YIDDISH, HEBREW, JEWISH, PALESTINE, ISRAEL, ANTI-SEMITISM, BOYCOTT, DIVESTMENT, SANCTIONS

This whole series of topics has no beginning, no middle, and certainly no end, largely due to the antics of the USA, the UK, France, and many other countries around the world.

Let's start with Yiddish, because that is something I have had a lifelong (92 and counting) involvement with and still think it is one of the most interesting languages to know something about.

My biggest regret is that those around me who spoke Yiddish, were involved with it and were interested in it are all long dead.

The following article appeared in the Saturday Age supplement "Spectrum" on 1 March 2019:

Yiddish concert embraces 'the lost language in all of us'

As the Jewish language awakens, a group of local musicians is putting poetry to song.

By Rachelle Unreich

March 1, 2019 — 11.00am

You could say Yiddish is having its moment, which is odd for a language that originated among Ashkenazi Jews some time in the 11th century.

In Shtisel, an award-winning TV show about the ultra-religious Jewish community in Israel, characters speak a mixture of Hebrew and Yiddish, which is largely old Germanic dialect. An all-Yiddish version of Fiddler on the Roof is currently playing off-Broadway, and later this year, Carnegie Hall will put on From Shtetl to Stage, celebrating old and new Yiddish culture.



From left, Evelyn Krape, Simon Starr and Galit Klas in the library at Kadimah Yiddish Theatre. Credit:CHRISTOPHER HOPKINS

Melbourne is no slacker in the Yiddish arena, boasting the largest number of Yiddish speakers in Australia. It's also home to Kadimah Yiddish Theatre, the team behind the production Play Me A Poem. At the National Theatre for one night, it will feature well-known musicians and composers such as Deborah Conway, Lior, Willy Zygier and Josh Abrahams creating original songs on stage to Yiddish poetry.

Kadimah's co-artistic director, Evelyn Krape, is on a mission to re-energise interest in Yiddish, which is sometimes referred to as a dying language, mainly because of its dwindling numbers: it was once spoken by more than 10 million Jews around the world but after the Holocaust, this fell to an estimated 1.5 million. Krape's aim is "to establish Yiddish as a thriving and dynamic cultural source," and she recalls being validated by non-Jewish actor Rob Menzies when their paths crossed at a play reading. "He said, 'Yiddish is the lost language in all of us'."

It's true that audiences around the world have been responding to Yiddish performances. A Yiddish-language production of Waiting for Godot opened up a Samuel Beckett festival in Ireland in 2014, and appeared in New York again recently. Composer Josh Abrahams (Addicted to Bass) performed Yiddish songs with the band Yid! at WOMADelaide last year. "The heat was incredible," he recalls, "yet thousands of people were giving the horah [an Israeli group dance] a red hot go. It was amazing."

In Play Me A Poem, musicians will put Yiddish poetry to unlikely tunes. Abrahams' song is reminiscent of Laurie Anderson, while reggae, jazz and Afro-Brazilian vibes will also be in the line-up. Simon Starr, musician and founder of the band Yid!, is expecting "an emotional response". He believes people who think of Yiddish as an old-fashioned language will be unprepared for how avant-garde some of the chosen poetry and lyrics are, despite some being written early last century.

"It is still pretty radical for today," Starr says. "Even if someone isn't connected to it ethnically, it's still deep and passionate and provocative. There are audacious commentaries on the Bible and current affairs, and also heartfelt, harrowing tales of suffering and longing and separation that mirror the migration patterns that were both a result of persecution and economic aspirations. It's a very rich source of material."

For this show there will be surtitles, so that audiences aren't merely listening to an orchestral piece but will have an understanding of the lyrics. "What's really fascinating is to see these amazingly modern responses to what are largely pre-Holocaust poems," says Krape, who co-directs. "We want to say to the audience: Listen – you'll hopefully be knocked off your feet. You might think this is old, but it's not old-fashioned."

Although many in the audience won't be familiar with Yiddish, others will have heard it spoken by an older generation at home. "I don't know what's going on in the ether," says Krape, "but it feels like people are searching for connections to community and heritage, in a way that is heymish [the Yiddish word for warm/ homey], but is [also] dynamic, innovative and contemporary." Krape's parents and grandparents spoke Yiddish, but she only came to it as an adult, and now attends classes in Brunswick.

In Melbourne, there's a thriving community of Yiddish learning: preschool and primary school Sholem Aleichem teaches Yiddish as a second language (and also as a VCE subject), while Monash University offers it at tertiary level.

Kadimah's artistic director, Galit Klas (who is also the show's initiator and co-director), was a Monash student, and was so inspired that she ultimately performed in and directed several Yiddish productions (singing in Yiddish Divas and writing The Ghetto Cabaret). "It really sparks something in their insides for the Jewish audience; it's like this lost missing piece," she says.

And it's also fulfilling for those who find modern music lacking. "Popular music has become horrendously manufactured," says Starr. "There's barely any trace of humanity in there, because instruments and voices have been so treated electronically. There's little human feeling left; it's music by algorithm.

"I think people still respond to well-played, live music that is played with the right intention. It's just people sharing real stories, and I can't imagine that ever going out of fashion. People will respond to that heartfelt live performance, and the next level is when the content has another layer or resonance for them."

That layer might not just come from being Jewish. Yiddish, it seems, has taken on a new life in modern times; TV viewers incorporate some of the vernacular from watching shows such as Girls or Seinfeld, as words like schmooze, shvitz and kvetch make their way into everyday language.

Starr says the thing he finds fascinating about Yiddish poetry is that "the themes are quite universal and humanist". In New York, he says, Yiddish "has become the hipster language of lesbians, because it's an outsider language and it's their little secret."

Non-Jews, such as US actor Shane Baker, have made a living out of mastering Yiddish. Although raised as an Episcopalian in Kansas City, Baker was hooked after seeing a Marx Brothers film, and is now a poster boy for Yiddish theatre.

Klas says Yiddish "doesn't feel dead to me at all".

"There's a challenge for all of us [in Play Me A Poem] in that we're working in a language that we don't know very well. But it also gives you an extra lens with which to see the world and to create art. I don't know if it's given me a huge insight into my Jewish identity, but it's made me more proud."

