Massad is almost a parody of himself at this point.

"Zionist brutality..." always a fun heading.

"While Israeli Jews were slaughtering Palestinians and the Lebanese...." you know who was actually slaughtering Palestinians? The Lebanese!

Just so much BS, it's stunning...

I don't think that is funny.

It is hilarious, though, that anyone could put together an article like this with headings like that one and people take it seriously.

Especially with a quote that you were able to pretty quickly prove was fake.

When, in 1982, the Israelis stood by as the Christian Phalangists massacred the Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila, he called for the resignation of Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin. “Everybody is somebody’s Jew,”

Sad you think his opinions are hilarious...oh well.

What the heck are you talking about?

Incidentally, Ariel Sharon did resign the post of Defense Minister for not preventing Lebanese soldiers from killing Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. at Sabra and Shatila. I would have called for his resignation too.

Still not sure what this has to do with the fact that the OP you posted begins with a made up quote that you were able to determine was fake in a matter of a few minutes.

What Levi meant was not altered..and he was not on board for Israel's Zionist dream.

And the article itself begins with a made-up quote by him.

The whole article compares the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust to the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of Israel.

That's exactly the sort of linkage people like the OP author go for.

It's from the anti-hasbara playbook page 1.

I would think you'd be done by now, lol.

Have at it.

Why would the Holocaust be off limits? Do you believe the parallels would need to be
exactly the same? Personally, I do not feel Israel can ever justify what it has done to
the Palestinians, and one need not look to the Holocaust for comparisons fair or contrived
to hold them primarily responsible for the misery and injustice.

Stopping constant attacks ,suicide bombings and massacres , which used to be daily events...



is very good Justification....Excellent Justification.

Am I sick as well? Off my meds? Some kind of dementia to go with my delirium ? -All because you disagree with my post?


LOL

But you are delusional imo, if you think the history of the I/P conflict supports
the notion that a land grab is anything but a land grab with the veil of "security"
as a cover.

Truly, delusional.

No fake quote needed!

Yet the author of your OP decided to lead with one. Any idea why?

out numerous times, the meaning is not altered.

I can't speak for the author, if he thought it was more biting as is, or less so with the
precise one..I don't know.

Yet your focus is fake, fake..lol

...that your friend Delrem had this to say about it:

supporter of the occupation..wasn't he? LOL You crack me up.


The McCarthy types tried to destroy his chances at tenure but it did not work.

Do you honestly feel that Massad has the power to ensure that Israel will leave
the Palestinians a viable state? The way you react to him, one would think he could
do that....interesting.

You're not doing the Palestinians any favors with Massad's trash.

I doubt you even read this OP..you have stated no objections.

It's the same material, actually.

It's the same schlock.

U are clueless.

Seriously?

A lot of Israelis would think that was a silly thought.

But I wouldn't call it "Palestinian Nationalist Brutality" when it occurs.

In fact, pretty much no one does.

Phrases like "Zionist Brutality" serve no purpose other than to link Zionism and brutality.

By the way, do you have any opinion on the fact that the author of the article began his piece with a fake quote?

As has happened in the pretty recent past. Would you apply that phrase? Personally, I think it's less than helpful.

Are you serious?

I mean this:

During the Jewish holiday of Passover in 2002, Park Hotel in the Israeli coastal city of Netanya held its traditional annual Passover seder (festive religious meal) for its 250 guests, in the hotel dining room located at the ground floor of the hotel. During this holiday many hotel guests were elderly Jews who didn't have family and relatives in Israel.

