<H1><b>NORMAN FINKELSTEIN PASSES HIS USE-BY DATE!</b></H1>

There comes a time when one discovers that those one thought were sound in their political analyses actually let one down completely by losing the plot and in effect shouting over the top of those trying to have rational discussions with them.

A few days ago I received my usual daily email from Mondoweiss which always has some very intersting items listed.

This particular one had a video of Norman Fikelstein doing an "interview" with a man called Frank, I believe. The "interview" lasted half an hour and was full of Finkelstein trying to talk down the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement as being related to a cult.

This is not only insulting but it is also false. Whatever ultimately brought down the South African apartheid regime, BDS was a major contributor and helped in a major way to bring to the world's attentions the brutality and evil of the police state regime in South Africa.

The modern BDS movement, started by a Palestinian group which saw that the armed struggle against the brutality of Apartheid Israel's ongoing attacks on Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem was not making sufficient progress and needed another focus to help the world realise the evils of the Israeli zionist regime.

There have been some significant achievements in the few years during which the campaign has been running, with some large companies and orgnisations leaving Israel and divesting from the state.

Finkelstin suddenly argues about the lawfulness of Israel's right to exist as a state and defends a great deal of the zionist state's abuses of Palestine and its indigenous inhabitants and states that there is no possibility of a one-state solution, nor a two-state solution and retain the viability of the Jewish "democratic" state of Israel.

It is not possible for Israel to be Jewish and democratic because a Jewish state would turn the country into a theocracy, a poit which it is rapidly reaching with an influx during the last 20 to 30 years of fanatical religious Jews from the USA. Most of these are now living in settlements stolen from the Palestinians who are daily treated to appalling conditions in thioe own country by the colonisers.

The origins of the BDS movement against South Africa are fascinating.

The paragraph detailing the story comes from:

No Easy Victories: African Liberation and American Activists over a Half Century, 1950-2000 Edited by William Minter,
Gail Hovey, and Charles Cobb Jr.
Published by Africa World Press.

"The Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PRWM), in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was founded by workers at Polaroid in 1970 who discovered that Polaroid film was being used for the pass system in South Africa. The two key activists were Ken Williams and Caroline Hunter, and their protest gained national prominence."

Finkelstein should be aware, with his intellectual ability and academic experience that mass movements do not happen overnight and a great deal of grassroots activism takes place before issues become public and attract the attention of masses of people world-wide.

IF BDS started in 1970 in the USA, it took until 1990, 40 years later, for the dramatic collapse of the South African apartheid regime and even then another 4 years passed before South Africa's first ever democratic elections were held for all its citizens, black, white and everything in between.

If Finkelstein believes in Israel as a viable demacratic entity he should leave the comforts of the USA and move to live there to defend his Jewish homeland. Reality might then hit him in the face and he might wake from his current stupor!

The interview on video is insulting and degrading to the person doing the interview and Finkelstein needs to make a public apology to him.