Play Me A Poem is at The National Theatre on March 3. nationaltheatre.org.au

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The above article from Spectrum does not give the historical perspective on why Yiddish has diminished over the years.

There is only one main reason - the zionists who wanted to develop a "homeland" for Jews in Palestine wanted to remove themselves from the reminders of their origins in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world where Yiddish was the spoken language. The zionists who managed to steal the country from the Palestinians made a conscious decision to say that Hebrew was the biblical language of the Jews and therefore it needed to be the language of the "new" country being established in Palestine to be called Israel.

And so Hebrew was born as the language of the zionists who established this "new" country and Yiddish spoken there was frowned upon to the extent that it has gradually died out.

Yiddish remained a spoken language amongst Jews in the United States of America, particularly in the ghettos of New York and was also very much a language Jews spoke in Buenos Aires in Argentina. South African Jews were, in the main from Eastern Europe and their language was Yiddish.

The following is an extract from Pakn Treger, magazine of the Yiddish Book Center, and is written by Aaron Lansky for the Fall 2018 issue, part of issue number 77. Their address is:1021 West Street, Amherst, MA01002, USA

The Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to Isaac Bashevis Singer in 1978. He was a Yiddish writer.

This is what he said when he went to Stockholm to accept his prize:

"The high honor bestowed upon me by the Swedish Academy is also a recognition of the Yiddish language," he said in Yiddish. And he concluded with words that can be read now as prophecy:

Yiddish has not yet said its last word. It contains treasures that have not been revealed to the eyes of the world. It was the tongue of martyrs and saints, of dreamers and cabalists - rich in humor and in memories that mankind may never forget. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of frightened and hopeful humanity.

Yiddish has not yet said its last word. And neither,  I suspect, has Isaac Bashevis Singer.


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This next article is from the same Saturday Age Spectrum as the previous article on Yiddish - 1 March 2019:

Antisemitism review: Deborah Lipstadt offers a guide for the perplexed

By Geoffrey Brahm Levey

February 21, 2019 — 3.06pm

SOCIETY
Antisemitism: Here and Now
​Deborah Lipstadt
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Every serious discussion of antisemitism includes this joke: an antisemite is someone who hates Jews more than is absolutely necessary. Attributed to British political thinker Sir Isaiah Berlin, the joke is wise as well as witty. Given the Jews' calamitous history, an ideological or pathological form of Jew-hatred can't simply be about not liking Jews or even treating them harshly. It must be a prejudice with no rational basis. Although often applied to any occurrence of hostility or discrimination against Jews, antisemitism originally entailed a conviction that the Jews are inherently evil. The word "anti-Semitism" was coined only in the late-19th century but has since been applied to Jew-hatred throughout history.

Vandalized tombs with tagged swastikas are pictured in the Jewish cemetery of Quatzenheim, in eastern France, on Tuesday, February 19, 2019.Credit:Jean-Francois Badias

Berlin's definition of an antisemite appears on page 14 of Deborah Lipstadt's new book, Antisemitism: Here and Now. A Holocaust historian at Emory University in Atlanta, Lipstadt attained prominence after David Irving sued her in a British court in 1996 for describing him as a "Holocaust denier". She and her publisher famously won that case, as portrayed in the 2016 film, Denial. The present book is not a history but a reckoning with antisemitism in its current guises and contortions. (Lipstadt rejects the old spelling of "anti-Semitism" as it wrongly implies that the opposition is to "Semitism" rather than to the Jews, as was always intended).

Alas, more than 70 years after the Nazis' quest to exterminate the Jews of Europe, cases still abound in which Jews are variously slain, vilified, excluded, or threatened because they are Jews. In October last year, for example, a mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue claimed the lives of 11 congregants and wounded seven others. There have been murderous attacks on Jews also in France and Brussels in recent years. In Britain, graffiti with messages such "Adolf Hitler was right" and "death to all Jews" has appeared in its cities.




Antisemitism. By Deborah Lipstadt.

Closer to home, Jews have been targeted and intimidated on Sydney public transport and while walking in Bondi. Earlier this month, more than 20 swastika symbols were daubed overnight around the Bondi area. Security guards are standard at Jewish schools and synagogues in Western societies. As Lipstadt observes, if anything, the bigots are growing more confident.

The current situation is complicated by two factors. First, Western Jews (in general) now enjoy a privileged status. Highly educated, socioeconomically successful, and politically influential, they are perceived by some less fortunate and marginalised as part of the dominant white majority. Second, there are the vexed issues of the Israel-Palestine conflict and of controversial Israeli government policies. Much of Antisemitism: Here and Now is devoted to discussing cases thrown up by these twin associations.

The book is written as an exchange of letters between Lipstadt and a whip-smart Jewish student, Abigail, and a non-Jewish law colleague, Joe, at her university. The format allows these fictional interlocutors to variously voice their confusion, outrage, and internal conflicts about episodes of apparent antisemitism on campus and in the wider world. Lipstadt responds sagely as a kind of guide to the perplexed.

The discussion begins by distinguishing different types of antisemite. There is the extremist who is upfront about his or her thirst for the Jews' demise. There is the "dinner party antisemite" who wouldn't dream of physically harming Jews but wants to exclude them from their golf or country club. There is the "clueless antisemite" who remarks to her Jewish friend that she, of all people, should be able to spot a bargain. And then there are the "antisemitic enablers", who, while not antisemites themselves, encourage the antisemitism of others.

Here, Lipstadt points her finger at both President Donald Trump, on the right, and British opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn, on the left. Trump has cultivated not only nationalist but also nativist sentiment. He defended the white supremacists and neo-Nazis at the 2017 Charlottesville rally, for example, even after one of them drove a truck through the counter-protesters. During his presidential campaign he retweeted an image of Hilary Clinton alongside a Jewish star embossed with the accusation of monied corruption. One of his ads showed three prominent American Jews with commentary about "global special interests" that "control the levers of power in Washington".
Corbyn has a history of arch criticism of Israel but also of supporting blatant antisemites. Last year, video emerged of him speaking at a Palestinian Return Centre event in 2013 in which he suggested that "Zionists" do not understand English irony despite living in the country all their lives, a comment that has not helped him shake the accusation that he himself is an antisemite. Lipstadt marshals compelling cases against both politicians as "enablers", while noting that Corbyn's disposition appears to be sincere whereas Trump's appears to be cynically directed at energising his electoral base.

