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"Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it."
- Noam Chomsky
As someone who lives on and off in the American bubble in Tel Aviv and came to Israel on a Birthright tour like some of the kids in the video, this is embarrassing, shocking, bizarre, but familiar. And as someone who spent many nights grimacing at similar overheard conversations from American Jews in town for the week from Long Island, the booze-fueled hubris and uber-Zionism is not so strange at all. In the Jewish homeland for the first time, on a free trip, fleetingly experiencing a place gripped by a visceral realism and powerful sense of purpose, it's easy to let the beer overtake you.
While documentary filmmaker Max Blumenthal rejects this argument ("No amount of alcohol could make me express opinions that were not authentically mine," he says. "If anything, alcohol is a crude form of truth serum that lubricates the release of closely held opinions and encourages confessional talk."), many American Jews understand how hubris and chutzpah can flow much freer in Israel. Spared the political correctness, decorum and social morays of America (or Britain, South Africa or Australia), many find that they walk taller, step louder, and even sprinkle their speech with words they'd never say back home.
Not to excuse the behavior of those in the video, I don't believe this idiocy reflects the values of young American Jews or their opinions on Obama, but rather the way that Israel, in particular Jerusalem, can radicalize the young to the left or the right. It also proves (once again), that fools and alcohol and camcorders do not make a good match.
Coincidentally, the video comes about a week after Haaretz reported on the campaign launched by far-right Israelis called "No, you can't," meant to persuade their countrymen of the dangers of the "anti-Semitic" Barack Hussein Obama - with the emphasis on "Hussein." So far, the campaign appears to consist of sparsely attended rallies and posters of Obama in a kaffiyeh, much like those of Yitzhak Rabin before his 1995 assassination.
For many, the video is shocking because they think Jews aren't supposed to be racist. Especially not nice Jewish boys like those in the video, showing off the hip hop gear bought on the mean streets of Great Neck, their hats cocked sideways as they survey the city they profess to own after five days.
There are really only two types of young American Jews in Israel: the ones who head for Jerusalem, and the ones who go to Tel Aviv. I hope Blumenthal films his next segment in Tel Aviv, though the results would probably be far less salacious. On a balcony in Florentin, he would ask the drum circle what they think of Obama and through the purple haze would hear only praise for the president, before being forced to listen to a 30-minute account of a recent trip to Nepal.
This video either proves that drunk Americans are starting to resemble Kahanists, or Israeli far-rightists have achieved the rhetorical brilliance of drunk American Jewish yahoos in town for a week. Talking to drunken Birthrighters to gauge Israeli opinion on Obama is like using Mormons to measure American public opinion on gay marriage. You're speaking to the wrong crowd and at the wrong time of night, only in a country where there is no closing time or public drinking ordinances. One can only imagine what would be caught on film in an American college town under these circumstances.
See Max Blumenthal's shocking footage of the reaction by some Israelis and American Jews in Jerusalem to Obama's speech to the Muslim world. Co-produced by Joseph Dana, aka Ibn Ezra: ibnezra.wordpress.com and Mondoweiss, a blog that covers the Israel-Palestine conflict and the Middle East from a progressive Jewish perspective.
well, we know for damn sure that this kind of deplorable behavior coming from people who think they're in their zone of safety ain't at all unusual... you can bet your boots there's plenty of it right here in the u.s. of a. from coast to coast being dispensed by bigots, intolerant bastards, skinheads, hate-mongers, and extremists of every stripe be they christian, muslim OR jewish... what i want to know is when we can dispense with this hateful shit and get on with living together and treating each other like genuine human beings...
U.S. reinstates Fulbright scholarships for Gaza students but will Israel let them leave?
on friday i posted my outrage over israel refusing exit visas to fulbright scholarship winners in gaza and the u.s. state department summarily canceling the offers... thankfully, a sufficient outcry went up to force a re-thinking of such idiocy...
The American State Department has reinstated seven Fulbright grants offered to Palestinians in Gaza for advanced study in the United States, reversing a decision to withdraw the scholarships because of Israel’s ban on Palestinians’ leaving Gaza for study abroad.
