[Marxism] Jared Israel

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Michael K:
> It doesn't surprise me at all that you would recommend TENC. TENC is
> completely consistent in its Islamophobia. Look back at the articles you
> were drooling over in 1999. Look at the argumentation. How many times are
> 'Islamist' forces mentioned, all the conspitracy involving Iran, Saudi
> Arabia etc etc to send Islamist forces to Europe etc. Did you ever see a
> mention of US support to Israel, in such a context, even then?

I have to agree with Michael on this. David Q. should *never* recommend
this website to anybody, even though it does contain some useful
information from a couple of years ago. Jared Israel is an Islamophobe. The
one thing consistent in his analysis going back to 1999 is a belief that
Islamic radicals are on the CIA payroll. Which leads me to follow up on a
point that John Cox made the other day but which I forgot to reply to.

He cited Milosevic's words and added his own comment:

"Six centuries ago, Serbia heroically defended itself in the field of
Kosovo, but it also defended Europe. Serbia was at that time the bastion
that defended the European culture, religion, and European society in
general." Milosevic speech: http://www.icdsm.org/milosevic/kosovo.htm [and
for the record, Islamic culture was a bit further advanced than European
culture at the time.]

This is awful stuff. My own view is that the world would be much better off
today if the Moors had beaten Charles Martel or if the Ottomans had swept
westward all the way into Great Britain. Islamic civilization was far more
advanced than Christianity.

I should add that the idea for an Emperor's Clothes website came from me.
At one point I was on the phone with Jared about 3 times a week giving him
advice. Like Les E., I knew Jared from the 1960s but across a deep divide.
He was the leader of the Maoist PLP in Boston, while I was working with the
Trotskyists. He led a violent attack on an antiwar conference that left one
of our members blind in one eye.

Jared dropped out of politics in the mid 1970s and didn't resurface until
the war in Kosovo broke out. He was upset over press coverage that
demonized the Serbs and rightly so. Unfortunately, he couldn't quite make
sense of the conflict in class terms. It was obvious to me from his
participation on Marxmail that he had lost any kind of grasp of Marxism and
was effectively rudderless.

After 9/11 he began to go off the deep end. The attacks on the WTC were
orchestrated by a cabal of CIA agents and their friends in the Arab world.
It was the kind of crude analysis found in some quarters of the left about
Kosovo applied to a new situation. From there, it was only a matter of time
when he would see the same kind of reactionary conspiracy at work in
Palestine. He said there was no massacre at Jenin, claiming media
distortions like those that occurred around Racak, etc., ad nauseum.


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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