The book further explores such issues as the difference between antisemitism and racism, antisemitism within the Islamic world, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and the "toxification of Israel", and the new hostility towards Jews within progressive movements and on campus. Lipstadt wisely cautions against an attitude of Jewish victimhood. She also criticises Jewish organisations that respond to the BDS by seeking to "boycott the boycotters" or which, like canarymission.org, seek to intimidate Pro-Palestinian professors and activists by compiling public dossiers on them.

Antisemitism is antisemitism regardless of the status of its targets. The Pittsburgh synagogue victims are no less murdered for having been visibly white and comfortably middle class. And the lazy equation of "wealthy and white" with domination overlooks the prominent involvement of Jews in progressive movements including the civil rights movement and feminism.

Less satisfactory is Lipstadt's treatment of the Israel factor. She is wrong to claim that questioning Israel's right to exist is axiomatically antisemitic. To demand only Israel's disestablishment among the family of nations, many of which are guilty of systematic abuses, is clearly discriminatory. However, one can hold that it was a mistake for a Jewish state to be established in Palestine without remotely being antisemitic. Even the founding father of modern Zionism, Theodor Herzl, initially campaigned to place the Jewish homeland in East Africa.

Criticism of Israel as a Jewish state is dismissed too quickly. Lipstadt counters that other democracies have official state religions. True, but the issue is whether and how the state religion is used in the distribution of individuals' rights, opportunities and overall treatment. It should be of concern that national fronts in Europe and alt-right figures in the United States laud Israel as an ethno-democracy while peddling antisemitism at home.
The 2018 Global Anti-Semitism Report found that "70 per cent of anti-Jewish attacks were anti-Israel in nature". Israeli brutality towards the Palestinians provokes brutal and intemperate politics elsewhere in reaction. It is also the case that Israel-bashing attracts and provides cover for genuine antisemites. The attempt to call this out has been hampered by the legacy of Israeli politicians and Jewish leaders responding to any criticism of Israel with the charge of antisemitism.

Often, non-Jews who are concerned about the Palestinians' situation invoke traditional antisemitic tropes without realising it or intending to do so. A current example is the controversy that has ensnared US Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, who suggested in tweets that American support for Israel is "all about the Benjamins" (referring to Benjamin Franklin on the $100 note) and the Israel lobby bribing politicians. The tweets sparked an uproar, a rebuke from House Leader Nancy Pelosi, and ultimately Omar's contrite apology. But as Peter Beinhart noted in The Forward, those who are quick to condemn this clumsy verbal bigotry are deathly silent about the tangible bigotry that Palestinians in the West Bank face daily courtesy of Israeli law and policy.

Although most diasporic Jews do not hold Israeli citizenship, a central plank of Zionism is the unity of the Jewish people. Many Jews in and outside of Israel have protested "not in our name" regarding Israeli government policies. Many more believe that this has nothing to do with them, not unlike ordinary Muslims who believe they shouldn't have to answer for the actions of Islamic militants. And many support or defer to Israeli government actions.

The book closes with Lipstadt counselling Joe not to be afraid, as a non-Jew, to call Israel out when he believes it has crossed a line. Sage advice for Jews as well.

Geoffrey Brahm Levey is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of New South Wales.

NETHERLANDS IRKS ISRAEL BY GRANTING PALESTINIANS RIGHT TO LIST GAZA AND WEST BANK AS BIRTHPLACE

World News

Netherlands irks Israel by granting Palestinians right to list Gaza & West Bank as birthplace

Published: 10 Feb 2019 | 21:05 GMT

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Palestinians in the Netherlands will for the first time be able to list the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem as their place of birth, in part because of the Dutch policy that Israel has no sovereignty over those areas.

Dutch State Secretary Raymond Knops informed the House of Representatives in The Hague of the change on Friday, explaining the decision was based on “the Dutch viewpoint that Israel has no sovereignty over these areas,” and the fact that the Netherlands doesn’t recognize Palestinian sovereignty.

Also on rt.com UNRWA slams Israel decision to close its Palestinian schools

Natives of these areas who are living in the Netherlands currently have two options when specifying their birthplace at the Dutch civil registry – ‘Israel’ or ‘Unknown’. The ‘Unknown’ option was only added in 2014, following protests seeking fairer options.

These options apply to Palestinians born after May 15, 1948, when the state of Israel was established.

While natives now resident in the Netherlands are still excluded from simply listing Palestine as their place of birth, they will now be able to use the name of  the territory they were born in.

Also on rt.com Israeli expulsion of observers from Hebron a ‘wicked’ decision – former UN rapporteur

The Netherlands does not recognize Palestinian sovereignty so the move is seen as a positive step people identifying as being from there. While the UN and 136 countries do recognize Palestine as a sovereign state, many EU countries are said to be waiting for this to be established as part of a peace agreement in the region.

Knops said the categories added are based on United Nations Security Council resolutions and the Oslo Accords.

ARE WE AT THE TIPPING POINT FOR CLIMATE ACTION?

Are we at the tipping point for action on the climate emergency?