In the evening of 27 March 2002, a Palestinian suicide bomber disguised as a woman approached the hotel carrying a suitcase which contained powerful explosives. The suicide bomber managed to pass the security guard at the entrance to a hotel, then he walked through the lobby passing the reception desk and entered the hotel's crowded dining room. At 19:30 pm (GMT+2) the suicide bomber detonated the explosive device he was carrying. The force of the explosion instantly killed 28 civilians and injured about 140 people, of whom 20 were injured severely. Two of the injured later died from their wounds. Some of the victims were Holocaust survivors.[3][4][5] Most of the victims were senior citizens (70 and over). The oldest victim was 90 and the youngest was 20 years old. A number of married couples were killed, as well as a father together with his daughter. One of the victims was a Jewish tourist from Sweden who was visiting Israel for Passover.[6]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passover_massacre

And this:

Suicide bomber Saeed Hotari was standing in line on a Friday night in front of the Dolphinarium, when the area was packed with youngsters (most of them Russian new arrivals) waiting for admission. Survivors of the attack later described how the young Palestinian bomber appeared to taunt his victims before the explosion, wandering among them dressed in clothes that led some to mistake him for an orthodox Jew from Asia, and banging a drum packed with explosives and ball bearings, while repeating the words in Hebrew: "Something's going to happen".[5] At 20:30 pm, he detonated his explosive device. It was the second attack in five months on the same target.[6] Witnesses claimed that body parts lay all over the area, and that bodies were piled one above another on the sidewalk before being collected. Many civilians in the vicinity of the bombing rushed to assist emergency services.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphinarium_discotheque_suicide_bombing

But, in case you hadn't noticed, most people who condemn Palestinian violence refer to it as "Palestinian violence", not "violence that just happens to be committed by people who just happen to be supporters of Palestinian nationalism". There was never a time when the Palestinian cause was given a break on that score.

Whoever is reading this, please note that the Primo Levi quote at the top of the article is fake. He did not say it.

This affected his views on Israel. He repeatedly condemned the Israelis’ treatment of the Palestinians. When, in 1982, the Israelis stood by as the Christian Phalangists massacred the Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila, he called for the resignation of Ariel Sharon and Menachem Begin. “Everybody is somebody’s Jew,” he told a reporter, Filippo Gentiloni, from the Italian newspaper Il Manifesto, and he cited the abuse of Poland by the Russians and the Germans. At that point in the interview, printed on June 29, 1982, Gentiloni closed the Levi quote and added a sentence of his own: “And today Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.” Carole Angier, in quoting this, either made a mistake or repeated someone else’s mistake. In any case, the quotation marks got moved, and Levi was represented as having said not just “Everybody is somebody’s Jew” but also “And today the Palestinians are the Jews of the Israelis.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/04/who-said-what.html

He must of meant something oh so different, lol.

Thanks for providing it!

Isn't that right?

actions at Sabra and Shatila? Explain to us please

to delegitimize Levi's actual quote, even after you posted what he did say but then again I can understand why such realities do not sit well with some

When convenient that is.

Last edited Sat Dec 7, 2013, 08:29 PM - Edit history (1)

How hard is it to say: "Maybe the author of this piece has an agenda"

Or to ask: "Why would the author lead with a quote that is easily proven to be fake?"

Why is it so hard for anti-hasbarists to draw a line at posting this sort of nonsense from Joseph Massad?

There are plenty of reasonable areas for discussions without dealing in polemics and faked quotes.

This is what is so funny to me. I beg you to take a step back and ask yourself some tough questions. You might be able to loose yourself of some of your assumptions.

I get that it is much easier to spout the anti-hasbara party line with catch-phrases like Zionist brutality, apartheid, slow-motion genocide, open air prison, etc. But if you really want to make a difference, try to get past all of that and really open up your mind. You might be surprised at what you find.

Gave it a shot.

And gets no pass...

A lie is a lie.

