Excellent post Jill. I have but one slight disagreement, and that is when you say Goodman's take on the situation doesn't help Palestinians. When Jews take an "As a Jew" stance in support of hamas, of terror, of the mistaken accusations directed towards Israel of genocide and apartheid, they help frame the issue as not one of anti-semitism or of Jew hatred. The Jew hater sitting beside somebody like Goodman can claim they have nothing against Jews. Here they sit, beside a Jew, and have no issues with that person as a Jew. They hug that Jew, if not physically, than by the connection. Jews like Goodman provide cover for the Jew hater, and in that way they may stay off the death train, or at least be among the last Jews to board that train.
Sadly, the phenomenon of the self hating “kapo Jew” is not uncommon throughout Jewish history. Whether through profound ignorance or some deep seated psychological need (ie Stockholm Syndrome) such individuals turn their backs on their own people, land, culture and history. What they never understand until it is too late is that there is no great success in being on the last train to Auschwitz.
Great article. I would note that Amy Goodman's platform does help pro-Hamas/anti-Israel views to proliferate, that is for sure. Most ignorant souls use her and her guests - Sy Hersh, for example, an award-winning journalist! - as validation for their anti-Israel bias. Goodman, Hersh, Finkelstein, Pappe, Chomsky, Jewish Voice for Peace - all of them provide the foundation for Jew-haters in the arena of public discourse in America and worldwide. How people like her come to be is beyond my comprehension, but she is not entirely an outlier.
To be more specific tankies supported the Soviets against the Czech uprising in I think 1956, it's just a catch-all for brain dead anti-Americanism as a worldview.
I think Aaron Mate actually believes in what he's saying, despite how moronic.
Max Blumenthal is deliberately contrarian to control the alternative media space for the almighty dollar. His pops Sydney is scum, and like father, like son.
He was born into money, and I don't hold that against him that was just his dice roll. So if he didn't need the cash, why become a Putin and Assad stooge. I mean lambasting the white helmets during the civil war and denying the use of chemical weapons is fucking evil. He's even more incoherent and conspiratorial than Alex Jones.
Who is his audience? He began as a typical democratic operative liberal Washington journalist, and now he's a damn space alien.
I liked your point on what kind of society fights to free its murderers and rapists back into the streets. This is one aspect of the cultural gap between Israeli and “Palestinian” societies. Our murderers are put on trial, theirs are role models for schoolchildren.
Democracy Now! is as conspiratorial as Alex Jones, is utterly extremist on every issue, and yet is more monotone, flat, and boring than NPR. It's quite an achievement.
How old is she? Lord Noam loved Israel before '67 and before becoming more firmly part of the American side in the Cold War.
Hamas retrieves rapists & murderers from Israeli prisons because Hamas does not view the prisoners as violent Palestinian criminals. Hamas views them as soldiers, and they would be correct. In a moral inversion, dishonor (like, um, hostage-taking) and murder are viewed as proof of strength. The terrorist state of Gaza is one large inversion.
Amy Goodman, along w her loathsome fellow travelers like Naomi Klein, Max Blumenthal and Norm Finkelstein et al, want the world to know that they have ascended above such grubby attachments as tribe, faith, family and ancestry (these things are for us lesser mortals) and are universalist humanitarians aka Communists of some stripe or other. (Communism/Socialism/Marxism was sold as being for the benefit of working people but it always was and always will be the opiate of the intellectuals, as it crowns them enlightened philosopher-kings who deserve to socially engineer humanity.)
Communists (for lack of a better term) have a very different conception of morality than the average person, they don't judge the deed they judge the perpetrator/victim and place blame depending upon their places in the social hierarchy. Thus, if they conceive of someone as poor, brown and oppressed (even if that makes no sense to the rest of us) and their victim as rich, white and powerful, through Communist alchemy their act of violence becomes an act of liberatory Justice, as in their ideology an Oppressor can do no right and the Oppressed can do no wrong.
