A Palestinian boy sits next to several dead bodies ["most of them children" -- JPost] after they were killed during an Israeli raid at the Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip (news - web sites) May 19, 2004. Israeli tanks and helicopters fired on protesters in a refugee camp on Wednesday, killing 10 Palestinians and raising a two-day death toll to 33 in Israel's bloodiest Gaza raid in years, witnesses said. REUTERS/Suhaib Salem
A malicious myth. With varying degrees of delicacy, everyone from fringe U.S. presidential candidates Lyndon LaRouche and Patrick Buchanan to European news outlets such as the BBC and Le Monde have used neocon as a synonym for Jew, focusing on Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Eliot Cohen, and others with obvious Jewish names. Trying to resurrect the old dual-loyalties canard, they cite links between some neocons and the Likud Party to argue that neocons wanted to invade Iraq because they were doing Israel's bidding.
Yes, neocons have links to the Likud Party, but they also have links to the British Tories and other conservative parties around the world, just as some in the Democratic Party have ties to the left-leaning Labour Party in Great Britain and the Labor Party in Israel. These connections reflect ideological, not ethnic, affinity. And while many neocons are Jewish, many are not. Former drug czar Bill Bennett, ex-C1A Director James Woolsey, the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, social scientist James Q. Wilson, theologian Michael Novak, and Jeane Kirkpatrick aren't exactly synagogue-goers. Yet they are as committed to Israel's defense as Jewish neocons are--a commitment based not on shared religion or ethnicity but on shared liberal democratic values. Israel has won the support of most Americans, of all faiths, because it is the only democracy in the Middle East, and because its enemies (Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, and Syria) also proclaim themselves to be the enemies of the United States."
In 1996, I was living in Iran, studying Persian and working on my dissertation. I would sometimes visit a small historical center for assistance with documents and advice on navigating Tehran's labyrinthine bureaucracy. One day, an employee of the center came up to me and, after apologizing ahead of time for her question, asked whether I was Jewish. I confirmed I was. 'Good,' she said. 'A friend from elementary school is Jewish. Do you want her to show you the synagogue?'
It is disturbing when the backlash to anti-Semitic discourse comes from an Egyptian newspaper rather than the pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times. It is likewise troubling when the "Are you Jewish?" question is far more malicious in the United States than it is (sometimes) in Iran. But, then again, times are changing."
Yassin, the erstwhile "spiritual leader" of Hamas, was responsible for the deaths of more than 400 Jews.
A broad array of lawmakers and celebrities took part in the march organized by human rights groups and political parties after recent desecration by vandals of Jewish sites in eastern France with spray-painted swastikas and other anti-Semitic graffiti.
'A black, white, and Arab France against anti-Semitism,' read a street-wide banner at the front of the demonstration."
Michael Berg also recently gave an explanation:
'He was not a friend of my son's, not even an acquaintance,' Berg said. 'Just a guy sitting next to him on the bus. The FBI was satisfied with that.'"
The Washington Post has two good articles on Berg. The first presents a good outline of what he did in Iraq up until the time of his execution. The second gives us a vivid and moving picture of who he was.
The two friends stood there silently for half an hour. A few weeks later, Nick was off to Africa. He ended up in Uganda, a poor nation on a poor continent, taking soil samples, trying to develop a brick that would not require water. He wanted to build communications towers, to spread knowledge, so that all those kids he was befriending might have a chance at something better.
Nick traveled to Africa at least twice, returning each time with only the clothes he wore. He had given everything else away. He told stories of standing in a village market in northern Uganda, talking local politics in his impassioned way with a Muslim cleric. Are you a Christian, the cleric demanded. No, Nick said, I'm Jewish.
The cleric stared at him -- and returned to their discussion."
But CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin reports on what is turning into a bizarre mystery with a connection to 9/11.
U.S. officials say the FBI questioned Berg in 2002 after a computer password Berg used in college turned up in the possession of Zaccarias Moussaoui, the al Qaeda operative arrested shortly before 9/11 for his suspicious activity at a flight school in Minnesota.
The bureau had already dismissed the connection between Berg and Moussaoui as nothing more than a college student who had been careless about protecting his password.
But in the wake of Berg's gruesome murder, it becomes a stranger than fiction coincidence -- an American who inadvertently gave away his computer password to one notorious al Qaeda operative is later murdered by another notorious al Qaeda operative."
"I can understand Mr. Berg's outrage and anger over the death of his son; therefore, I'll forgive him for his stupid, moronic, politically-motivated, un-American, ignorant, un-Patriotic, brainless, dim-witted, foolish, idiotic, reckless, careless comments about how it twas the fault of the U.S. Government for the killing."
