Audio of Norman Finkelstein's talk in Berkeley on Wednesday.

I couldn't make it so I'm glad to be able to hear it.

Many thanks for this audio as getting to Berkeley on a week night is not possible for many of us. Many thanks also to Norman Finklestein for standing firm on his principles in opposing the horrors perpetrated by the US puppet, the Zionist government of Israel, despite the fact that he lost his job. We all hope he is soon able to earn a decent living elsewhere.

I have some criticisms of and comments on his statements:
1. The very concept of chasing 750,000 people off their land, which involved murder and rape in the process, is unconscionable, and that is the creation of the State of Israel. Further, the founders of the state of Israel were terrorists, not just in this heinous crime against humanity, but also in murdering the UN mediator and in blowing up the King David Hotel. THERE WAS NEVER A TIME that there was anything benign about Israel. Finklestein referred to the 1970s and 1980s as being somewhat better than now in Israel. The Palestinian refugees of 1948, sitting by the thousands in camps, know for sure there was nothing good about the heinous crimes against humanity perpetrated by Israel, and so should the rest of us. A good description of the heinous crimes perpetrated by Israel since its creation, and done so by design, may be found in:
The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
(2006) Oneworld Publications, ISBN 978-1-85168-555-4
(Has full details on the 1948 to present mass murder of boys and men, rape and murder of girls and women and theft of Palestinian land all planned by David Ben-Gurion, first president of Israel, and cohorts, as Ben-Gurion described in his diary quoted in Pappe’s book.)

2. His failure to understand the necessity of the only viable solution to the Palestinian issue, namely a socialist, secular Palestine and a socialist, secular Middle East, is part of his failure to frame the entire issue in terms of class struggle. The US pays for the existence of Israel to protect US oil profits in the Middle East; it does not pay for the existence of a Jewish state to save Jews; in fact, Israel is a death trap for Jews. To end US aid to Israel is to end the Zionist government of Israel; the people can and will continue to live there, regardless of the superstition they claim to believe in. For the sake of world peace, we all must support the end of the US puppet government of Israel, just as we all supported the end of the US puppet government of Vietnam and the US puppet government of Cuba.

3. Those who claim to believe in the Jewish superstition vote 70% Democrat because they know that the Republican Party is filled with Nazi worshippers and all the rest of the anti-Semitic fascist groups that exist in the U.S. This has nothing to do with Israel (both the Democrat and Republicans Parties are 100% pro-Israel); it has to do with this fact of American politics, and this has certainly always been the case since WW2, and perhaps since the days of FDR, whose administration marked the end of the Republican Party as the party of anti-slavery. The presidential vote for decades has been for the Democrats: 90% of the African-American community, 70% of the religious Jewish community (the only ones counted as Jews, and that is a correct basis), and 60% of the Latino community. This year's election will most likely be exactly the same and again as in 2000 and 2004, the Democrats will win regardless of who is on the ticket, unless the Republicans commit election fraud. In either case, a party of capitalism will have won and the US blood for oil wars abroad and fascism at home will continue. If you want peace and civil rights, you have to vote Peace & Freedom or Green, preferably the former. The fact that 70% of American Jews claim to oppose the war in Iraq and possible war with Iran is also a reflection of both their opposition to the Republican Party and their having to live in American society, where the warmongers and anti-Semites are often the same. It has nothing to do with Israel having been exposed as a pariah state; it always was and so are the warmongers in the US. American Jews are responding to American political conditions.

4. The overwhelming majority of Americans do not think about Israel or politics at all. These polls that Finklestein cited are not a good measure of what Americans understand about Israel. And, as we all know, any poll regarding Jews will always be unreliable because of the anti-Semitism that exists in this society, and is always worse in an economic crisis. The average American is preoccupied with all the nonsense from football to Valentine's, Halloween to Christmas, Easter to Thanksgiving, the endless personal disputes, shopping for clothes and entertainment items and all the other trash that too many people elevate to being serious. The anti-woman joke about the crazy aunt being similar to how Israel is being viewed by many American Jews demonstrates how far removed from reality this intellectual, Norman Finklestein, is. Israel is a real estate investment for wealthy Jews and an American military base for the war machine which exists to maximize the profits of the US capitalist class, the primary goal of American society. What Norman Finklestein needs to see is what we all need to see, a serious labor movement. In lieu of that, we all must connect one way or another with the needs and concerns of the workingclass, whether it be saving rent control in California by opposing Proposition 98, labor organizing, supporting labor TV and radio programs or the like. No matter how many books we have read, we must always remember that it is labor that creates all wealth and it is the workingclass that decides the future with their labor, remembering that when labor withdraws its hand, nothing moves.