Thus, while the rest of us may see a treacherous self-hating Jew, they see themselves as an enlightened priesthood blessed with "critical consciousness" and a higher form of compassion that encompasses all the planet's poor and dispossessed, regardless of circumstance or fact.
And if their own people get kidnapped or murdered by one of their sacred Oppressed classes, well, they probably had it coming anyway and it's a small price to pay on the road to Utopia. Also, it seems that the history of the Soviet Union shows that the best way for a Jewish Communist to prove their loyalty to the Revolution is to become publicly vehemently anti-Jewish, as this displays their zeal and commitment.
Communists are the spiritual descendants of Milton's Satan and live by his famous creed: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."
They would rather that we all live in misery as long as they're in charge and get to tell us all what to think, do, believe.
They consider all the gains and rewards of capitalism/democracy evil and illegitimate—except for their places in society, which they consider well-deserved based upon their inherent moral and intellectual superiority.
Honestly, I am uncomfortable with calling these people "Communists." Real Communists implemented communist values and lived under them (i.e. Castro and the revolutionaries of Cuba). Not all of them are "bad" depending on what position of power they occupied within that structure. These idiots are the products of wealthy capitalism pretending at being progressive, and they just look dumb doing it.
I understand and share your discomfort at labelling our modern SJWs "Communists", I was just trying to find an umbrella description and feel that the differences bw Communism/Marxism/Socialism/Social Justice are more based on time and place yet the underlying ideologies and the types of people drawn to them remain mostly the same.
Leftism (which might be a better term) seems to me to be the will-to-power of disaffected adversary intellectuals, who posit some form of utopian egalitarianism as their claim to rule, as opposed to nobles or generals or rich capitalists. (And there is a pretty obvious and visible through-line of connection bw supporters of the Soviets and Castro etc and today's Western supporters of the "Palestinians".)
Yesterday's radical lawyers and intellectuals are today's "products of wealthy capitalism" and neither of them practiced what they preached (remember the Politburo led much better richer lives than the proletariat) but all of them believe in the "Animal Farm" conception of morality and equality where some animals are more equal than others.
Either way, thanks for your work, is much appreciated.
Sorry unless I skipped over it - does this female & her guests ever discuss the stipends that are paid to these terrorists & their families. It’s been suggested that some of these paid assassins are now millionaires. How ugly it is to know that some Jews have the ability to overlook the suffering of their own while glorifying or forgiving the evil deeds of their enemy. Bizarre
I really recommend the Omar Yousef mystery series if anyone one wants to get a feel for daily life for Palestinians. The media portrays them as victims or terrorists, the vast majority are neither. The story of the neither is the most important story for making sense of them. You're average dude living his life in Ramallah will go months to years without encountering an Israeli soldier.
Can you recommend any Palestinian writers who are respected in their culture but also reflect on their society's pathological/homicidal/suicidal obsession with the destruction of Israel? (My impression is that most the "neither" you refer to still don't accept Israel's right to exist in peace and security, but maybe I'm wrong--I just have never seen much evidence of a Palestinian movement to oppose terrorism against Israel.) The few I know of are immediately branded Islamophobic and excommunicated by the Muslim community (I'm thinking of The Green Prince, Mosab Hassan Yosef, who truly is a force of nature).
I read Words of My Father to try to understand "the other side," and was struck by how naive and lacking in insight the author was. Never once did he ask whether Palestinians might have done anything to prompt the presence of Israeli soldiers in Gaza (maybe the fact that his father, who sounds like a truly remarkable man, was about the only guy around interested in peace, could have been a clue). For similar reasons I also subjected myself to Khalidi's 100 Years War PLO propaganda book (I think the Arabic word is "dreck").
Truth is, as Haviv Rettig Gur has pointed out, Israel already IS an Arab-majority country. Population is 20% Muslim or Christian Arabs, plus 40% Jewish Arabs (ie, Mizrahi, unless of course you believes Jews can't be "real" Arabs, as apparently was true of the Arab-majority countries from which the Arab Jews were expelled, or "ethnically cleansed" in today's parlance, following the founding of Israel). So that leaves only about 40% Jews with European/Christian roots.
