UK Opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn is accused of presiding over a surge of anti-Semitism inside the Labour Party. Author Norman Finkelstein and British scholar Jamie Stern-Weiner say that Corbyn’s foes have cynically concocted a fake scandal to sabotage his progressive agenda and support for Palestinian rights.
Watch the full interview here.
Hillary keeps saying, “We have to build on Obama.” But what did Obama actually do that we are supposed to build on? Did he reduce college tuition or student debt? Did he create real 9 to 5, 40-hour-per-week jobs at a decent wage? Did he reduce income inequality? If his term of office was such a resounding success—which power-hungry grovelers like Paul Krugman now proclaim—can you tell me why so many people are rallying behind Trump and Sanders? Have you ever in your lifetime seen such mass disaffection from the political establishment and the system it represents?
To read more, visit Mondoweiss.
Israel stands at a precipice, with a deranged head of state who thrives on orchestrating national hysteria, barging in on the US Congress and directing bug-eyed stares at the UN General Assembly. Netanyahu in many ways personifies the reality that the occupation has only exacerbated the most egregious features of Israeli society.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Naiton.
If you are tired of the pro-war, pro-Israeli propaganda and want to know what’s really going on in Gaza, I highly recommend Method and Madness: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Assaults on Gaza.
To read the rest of the review, visit Red Dirt Report.
The question is: then why did Israel attack? And the response–one of the responses, the one by Ariel Sharon–because there was a split in the cabinet whether or not–Israeli cabinet–whether to launch the first strike. And Sharon said, if we don’t–this was Ariel Sharon. It’s the same cast of characters–goes back quite a ways. Ariel Sharon, he says, if we don’t attack, it’s going to diminish our deterrence capacity. What does that mean? Because Nasser was making all of these noises, Nasser did close the Straits of Tehran, Nasser did move troops into the Sinai, and Nasser–you know the rhetorical flourishes about we’re going to defeat Israel and so on and so forth, and so had whipped up a kind of ecstatic hysteria in the Arab world, finally, to challenging Israel.
Now, de facto–de facto–Nasser was a windbag–a congenital problem in the Arab world, leaders who are windbags–and obviously there was nothing backing his claims, but they thought that this was whipping up too much of a hysteria in the Arab world; it’s time to remind them who’s in charge.
To listen to the full interview, visit The Real News
In Old Wine, Broken Bottle: Ari Shavit’s Promised Land, a book-length critique of My Promised Land, forensic scholar Norman Finkelstein includes a table that juxtaposes Shavit’s various descriptions of Palestinians and Jews. What it reveals is the systematicity with which he associates Palestinians with filth, disease, and cultural and technological backwardness. By contrast, Shavit goes to excessive lengths to underscore his Jewish characters’ taste for European high culture, to the degree that it constitutes something of a leitmotif. Jewish-Israeli contributions to agronomy and medicine, among other civilization-enhancing values, are repeatedly underscored.
Given their pervasiveness, one cannot escape the feeling that these dehumanizing tropes serve a strategic function in the book’s overarching polemic. And indeed, the reader’s acceptance of Shavit’s most provocative contention—that the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was not only tragic but also morally justified on the grounds that it brought the State of Israel into existence—is emotionally and rhetorically premised on this prior matrix of orientalist characterizations. As Finkelstein puts it: “The tacit message is that Palestinians, if left to their own devices, would have produced just another destitute, dreary, and despotic Arab state, while the world would have been deprived of Israel’s high-tech industries, cutting-edge inventions, and flourishing cultural landscape.”
To read the rest of the review, visit The Cairo Review of Global Affairs
If Norman Finkelstein didn’t exist, it would certainly be necessary for supporters of the Palestinian cause to invent him, too – although, even the most ingenious proponent would be hard pressed to conceive a more perfect critic of Israel than he.
To read the rest of the review, visit Counterfire
In the event of a fourth war over Gaza, Finkelstein’s book will be an invaluable resource. It is short, clearly written, thoroughly researched, and devastating in its critique of the Israeli state’s “self defense” narrative and the apologists who excuse the inexcusable. Above all, Finkelstein underlines the crucial point, to be remembered if and when violence resumes: “The refrain that Israel has the right to self-defense is a red herring. The real question is, ‘Does Israel have the right to use force to maintain an illegal occupation?’ The answer is no.”
To read the rest of the review, visit Muftah
If both parties would act completely logically, what do you think would be the most reasonable resolution that would best serve both people’s interests?
