Israel Shamir Supports LePen, Attacks Jews in General

Israel Shamir's Support for LePen and Condemnation of the Jewish People Denounced by Struggle Editor


The Dangerous Liaisons
The Beginning Of The End Of The Jewish Post-War Ascendancy?
By Israel Shamir

The people of France have sent an important message to the world, by
electing the traditionalist leader, Jean-Mari le Pen to the second round
of the French presidential elections. It was not just a proof of general
dissatisfaction, as NY Times claimed. The first round occurred while the
Jewish troops besieged the Church of Nativity, starved nuns, shot
priests, and despoiled the land of Christ. Israeli bulldozers worked
around the clock covering mass graves of their innocent victims in the
Jenin refugee camp, Jewish soldiers destroyed churches and mosques in
Nablus, shot at the Holy Virgin in Bethlehem, while one hundred fifty
thousand Jews marched in Paris and elsewhere, supporting the genocide in
Palestine. Waving Israeli flags and draped in the blue and white colours
of their national banner (the tricolour is dropped and forgotten), the
Jews marched from the Place de la République to the Place de la Bastille
in Paris, chanting in French and Hebrew and carrying signs that read
"Yesterday New York, today Jerusalem, tomorrow Paris.”

Today’s Jerusalem is an unhappy city, its non-Jewish majority
dispossessed, uprooted, pushed into ghetto and controlled by the brutal
Jewish Border Police. Today’s Jerusalem has the most advanced torture
facilities, and there, thousands of kidnapped Palestinians are subjected
to electric chocks, beating and humiliation. Today’s Jerusalem is a
place where only Jews can move freely and enjoy the fruits of
civilisation. Should it be a model for tomorrow’s Paris? Mais non, the
people of France had experienced the German Nazi conquest in 1940s, and
they did not want to try the Judeo-Nazi occupation.

That was the main message sent by the French voter. We should thank
General Sharon’s brutality and ill-conceived solidarity of Jews in
France with the génocidaire for this result. Until now, the Jews were
divided in their tasks and purposes. In Palestine, they created a toxic,
ferociously nationalist and religiously fanatic entity based on Hitler’s
Nuremberg Laws. Elsewhere, in France as well as in Britain, they
promoted the pseudo-liberal paradigm of dismantling European national
and cultural content in favour of the Judeo-American spirit. In
Palestine, they shot at the church; in France, they undermined it by
subterfuge. One law for themselves: extreme right wing nationalism of
Sharon. Another law for the goyiim: liberal New Labour of Tony Blair.

If the Jews would have sense, they would keep the inner dialectical
unity of their pincer-movement attack as their best guarded secret. But
they were inebriated by their successes. The spiritual teacher of
Sephardic Jews, Rabbi Obadiah Joseph, ruled that Jews should not show
their ascendancy in the world until they would be able to destroy the
Christian Churches in the Holy Land. Now, with the Nativity besieged,
they apparently felt the condition is fulfilled. Jews became united to
an extent unknown since the days of Christ, and united by a common will,
single purpose and a feeling of arriving to the pinnacle of power.
Intoxication of power and unity caused the usually cautious people to
drop masks, to leave pretences. It seems the Jews call out ‘Kill him’,
as two thousand years ago. This new openness provided us with a
previously unheard-of insight into the soul of the Jews and their
supporters.

An authentic Jewish voice, Ron Grossman of Chicago Tribune[i] wrote, “As
a self-proclaimed humanist, I ought to recoil in horror from the thought
of tanks rumbling through a city, anybody's city. My head should hang in
sorrow at televised images of street fighting (rather, massacres - ISH)
in Bethlehem and Ramallah. But here is a hint: Don't lecture or preach
to us. Forget about appealing to our better selves”.

Please note this plural ‘us’ before denying the obvious. The Jews do not
hide anymore behind the useful but dated device of “Americans, French or
British citizens of Jewish faith”. It is again The Jews, a single body
with a single mind. Forget about appealing to their better selves, as
they have not got any. ‘The better selves’ were just a device.

“No one can express the aspirations of most Israelis like the prime
minister. This is not a war that was waged by Sharon, the "warmonger,"
this is the war of all of us”, reports Gideon Levy, a man of heart and
conscience, who was recently banned from the pages of the ‘liberal’
Haaretz. (I was banned ten years ago. Welcome to the club, Gideon!) “It
will also be very difficult to blame Sharon for the consequences of the
war, in the light of the sweeping support he has been given by the
majority of Israelis. Nearly 30,000 men were mobilized and they reported
for duty as one man, making the refusal movement, with 21 refuseniks
currently in jail, irrelevant”.

