On Sun, 30 Mar 2003, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, Ellen Willis was quoted as saying:
>
> > In any case, the war between Israel and the Arab and Islamic worlds has
> > never been only about conflicting claims to a piece of land
>
> So what is it about? Inquiring minds want to know. jks
You mean you want the rest of the original quote? Doug already posted it, but it's short, so here goes:
<outer quote>
Her Salon review of contra apologist Paul Berman's book is pretty alarming too. And here's a real shocker of a passage from her contribution to Implicating Empire:
<quote>
Another clue to the psychopathology that drives the Islamist movement is its increasingly hysterical Jew-hatred, which has borrowed liberally from both Nazi and medieval Christian polemics. True to its characteristic evasions, the left has tended to dismiss Islamist anti-Semitism as a mere epiphenomenon of justified anger at Israel, which would presumably go away if justice were done. But is it not worth examining the strange mental processes that transmute a political grievance against Israel into a widespread delusion that the Jews masterminded the World Trade Center massacre? And what do we make of the execution of an American journalist who, before being beheaded, is forced to intone, "I am a Jew, my mother is a Jew, my father is a Jew"?
In any case, the war between Israel and the Arab and Islamic worlds has never been only about conflicting claims to a piece of land, the homelessness of the Palestinians, or the occupation of the West Bank; if it were, it would have been settled long ago. Rather, Islamist passion for Israel's obliteration has at its core revulsion at the perceived contamination of the holy land by an infidel nation; worse, a modern democracy; even worse, one populated by that quintessentially alien, bloodsucking tribe of rootless cosmopolitans, the Jews. just as the Europeans once handed their unwelcome Jewish refugee problem to the Arabs, their genocidal antiJewish rhetoric has migrated to the Middle East; but the emotions that give the rhetoric its power are strictly indigenous. They are unlikely to be assuaged by an Israeli-Palestinian settlement; they are far more likely to be inflamed.
And if the worst should happen, the world will once again be shocked. We still don't know-and don't want to know.
</quote>
She denies being a Zionist, but this is pretty indistinguishable from Zionism. Forget that land grab - it's really all about old-fashioned anti-Semitism. And she seems to have forgotten about the role of religious lunatics within Israel.
Dug
</outer quote>
Michael