve a lot of squeamish self-interrogation on the part of Jews,\u201d and Weiss knows what this means. That\u2019s why he, and his Jewish partner Adam Horowitz, banned Jeff Blankfort from commenting on their site \u2013 Blankfort was critically discussing Jewish related topics. Weiss couldn\u2019t allow it.<\/h5>\n
Weiss is brave enough to admit that \u201cthe acknowledgment of Jewish prominence in the Establishment, and of the power of Zionism, would make a lot of Jews uncomfortable\u201d, but he isn\u2019t bold enough to admit that the problem is far worse, since Jewish anti-Zionists like himself and JVP are relentlessly seeking a similar hegemony within the Palestinian solidarity discourse and openly campaign against prominent activists<\/span><\/a> who challenge Jewish power. Is it possible that what we are dealing with here is a tribally-driven, power seeking tendency that is inherent to Jewish politics? The answer is a categorical yes, and I provide all the relevant information on this in my latest book The Wandering Who<\/span><\/a>.<\/h5>\n
Weiss regards himself as an anti-Zionist while, as far as his language is concerned, he actually manifests every possible Zionist symptom. \u201cSilence\u201d on issues to do with Zionist power is \u201cbad for Jews,\u201d says Weiss. Like any Hasbara parrot he repeats the old mantra of \u2018good\u2019 vs. \u2018bad\u2019 for the Jews. But then isn\u2019t this just what you would expect from a Zionist?<\/h5>\n
It doesn\u2019t take Weiss too long to drop his political bomb: the silence over Zionist power \u201callows people who are justifiably angry over our foreign policy to believe that all Jews support Israel.\u201d Here, Weiss is absolutely correct. It is about time to deliver the message to the American people and the entire world \u2013 Not all Jews support Israel! In fact, at least two dozen American Jews including Weiss oppose Zionism because, as Weiss confesses, because \u201cit is really bad for the Jews.\u201d<\/h5>\n
If you think you\u2019ve had enough of Weiss\u2019 Judeo-centrism read this: \u201cZionism came out of the real condition of Jews in Europe in the late 19th and 20th centuries. I can well imagine being a Zionist at other periods of Jewish history. I would have been a Zionist if I had been in Kafka\u2019s circle in Prague in the 19-teens with the rise of anti-Semitism. I would have been a Zionist if I had been born into the family of my mother\u2019s best friend in Berlin in the 1930s.\u201d<\/h5>\n
In this embarrassing passage, Weiss, the so-called \u2018anti\u2019 Zionist, actually admits that considerations of Jewish safety would justify the colonization of Palestine. This non-ethical vision is also apparent in JVP\u2019s latest \u2018educational\u2019 video<\/span><\/a>. It is clearly consistent with the Zionist take on the primacy of Jewish suffering. Which is exactly what you would expect from a Jew who operates politically within Jewish racially-segregated cells. There is only one possible conclusion \u2013 Jewish anti Zionism is a myth. Jewish opposition to Zionism is just another form of Zionism-lite that, just like it\u2019s right-wing counterpart, locates Jewish self-interest firmly at its core.<\/h5>\n
Weiss is a pretty clumsy spin-doctor. He argues that the current militant and totalitarian aspects of Israeli society flow from a \u2018Zionist belief system\u2019. Here, Weiss misleads his readers and I think he does this consciously. Israel defines itself as the Jewish State and as the true embodiment of Jewish culture. Its barbarism is the direct outcome of its interpretation of Jewish texts and spirit. If anything, Zionism was born to \u2018civilize\u2019 the Diaspora Jew who, certain 19th century emancipated secular Jews found so repellent. So it is not Zionism that makes Israel barbarous, it is the way Israelis interpret their cultural, spiritual and textual heritage. Of course, Weiss is welcome to suggest that there is another possible interpretation to Jewish heritage, but he should be precise and point to those Jewish texts that preach universal ethics and world peace.<\/h5>\n
Weiss reckons that once we should be brave enough to deal with Zionism, \u201cliberal Zionists will be pressed to decide what they believe in more, liberalism or Zionism.\u201d But still I\u2019m puzzled. If Weiss is so open and tolerant, surely he would allow discussion on his own website concerning the Jewish character of the Jewish State. He would invite a discussion concerning the Jewishness of the Jewish Lobby. I believe that Philip Weiss is operating unwillingly and unwittingly as a Zionist fig leaf. He invests all his intellectual energy diverting attention from the root cause of the problem \u2013 namely Jewish culture and Jewish identity politics. And why? Probably because of his own unease with is own Anti Zionist Zionist behaviour.\u00a0<\/span><\/h5>\n
The Wandering Who? A Study Of Jewish Identity Politics and\u00a0 progressive spin …
\n\u00a0Amazon.com <\/span><\/a>\u00a0or Amazon.co.uk<\/span><\/a><\/h5>\n

Source\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Deconstructing Philip Weiss<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":109,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[61,37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-61758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-Commentary","category-Israel_Anti-Semitism_Zionism_and_US-UK_allies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/109"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=61758"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":61894,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/61758\/revisions\/61894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=61758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=61758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thetruthseeker.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=61758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}