The Jews abroad were just as awful as those in Palestine. Professor
David D. Perlmutter wrote in LA Times[ii]: “I daydream--if only! If in
1948, 1956, 1967 or 1973 Israel had acted just a bit like the Third
Reich, then today Israelis would shop, eat pizza, marry and celebrate
the holy days unmolested. And of course Jews, not sheiks, would have
that Gulf oil’. Witty if snobbish Taki of the British weekly Spectator
contributed the following anecdotal evidence of the new Jewish vehemence
and single-mindedness: “On Easter Sunday, during lunch, the richest
woman in Israel, Irit Lando[iii], suddenly burst into my house and began
to harangue my friends and family about Adam Shapiro. Despite the fact
she's one of my wife's oldest friends and was invited to drop in after
lunch, I was extremely annoyed. I reminded Irit that my house was not
Israeli occupied territory; that it was Easter; and knowing how I feel
about the plight of the Palestinians, she should change the subject.
Which she did, turning on the press, instead, and how they gave
publicity to that godawful traitor Adam Shapiro”.

As few mavericks of Jewish origin like Adam Shapiro or marvellous
Jennifer Loewenstein became increasingly marginalized, the Jews en masse
rally to support Sharon and Israel. From Moscow to Brooklyn, from
Marseille to Hampstead, the Jews speak in one voice. WE ARE ONE,
proclaimed the headline of the Jewish Week. This vision of united, ready
for the kill, Jewry could not but scare the French voter, and any
thinking man. Le Pen was probably the only French politician totally
opposed by the Jews.

The French and the West European Left should learn the lesson before it
is too late. Their liaison with the Jews became a liability and a source
of embarrassment. Historically it was probably justified, but not any
more. Even the Jewish stranglehold on media can not deliver the
electoral goods. Instead of supporting Jewish agenda, the Left should
compete with the Right by addressing problems of working class in the
country and of the income disparity on the global scale. There should be
no more immigration, and this task calls to stop the main creator of
immigration, the unfair Judeo-American globalisation and Bush and Blair’
s War against Islam. In the forthcoming May elections in the UK, the
Left should give the boot to Michael Levy’s protégé Tony Blair, and turn
to the tradition of Michael Foot.

The electoral success of Le Pen could signify the beginning of the end
of the Jewish post-war ascendancy. Inverting the slogan of French Jews,
we say, "Yesterday Paris, Today Washington, and Tomorrow Jerusalem".

################

[i]
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/perspective/chi-0204070422apr
07.s

[ii] April 7, 2002

[iii] I normalised the spelling of her name. Taki the snob had to spell
quite an ordinary Jewish name Landoi (var. Landau) in the French way.

(Israel Shamir is an Israeli journalist based in Jaffa. His articles can
be found on the site http://www.israelshamir.net In order to subscribe to this
list or to be removed from it, please write to info [at] israelshamir.net No
copyright for electronic transmission, but ask for permission in order
to publish as hard copy.)


Reply by Tim Hall

Dear Israel,

From within Israel itself you have been a courageous voice in defense of the
Palestinians, hailing their struggle and advocating a one-state,
one-person-one-vote solution which would effectively dismantle the Zionist
theocratic state if implemented.

Hence it is with great disappointment that I read your April 23 article "The
Dangerous Liaisons," which applauds the electoral success of the fascist
LePen in France and raises the old fascist bogey of the "world Jewish
conspiracy," which you re-name the "Judeo-American spirit." You take up
LePen's retrograde call to oppose immigration and you make a ludicrous claim
that the French voter is faced with a "Judeo-nazi occupation." You thus
imply that those who voted for Le Pen inherit the tradition of the World War
II anti-nazi Resistance. You even lay major blame for the present capitalist
globalization on the Jews (it is hardly a Jewish monopoly, being an
American-led imperialist globalization heavily supported by the EU
and other capitalist powers).

Factually, what you are saying is garbage. In its effect, it does nothing
but help Sharon and the Israeli conquerors.

Even if, as you claim, virtually all Jews were united in support of Sharon's
brutality, that would be no reason to support LePen, a fervent defender of
French colonial domination of Algeria. LePen's anti-immigrant call, which
is obviously directed against Arabs and which you so shamefully embrace,
is indefensible. At what point in history do you draw the line
and declare that the immigrants who arrived before that date are "the true
French" (or "the true Americans") and those who arrived later are
"foreigners"? To play this game is to be a pawn of the cliques of
billionaires who rule the world and use national/racial conflict to keep
their working-class subjects divided and at war with each other.

