Re: [A-List] Fw: Petras flirting with anti-Semitism?

["Nestor Gorojovsky" <nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, Petras IS flirting with anti-Semitism.

Date sent:      	Sun, 03 Jun 2007 15:15:33 -0400
From:           	tony black <tal@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject:        	[A-List] Fw: Petras flirting with anti-Semitism?
To:             	The A-List <a-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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> Allen Ruff, "Do Zionists Run America?"Do Zionists Run America?
> 
> by Allen Ruff
> James Petras, The Power of Israel in the United States
> (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2006)
> 190 pages, $16.95 paperback.
> 
> Widely known as an expert in Latin American history and social
> movements, and a prolific critic of U.S. imperialism, James Petras has
> ventured forth in his latest book The Power of Israel in the United
> States, and several recent essays on the same theme, as a modern-day
> exorcist eager to take on a cabal currently holding in its grasp the
> very course and direction of the nation. According to Petras, it's the
> so-called "Zioncons" (his term) at the helm in Washington, along with
> the coordinated network of pro-Israel political action committees
> comprising "the Jewish lobby," and a broad array of "dual loyal"
> operatives, scads of money in hand, who control the media and public
> opinion, call the shots in Congress, curtail academic freedom, divert
> the labor movement, and prevent the antiwar movement and authentic
> "progressives" from setting a truly democratic domestic and foreign
> policy agenda. In his writings on Latin America, Petras has incisively
> analyzed the material causes and corporate interests behind the U.S.
> drive for domination.  When it comes to the Middle East, it's a
> different story: To hear Petras tell it, the reason the United States
> is in Iraq, and threatening Iran, is that it has been thoroughly
> infiltrated and "colonized" by the agents, direct and indirect, of a
> new "hegemon" ascendant on the global scene -- the state of Israel --
> a new superpower that has managed, through well-heeled access and
> unprecedented political clout, to subvert, bend, and shape public
> opinion, the political terrain, and the course and direction of the
> most powerful country in world history. If corporate power decisively
> determined policy, Petras argues rather sketchily, the oil industry's
> interests would dictate a more balanced if not "pro-Arab" tilt. 
> (What's really so hard about supporting Israel and the Arab oil
> kingdoms at the same time?)  Thus Petras would have us believe that
> Israel calls the shots entirely in this country on anything to do
> whatsoever with U.S. policy in the Middle East.  The tail, according
> to Petras, clearly and undisputedly wags the dog. The Lobby There's a
> strong undercurrent here of an appeal to a far-from-savory American
> nationalism, which seems very strange coming from a veteran
> revolutionary anti-imperialist.  Yet the argument is important,
> because variants of Petras' argument have had adherents on the Left. 
> And there's an empirical case to answer: Few who have examined the
> question would dispute the immense lobbying power of the powerful
> American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and a host of other
> related and well-coordinated pro-Israel organizations. Sadly, among
> many basic errors in this poorly edited book, AIPAC is misidentified
> as "American Israel Political Action Committee" -- AIPAC in fact is
> not a political action committee per se, but an umbrella funding
> source for a variety of PACs -- and it's weirdly implied that AIPAC is
> tax-exempt, which as an overtly political lobby of course it's not
> (although the related American Israel Education Fund is). A number of
> prominent names are misspelled, most egregiously former CIA director
> George Tenet who's rendered as "Tenant"; a nonexistent "Union of
> Reform Jews" is mentioned, possibly a reference to the Union for
> Reform Judaism, but it's impossible to tell for sure. Such mistakes
> could be corrected, but the quality of the analysis is hardly better
> than the editing.  This is a real shame, because the poisonous effect
> of AIPAC is a genuine political problem, and any attempt to confront
> "The Lobby" or intelligently discuss U.S. Middle East policy brings
> immediate denunciation and retribution, as witness the vicious recent
> attacks on Jimmy Carter for his book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, or
> professors John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt for their study
> "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy." Many, including a sizeable
> sector of Jews critical of the Zionist project, recognize the
> disproportionate influence of pro-Israel support within the Democratic
> and more recently (in alliance with the Christian religious right) the
> Republican parties, or within organized labor.  Some left critics have
> even made an effort to point out the influence of Israel's backers in
> the dominant media, Hollywood, the academy, and elsewhere. What sets
> Petras' work apart, first off, is his dropping or blurring of
> distinctions.  The terms "Jewish lobby," "Israel lobby," and "Zionist
> lobby" are used interchangeably.  Others, at least on the Left, have
> worked to mark the important distinction between Jews, as Jews,
> regardless of their differing ideologies, and those supporters of
> Israel, Jew and non-Jew alike, who actively promote and support
> Israel's racist and expansionist practices. Petras facilely drops that
> distinction.  (In an apparent attempt to deflect criticism, he states
> that he is justified in using the term "Jewish lobby" since that is
> what the Israelis use when discussing political support in the United
> States -- as if adopting the Zionist movement's cynical appropriation
> of all things Jewish serves any progressive purpose.) What makes the
> use of the term an issue is the fact that Petras then lapses into the
> well-worn dual-loyalty discourse, using such language as "Israel
> Firsters," "colonizers," and "colons" to describe Israel's
> multi-layered and well-situated support system in the United States. 