Are we at the tipping point for climate action? In 2016, when we started our campaign calling on the Australian parliament to declare a climate emergency, we had no idea how far and how fast the idea would spread. Within a year we had the support of 20,000 individuals and 55 groups. Scientists, journalists and politicians from across the political spectrum had spoken out. In 2017, Darebin Council became the first council in the world to declare a climate emergency. They wrote a Climate Emergency Plan and in 2018 held a Climate Emergency Conference. The Climate Mobilization in the United States and the Extinction Rebellion campaign in the United Kingdom have been putting pressure on local municipalities to follow in Darebin's footsteps and they are making fast progress. Recently, London became the third city in the UK to declare a Climate Emergency, after Bristol and Manchester, with Totnes and Stroud following soon after. The London emergency transition program will include retrofitting buildings, creating a national electricity system that runs without creating greenhouse gas emissions, and electrifying the transportation system. There are now 21 councils and cities that have declared a climate emergency and eight of these declarations were in the last  two weeks! In the United States, The Climate Mobilization succeeded in having emergency climate action and a World War two-scale mobilisation written into the platform of the Democratic Party. Newly elected Democrats including  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (in the picture) are pushing hard for a Green New Deal. Please donate In mid 2018, we launched a booklet, 'Don't mention the emergency?' and we have now distributed over 1000 copies to politicians, scientists, journalists and community campaigners. It explains how to talk about the climate science and the need for emergency action in ways that move people to take action.   Campaigns all around the world are using the online version and we are starting to hear more use of emergency language from leaders and commentators. The picture below shows school students delivering a copy to local Labor candidate Kate Thwaites. We need your help to print more booklets in time to distribute them to politicians and opinion leaders before the federal election in 2019. Please donate here to help the emergency message reach more of those who need to hear it. We need $3000 to print another 700 copies. Listen to the author of the booklet, Jane Morton, explain our need for your help here. School Strike for Climate One person can make a difference. In August 2018, 15 year old Greta Thunberg (pictured below) began a school strike calling on the Swedish Parliament for emergency climate action. She says, "I have Asperger's syndrome, and to me, almost everything is black or white. I think in many ways that we autistic are the normal ones and the rest of the people are pretty strange. They keep saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all. And yet they just carry on like before. If the emissions have to stop then we must stop the emissions. To me, that is black or white. There are no grey areas when it comes to survival. Either we go on as a civilization or we don’t. We have to change." Within months school students in many countries around the world were following Greta's example. In Australia, tens of thousands of school students took to the streets on 30 November, defying Prime Minister Scott Morrison's call for"more learning in schools and less activism". What an amazing and uplifting sight it was to see students out in force. Students fully understand how serious the problem is and that time is running out to preserve a safe climate. The students' strike, and its widespread media coverage, has been a great morale boost for climate activists. It has put the climate emergency front and centre of the coming Australian federal election. The Extinction Rebellion is spreading While school students are striking, their parents and grandparents are signing up to risk arrest as part of the Extinction Rebellion (XR). This movement recognises the climate emergency as an existential threat to humans as well as vulnerable ecosystems. Even if all nations honour their Paris emissions reduction commitments, we are still on track for three to five degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century, and at those temperatures, most people on earth would die. That's why we need to "rebel for life". On 31 October, Greta Thunberg and journalist, George Monbiot were in London with thousands of campaigners calling on the UK parliament to declare a climate emergency. When the government failed to act by the deadline, the Extinction Rebellion began a series of escalating acts of disruptive civil disobedience, commencing with a protest that closed down much of the centre of London for several hours on 17 November. They have also staged sit-ins at the BBC and government offices and glued their hands to office windows to put pressure on the government to act. They have the support of hundreds of eminent people including a former archbishop. There are over 35 countries working on launching their own rebellions in mid-April 2019. If you would like updates from the international campaign, sign up here. If you are interested in being part of the Australian rebellion, sign up here. New data base We hope you like our new format newsletter and are happy to continue receiving occasional updates from the Australian campaign to declare a climate emergency. If you received this after unsubscribing, our very sincere apologies. We have recently consolidated a number of Excel spreadsheets into this Action Network data base. From now on we will be able to keep better track of those who subscribe and unsubscribe.

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HOMOPHOBIA IN PRESTON, MELBOURNE IN 2018

HOMOPHOBIA IN PRESTON, MELBOURNE IN 2018 Document dated 25 December 2018

When we bought our house in Preston, in Melbourne, Victoria, the type of house was called a villa unit in 2000, and we moved in in January and February 2001 from Sydney and Newcastle.

We are unit 2 of two units and unit 1 is the front one, nearest the street along the driveway which is common property.

It didn’t take us long to discover that unit 1 was public housing, in other words it belonged to the Victorian Department of Housing. It was not administered by them and was managed by an organisation called “North East Housing. It was controlled under a scheme called “Transitional Housing” and was supposed to mean that tenants were placed there until more suitable accommodation could be found for them, supposedly for about 1 year from placement.

We soon discovered that this did not mean what it said and some tenants were there much longer, which was both good and bad.

For the purpose of this document, the current tenants fall under the word “bad”, not only bad, but shocking!

We estimate that the current tenant is the 13^th since we moved in on 27 January 2001, and to date have been in unit 1 for 2 years and two months.

In that time she has been appallingly rude to us using the worst of language and threatening us in several ways, to the extent that we have spoken to the police because Haven, Home Safe have not responded to our requests that this family be moved out as soon as possible.

We suspected that her problem may be homophobia and we felt she was linking that to paedophilia because she has 3 little boys, one now aged about 3 and the other two seem to be about 7 years old.

It all came to a head on the afternoon of 15 December 2018 as the following details will explain:

We have complained about the driveway being cluttered with the children’s toys – bicycles, scooters, large netball balls and other paraphernalia. We have not complained about the children playing with them, our complaint is that when the children are not playing with them, they are left lying in the driveway and being an obstruction to those of us who use the driveway every day.

On this day at 1.30pm two friends came to pick us up to go shopping. One of these friends is a man in his late 80s and he uses a walker aid and walks with difficulty. He is also legally blind as he has Macular Degeneration, and therefore has to be helped with his walking wherever he goes. The driveway was cluttered as usual and the other friend, who is not incapacitated kicked one of the items out of the way to help the person with the walker make his way through along the driveway to unit 2, our unit.

We got ready to go shopping and were walking down the driveway to the street when the tenant came to one of the windows of unit 1 and screeched at one of our friends, “GO FUCK YOURSELVES YOU POOFTERS!”.

There was other abuse as well, such as “Haven laughs at you, they think you are a joke” (judging by the responses we have had from Housing, this seems to be true!!!), but we have reached the stage where this behaviour can not be tolerated any longer.

If the tenant is not removed in the very near future, we will be considering an intervention order on advice from the police. We will also be considering retaining a lawyer to bring a damages claim against both the Housing Minister and HHS for the stress, inconvenience and cost caused by the tenants despite repeated requests for their removal, over a lengthy period of time.

SBS - APPLY BDS TO EUROVISION 2019 AND SUPPORT PALESTINE

SIGN PETITION TO SBS TO BOYCOTT EUROVISION 2019 IF IT IS IN ISRAEL

September 24, 2018

I Don’t See How a Palestinian State Can Ever Happen

by Robert Fisk

Photo by young shanahan | CC BY 2.0

Abu Yussef Abu Dahuk is 60 years old. But of course he looks around 75 or 80, because he is a Bedouin and lives under a corrugated iron roof and sheets tied together with string, and because he owns just 120 goats which belong to his 17 children. And because the Israeli cops and soldiers a couple of hundred feet away are ready to demolish his little slum and drive him away.

