Israel Shamir: the beginning of the end of the Jewish post-war ascendancy?

Max B. Sawicky sawicky at bellatlantic.net
Sat Apr 27 10:11:04 PDT 2002


huh? surely junk is junk, irrespective of the bona fides of the author. contrariwise, if something is good, it's good regardless of the bona fides of the author.

mbs: in principle yes, but when you circulate something you are also making an implicit comment on the source.

". . . I do not know, but perhaps someone here does -- when did Holocaust denial become a significant strand in Palestinian/Arab politics? Is it a case of having something thrown in your face so often that the gut response is to try and deny it? Doesn't make it right, although I can well understand it. Like my gut response to the (re-?)discovery of 'culture' and 'development' is to deny it, despite (or perhaps because of) the wondrous 'rehabilitation' of confucianism... kj khoo

mbs: Before WWI, one can document contrasting currents among Arabs -- impulses to cooperate with Zionists and a desire to expel them. In the latter case, any claims on the part of the settlers would be discounted or ignored, in the former there would be discourse that attempted to see them as allies or even of the same ethnic group (semites), brothers under the yoke of the Ottomans or more broadly, Christian chauvinism. So the politics could be predicted to determine any subsequent views of the European Holocaust. Insofar as you regard Jewish colonization as an abomination, you would not care what might have brought them here, and vice versa.

That doesn't exactly answer the question, but I think it explains whatever answer applies.



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