The American Consulate in Jerusalem sent e-mail messages on Sunday night to all seven telling them it was “working closely” with Israeli officials to secure them exit permits. Maj. Peter Lerner, spokesman for the Israeli Defense Ministry’s office of civilian affairs, said the Gazans would be granted permits after individual security checks.
israel had better not pull any bullshit over those "individual security checks"...
Israel is simply vicious to not allow Gaza students to pursue their Fulbright awards
a fulbright scholarship is one of the best vehicles available for building positive person-to-person relationships between the people of the u.s. and those of other countries, but israel, in its crazed obsession with power, control, and, yes, i will say it, genocide, can't find it in its cold heart to allow gaza students to take advantage of them...
Hadeel Abu Kawik was supposed to spend next year in the United States on the prestigious Fulbright scholarship program, but now it appears she will remain trapped in the Gaza Strip by an Israeli blockade.
Word that the U.S. State Department was canceling her scholarship came after Abu Kawik, 23 and a computer engineering student, went through a lengthy process for the scholarship that included interviews, exams and an English test.
"I was building my hope on this scholarship," she said Friday.
here's what a young afghan i am helping apply to a u.s. mba program had to say about his fulbright experience... read it and then tell me why israel's action is defensible...
In the middle of my academic career at Kabul University in 2005, I earned a Fulbright scholarship for my academic excellence, English proficiency and leadership talent. Under the Fulbright program, I traveled to the U.S. and began to study intensive English at University of California in Davis. After one quarter term of English studies, I enrolled in a college in New York where I successfully completed my allocated one year towards a BA in economics.
The U.S. experience was enriching and eye opening. I not only improved my English skills, but benefited from the rigorous academic standards. It was also an excellent opportunity to socialize and learn in non-academic environments. Through our friendly chats over dinner or lunch or outside in a café, I made many friends from various backgrounds. I was an ambassador for my country and culture, and helped my new friends to learn the realities of life in Afghanistan and to overcome the many misconceptions they had about my country, religion and culture. In return, I also learned significantly about western values, norms and lifestyle, which helped me to realize that regardless of where we are from, what we believe, what our history is, and how different our values are, we are all human beings and that is what matters.
the state of israel and the neo-con zionists are not representative of the jewish religion and the jewish people any more than the angry, bigoted christian fundamentalists and neo-cons in the u.s. are representative of my country or of christianity...
Will the condemnation of the Holocaust by Hamas get any media coverage and, if not, why not?
now, goddamit, THIS is news, or at least it SHOULD be...
[I]t should be made clear that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian government in Gaza denies the Nazi Holocaust. The Holocaust was not only a crime against humanity but one of the most abhorrent crimes in modern history. We condemn it as we condemn every abuse of humanity and all forms of discrimination on the basis of religion, race, gender or nationality.
And at the same time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against us - to the point where in February the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatened the people of Gaza with a "holocaust".
Within 24 hours, 61 Palestinians - more than half of them civilians and a quarter children - were killed in a series of air raids. Meanwhile, a horrible crime against humanity continues to be perpetrated against the people of Gaza: the two-year-old siege imposed after Hamas won the legislative elections in January 2006, which is causing great suffering. Due to severe shortages of medicines and food, scores of Palestinians have lost their lives.
It cannot be right that Europeans in general and the British in particular maintain a virtual silence toward what the Zionists are doing to the Palestinians, let alone supporting or justifying their oppressive policies, under the pretext of showing sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust.
The Palestinian people aspire to freedom, independence and peaceful coexistence with all their neighbours. There are, today, more than six million Palestinian refugees. No less than 700,000 Palestinians have been detained at least once by the Israeli occupation authorities since 1967. Hundreds of thousands have so far been killed or wounded. Little concern seems to be caused by all of this or by the erection of an apartheid wall that swallows more than 20% of the West Bank land or the heavily armed colonies that devour Palestinian land in a blatant violation of international law.
The plight of our people is not the product of a religious conflict between us and the Jews in Palestine or anywhere else: the aims and positions of today's Hamas have been repeatedly spelled out by its leadership, for example in Hamas's 2006 programme for government. The conflict is of a purely political nature: it is between a people who have come under occupation and an oppressive occupying power.
needless to say, this appeared in the guardian... if anybody sees this in u.s. media, please post the link in the comments...
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