> To talk about "the Jewish lobby" in one breath and to then speak of
> strategically-placed Israeli agents, operatives, and Zionist
> infiltration in another is to suggest that American Jews generally are
> to be viewed as disloyal, suspect, untrustworthy, not what they seem.
> Elements of the far right have always done this kind of thing.  Such
> sloppy use of language lumps makes it seem as if Jewish-American
> opinion is monolithic in support of Israel, which is precisely one of
> the falsehoods that the Left needs to demystify. There are some points
> of interest in the book.  One chapter is devoted largely to the FBI's
> purported discovery and quiet post-9/11 dismantling of an Israeli spy
> network operating in the United States, briefly reported by Fox News
> and then disappeared from view.  Leaving aside Petras' peculiar
> affection for the FBI's patriotic devotion, one would like to know
> more about this; but the trail seems to have turned cold. Zioncons In
> Control? Petras' argument is multi-layered.  Largely ignoring a
> lengthy and specific history regarding the U.S. imperial agenda in the
> Middle East that extends back at least to mid-World War II (originally
> built around controlling oil and displacing Britain as the leading
> imperial power), he tells us that support of Israel and Israel alone
> defines U.S. policy in the region. He asserts that the invasion and
> occupation of Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with oil, and that the
> oil industry actually stood firmly opposed to Bush administration
> actions.  Sidestepping any discussion of U.S. attempts to gain and
> maintain strategic control over the region and its resources, he
> argues that Israel's strategically placed "Zioncon" operatives in the
> White House and Pentagon (mostly gone at the time of this writing)
> took this country to war simply and solely out of a desire to crush
> Israel's major regional adversary, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, to advance
> Israel's imperial ambitions. A fair amount of space in the book lays
> out what Petras describes as the "Zionist power configuration" or ZPC,
> in the United States -- "a complex network of interrelated formal and
> informal groupings, operating at the international, national, regional
> and local levels and directly and systematically subordinated to the
> State of Israel, its power holders and key decision makers." Reaching
> from the "Zioncons" in the Oval Office and Pentagon and through a
> Congress bought and paid for by "pro-Israeli Jews" (36), and extending
> throughout most of the dominant media and the major trade unions, this
> network of "overseas expatriates" and "colonizers" or "colons" reaches
> right down to "the lawyers' boardrooms and doctors' lounges" (37) and
> "pro-Israel Jews disproportionately represented in the financial,
> political, professional, academic, real estate, insurance and mass
> media sectors of the American economy" (40). Describing the response
> of those present at an AIPAC conference in Washington in May, 2004,
> Petras tells us that the pledge of unconditional support to Israel
> given by Congressional leaders and the two major Presidential
> candidates "[evoked] the bloodthirsty cheers of investment brokers,
> dentists, doctors, lawyers -- the cream of the cream of American
> Jewish society" (71). The book goes after columnist Seymour Hersh,
> accusing him of covering up the role of the Zioncons in driving U.S.
> war policy -- a particularly absurd argument, given that the most
> prominent of the Jewish neoconservative militarists, Richard Perle,
> had to resign as an officer of a military advisory board following
> Hersh's exposure of him (to say nothing of Hersh's authorship of the
> definitive work on Israel's super-secret nuclear weapons program).
> Petras also spends a whole chapter attacking dissident foreign policy
> critic Noam Chomsky, asserting that "[Chomsky's] analytical virtues
> are totally absent when it comes to discussing the formulation of U.S.
> foreign policy in the Middle East, particularly the role of his own
> ethnic group, or the Jewish pro-Israel lobby and their Zionist
> supporters in the government" (168).  The substance of his critique of
> Chomsky's actual argument doesn't go much beyond this kind of abuse.