The Palestinian had two wives – the first died 18 years ago, and the second serves us the usual scalding hot tea on this scalding hot morning – and has been expelled from his grazing lands three times; first from Tel Arad near the Israeli town of Beersheva and then again after the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank; and then in 1974. Now the Israeli High Court of Justice – and yes, let justice indeed be its name – has decided that the 180 members of the Bedouin Jahalin tribe should be dispossessed once more. They must be moved to an area in Abu Dis not far, as the residents point out, to a garbage dump. Not that you can be dispossessed of rags and a mud school or bits of rusting metal that prop up a plastic roof over shacks.

But it’s not that simple. We all know – the Israelis know, the EU which has given €315,000 to Khan al-Ahmar knows, and the Palestinians know – that this is no chance demolition. Just over the hills to the north peep the red rooftops of the Kfar Adumim Jewish colony, and the destruction of Khan al-Ahmar will give its Israeli inhabitants room to move – high court permitting, needless to say – down to the highway and thus destroy the last of the Palestinian villages beside the road to Jerusalem. Another circle of Israeli concrete around the city will be complete.

Abu Yussef Abu Dahuk knows all too well what this means. “The settlement continues to be built and so they must move us out. Now we are not allowed to cross the valley behind us with our goats or the settlers will take our goats. We are not allowed to build proper homes and so we have to use these metal structures. The settlers can build a villa, with electricity and a water source and a garden – and for us in the winter, we can build nothing. We put plastic on top of the metal to stop the water falling on us when we are sleeping.”

But I think Abu Yussef Abu Dahuk may not be sleeping in Khan al-Ahmar much longer. The Palestinian Authority has done little for the Bedouins here and the arrival of two van loads of Palestinian activists with their flags and cameras and feeble but naturally much publicised attempts to block the highway seemed far too theatrical, ritualised and – dare one say so? – cynical, to be of much help to the 180 Bedouins.

The Israeli policemen and policewomen and the soldiers are trying to keep the main road, the famous Trans-Samaria Highway, open but the phone cameras are poised above them – more cameras than cops, I observed – and then the plain clothes cops arrive with their own cameras and everyone is filming everyone else. The only figures who remain out of focus are the old shepherds and their children who mostly stay behind the front-line ditch on the north side of the highway.

We’ve watched this stage-play so many times that it has, like so much of the West Bank, become normal. Legal (thanks to the High Court), familiar, usual, timed to the minute – two news agency reporters cheerfully agreed to leave at the same time so that neither can scoop the other if the cops moved in — and utterly outrageous. But the police don’t move. They shepherd a few shepherds off the road and sigh with irritation at the shouts of “Free Palestine”, but the Israeli bulldozer which ominously turned up retreats from the wadi and grinds off up the road.

The European parliament has been much exercised about Khan al-Ahmar, warning that the Israelis would be committing a war crime if they demolished the herding village whose goats now wander among the demonstrators. By a 320 to 227 vote, it approved a Strasbourg resolution which demanded Israeli compensation for financial losses incurred by the EU in the little plot of land.

Ten EU states are providing humanitarian assistance in Khan al-Ahmar, including a primary school, and the parliament’s resolution says that if the demolition and the forcible transfer of its residents takes place, this “would constitute a grave breach of international law”. In other words, a “war crime” under the Fourth Geneva Convention.

Correctly, if a little late in the day, Federica Mogherini, the EU’s head of foreign policy, told parliamentarians that the destruction of Khan al-Ahmar “would also be a blow against the viability of the State of Palestine and against the very possibility of a two-state solution.” She noted that it’s almost impossible for Palestinians to obtain building permits in the West Bank’s Area C, thus placing the Israeli claim that the shepherds’ shacks had been constructed illegally in its own grim context. Area C is under total Israeli occupation and – so the Jewish settlers say – must be annexed at once. “C” comprises 60 per cent of the West Bank. Why on earth would the Israelis encourage anyone to stay in the land of the ever-expanding Jewish colonies?

Abu Yussef Abu Dahuk talks – of course, of course – about the Balfour Declaration and the curse of its false promise to protect the non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine more than a hundred years ago. Sitting in his pitiful shack, I and my colleagues dutifully apologise for the long dead British foreign secretary. “You created this problem,” the proud but soon-to-be homeless Bedouin says softly. “You know that if they finally move us to Jordan, that will create only more conflict among those communities there. You don’t need to apologise for Balfour – it’s like water that has leaked from a pipe. You need to put pressure on the ‘spoiled kid’ [Israel] to stop doing what he is doing. We held out the hands of peace [in Oslo] 25 years ago, and still we are not getting anything back.”

He used to get more food, medicine and help from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, he says, before the Americans announced that they would stop funding it. “Now we get nothing.” And so – how many times do we come up with this insulting question? – I ask Abu Yussef Abu Dahuk if he will ever live in a Palestinian state? “For me, I don’t think so. In my life, I don’t think so. It’s already 25 years since Oslo was signed and nothing has happened.

 Maybe if the leaders were changed, something would happen… We are an honest people – we are not politicians. But life has taught us a lot of things.”
Mogherini should surely come and talk to this man. For who can believe in a Palestinian state today, let alone “a blow against its viability” as a future state? Its viability is as secure as the plastic sheet over this poor man’s head, its existence a myth whose reality exists only in Strasbourg. Even the goats know that.

More articles by:Robert Fisk

Robert Fisk writes for the Independent, where this column originally appeared. 

September 21, 2018

Israel’s Anti-Semitism Smear Campaign

by Andrew Levine

Photo Source U.S. Embassy Jerusalem | CC BY 2.0

Donald Trump is devoted to his bottom line and to a belief in his own greatness.  Beyond that, he has no fixed convictions.

He does have instincts and attitudes, however. Some of them are less odious, at least in theory, than the fixed convictions of neoliberal and liberal imperialist Democrats. Most are worse; and, because the Donald is “special,” nearly all of them are in a state of constant flux.

The more permanent ones have mainly to do with keeping brown and black people, and women of all hues, down and in their place.

The general idea is to maintain patriarchy and, above all, to make America white again – or rather, since it still is mighty white, as white as it used to be.