Factually, the "World Jewish Conspiracy" (you stress the Jewish part of what
you call the "Judeo-American spirit") is also garbage. Yes, there are very
powerful Jewish -- and, obviously, American -- capitalists. But there are
also powerful capitalists of every other industrially developed nationality.
Focusing all blame on only one or two nationalities among the ruling class
lets all the others off the hook. Henry Ford and the majority of world
capitalists were quite happy to finance Hitler to blame all the ills of the
world on the Jews. It helped their class survive.

Factually, again, the impression you give of all Jews being united behind
Sharon is also false. Large numbers of anti-Zionist Jews took part in the
big April 20th demonstrations in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.
Progressive Jews are active in the militant pro-Palestinian student movement
at the University of California Berkeley campus. Abroad, indignant Jewish
voices have been heard in the UK and elsewhere denouncing Sharon's
aggression.

The present moment is certainly a turning point for the Palestinian
struggle. It is also a turning point for the movement of solidarity with
the Palestinians. Sharon's brutal aggression has horrified justice-loving
people everywhere. It creates an unprecedented opportunity to expose
Zionism and win people away from its influence. But in order to do that, we
cannot transfer one ounce of our genuine hatred of Zionist brutality to
blaming the Jewish people as a whole.

That direction leads to fascism. I hope you will turn back from it.

Sincerely,
Tim Hall
Editor
Struggle
A Magazine of Proletarian Revolutionary Literature

Responses To The Dangerous Liaisons By Israel Shamir


My commentary on Le Pen’s electoral success in the first round of the
French presidential elections caused many responses, from exuberant

“Yes, man. I agree with every word”

of Gilad Atzmon, the Israeli musician and writer, to surly

“Take me off your list. I'm seeking to have you banned from
al-awda-unity”

of the good Jewish American supporter of Palestinians, Stanley Heller.

The discourse went by two distinct routes, one, referring to Le Pen, his
policies and circumstances, including the question of immigration; two,
is the usual ‘fight against anti-Semitism’ of our Jewish friends. Their
texts are given below, while the original Dangerous Liaisons is in the
very end.

I hesitate to enter another debate of anti-Semitism. After Jenin
massacre, during the vicious siege of the Church of Nativity, I am not
sure we should give much consideration to fine feelings of our Jewish
friends. Hundred years ago, a similar discussion went on between the
Russian Bolsheviks (of Jewish or any other origin) and the Jewish
Bundists. Bund guys felt the Jewish people are too special to get the
general treatment. Years and aeons passed, but good people like Stanley
(and I like and appreciate him and his work for the cause) do not
succeed to get out of Bund mould. My good friend Miriam wondered, why I
should annoy people by speaking of ‘Jewish’ soldiers, snipers etc
instead of the ‘Israeli’ ones. Dear Miriam, Israel means Jews. That is
the meaning of the word. The State of Israel means the state of Jews.
Beside semantics, there are none but us Jews in power of Israel. Enough
of this small game of distinction between Israel and Jews, as we witness
mass unlimited support of Jews for Israel.

If our Jewish friends’ feelings are hurt, they are now in the same boat
with the Muslims, terrorists to a man, with the Germans, willing
executioners of You-Know-Who, with Europeans (White Supremacists) and
the rest of mankind. This demand of a special treatment for the Jews is
a source of Jewish neurosis. Why a Jewish Week may write, “We (the Jews)
Are One”, but I may not repeat: “the Jews are unified to an incredible
extent”? Isn’t it a case of having a cake and eating it, proclaiming
unity within and forbidding the outsiders to see it?

Stanley objects to an ‘old canard’ of Jews as enemies of Christ. We live
in the strange days when old canards became true. Jews besiege the
Church of Nativity, and probably will destroy it soon – is it an “old
canard” or reality? Hundreds of children are murdered in Palestine – is
it an “old canard” or reality? Senate and Congress of the US kowtow to
the Jews – is it an “old canard” or reality? Stan is sure that the
Americans will forever stand by the Jews, right or wrong. Well, the
success of Le Pen should teach him that it can change. He thinks that Le
Pen won the hearts of French voters by his anti-Muslim views. How come,
then, that he was tried twice for his “anti-Semitic” remarks, and
never – for an anti-Muslim ones? I am not alone in my opinion: Naomi
Kleinof No Logo wrote: The hatred of Jews is a potent political tool in the
hands of the right inEurope and in Israel. For Mr. Le Pen, anti-Semitism is a windfall,
helping spike his support from 10 per cent to 17 per cent in a week.

Some readers misunderstood me and thought I support Le Pen. Surely I do
not: Le Pen is a bad guy in my books, but bad guys will be called to
undo the excessive Jewish power if the good guys fail to do it. The
paradigm of Chosenness makes no harm as long as it is kept separately
from power. Being empowered, it becomes a source of great trouble for
mankind, and eventually for the pretenders to the Chosenness. History is
made of harsh but just stuff: at first, it offers the pretenders a
peaceful way out. Whoever fails to take it, will learn a hard way. The
Jews who rejected Christ’s message of peace with neighbours were crushed
by the Roman legions just thirty years later. The Jews, who rejected the
peaceful message of togetherness, and moved from Left to Right, may yet
live to regret it.