> At one point, in relation to a passage critical of UN Secretary
> General Kofi Annan's failings in regard to Israel, Petras goes so far
> as to mention, in a note, that the man's wife is Jewish! Seeing them
> as complicit, Petras also goes after Jews on the Left and in the
> anti-war movement: The leaders of the peace movement, both Jews and
> non-Jews alike, reject any effort to include Israel's genocidal war
> against Palestine for fear of alienating the "public" (read the major
> Jewish organization) and the self-styled progressive Jews, who are
> ever protective of everything Jewish -- even war crimes.  Worse still,
> with few rare exceptions, the "progressive" Jewish critics of the war
> and Israel are forever and adamantly determined to avoid criticizing
> the role of powerful Zionist policymakers in the government, their
> ties to Israel and the significant support they receive from the major
> Jewish organizations. . . .  The tragic myopia or perverse refusal of
> Leftist Jews to face up to the prejudicial role of the major Jewish
> groups promoting the Israel First policy . . . substantially
> undermines their and our efforts to secure peace and justice in the
> Middle East and to forge a democratic U.S. foreign policy. (56-57) In
> short, as Petras would have it, the "progressive" Jews within the
> antiwar movement are an impediment to peace and an enlightened foreign
> policy! False Populist Appeal If one were to believe James Petras'
> explanations for U.S. war and intervention in the Middle East, then
> all this country might need to set it back on the track and restore it
> as a force for "freedom" and "justice" in the world would be to have a
> purge of not only the top layers of our government, now seemingly
> hijacked and under the sway of a corps of well-placed and influential
> agents of a foreign power, but virtually every key institution -- the
> media, the academy, the various think tanks, the military, the
> academy, the medical and law professions.  As Petras phrases it in the
> very last sentence of this insidiously twisted jeremiad, it's time to
> "move ahead and decolonize our country, our minds and politics as a
> first step in reconstituting a democratic republic, free of entangling
> colonial and neo-imperial alliances." Could anything possibly be more
> worthless than arguing over whether Richard Perle or James Petras is a
> better American patriot? If it is hard to imagine a leftwing scholar
> of Petras' stature writing this kind of thing, one might also ask why
> anyone should even bother examining such a work.  Partly, it's
> important precisely because of the fact that Petras is widely known
> and read in some quarters.  His numerous books and hundreds of
> articles critical of U.S. imperialism in Latin America and elsewhere,
> and his critiques of neoliberal globalization, have garnered him a
> significant audience in the Global South. Unfortunately, his current
> book may be taken up there and elsewhere as some seemingly worthwhile
> analysis of how and why the United States does what it does in the
> world.  It may also be seized upon as documented "proof" of "the
> anti-Semitism of the Left."  It might conceivably be taken up by
> elements of the far right, already convinced and not needing to be
> told, but always receptive to more "proof" of Jewish machinations and
> conspiracies. More ominous, perhaps, the book will certainly seem
> attractive to numbers of unevenly developed and unschooled radicals,
> disenchanted youth and others already opposed to war and occupation
> abroad and assaults on civil liberties and increasing authoritarianism
> at home.  It may contribute to miseducating and disorienting a
> movement that needs a serious, trenchant and materialist critique of
> imperialism and of Zionism. To understand what seems to have led
> Petras into this blind alley, it may be worth looking at the
> remarkable recent renascence of various forms of populism -- left,
> right, and just plain confused -- with its illusory solutions to real
> problems.  Grounded in vague notions of "the people," joined in
> opposition to some oligarchy or "plutocracy" of usurpers at the top,
> populism as an ideology is often backward-looking, filled with demands
> to regain a declining status and position and calls to "take back our
> lands/nation/democracy/republic." While populism certainly has had its
> contradictory progressive and democratic edge, typified in our own
> period by anti-corporate demands of the Green party and other forces
> in the global justice struggle, populism has also had a reactionary
> side appealing to social groups bypassed and buffeted by economic
> forces beyond their control -- a nativist, xenophobic and racist side,
> a penchant for conspiratorial theory and a related quest to exorcize
> evil cabals, rid the country of outsiders and/or their domestic
> agents, and reclaim "the republic."  This retrograde side of populism
> is evidenced above all today in ugly anti-immigrant racism. In some
> weird way, however, Petras seems to think that such instincts can be
> turned in a progressive direction if the "Zionist Lobby" is targeted
> as an alien force imposed from the outside on American society.  The
> true and ugly reality of The Lobby -- fundamentally a home-grown
> outgrowth of U.S. imperialism, not a foreign body parasitic upon it --
> is lost. For the simple reason that it illustrates just how far astray
> one might go in search of answers in these troubled and dangerous
> times, The Power of Israel in the United States should be examined as
> a case study of what happens when even a prominent left intellectual
> abandons a clear class-based, anti-imperialist understanding of
> politics.
> 
> 
> Allen Ruff, historian and long-time Madison political activist,
> author, staff member at Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative and radio voice
> on WORT (89.9fm, Madison), is a founding member of US Out Now, the
> Madison Area Peace Coalition, Jews for Equal Justice, and a member of
> Solidarity.  This essay also appears in Against the Current 128,
> May/June 2007.
> 
> | | Print
> 
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> 



Este correo lo ha enviado
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[No necesariamente es su autor]
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"La patria tiene que ser la dignidad arriba y el regocijo abajo".
Aparicio Saravia
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