Trump doesn’t much care for Muslims or Hispanics. He is happy to deal with them, though – if they are rich and far away and if there is some percentage in it for him. Otherwise, like many of his supporters, he holds them in contempt and wishes them ill.

Whenever he can, he harms them as well – often with gratuitous cruelty.
He seems to hold Palestinians in especially low regard. This comes from working with and living among real estate moguls like himself and the politicians, lawyers, accountants, and other shady characters who serve their interests.

 Many of them, the Jewish ones especially, do have fixed, anti-Palestinian convictions.  In our time and place, this goes with being of a certain age.

Were we living in a healthier political environment, the kind that existed before the Democratic Party gave itself over to corporate-friendly identity politics, I’d call aging members of the tribe for whom Israel is everything and Palestinians are nothing “elders of Zion.”  A quip like that is ahistorical but on point and, in a snarky way, even funny.

However, it is no longer kosher to joke around in ways like that. The problem is not just that the dominant tone in politics nowadays is humorless and self-absorbed.  It is also that on the surface, politics has come to have little to do with how the class struggle is going, or with who is doing what to whom, or with where societal benefits and burdens are going.

That was all so sixties and seventies.  Politics today is about not offending peoples’ identities.

Overwrought identity politics does address the interests of subaltern groups in positive ways.  However, the situation is more complicated than that.

Black and brown people and victims of patriarchal attitudes are asserting themselves – boldly and to good effect.  But, despite how things may appear, the class struggle has not gone missing.

Quite to the contrary, American politics today is about what it has always been about: furthering the interests of still mostly white, still mostly male, titans of commerce, industry, and finance.  It is about securing their power and wealth, and the capitalist system that makes their good fortune possible, from hostile political contestation.

To that end, it helps that identity politics is all, or nearly all, there is.

And so, the action nowadays, at least on the surface, is on what Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) called “trifles… a word, a smile … and any other sign of undervalue…”  Democrats, and Republicans too, have seen to that.

This is why nowadays only the foolhardy dare say anything that could be construed as hurtful by those who have forgotten what they ought to have learned in nursery school — that “sticks and stones can break my bones, but names can never hurt me.”

Jokes about classic anti-Semitic tracts, like The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, are therefore best left unmade.

But what the hell!  “Elders,” straight out of central casting, who have shaped the Donald’s “thinking,” deserve all the disparagement and all the ridicule they get.

For all I know, there are Jewish Trump cronies who are religious or, what comes to the same thing, observant; they may even pray three times a day, keep kosher, and abstain from work on Jewish holidays and on the Sabbath.  It is a good bet, though, that, if there are people in Trump’s life who fit that description, that, even for them, Zionism, Jewish nationalism, matters more than Judaism, the Jewish religion.

Were the Prophetic tradition still alive, there would be religious Jews now calling Zionism a false idol.  Instead, there are religious (observant) Jews who see it as the fulfillment of Judaism, and therefore as a suitable replacement for it.

Since it emerged in the late nineteenth century, Zionism has come in many versions — some liberal, some not.  The kinds Trump knows are virulently rightwing.  It comes with the territory.

His cronies, and their co-thinkers in Israel and around the world, want Palestine ethnically cleansed of Palestinians – to make room for the Herrenvolk,and to guarantee that no “population bomb” will ever jeopardize the Jewish character of what Benjamin Netanyahu, in defiance of logic and history, calls “the nation state of the Jewish people.”

Trump’s presidency has been a godsend for Zionists like that.

It would give our Commander-in-Chief too much credit to say that he has policy objectives in mind.  But some of the people he has empowered do.  They want to give rightwing Israelis whatever they want, and otherwise to do all they can for them.

Trump put his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a not-too-bright graduate of a Zionist day school and the gzillionaire son of a felonious Trump-like New Jersey real estate mogul, in charge of Middle East diplomacy.  He made a Trump Organization lawyer, Jason Greenblatt, an  “Assistant to the President and Special Representative for International Negotiations.” His bankruptcy lawyer, David Friedman, is his Ambassador to Israel.  All three are in way over their heads; and all three are zealous ethnocrats.

Trump also appointed Nikki Haley his Ambassador to the United Nations and John Bolton his National Security Advisor.  Haley might as well be angling for the title “Whore of AIPAC.”  Bolton is arguably the most execrable neocon in creation.  This is just the tip of the iceberg; the rot goes all the way down.

And so, the Trump administration moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and cut the entire U.S. aid budget to UNRWA, the UN agency that has been addressing the needs of Palestinian refugees, victims of U.S. backed Israeli ethnic cleansing, since 1949.

Who knows what his rationale for that bit of gratuitous cruelty might be?  Perhaps he wants to be able to say that the humanitarian disasters he causes are bigger than the ones Netanyahu can boast of.

The nicest thing to say about these and other, less spectacularly egregious anti-Palestinian Team Trump initiatives is that they have delivered the coup de graceto the long defunct “two state solution,” and to the pretense that the United States is an “honest broker” with whom Palestinians can deal.

It would be fair to say too that Trump has all but given the keys to the White House to Netanyahu and to even more noxious Israeli politicians farther to his right.

With the House and Senate in the pocket of the Israel lobby, this has always been the course of least resistance for American presidents, especially in recent decades, as Christian Zionists have become a mighty political force.

Those benighted souls are hell bent (literally) on bringing on the End Times – and, with it, the conversion or eternal damnation of each and every Jew.  Jewish Zionists with a modicum of self-respect would therefore tell them t0 go to hell.
But because they realize how important Christian Zionists can be for keeping the Republican Party on board, they pander to them shamelessly.  The Trump administration does too.

Thus, under Trump, American policy towards Israel and Palestine has become worse, but not qualitatively different than it used to be. This is par for the course; Trump makes everything worse, while nothing fundamental ever changes.

Before Trump, there used to be at least a pretense of evenhandedness, and, when pushed too hard, American presidents would sometimes timidly, but decisively, show the Israelis who is boss.

In principle, this has never been hard to do because Israel, as we know it, could not survive for long without massive American support, and because the vaunted Israel lobby – the Jewish, not the Christian, part of it — has always been a Paper Tiger.

It is too bad that the American political class and the media that reflect its thinking have never been able to wrap their heads around that simple fact.  Many in the media are Zionists too.  Many are simply obtuse.