Audio uploaded/posted courtesy of Aaron Aarons.

Joseph Anderson made the recording. I only converted it to mp3 and uploaded it. I couldn't call him in the middle of the night to ask if he wanted to be credited for the recording, so I left that matter for later.

I gave us both credit.

Thanks.

From:
To: [extensive recipeint list deleted]
Subject: FW: Is Obama Turning (Further) Right? By GREG KAFOURY http://www.counterpunch.org/
Date: Wed, 28 May 2008 17:14:55 -0700

From: cuibono
To: [extensive recipient list deleted]
CC: kafoury [at] kafourymcdougal.com.
Subject: "Is Obama Turning (Further) Right?" -- By GREG KAFOURY http://www.counterpunch.org/
Date: Tue, 27 May 2008 18:49:38 -0700

http://www.counterpunch.org/ May 27, 2008

[http://counterpunch.org/kafoury05272008.html]

"From AIPAC to the Cuban Exiles"

[cuibono has a cpl cuibbles but otherwise Mr Kafoury nails Obummer to the mast.

Cuibble the first: I sub to Mr Nader's daily feed but have not seen anything re "Israel" or Palestine recently enough to remember it. And I would remember it, since the q. of Nader's reliability re Zionism etc is a particular focus of mine, esp. his parroting of the "War For Oil", "No Blood For Oil" snowjob.

Cuibble Deuce: Dunno where Mr K. gets the notion that the Two State Illusion is "within reach" of becoming reality. It surprised me: Kafoury seems generally intelligent & informed, so why is he repeating that tired jive? Otherwise he's done a superb job exposing Obummer for what he is. As I may have said before, "Run Tom Run":) ]-------------



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Dear Friends in The Struggle:

I'm just guessing that Kafoury might have gotten that "jive" most recently from Norman Finkelstein, who, inexplicably, suddenly --*after* he was fired from DePaul -- turned Zionist apologist and "two-stater". This, aside from, and like, Noam Chomsky.

I recently told Palestinian-British activist, academic and public speaker Ghada Karmi about this "victory is within reach / at hand!" or "we're on the verge of victory!" line of Finkelstein's (who, although he calls himself a "communist", ridicules those who advocate a *re-unified* Palestine as "armchair Marxist purists"), and she, too, said that it was "nonsense" and "where in the world does he get *that* from"?

I also told her about how Finkelstein -- and Chomsky (a self-described "Anarchist"!) -- believe that **THEY** know what's best for the Palestinians -- **regardless** of -- and to *hell* with -- what the *Palestinians* themselves (including progressive/leftist Palestinian activists) think -- and that if you don't agree with them (Finkelstein, Chomsky, and those other Jewish 'liberal Zionist' American leftist icons), then you're against (or, as Chomsky puts it, against "what's *best* for" -- i.e., what *Chomsky himself*, 'The Great White Hype', stipulates for) the Palestinians. And, as Chomsky further puts it, "if you *really care* about the Palestinians", then you'll listen to and not disagree with *him*. Chomsky and his mentee Finkelstein ultimately ignore *the Palestinians* and *Palestinian* thought (even ignore Edward Said, whom Chomsky otherwise compliments on Democracy Now, giving the revisionist impression that the 'now safely dead' Said agreed with him) -- *just like* the racist white Western imperialist powers and the original racist white Zionists did.