THE QUOTE WAS A LIE.... the rest of the article should be treated with the respect it deserves following this lie : NONE !

no matter how many times or in what font you say it, sorry you choose not to answer though albeit is understandable

...that could be cut-and-pasted straight from the Stormfront website. Here's a little more on the author of the OP that our friends here feel compelled to defend:

You and Shira are pounding this one like Senator Vreenak

the letter is indeed a hoax, however the quote appears to be correct or very close to it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_to_an_Anti-Zionist_Friend

1) King did not go to Cambridge in 1968. According to Cambridge University, his visit there was in '66.
2) CAMERA has "updated" the quote to place it at Harvard. problem is, Martin Lipset (the source for the quote) was not at Harvard to have heard it. And he claimed it was Cambridge, anyway.
3) Martin Lipset is the one and only source for this quote.
4) Lipset himself was really, really far from any definition of an "unbiased source," being a rather prominent member of several Zionist groups himself (Chair of the National B'nai B'rith Hillel Commission, in fact.) The article where he claims to have heard the quote is "The Socialism of Fools: The Left, the Jews and Israel" in the December 1969 edition of Encounter Magazine.
5) Aside from King, everyone at this event is anonymous; the student is unnamed, there is no mention of anyone else, and there has never been any non-Lipset verification.
6) The article was published, as said, in 1969 - a year after King's murder.

That is, it's one guy, who doubtless has an investment, who is attributing a quote to a figure who is unable to verify or deny, and there is no other source involved.

I refer you to the good Romulan Senator in my previous post.

King had a few things to say on Israel. There are actual quotes. For instance, this one, delivered at the annual convention on the Rabbinical Assembly:

"King did not go to Cambridge in 1968. According to Cambridge University, his visit there was in '66."

What the heck are you talking about? Cambridge University? In England?

Do you not know that Cambridge is a suburb of Boston and is where Harvard is located?

Went back to check, and I had gotten jumbled. Lipset claims it was said at a dinner in Cambridge while King was visiting Harvard in 1968. However, the last time King visited Harvard was April 23, 1967 - according to Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper, published on the day of his murder.

Either way, the point is that King was not there when Lipset says he was.

That, Lipset's own politics, the inability to independently verify, and the lack of any useful detail to the account (Where was this dinner? Who was the student? Who else might have been there? What did the student say before, or after?) put it into dubious territory, at best - and that's if one takes Lipset as a reliable narrator in the first place.

Today, we're seeing a bunch of right-wing dumbfucks prance around and laying claim to Nelson Mandela as one of their own, now that he's incapable of pointing out that no, he certainly wasn't. This is what Lipset did with King - attributed a quote to him, that just happened to mesh perfectly with Lipset's own beliefs, that Lipset just happened to overhear, and he just happened to only mention it once King was no longer around to offer correction.

As i said, there are verifiable King quotes on Israel. not a whole bunch, but what's there seems to be supportive, or at least not hostile. I've already mentioned why they never get used.

I find no reason to doubt the veracity of the quote. It is, as you point out, consistent with similar things he had said on the subject during his life.

Last edited Sun Dec 8, 2013, 03:11 PM - Edit history (1)

This creates a conundrum for you, as he was w/o question a liberal and a zionist.

I can almost see and smell the smoke coming out of your ears due to all the short-circuiting going on within your brain. The cognitive dissonance must be giving you some painful headaches.

I won't even mention President Obama's zionism....

For what it's worth, it took me nearly forever to verify that quote to any degree - I mean, really, forever. Here's the question and answer in full, if you're at all curious:

Recommend bookmarking.

....the situation for Arabs in Israel with that of Blacks in the USA.

You're also dead wrong about the quote where he equated criticism of zionists with antisemitism...

http://www.martinkramer.org/sandbox/2012/03/in-the-words-of-martin-luther-king/

He was in Cambridge just as Lipset wrote. Lipset was as credible a source as there was back then. No one disputed Lipset back then and King's family has never attempted to dispute the quote ever since.

So King would have considered you and your fellow anti-zionists unenlightened bigots.

Ouch.

And not the fake one .

And if I read an article that opened with a fake MLK quote . I would snap my fingers and go next as I trashed the fake useless garbage article that would use a fake lying quote.