As to the question of immigration, immigrants should be allowed to
integrate fully in the lands they chose to live in. But an additional
import of immigrants is disruptive and inhuman.

Shamir



Hall's Reply to Israel Shamir's Defense of "The Dangerous Liaisons"

Dear Israel,

Your article "The Dangerous Liaisons" (4-23-02) was controversial for two things: its apparent support for the French fascist demagogue LePen and its denunciation of the entire Jewish people for the crimes of Zionism in the wake of Sharon's aggression.

Answering criticism in "Responses to the Dangerous Liaisons" (4-26-02), you assert that you do not really support LePen. At the same time you reiterate your condemnation of the Jewish people.

Let us take the LePen question first. You declare, in your defense: "Some readers misunderstand me and thought I support LePen. Surely I do not: LePen is a bad guy in my books, but bad guys will be called to undo the excessive Jewish power if the good guys fail to do it." You claim that this is not supporting LePen. But what it really means is that you do support him: if the "good guy" (presumably here the Palestinians and the world's masses) can't defeat Zionist (you say "Jewish") reaction, you hold out hopes that LePen will perform a service to the world's people by doing it. I can't see any other meaning to this sentence and it does, in fact, constitute support for LePen. You are turning to a sleazy, vicious reactionary to fight your main enemy for you. Have you given up on the ordinary masses?

Furthermore, there is the problem of your statements about immigration. You say you are only against new immigration. But the point is, to be democratic, to fight for the least oppressive situation for the workers under capitalism, we must be for the freedom to go from country to country in search of work. That's what most immigration is about. The severe interference with such movement by the authorities only condemns the workers to worse servitude by subjecting them to harassment, prison, deportation, etc. Keeping the workers in turmoil, keeping a section (the recent immigrants) without even the limited rights won by the earlier immigrants, only serves the rich bosses. But you have sadly taken up LePen's banner here as well.

Finally, with regard to your present views on the "world Jewish conspiracy" (you stress the "Judeo" part of what you call the "Judeo-American spirit") being the core of world oppression, this is not only false but is very helpful to Sharon at this critical moment. Your answer to the complaints about the "Liaisons" article on this score are twofold.

First, you state correctly that the world mainstream (imperialist, I would add) press constantly blames whole nations for the crimes of their ruling classes, as in the case of blaming "the Germans" for World War II, etc. So what right, you ask, do Jews have to complain when the same thing is done to them? True, the mainstream press does do this, in order -- consciously or unconsciously -- to pit one nation against another. But just when did you join the scurrilous, lying, jingoist mainstream press -- on April 23, 2002? I hope not. Inciting one nation against another only pushes the masses of each country closer to their rulers; progressive writers work to separate the masses of each country from their rulers, especially in oppressor countries like the U.S. and Israel.

You look at the present situation and see considerable unity among Jews behind the Zionists. I think you exaggerate its extent. But when certain Jews write you in protest against your condemnation of them all, you answer that we can't worry too much right now about the feelings of "our Jewish friends." Not only does this falsely suggest that progressive Jews are a miniscule number, but it misses the point altogether. The point is, no matter what is the actual number of progressive Jews, progressive people are duty-bound to expose the crimes of the Sharon war machine in the West Bank and use this exposure to split Jews and others away from Zionism. This is a historic moment. Never has the opportunity been greater to expose the reactionary nature of Zionism to the world's people, including to Jews. You, and all of us, are being tested.

But at this historic moment, you have seemingly thrown up your hands in despair, as if to say, "The Jews? Oh, they're all in the pocket of Sharon. To hell with them! I'll sic LePen on the whole damn bunch!" Do you really think that LePen will help the Arabs who are being slaughtered by Sharon? The Arabs to whom you have, to your great credit, shown such support in the past?

This is very sad. What if the American youth had taken this attitude to the American people in 1965-69, when B-52's and napalm were slaughtering Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians by the hundreds of thousands? But we didn't, and it's time for you to show that same spirit.


Sincerely,
Tim Hall
Editor
Struggle
5-3-02

(Tim Hall is a Marxist-Leninist activist, supporter of Communist Voice Organization and editor of the quarterly revolutionary literary magazine Struggle, Box 13261, Detroit, MI USA. 48213-0261. Tim Hall may be reached at timhall11 [at] yahoo.com. Communist Voice Organization may be reached at http://www.communistvoice.org.)