Yet, as I've pointed out, they don't want to lift a damn finger to do anything *practical* -- even *nonviolent* measures -- for the Palestinian cause: they even oppose boycotts (commercial, economic or cultural), divestment, and sanctions against Israel. (They even oppose universal right-of-return to Palestine for the Palestinians -- but not for the Jews.) Karmi was very dismayed hearing this about Finkelstein, after she told me that he was recently arrested and deported from Israel. (Joel Kovel, anti-Zionist Jew-American academic and author, most recently his book "Overcoming Zionism", was also severely dismayed with Finkelstein -- although, beyond disappointment with Chomsky, a long time covert functional Zionist.)

I'm sorry, but getting kicked out of Israel (or not being allowed in) is just not that hard to have happen to any critic of Israel -- an occasion that Finkelstein, and progressive media people like Amy Goodman, will no doubt use as political cover for him -- like Stephen Zunes uses attacks against him by the Zionists/lobby, who attack anyone to the left of Atilla the Hun when it comes to the political spectrum and Israel. I'm surprised that Chomsky -- who's opposed to even politically attacking or fighting, or otherwise merely exposing, the Israel lobby -- as well as opposed to boycotts against apartheid *Israel* -- hasn't gone and gotten himself arrested and deported from Israel as his "leftist" PR move/cover.

To borrow Jeffrey Blankfort's term, we all, in the Palestinian movement/cause/solidarity, should publicly renounce, get rid of, and otherwise abandon all those "Zionist 5th column" agents, infiltrators, apologists and obfuscators (especially obfuscating to white-American progressives/leftists) -- and from Chomsky right down to Michael Lerner and the likewise rest of them, shouldn't be invited to speak at pro-Palestinian conferences like the Sabeel Conference. This is because AT ANY CRITICAL TIME IN EVENTS (as with NAOMI KLEIN's attack article on those around the world, and especially in the West, who protested Israel's genocidal military rampage through Jenin and other Palestinian cities/towns, suddenly discovering "widespread anti-Semitism" -- SUDDENLY AT THAT PARTICULAR INSTANCE IN TIME -- AND WHERE ELSE BUT ON "THE *LEFT*"!), or at the last moment, or in the end, those liberal/leftist closet Zionists/apologists will suddenly, calculatingly, politically *TURN* ON THE MOVEMENT.

THE THRESHOLD LITMUS TEST should be: ARE YOU PUBLICLY ANTI-ZIONIST? -- Zionism and it's entailments and requirements being a morally *repugnant* racist ideology. If they aren't, they should be kicked to the curb and thrown on the garbage heap of history. I'm beginning to believe that those icons are "leftists" only as a cover for their covert (or *overtly proclaimed*, in Stephen Zunes' case) Zionism.

I wouldn't give a traditional/conservative/"liberal"/"progressive"/"leftist" Zionist, or Zionist apologist, the time of day. If they want to go out and "fight the Occupation", they can go out and do it on their own, *INDEPENDENTLY*, because they are really just serving their *own Zionist purposes* anyway: a little, geographically corrupted and unviable, leftover scraps, suiggly little rump state, on the worst land, for the Palestinians.

[Hey, I know alll about those *"liberal" racist white people*! -- and if Palestinians don't learn from the Black-American political experience, the positives and the negatives (like Obama), the Palestinians will *suffer* for it. *40 YEARS* from now Israeli soldiers, like American cops, with worriless impunity, always state-exnonerated, will *still* be killing Palestinians, like American cops are still killing Black-Americans, even in hails of mass bullets, 40 years after the mainstay Civil Rights movement, and still mass-imprisoning those they don't outright kill. And the Palestinians will end up with their false prophet, like Obama (like they don't already have one with Mahmoud Abbas, whom the Bush administration has repeatedly, let me politely say, uhhh, kicked in the ass) -- Obama, who would have been written off in the mid/late '60's by Black-Americans (by even Black athletes, like Mohammad Ali, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, John Carlos, Tommie Smith, etc.) as a Black liberal sambo, when even many Black *comedians* (like Moms Mabley, Godfrey Cambridge, Dick Gregory and others) had more consciousness than Obama has. NO ONE BLACK would have said that Obama was really giving us Blacks "the wink-wink" while he was supposedly trying to disguise from white people his true intentions as 'The Mulatto Savior'. Obama wouldn't have gotten off the ground with Black folks back then -- he's explicity, repeatedly, promised ZIONIST JEWS/ISRAEL'S (especially establishment Blacks', including Black politicians', new masters) *everything*, but even Black Katrina victims, or the most egregious police Black murder victims, and state murder, Black death row, victims, *nothing* -- and that's how far we Black folks have sunk as a whole.