This strain is exceedingly important to notice and combat as we approach the election that will make or break the War on Terror.
Here is Ron's comment. These prefatory remarks are not meant to set Ron up as an example of this element of the Right. Look to the quotes about Michael Berg above for that. I am merely trying to provide context.
I saw your post on LGF re: Berg and it enraged me. Why? Because every time one of these outrages is perpetrated, I am convinced that I cannot take any more, and then I am told some preachy blah. As well as seeing the people who attempting to defend me get attacked in a very opportunistic way. Read the New York Suns May 10th, James Tarantino [Taranto] re: Eleanor Clift to get an idea of what I'm discussing.
She considered Abu Grhaib to be the biggest news story of the war, and Tarantino asks "bigger than the lightning fast victory? Bigger than the battle in which Udai and Kusai were killed? ... the reason it is so big for her is b/c it gives her a chance to demolish the war effort". the people you were posting to are not idiots or moral cretins. They are decent people who are getting fed up. Please remember that they are human. They have human reactions. Such as fear, anger, and guilt.
Guilt, that we are in some way responsible for this atrocity. Lets face it, we were the ones who propped up that sick bitch Hussein to begin with. So really, the deaths of many Iraqis are on our hands.
Anger over what was done to an innocent man. He [Nick Berg] was a good man who meant only well to others.
Fear that it will be done to us.
These are all perfectly reasonable reactions to an insane situation.
I'm glad I didn't jump all over you, b/c looking at your site, I see that you are sincere and intelligent. But I felt that I have to explain what happened, not b/c I don't think you can figure it out.
Ron,
For what it's worth, I would like to say that I feel it's perfectly legitimate to have feelings of rage in response to obscenities like Berg's slaughter. When I watch shit like that, my thoughts run from inarticulate disbelief to profane and barbaric revenge fantasies. I'm hardly beyond reproach.
That said, I was making a simple argument at LGF: it is utterly classless to use Nick Berg's massacre as a jumping-off point for crapping on his father as a stand-in for some "Leftist" strawman. I use Reuters-style quotes and the term "strawman" here because Berg's father has done barely anything to merit the calumnies some "patriotic fundamentalists" are throwing at him. He merely made a couple of bland anti-Bush pronouncements. Now, it may turn out that he is indeed a Leftist, some ANSWER guy, for instance. I say, who fucking cares? I will not spit on Nick Berg in the wake of his death by spitting on his father. Doing so is disgusting and morally idiotic.
You implied that because Michael Berg made a public statement, then it is ok -- no, mandated -- to respond to him publicly. This is a more pragmatic argument, although it is ideological too: Michael Berg's rhetoric needs to be combatted lest he vitiate the war effort. Short of his becoming a career apologist for terror, like Rachel Corrie's parents are doing, I exhort you, with all due respect, to get a grip. The guy was suffering paroxysms of rage, and he had a covey of media vampires bustling in his yard, shoving microphones in his face while he learned that a video of his son's decapitation was playing on porn-loop across the world. He did not seek to make a public statement, he got brutally suckered into giving one at the worst possible time. Give the guy a break.
This is the gist of what I was saying over at LGF. Some posters there truly are idiotic moral cretins, and this bashing of Berg Senior was a good example of that, but hardly the only one. There is something I call "nouveau conservatism", a cheap, distilled ideology that grew out of post-9/11, pop neoconservatism, and which is often on display at LGF. Inevitably, all organic and powerful movements produce a shallow, gestural simulacrum of themselves. The hippies of the late '60s eventually became a smelly cotillion of kids at a Phish show. The culture of nouveau conservatism, like that of the nouveau riche, is obnoxious and noisome, a parody of its progenitor. And it is doing a lot more damage to the neocon undertaking in Iraq and elsewhere than any despairing statements by Nick Berg's father.
I watched the video of Nick Berg's massacre by mujahideen savages. It is baleful and fathomlessly sad.
...
Berg attended Cornell University, Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Oklahoma, where he got involved in rigging electronics equipment while working for the maintenance department, his father said. He helped set up equipment at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia in 2000
While at Cornell, he traveled to Ghana to teach villagers how to make bricks out of minimal material. His father said Berg returned from Ghana with only the clothes on his back and emaciated because he gave away most of his food."
...
Berg's family said they were informed by the State Department on Monday that he was found dead.
...
'I knew he was decapitated...' Michael Berg said. 'That manner is preferable to a long and torturous death. But I didn't want it to become public.'"