But with liberal Zionism in its death throes, thanks largely to the evolution of Israeli politics and society in the Netanyahu era, this could soon change.

***

Liberal Zionism is, after all, a contradictory project; a liberal state is a state of its citizens, not of a particular religious or ethnic group, especially one scattered around the world with no real connection to the land, the language, or, religion apart, the culture of the country with which they are supposed to identify.

Even so, liberal Zionism was once a flourishing ideology, grounded in the realities of Israeli society. Israel could never become quite what it claimed to be – “Jewish and democratic” – but it did become a functioning liberal democracy for the roughly eighty percent of its population that is Jewish.

For the other twenty percent, it was a flawed, but not entirely failed, democracy; not much to boast of, but not bad for the region either.

Had a Palestinian state been established alongside Israel, as was supposed to happen after Oslo, the liberal Zionist idea might even now be viable.

However, successive Israeli governments kept that from happening, even while nominally endorsing the idea of a Palestinian state.

What they were really doing was buying time for the settlement movement to grow in power and extent.  They were establishing “facts on the ground.”

Even so, Oslo’s failure was not entirely Israel’s fault; Palestinian leaders deserve blame too.  However, Israel is by far the more culpable party – if only because it has always held nearly all the cards.

Liberal Zionism is among the casualties of Israeli intransigence, and of the sheer inhumanity of “the only democracy in the Middle East” and “the most moral army in the world.”

It was hanging by a thread a decade ago. But now that the occupation of the West Bank has been going on for more than half a century, and now that the government of Israel has turned Gaza into an open-air prison and waged three savage wars against its basically unarmed population, liberal Zionism has become a dead letter.

But this is not the only reason why so many younger American Jews are uninterested in or embarrassed by the state that is supposed to be theirs by “birthright.”

The passage of time is a factor too.  Even apart from Israel’s violations of international law and the brutality of the occupation regime it has installed, younger American Jews would still be drifting away from the Zionist sympathies of their parents and grandparents.

Too bad that the American political class and its counterparts in other Western countries have no appetite for taking this plain fact into account.

Therefore, now as in the past, Israel gets more or less what it wants from the United States; it seldom even has to ask.

The tail wags the dog, but sometimes the dog does try to set the situation straight. At first, Obama sorely wanted to do the right thing, but, in the end, he didn’t have the backbone.  Bush 41 pushed back a little in 1991, when Yitzhak Shamir all but forced him to make America less abject again.  And there were other, even lamer, attempts over the past half-century at putting the dog, not the tail, in charge.

Even so, Eisenhower was the only real exception to the rule.  When necessary, as it was during the Suez crisis, he was not shy about making it clear to the Israelis who the boss really is.

But that was more than seven decades ago. Now we have Trump – a president who shamelessly gives the ethnocratic settler state all that it wants – and then some.

And yet the conventional wisdom has it that Trump and his people are working on, dare I say, a “final solution” to “the Palestine Question.”  They even parrot the risible Trump-Netanyahu contention that Palestinians are at fault for not being “a partner for peace.”

It isn’t just nasty, over-the-hill Jewish men, and Jared Kushner, who are the problem; it isn’t even them plus the Bible thumpers in the Trump base.

It is also the much ballyhooed MBS, Mohammad bin Salman, and the entire ruling cohort in Saudi Arabia, the most retrograde state in the world.   And it is the leaders of smaller and slightly less noxious feudal regimes in the Persian Gulf, along with others in the Sunni Muslim world who are, in varying degrees, in thrall to Saudi money.

Thus the injustice that the Trump administration exacerbates is an abomination of regional, if not quite global, dimensions, in which the Palestinian people are up against have some of the world’s most malign and most powerful forces, and in which their friends, such as they are, are unable or unwilling to do much of anything to help them.

Undoutedly, MBS is an even worse moral monster than Trump – witness what the Saudis have done and continue to do to the people of Yemen. But, for Palestinians, Trump’s afflictions are the cruelest of the lot.

Not only has he cut off the U.S. contribution to UN efforts to provide vital life services to Palestinian refugees – in other words, to mitigate some of the worst consequences of U.S. backed Israeli ethnic cleansing – but now, probably at John Bolton’s direction, he is closing down the PLO’s diplomatic mission in Washington, and cutting off all U.S. aid to Palestinians period.

He is also moving against Palestine solidarity activists.   Indeed, it seems that this is what the latest flurry of anti-Palestinian Trump machinations is all about.
At the direction of the Israeli government, the Israel lobby in the United States and other countries is now taking full aim at the large and growing Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement.

Modeled on forms of struggle developed against Apartheid South Africa, BDS was called into being by civil society forces in Occupied Palestine and abroad in 2005.  Despite the best efforts of Israel and its supporters around the world, it has been growing mightily, especially in recent years.

In Netanyahu’s eyes, this amounts to an “existential threat.”  But, because BDS is non-violent, and because it does not physically threaten Israeli Jews, what can he say against it that could possibly move anyone who is not a willfully blind Zionist ideologue?

The answer: that BDS is anti-Semitic.

The charge is manifestly illogical and ahistorical, but there is nothing else that could serve the purpose, and Zionists nowadays need what American football fans call “a Hail Mary pass.”

*                                  *
It was to combat the specter of BDS that the Trump administration, with the support of pro-Israel legislators in Congress, has now adopted the IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of anti-Semitism, according to which saying that Zionism is racist or likening Israeli policies to Nazi policies is deemed anti-Semitic.

Partly on the basis of the IHRA definition, Kenneth Marcus, a longtime Israel advocate who heads the Office of Civil Rights in the Trump – Betsy DeVos Education Department is now reopening a case that the Obama administration dismissed in which the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and others accused Palestinian solidarity activists of anti-Semitism for an incident that occurred at Rutgers University in 2011.

The offending activists are supposed to have discriminated against Jewish students by charging a fee to attend an event on the Nakba after scores of pro-Israel students arrived to protest and presumably disrupt the event.

The ZOA then filed a Title VI complaint saying that the pro-Israel students experienced a hostile environment because they are Jews. In fact, the organizers of the event requested a fee from everyone to cover not just the costs of the venue, but also increased security costs stemming from the presence of the protestors.