That's a great question and I can't really recommend any authors you're asking for because I honestly do not know any. Maybe others on this comment thread may have some insight; I would be totally open to reading Palestinian authors who have a balanced take on the situation. I just don't know of any myself.
I don't count Mosab Youssef in that inquiry because he's basically ex-communicated himself from that community and he's such an extreme example, he can't be considered an "average" Palestinian at this point.
By “nationalist” I’m guessing you mean demanding the destruction of Israel, rather than peaceful coexistence with it (ie, us-versus-them existential struggle to the death, rather than a mere real estate dispute)?
If so, then that is exactly the problem I was raising above. Where is there a Palestinian political movement expressing shame and regret over the backward, barbaric state to which they have allowed their society to descend? And no, I’m sorry, they are not allowed to just blame it on the Jews.
I "discovered" Goodman about the same time I started taking interest in Chris Hedges who was frequently invited on state sponsered media here in Canada back in the days (he has been unofficially banned since). The recurrent antizionist theme in their dispatches soon became obvious and prompted me to tune them out completely. Retrospectively, I realize how they were part of the ground work in bringing about the subversive vibe that has exploded on our streets since 10/7.
When journalists and intellectuals style themselves as anti-establishment, they are just creating another establishment. The alternative press is just another establishment media. And the alternative media has a tendency to make the same points over and over, and anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism are always required for some reason.
I am happy to say that I have never heard of Amy Goodman before, and I will do my best to avoid her in the future. And kudos to those who have taken one for the team by listening to her in order to debunk her.
But I do take some issue with the claim that "as-a-jews" do not get to revoke their Jew card. Why should the definition of who is Jewish be left to the antisemites? What about the Jewish people as a whole? On one of his recent podcast interviews with 2 Columbia students, Professor Shai Davidai expressed this beautifully, I thought: Somebody as an individual can be a "Jewish person," but not be part of "the Jewish people."
So, when someone's main invocation of their Jewish identity is to use it as a club with which to beat "the Jewish people" as a group, then they have removed themselves from the Jewish people. And as the brilliant Professor Ruth Wisse has observed, it is not accurate to refer to them as "self-hating Jews," because they do not hate themselves at all, quite the contrary. They are simply antisemites of Jewish ancestry, which unfortunately have been numerous throughout history. (Sure, the nazis would have gassed them as Jews, but who cares anyway.)
The Jewish people are first and foremost a People. And about half of those people live in Israel. So if a person of whatever ancestry is indifferent to the potential danger to or destruction of half of the Jewish people, what does that make them? Whatever the answer, they do not possess a "Jew card" in my book.
Great one Jill ! My anti Israel former friends love to cite Goodman. And Bernie Sanders. Cause ,you know, Jews. But of course the real Nazis carted all Jews off. And Jew sympathizers too. Cause we are race traitors I think I recall. I much prefer fighting by your side than being carted off together. Love you as always!
She’s has been spewing anti Israel propaganda for decades. John Stewart has joined her ilk as has Bernie sanders. Self deprecating Jews… it’s terrible. How do we stop it and how do we prevent more of this: https://k12trackers.substack.com/archive?sort=top?
Excellent post Jill. I have but one slight disagreement, and that is when you say Goodman's take on the situation doesn't help Palestinians. When Jews take an "As a Jew" stance in support of hamas, of terror, of the mistaken accusations directed towards Israel of genocide and apartheid, they help frame the issue as not one of anti-semitism or of Jew hatred. The Jew hater sitting beside somebody like Goodman can claim they have nothing against Jews. Here they sit, beside a Jew, and have no issues with that person as a Jew. They hug that Jew, if not physically, than by the connection. Jews like Goodman provide cover for the Jew hater, and in that way they may stay off the death train, or at least be among the last Jews to board that train.
The good ole “I love Jews, I just hate Zionists. I have a lot of Jewish friends!” method
Exactly. Same thing with Bernie and him flying cover (wingman) for members of the squad!