Obama would have 'had to' denounce a whole lotta people in the '60's.]

If you join with those "liberal/progressive/leftist" Zionists, or covert/backdoor Zionist apologists, all they'll be doing is (like Michael Lerner and his Tikkun outfit) causing you endless trouble and major headaches: stipulating *WIDE* restrictions, about who can/can't speak at what public events; about who can/can't even be on stage; about who can/can't be on any public panel; wide demands/stipulations/restrictions about what signs can't be present [like, "No signs or shirts with old pre-Israel Palestinian house keys on them!: they make us Jews feel *uncommmfortable* and even physically *thrrreatened*...!"]; about who can/can't ask questions or which questions are 'too controversial' and can't get selected; trying to stipulate, even on the left, who gets the stamp of approval of who's "A Good Palestinian", vs. who's "A Bad Palestinian", and who is otherwise stamped/slurred as "an anti-Semite" (or, like Zunes' back-up slur "*parallels* anti-Semitism").

And ultimately, like Israel -- if *everyone* around the Western world morally, finally, demanded at least "a Palestinian state" -- these Zionists would then force *endless* debate about some hypothetical, future, "take-it-or-leave-it", so-called "Palestinian state's" hyper-squiggly boarders, or even the very *definition* of a so-called "Palestinian state": 'after all, we must be sensitive to Zionist Jewish sensibilities about their "light unto the world", their nation and its ongoing major settlements. Gaza is one thing, not really that important in the over all scheme of their colonial nation project (and "evacuating" Gaza really fit right in), but elsewhere Israeli Jews already gotten all nicely settled in on those lovely hilltop 'suburban' sprawls of Greater Israel, for good!'

Those "leftist" Zionists (and now Zionist apologists, like Finkelstein and functional Zionists like Chomksy) have *repeatedly* shown that they care *more* about "Jewish sensitivites" than about Palestinian *oppression* and *suffering*. Or, like Finkelstein did in his last speaking engagement in Berkeley, he spent almost his entire lecture trying to exonerate, in general, today's Jews -- presumably 'the good Jews', a la 'the good Germans' of Nazi Germany) -- about Israel & Zionism, especially those Jews who haven't even given the Palestinian cause lip service, let alone *any* actual and practical *opposition* to Zionism: Finkelstein's, indeed, overwhelmingly 'silent majority' (later we can ask that supposed 'silent Jewish majority', "What did *you* do during Israel's 'Nazi/Apartheid era': did you turn *your* head and look away?).

As an aside, I like the way Karmi put it, my quoting her as closely as I can recall: 'There is already *one* state in so-called Israel-Palestine [a term she said she hates]: it's actually just *one* state with any number of different *zones* of restrictions for the Palestinians across it.

As I told Finkelstein about Chomsky, I'm glad that Chomsky wasn't an "Abolitionist" during the days of American slavery: he would have been covertly protecting the rich plantation owners and the slave plantation system (merely trying to make minor reforms, with a nip and a tuck here and there), as he 'once lived on plantations himself with many of his plantation friends'.

Or as one African American put it about American slavery:

"The conservatives said, 'Keep the system the way it is'."

"The liberals [including liberal plantation owners!] said, 'Keep the system, but let's be nicer to the slaves' [Desmond Tutu calls that attitude 'Apartheid with a smiling face']."

"But, the often-derided so-called 'purists' [as Finkelstein & Chomksy deride us] said, *'ABOLISH IT!'*"


(Interesting how Finkelstein, as a self-described "communist", advocates abolishing capitalism, but really not Zionism.)

Otherwise, good article, Mr. Kafoury. Or as I tell Blacks and whites beguiled for Obama: someone (like me) has to be able to later say I TOLD YOU SO.

And so it be's...


All Together in The Struggle,

Joseph Anderson,

Berkeley, CA