When in doubt, blame Israel

I enjoy reading Counterpunch, the leftist ezine maintained by the Cockburn family.  It's one of the first places I check when I'm reading around the Net in search of some alternative to the Press Release Media that now constitute our source of Official News.  For one thing Counterpunch gives a forum for such Marxist oriented writers as Rob Urie, who criticizes Darwinian capitalism in unsparing terms reminiscent of Leon Trotsky, if not quite with the same rhetorical, true-believer flourish.  What is going on in the United States economy, with wealth disparity having reached utterly absurd levels, with academic studies confirming what we already knew, that the U.S. is a political oligarchy controlled entirely by money, should not be nibbled at around the edges, the way the MSM do.  If you "deregulate" Big Business, if you allow such legal excrescenses as the Citizens United case to go unremedied by legislation, if you do not (as the Justice Dept. does not) enforce anti-trust laws, and if you allow an unfettered "globalization" to set the agenda for domestic legal frameworks - if you do all that, as the U.S. has done, then inevitably, as a matter of human nature, you will wind up with a system like we have.  Karl Marx was wrong only in his "scientific historicism" and his somewhat naive and fairy-tale view that the proletariat would arise and establish a workers' paradise.  That was the cover story in the U.S.S.R. and Red China, and just as inevitably a different kind of hierarchical system, enforced by secret police and suppression, came to dominate wherever Communism was attempted.

What you have to put up with in browsing Counterpunch, however, is the other kneejerk tendency of the hyper-intellectual Left, the tribally-enforced, automatic denunciation of Israel...whenever Israel comes up, and quite often when no one has even mentioned Israel.  Quite often when the topic has nothing to do with Israel, say in an essay by Andrew Levine about President Obama's "spinelessness," which are sometimes enjoyable to read in a pox-on-both-their-houses way.  Suddenly, in the middle of reading about the corruption of American electoral politics, Mr. Levine will suddenly careen off in the direction of "Israeli war crimes" and you suspect, probably correctly, that the Censors and Guardians of Ideological Purity at Counterpunch have sent a memo to Mr. Levine that he is not meeting his quota of Israel-bashing digressions this month, and if he wants to continue publishing at this fine Leftist tabloid, well...just sayin', as we just say these days.

I was thinking about this in the context of the Bill Maher/Berkeley campus speech hullaballoo recently, which had the customary two-day shelf life recently in public consciousness.  Students at Berkeley did not want Maher near the 50th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement because of some anti-Muslim statements Maher had made on his "Real Time" show.  Okay, sometimes irony just writes itself.  Or as Tom Lehrer (Jewish, admittedly) once answered in response to a question about why he had given up writing political songs - when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, Lehrer knew satire was dead.

So the Berkeley students did not want Maher exercising Free Speech on their campus, not if he was going to say things they didn't approve.  Personally, I thought (based on a Berkeley education) that this was the whole point of free speech, at least as formulated by the great John Stuart Mill in On Liberty.  This was why the (mostly Jewish) lawyers of the ACLU, led by Burton Joseph (guess what) won the landmark case permitting the Nazi Party to march in Skokie, Illinois in 1977, where one in six residents was a Holocaust survivor.  The Nazis were being a little ...politically incorrect, wouldn't you say?  No matter.  Prior restraint is unconstitutional under the First Amendment.  Except, perhaps, at Berkeley.

This came as no huge surprise to me, based on undergraduate experiences.  Ideological purity on the Left is perhaps more decisively enforced, niggle for niggle, than on the Big Tent Right, where, after all, all the Republicans really want is more money.

Sam Harris, militant atheist and rarefied, almost bloodless logician, was on the Bill Maher show that nearly caused Ben Affleck to plotz.  Ben knew, and shouted everyone down who tried to disagree, that everyone is the same, and that the anti-Muslim comments by Maher and Harris were beyond the pale, were racist, ethnocentric, et cetera.  I did not take Sam Harris's comments as a general condemnation of all Muslims; indeed, after Harris gets through with his limitations, codicils, refinements, reservations, statistics, demographics and airborne footnotes, it's not always altogether clear what he's saying. Nevertheless, Sam Harris lays out a clear argument against moral equivalency in Gaza, Israel versus Hamas (in my view), in this podcast.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=HX-UPcrejHc#t=679.
This is the sort of thing that an ideologically pure writer at Counterpunch must never say: one can never refer to Israeli self-defense, territorial integrity or anything of the kind.  Israel's job is to cease to exist, period.

Beginning at about minute 12:30, Harris brings up ISIS, and its Genghis Khan-like campaign of rape, murder and pillage that it is currently conducting throughout Syria and Iraq, although details have become sketchy lately because of an ISIS practice of beheading, on camera, any Western journalist who gets too close to the action.  This brings up a point frequently (as in always) neglected in the polemics of the Left: the real threats, in the main, both currently and historically, to the safety and security of Muslims throughout the world originate with other Muslims.  The deaths inflicted by Muslims upon other Muslims exceed by several orders of magnitude all deaths ever inflicted by Israelis on Arabs or Muslims more generally, beginning in 1948, counting all wars since including Intifada I and II and Gaza.  I also find the tongue-tied approach of the Left to the predations of ISIS a little puzzling.  The only way that Cockburn & Co. permit discussion is in the context of "blowback;" that is to say, if the Sunni umbrella group known as ISIS is killing Kurds, Shia, Alawites and other Muslim sects by the bushel, by the carload lot, by corpses measured in the gross tonnage, well - it's the USA's fault for taking the lid off of Muslim sectarian tensions. 

You've heard the argument, and honestly speaking, doesn't that lead to a somewhat uncomfortable position for our ideologically pure Leftist?  The argument amounts to a recognition that without an authoritarian police state ruthlessly controlled by a dictator, such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Bashar Assad in Syria (under full power), militant Muslim sects will immediately resume ethnic cleansing to finish up some old business that's been bugging them since the 7th Century about who the rightful heir to Mohammed really is. Yet the United States prides itself (through lip service anyway) on the notion that freedom and democracy are blah blah blah, so that these internecine, sectarian bloodbaths are the price that must be paid, or something like that.  Or we must invade Iraq again (and Syria too) to prop up (a, in Iraq) our puppet democracy, or (b, in Syria) the corrupt dictator Assad until we have a chance to overthrow him and install an anti-Russia puppet government on more favorable terms.

There isn't much to choose among these various unpalatable outcomes.  Where it gets excruciating for the anti-Israel left is that all the arguments must be stood on their heads when it comes to Hamas and Gaza.  One could conclude, on the basis of the lessons learned in the greater Middle East, where blood is flowing like the Tigris & Euphrates used to flow, that Israel's misfortune is that it's another branch of the kafir, the infidel or heathen that cannot be tolerated in Muslim lands.  Yet that's no fun for the American anti-Israel Left.  You can't talk about that because then you're foreclosed from blaming Israel and its "imperialist" enablers, which is the Chomsky - Counterpunch Standard Approach.  And no self-respecting, ideologically pure, Prior Restraint Advocate wants to be caught dead doing that.