The alleged smoking gun was an email from an organizer saying that “150 Zionists” had shown up at the event.  Marcus claims “Zionists” meant “Jews”.
His letter to the ZOA reopening the case said: “The visual perception of ‘150 Zionists’ referenced in the email could have been rooted in a perception of Jewish ancestry or ethnic characteristics common to the groups.”  The argument then was that in cases such as this, “Zionist” is code for “Jewish.”

Since, according to the IHRA definition, if you deny the right of Jews to self-determination in historic Palestine or apply a “double standard” to Israel’s actions and those of other nations or compare Israeli policies to Nazi policies, you are an anti-Semite.  QED.

This is plainly indefensible conceptually; it is also a subterfuge – cut from the same cloth as charges leveled against Jeremy Corbyn and others in the British Labor Party.

The UK has an Israel lobby too, but there is more to the anti-Corbyn smear campaign in Britain than that; there is a specter haunting the ruling class and its allies.

It is not the specter of communism that Marx and Engels had in mind in The Communist Manifesto(1847), nor even the specter of as much socialism as the British enjoyed in the pre-Thatcher era.    The fear is that, before long, Corbyn, a genuine socialist and internationalist, will become Prime Minister – putting the UK back onto a progressive track for the first time in decades.

Elections are not imminent, but neither is it a sure thing that they can be put off for long.  And while a Labor victory is far from assured, it is not impossible.

For one thing, the Conservative Party in the UK is a rotting hulk — though, in its favor, unlike our GOP, it is merely retrograde and, not withstanding the presence of its many miscreants, not also the party of anyone as viciously awful as Donald Trump.  Still there is little doubt that quite a few Brits would be happy to see the back of it.

For another, while the UK electoral system is flawed and undemocratic, it is less so than its U.S. counterpart.  The Labor Party’s parliamentary wing is as bad, or nearly as bad, as our Democrats, but Labor is also a membership party with a rank-and-file solidly behind Corbyn, the party leader.  Thanks to him, it is now, by far, the largest party in the UK, and one of the largest in Europe.

To be sure, what ultimately matters is not how many members a party has; it is how many votes it gets. The growth in Labor Party membership may have more to do with the extent of popular discontent with the status quo than with the course of future elections.  Even so, the power elites are worried.

There is little evidence, so far, that, in these scoundrel times, those elites, in alliance with UK Zionist organizations and with the support of the Israeli government, are getting much traction, outside media circles, by charging one of the most principled anti-racist – and anti-anti-Semitic – politicians in the world with anti-Semitism.

Still, it is a dangerous game that they are playing in much the way that the Trump administration’s unabashed adoption of rightwing Zionist policies and propaganda is dangerous.  Not only are such machinations immoral and stupid; they are also “bad for the Jews.”

For the most part, anti-Semites still avoid calling themselves what they are; the word “anti-Semite,” like the word “racist” still has bad connotations.  How much, if at all, this affects real world anti-Semitism and racism is debatable, but even if it doesn’t affect it much, it does serve a worthwhile purpose.

Hypocrisy always does; it is, as the saying goes, the compliment vice pays to virtue.  It helps maintain a state of affairs in which, in theory if not in practice, anti-Semitism, along with other forms of racism, is delegitimized.

But how long can that way of thinking be maintained when the word is illogically and relentlessly applied to positions to which right-thinking, morally decent people of all faiths and ethnicities are drawn?

The question answers itself.

***

Not to belabor the obvious, but to be clear:  one can be critical of Israel without being anti-Zionist; even the IHRA definition concedes that.  In the United States and other Western countries, there are probably more Zionists critical of Israel, and also critics who have no position on Zionism, than there are anti-Zionists.

Even more obviously, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not just logically distinct, but also historically and, even today, for some of the most extreme Orthodox Jews, theologically at odds.

Before the Nazis took power in Germany, and indeed even until the end of World War II, most American Jews were non- or anti-Zionist – not because they were “self-hating,” but because they were true to Jewish traditions.

It is only slightly less obvious that when anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism do shade off into one another, that incidents are rare and that they mainly occur within poorly off subaltern immigrant Muslim communities in Western countries.  If there is a problem, that is where it lies.

The far Right in Europe and North America loves Israel; and the Israeli far Right loves them back.  The endemic anti-Semitism of rightwing political movements in our time can survive in this mutual admiration society, but it is dampened somewhat, especially when trumped by the hardcore Right’s blatant Islamophobia.

It is telling, though, that, in the circumstances, it is anti-Semitism and Zionism, not anti-Zionism, that run together.

This is not the only thing that proponents of the anti-BDS smear campaign prefer not to acknowledge.  They also take care not to point out that the expressions of anti-Semitic attitudes that they do dwell on have little, if any, connection either to classical anti-Semitism or to Islamic traditions.

Bona fide anti-Semitism is a descendant of Christian anti-Judaism; it is not a Muslim thing.  Muslims and Jews have had a very different and generally more amicable relationship.

To be sure, Muslims have never treated Jews, or members of any non-Muslim religious community, as full-fledged equals.  But they have nearly always treated the “people of the book” decently and with respect.

However, nowadays, fine points such as these are deliberately overlooked.  For a state not acting at all like the “light unto the nations” that it purports to be, a state that long ago exhausted all the moral capital it could squeeze out of the Holocaust, these are all just inconvenient facts.

The Israeli propaganda machine, like Trump’s mind, latches on to whatever works.  Lately, with boycotts, divestment, and perhaps some day even sanctions looming, it is pushing all the buttons.

But the buttons aren’t working like before.  For most people alive today, the Holocaust is not a living memory.  And except for those who think, as many older Zionists do, that Jews can only be safe in a Jewish state, its relevance is obscure.   It was, after all, the work of Europeans, not Palestinians; and it took place before the state of Israel even existed.

Nevertheless, except for the force of arms and the acquiescence of American and other Western governments, it is all that Zionists, the kind that want historic Palestine ethnically cleansed of Palestinians, have going for them.

Therefore now, with significant parts of world – and Jewish – public opinion coming around to the conclusion that enough is enough, apologists for Israel are becoming desperate.

Too bad that they just don’t get it: that their desperation is doing Jews around the world, and in Israel too, no favors.

More articles by:Andrew Levine

ANDREW LEVINE is the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS (Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is In Bad Faith: What’s Wrong With the Opium of the People. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park.  He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion (AK Press).