Norman Finkelstein: If the world acted rationally, it would recognize that Earth is a tiny pebble spinning in the Universe, that most of the challenges currently confronting Humanity can only be solved on a global scale, and that, Life is short, so why squander it on petty egotistical idiocies? But, people are mostly not rational in the bigger sense (see Dostoyevky’s NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND). So, we must deal with humanity as it is, not as we wish it to be. The only possible solution is the one endorsed by the international community and international law. Everything else is pie in the sky. As Woody Guthrie put it, “You’ll get pie in the sky when you die,/That’s a lie.” (He was targeting the Salvation Army.)
To read the full AMA, visit Reddit
Finkelstein is not one to mince words. He has repeatedly called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who gave a speech before a joint session of U.S. Congress on March 3 — a maniac.
“I think it’s an accurate description,” he told NUVO. “He’s a lunatic, he’s a maniac… In the midst of everything that’s happening, that happened in the Middle East: let’s just start with the 2003 attack on Iraq and the rise of ISIS, the destruction of Syria, the millions of refugees that have been generated…Do we really need another war with Iran? Is that what the world needs? Can it be anyone other than a certifiable maniac that would after all of this death and destruction since 2003 would now be encouraging military confrontation with Iran?”
To read the rest of the article, visit NUVO
“Well worth reading.”
To read the rest of the review, visit Red Pepper Magazine
“The Palestinians have tried nonviolent resistance, and we ought not to forget about that.”
To watch the interview, visit RT
“The U.S. has always been very steadfast in their support of the Arab dictatorships. I think the very last thing they would want is a democracy, even a very limited one such as we have in the United States, take root in the Middle East. Because for it to take root all of the U.S. allies would very quickly and expeditiously be removed from power, and popular government more or less responsive to the population would take their place. The U.S. doesn’t want governments responsive to their populations, the U.S. wants governments responsive to the United States.”
To listen to the podcast, visit This is Hell!
Knowing Too Much is essential reading for understanding Finkelstein’s real views, why the debate in the U.S. Jewish population exists, and the critical importance of deepening it.
To read the rest of the review, visit New Politics
To listen to the full podcast, visit Greed for Ilm
If diplomacy and judicial redress won’t go anywhere, then the only option left is popular resistance. But what kind of popular resistance? The question is not whether Palestinians have the right to use armed force to end the occupation. Of course, they do. Rather, the point at issue is a practical one: Which tactics and strategy are most likely to yield political gains? However heroic the resistance of the people of Gaza, however inspiring their indomitable will, the fact remains that, after going three bloody rounds with Israel in the past five years, after suffering death and destruction on a heartrending scale, armed resistance has yet to produce substantive improvements in people’s daily lives.
To read the rest of the article, visit Alternet
[Method and Madness] book is a slender compilation of the author’s contemporaneous writings and is packed with rapier-like debunking of the arguments deployed by Israel and its defenders at the time.
To read the rest of the review, visit The Morning Star
“[A]n undiluted, undoubtedly powerful prosecution case against Israel over the death and destruction visited on Gaza by its military assaults since 2008.”
To read the rest of the review, visit The Independent
The argument contrived by the UN Panel to justify Israel’s naval blockade consists of a sequence of interrelated propositions:
The Israeli naval blockade of Gaza was unrelated to the Israeli land blockade;
Israel confronted a significant security threat from Gaza’s coastal waters;
Israel imposed the naval blockade in response to this security threat;
The naval blockade was the only means Israel had at its disposal to meet the threat posed by the flotillas;
The Israeli naval blockade achieved its security objective without causing disproportionate harm to Gaza’s civilian population.
To pronounce the naval blockade legal, the UN Panel had to sustain each and every one of these propositions. If even one were false, its defence of the blockade collapsed. The astonishing thing is that they are all false. Each will be addressed in turn.
To read the rest of the article, visit New Left Project
Method and Madness is a sustained and devastating onslaught on the myths and lies of Israeli propaganda. Against tanks, warplanes, drones, high-precision missiles and white phosphorus, Finkelstein deploys the weapons of white-hot anger, scathing irony, sanity, common sense, international law, rational logic, clear analysis and the truth.
To read the rest of the review, visit New Left Project
To view the segment, visit Al Jazeera.
Regardless of what one thinks of Finkelstein’s stance on a solution to the conflict, or his view on BDS, he remains one of the most perceptive critics of Israel’s increasingly barbarous occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. It would be a minor tragedy if his latest book were to be ignored because his views on a solution to the conflict are out of fashion.
To read the rest of the article, visit TeleSUR
