Update on Guardian partner, The Arabist: On “Jewish Money”

Looking back at a few posts from The Arabist, the Guardian’s new partner blog, I found this by one of the blog’s main contributors, Issandr El Amrani, on President Obama’s AIPAC speech in May.

It’s interesting that a lot of people who follow Israel lobby issues think that Obama’s speech to AIPAC was actually a tough one, once you strip away the usual “unbreakable bond” stuff…Netanyahu will once again get away with running circles around an American president. People might be growing increasingly bitter about this, but American politics is structured in such a way that it resets frequently. A new PM in Israel or a new president in the White House and we might be back, for all intents and purposes, to zero while we wait for the long game of delegitimizing AIPAC and the lobby more generally.  

El Amrani then quotes Phillip Weiss, the founder of the anti-Zionist blog, Mondoweiss:

Obama said that time is running out on the endless peace process. I was abusing him through most of the speech but when he said, “The world is moving too fast,” I cried out in pleasure. Obama knows what we on the left know: that because of the Arab spring and the millions on the Arab street whose demands he dignified today, and because of the disgust of peoples everywhere with the American-led peace process…as he reminded the lobby– the world is sick of a Jim Crow state.

And when Obama spoke twice of the “demographic” realities west of the Jordan, he was only echoing what [John] Mearsheimer said the day before, there is a majority of Palestinians between the Jordan and the sea, and this is your last chance to gerrymander a Jewish majority on the vast majority of the land that you already ethnically cleansed. I believe he spoke these words about demography with rage– how can an anti-racist say racist phrases without rage?…Obama doesn’t believe in a Jewish democracy any more than he believes in a white or a Christian democracy. He will say these words over and over, in bitterness, to the lobby that has got him politically hogtied because he depends on…Jewish money, and he may well believe in partition for the same reason Mearsheimer does, to head off violent cataclysm in Israel and Palestine, but he is on our side in his heart. On the side of the world moving forward with progressive ideals. 

So, Israel is as an “ethnic cleansing”, “Jim Crowe” state which is propped up by “Jewish money”.

In surveying recurring anti-Semitic motifs, one of the more popular is that of the Jew as a corrupting force. This is a derivative of the theme that Jews dominate the world with their money.

Arab political cartoonist Khalil Bendib

I never cease to be amazed at the lack of cognitive dissonance of those who fancy themselves anti-racists while simultaneously advancing narratives of the injurious effects of Jewry on the body politic – arguments historically associated with explicit anti-Semitism of the the extreme rightconspiracy theorists, and Islamists.

The Arabist and the Guardian: A partnership made in heaven. 

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