Sadly, the phenomenon of the self hating “kapo Jew” is not uncommon throughout Jewish history. Whether through profound ignorance or some deep seated psychological need (ie Stockholm Syndrome) such individuals turn their backs on their own people, land, culture and history. What they never understand until it is too late is that there is no great success in being on the last train to Auschwitz.
Perfectly stated.
Great article. I would note that Amy Goodman's platform does help pro-Hamas/anti-Israel views to proliferate, that is for sure. Most ignorant souls use her and her guests - Sy Hersh, for example, an award-winning journalist! - as validation for their anti-Israel bias. Goodman, Hersh, Finkelstein, Pappe, Chomsky, Jewish Voice for Peace - all of them provide the foundation for Jew-haters in the arena of public discourse in America and worldwide. How people like her come to be is beyond my comprehension, but she is not entirely an outlier.
Their caught up in their own echo chamber of self-hating Jews and assorted Jew-haters
Every obsessive anti-Zionist Jew is max tankie. It's like they're still having Bundist versus Zionist WrestleMania events in fin de siecle Vienna.
Max Tankie? Can you elaborate?
To be more specific tankies supported the Soviets against the Czech uprising in I think 1956, it's just a catch-all for brain dead anti-Americanism as a worldview.
Guess who the good guy is in Ukraine vs. Russia?
It's just usual Occidentalism and anti-imperialism and what have you.
Also Blumenthal, one of the absolute worst.
I think Aaron Mate actually believes in what he's saying, despite how moronic.
Max Blumenthal is deliberately contrarian to control the alternative media space for the almighty dollar. His pops Sydney is scum, and like father, like son.
Right. But Sydney is just a machine guy, a loyal flunky. Max is way more toxic.
He was born into money, and I don't hold that against him that was just his dice roll. So if he didn't need the cash, why become a Putin and Assad stooge. I mean lambasting the white helmets during the civil war and denying the use of chemical weapons is fucking evil. He's even more incoherent and conspiratorial than Alex Jones.
Who is his audience? He began as a typical democratic operative liberal Washington journalist, and now he's a damn space alien.
I guess as you say it it’s ultimately about engagement. There’s an audience for that so he’s selling it to them.
I liked your point on what kind of society fights to free its murderers and rapists back into the streets. This is one aspect of the cultural gap between Israeli and “Palestinian” societies. Our murderers are put on trial, theirs are role models for schoolchildren.
You mean resistance butchers, right?
Omer Morashti, are you my former roommate at BGU?
I just laughed so hard and I never lol.
And he is! Friendship rekindled!
Well said.
Democracy Now! is as conspiratorial as Alex Jones, is utterly extremist on every issue, and yet is more monotone, flat, and boring than NPR. It's quite an achievement.
How old is she? Lord Noam loved Israel before '67 and before becoming more firmly part of the American side in the Cold War.
Hamas retrieves rapists & murderers from Israeli prisons because Hamas does not view the prisoners as violent Palestinian criminals. Hamas views them as soldiers, and they would be correct. In a moral inversion, dishonor (like, um, hostage-taking) and murder are viewed as proof of strength. The terrorist state of Gaza is one large inversion.
...and they have millions of western supporters backing them as they do it. It's sick.
Amy Goodman, along w her loathsome fellow travelers like Naomi Klein, Max Blumenthal and Norm Finkelstein et al, want the world to know that they have ascended above such grubby attachments as tribe, faith, family and ancestry (these things are for us lesser mortals) and are universalist humanitarians aka Communists of some stripe or other. (Communism/Socialism/Marxism was sold as being for the benefit of working people but it always was and always will be the opiate of the intellectuals, as it crowns them enlightened philosopher-kings who deserve to socially engineer humanity.)
Communists (for lack of a better term) have a very different conception of morality than the average person, they don't judge the deed they judge the perpetrator/victim and place blame depending upon their places in the social hierarchy. Thus, if they conceive of someone as poor, brown and oppressed (even if that makes no sense to the rest of us) and their victim as rich, white and powerful, through Communist alchemy their act of violence becomes an act of liberatory Justice, as in their ideology an Oppressor can do no right and the Oppressed can do no wrong.