In an interview Scarpa and Soave don't mention, journalist Giampaolo Pansa asked Levi what 'instinctive reaction' he had after hearing about the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Why anti-Zionists feel the need to repeat and re-publicize fake quotes is beyond me.

Happens quite a lot though.

by the usual sort of bilge-dwelling racists that we see in this forum.

Link it up, pronto.


Ha Ha thought so, you can not.

If it makes you feel any better.

I'm a great admirer of primo Levi by the way. I read both the drowned and the saved and if this be a man as a teenager.

And that's why people are so passionate as to the accuracy of his words.

Can you think of an honest anti-Zionist position (aside from Netuei Karta and their ilk) that is not either loony or anti-Semitic? Either they believe that no state should exist anywhere (good luck with that), or else they single out the Jewish state and they have a lot of explaining to do. If the entire position is founded on falsehoods, then why wouldn't they try to support it with fake quotes?

Thanks for the post.

In one of his recent columns for Al Jazeera, Columbia University professor Joseph Massad holds forth on the topic of “Israel and the politics of boycott.” He casually claims in this piece that “the Zionists…were pioneers in their use of boycotts to effect racial separatism,” while “the Nazis would be latecomers to the tactic.” In other words, the Nazis were just imitating “the Zionists”… No doubt the politically correct thing to do is to regard Professor Massad as just another Israel “critic.” But one of Massad’s older Al Jazeera columns offers an excellent example of the professor’s methods and the kind of “intellectual” company he gets to keep as a result.

Some two years ago, Massad penned a bitter complaint about the contrast between a supposed western indifference to any suffering by Arab/Palestinian children and an eagerness to sympathize when Jewish children are in danger. Reflecting his obsessive hatred of Zionism, Massad devoted one section of his article to “Zionism and Jewish children,” where he claimed that “Zionism did not always show similar love towards Jewish children, whom it never flinched from sacrificing for its colonial goals.”

The “evidence” Massad produced to support his vicious claim is a quote of David Ben-Gurion, who, according to Massad, rejected a generous British offer to take a few thousand Jewish children from Germany to Britain in the wake of the so-called “Kristallnacht”-pogroms in November 1938. The quote reads:

False syllogisms, troublesome combinations and Primo Levi’s political positioning on Israel and Palestine

Excerpts:

Last April, two Italian researchers of the International Primo Levi Studies Centre in Turin published an article in the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. Domenico Scarpa and Irene Soave analysed the emergence of a syllogism falsely attributed to Primo Levi: 'Everybody is somebody’s Jew. Palestinians are Israel’s Jews'.

After noticing a high degree of recurrence of this sentence on Google, the two researchers aimed to dismantle the history of what proved to be a falsely-attributed syllogism. Their main evidence comes from the comparison of an interview with Levi published in the Italian newspaper La Repubblica in 1982 and another article in the same year, published in Il Manifesto : in the latter, the journalist Filippo Gentiloni, reporting a sentence by the clockmaker Mendel (one of the protagonists in Levi’s If not now, when?), added a personal comment right after the quote: 'And the Palestinians are Israel’s Jews'.

<snip>

Levi never claimed on his own behalf that 'Palestinians are Israel’s Jews', but in both his interview with Il Manifesto and La Repubblica he affirmed the possibility of a comparison, as long as this happens without exploitation and within certain limits. These limits are determined by Levi’s positioning and analytical rigour: 'There is a certain analogy. I would not want to push things too far, but the similarities seem to me essentially this. We are talking of what we might call a "Nation" , because in the Arab world things are always difficult to define, which found itself without a country. And this is a point of contact with the Jews. There is a recent Palestinian diaspora that has something in common with the Jewish diaspora of two thousand years ago. But the analogy cannot go much further, in my opinion.'