Thus, while the rest of us may see a treacherous self-hating Jew, they see themselves as an enlightened priesthood blessed with "critical consciousness" and a higher form of compassion that encompasses all the planet's poor and dispossessed, regardless of circumstance or fact.
And if their own people get kidnapped or murdered by one of their sacred Oppressed classes, well, they probably had it coming anyway and it's a small price to pay on the road to Utopia. Also, it seems that the history of the Soviet Union shows that the best way for a Jewish Communist to prove their loyalty to the Revolution is to become publicly vehemently anti-Jewish, as this displays their zeal and commitment.
Yes. And they do it all while enjoying all of the benefits and comforts of a wealthy capitalist society that they supposedly hate so much.
Communists are the spiritual descendants of Milton's Satan and live by his famous creed: "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven."
They would rather that we all live in misery as long as they're in charge and get to tell us all what to think, do, believe.
They consider all the gains and rewards of capitalism/democracy evil and illegitimate—except for their places in society, which they consider well-deserved based upon their inherent moral and intellectual superiority.
Honestly, I am uncomfortable with calling these people "Communists." Real Communists implemented communist values and lived under them (i.e. Castro and the revolutionaries of Cuba). Not all of them are "bad" depending on what position of power they occupied within that structure. These idiots are the products of wealthy capitalism pretending at being progressive, and they just look dumb doing it.
I understand and share your discomfort at labelling our modern SJWs "Communists", I was just trying to find an umbrella description and feel that the differences bw Communism/Marxism/Socialism/Social Justice are more based on time and place yet the underlying ideologies and the types of people drawn to them remain mostly the same.
Leftism (which might be a better term) seems to me to be the will-to-power of disaffected adversary intellectuals, who posit some form of utopian egalitarianism as their claim to rule, as opposed to nobles or generals or rich capitalists. (And there is a pretty obvious and visible through-line of connection bw supporters of the Soviets and Castro etc and today's Western supporters of the "Palestinians".)
Yesterday's radical lawyers and intellectuals are today's "products of wealthy capitalism" and neither of them practiced what they preached (remember the Politburo led much better richer lives than the proletariat) but all of them believe in the "Animal Farm" conception of morality and equality where some animals are more equal than others.
Either way, thanks for your work, is much appreciated.
“idiot” or “moron” works great, IMO!
lolol
Excellent post ! It is tragic that far too many of Goodman’s contemporaries share such views
Sorry unless I skipped over it - does this female & her guests ever discuss the stipends that are paid to these terrorists & their families. It’s been suggested that some of these paid assassins are now millionaires. How ugly it is to know that some Jews have the ability to overlook the suffering of their own while glorifying or forgiving the evil deeds of their enemy. Bizarre
No. To her, all Palestinians are victims.
Perhaps victims of Hamas . It ends with that…. They and UNRWA enable their victimhood.
I really recommend the Omar Yousef mystery series if anyone one wants to get a feel for daily life for Palestinians. The media portrays them as victims or terrorists, the vast majority are neither. The story of the neither is the most important story for making sense of them. You're average dude living his life in Ramallah will go months to years without encountering an Israeli soldier.
Can you recommend any Palestinian writers who are respected in their culture but also reflect on their society's pathological/homicidal/suicidal obsession with the destruction of Israel? (My impression is that most the "neither" you refer to still don't accept Israel's right to exist in peace and security, but maybe I'm wrong--I just have never seen much evidence of a Palestinian movement to oppose terrorism against Israel.) The few I know of are immediately branded Islamophobic and excommunicated by the Muslim community (I'm thinking of The Green Prince, Mosab Hassan Yosef, who truly is a force of nature).
I read Words of My Father to try to understand "the other side," and was struck by how naive and lacking in insight the author was. Never once did he ask whether Palestinians might have done anything to prompt the presence of Israeli soldiers in Gaza (maybe the fact that his father, who sounds like a truly remarkable man, was about the only guy around interested in peace, could have been a clue). For similar reasons I also subjected myself to Khalidi's 100 Years War PLO propaganda book (I think the Arabic word is "dreck").