Here, like elsewhere, Levi stopped dead right before the syllogism that was attributed to him. It seems as if for Levi the best way to avoid a trivialisation of the complexity and relative awkwardness of his political reasoning on Israel and Palestine was to avoid thinking in the concise rhetoric of slogan and propaganda. Now that we know what is true and what is false about Levi’s words on such a delicate and essential topic, we can cheer up and try to develop our reasoning from his lessons and words. This point of departure for our broader and on-going research on how to develop a political positioning from processes that we can define as combinations, assemblages, albeit vertiginous, is similar to that of Levi’s moral bio-chemistry, a bio-chemistry that seems to develop from his reflections on the 'grey zone' in Israel-Palestine too.

http://www.opendemocracy.net/nicola-perugini-francesco-zucconi/false-syllogisms-troublesome-combinations-and-primo-levi%E2%80%99s-politic

That fact will not change..but enjoy the distinctions you're holding onto about " everybody ".

Nice homework, oberliner..do your own next time you cry, fake.

And here on DU are Zionists and against the occupation too.

Do you believe most posters here are either for the occupation or are bigoted or are antiSemites?

I do not believe that, what about you?

Levi was not on board with Israel's program.

There was no "cry fake". Simply pointed out that the quote was a fake, which you immediately confirmed. No homework required.

If you want to promote articles that link Jewish suffering in the Holocaust at the hands of the Nazis to Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israelis then at least be aware of what you are doing and maybe ask yourself why you are doing it?

Took you long enough to respond..lol

Because he is Jewish? - So he can only give advice on Israel and Jews?

How about you?

What is your qualifications to give advice on whom?

you also presume you speak for the majority of Jews...but you do not.

One does not need qualifications based on ethnicity.

Part of the mainstream, how about you?

I only speak for me.

Also, there are roughly zero Palestinians actually reading this forum on a regular basis.

How do you know this?

But regardless, my statement earlier had nothing to do with ethnicity..more about your need to sanitize Israeli
policy..make it more palatable. It is my opinion that approach leaves your position lacking, to say the least.

No offense intended.

The existence of The Jewish State ensures the meaning of the words "never again" as it pertains to Jews Worldwide.


A life raft indeed , allowing Jews to live outside Israel and not have to be Zionists but knowing their safety as Jews is assured---Strong Jews .. A novel idea since -1948-- ( and hated by those who can not bear or "tolerate" that idea )

You missed that with your word salad.

That article that you posted,from a Jewish/Zionist newspaper was pointing out that even though Levy did not self identify himself a Zionist , he very much was in fact an uber Zionist by believing Israel to be the life raft of the Jewish people.

Calling something a word salad doesn't extinguish defeat of ones "argument ".

Do you understand what he objected to?

some people grow and evolve others not so much

And the so-called quote is not cited. Can you tell me the source?

Here's some information you might find interesting:

Levi's novel If Not Now, When? is about East European Jews who go to Israel at the end of World War II. When Levi went to talk about his novel to a group of Italian Communists, "a group of Palestinians verbally attacked him. Levi was seen as an emissary of Israel's officialdom and a supporter of Begin's militant Zionism ... the Palestinians raised such a clamor that Levi had to be bundled out of the clubhouse back door" (p. 404).

We can't read the minds of the Palestinians who forced Levi to flee from the room, but I find it hard to believe that they thought he supported "Begin's militant Zionism." Levi had made it clear that he disapproved of Begin's policies. If a group of Palestinians felt they had to verbally attack him, it almost certainly was because they felt that Levi was not an anti-Zionist.

We can conjecture about the depth of Levi's Jewish identity or his commitment to Israel. We can speculate about his depression and the reasons for his death. Conjecture and speculation are useful and rewarding, but, as Levi would have agreed, they must be consistent with facts. There is nothing as beautiful as a fact. However, when we try to understand the complexities of the human soul, we can never have enough facts. A human being is as vast a subject as the universe.

http://www.jochnowitz.net/Essays/Thomson.html

There is no source provided.

now I understand denial of quotes that go against the grain are du jour here for some, but unless you can prove unequivocally that Levi did not say that then it stands

Kissinger said much the same thing about being American...