Truth is, as Haviv Rettig Gur has pointed out, Israel already IS an Arab-majority country. Population is 20% Muslim or Christian Arabs, plus 40% Jewish Arabs (ie, Mizrahi, unless of course you believes Jews can't be "real" Arabs, as apparently was true of the Arab-majority countries from which the Arab Jews were expelled, or "ethnically cleansed" in today's parlance, following the founding of Israel). So that leaves only about 40% Jews with European/Christian roots.
That's a great question and I can't really recommend any authors you're asking for because I honestly do not know any. Maybe others on this comment thread may have some insight; I would be totally open to reading Palestinian authors who have a balanced take on the situation. I just don't know of any myself.
I don't count Mosab Youssef in that inquiry because he's basically ex-communicated himself from that community and he's such an extreme example, he can't be considered an "average" Palestinian at this point.
Ghassan Khanafiya and Mahmoud Darwish are considered their founding literary figures, but they are nationalist.
By “nationalist” I’m guessing you mean demanding the destruction of Israel, rather than peaceful coexistence with it (ie, us-versus-them existential struggle to the death, rather than a mere real estate dispute)?
If so, then that is exactly the problem I was raising above. Where is there a Palestinian political movement expressing shame and regret over the backward, barbaric state to which they have allowed their society to descend? And no, I’m sorry, they are not allowed to just blame it on the Jews.
I "discovered" Goodman about the same time I started taking interest in Chris Hedges who was frequently invited on state sponsered media here in Canada back in the days (he has been unofficially banned since). The recurrent antizionist theme in their dispatches soon became obvious and prompted me to tune them out completely. Retrospectively, I realize how they were part of the ground work in bringing about the subversive vibe that has exploded on our streets since 10/7.
When journalists and intellectuals style themselves as anti-establishment, they are just creating another establishment. The alternative press is just another establishment media. And the alternative media has a tendency to make the same points over and over, and anti-imperialism and anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism are always required for some reason.
I am happy to say that I have never heard of Amy Goodman before, and I will do my best to avoid her in the future. And kudos to those who have taken one for the team by listening to her in order to debunk her.
But I do take some issue with the claim that "as-a-jews" do not get to revoke their Jew card. Why should the definition of who is Jewish be left to the antisemites? What about the Jewish people as a whole? On one of his recent podcast interviews with 2 Columbia students, Professor Shai Davidai expressed this beautifully, I thought: Somebody as an individual can be a "Jewish person," but not be part of "the Jewish people."
So, when someone's main invocation of their Jewish identity is to use it as a club with which to beat "the Jewish people" as a group, then they have removed themselves from the Jewish people. And as the brilliant Professor Ruth Wisse has observed, it is not accurate to refer to them as "self-hating Jews," because they do not hate themselves at all, quite the contrary. They are simply antisemites of Jewish ancestry, which unfortunately have been numerous throughout history. (Sure, the nazis would have gassed them as Jews, but who cares anyway.)
The Jewish people are first and foremost a People. And about half of those people live in Israel. So if a person of whatever ancestry is indifferent to the potential danger to or destruction of half of the Jewish people, what does that make them? Whatever the answer, they do not possess a "Jew card" in my book.
Really well said
Great one Jill ! My anti Israel former friends love to cite Goodman. And Bernie Sanders. Cause ,you know, Jews. But of course the real Nazis carted all Jews off. And Jew sympathizers too. Cause we are race traitors I think I recall. I much prefer fighting by your side than being carted off together. Love you as always!
She’s has been spewing anti Israel propaganda for decades. John Stewart has joined her ilk as has Bernie sanders. Self deprecating Jews… it’s terrible. How do we stop it and how do we prevent more of this: https://k12trackers.substack.com/archive?sort=top?
So pleased that you made the effort to expose the imbalance of the most assuredly unbalanced Amy Goodman.
Many years ago, her most famous picture was of her doing the V- victory sign that Arafat used to do all the time.