The myth of the wandering Jew

Gilad Atzmon has a predictably excellent new piece posted at Palestine Think Tank; a discussion of When And How the Jewish People Was Invented by the Israeli historian Shlomo Sand, whom Atzmon calls “probably the most advanced leftist Israeli thinker.”  It’s a fascinating summary of Jewish history and the myth of Jewish exile.

Accordingly, the ‘Jewish people’ is a ‘made up’ notion consisting of a fictional and imaginary past with very little to back it up forensically, historically or textually. Furthermore, Sand – who elaborated on early sources of antiquity – comes to the conclusion that Jewish exile is also a myth, and that the present-day Palestinians are far more likely to be the descendants of the ancient Semitic people in Judea/Canaan than the current predominantly Khazarian-origin Ashkenazi crowd to which he himself admittedly belongs.  Astonishingly enough, in spite of the fact that Sand manages to dismantle the notion of ‘Jewish people’, crush the notion of ‘Jewish collective past’ and ridicule the Jewish chauvinist national impetus, his book is a best seller in Israel.  This fact alone may suggest that those who call themselves ‘people of the book’ are now starting to learn about the misleading and devastating philosophies and ideologies that made them into what Khalid Amayreh and many others regard as the “Nazis of our time”.

Here it is in English: “The Wandering Who?” and for Machetera’s Spanish readers, El mito del judío errante, translated by Manuel Talens.

How Internet censorship works, Part 4: The Zionist hijacking of Spanish Wikipedia

A short time ago, Machetera received the news that Rebelión, the primary Spanish language alternative media site had been censored by the Spanish language Wikipedia. A Rebelión editor, who also happened to be a Wikipedia contributor, tried to link a reference to Rebelión, and found that the link was un-saveable. As you will read in the story below by Santiago Alba Rico, where more details are provided in the footnote, when this editor asked what was going on, the answer came back that Rebelión could not be linked to any longer because it was not considered to be a reliable source.

But the truth is that it has nothing to do whether or not Rebelión is a reliable source (unlike for instance, the New York Times, or El País which would never ever lie), and everything to do with Rebelión‘s anti-Zionist stance. The Zionists who’ve hijacked the Spanish language Wikipedia for their own purposes are methodically combing through Wikipedia and manually disabling the links, and soon it will be as though Rebelión never existed at all. (Oh, but they wish.)

Omer update

GAZA CITY, Jun 28 (IPS) – Mohammed Omer, the Gaza correspondent of IPS, and joint winner of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, was strip-searched at gunpoint, assaulted and abused by Israeli security officials at the Allenby border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank on Thursday as he tried to return home to Gaza.

…The Shin Bet officials then started to make fun of the European parliamentarians, and mocked Omer for being “the prize-winning journalist”.

The Gazan journalist was repeatedly asked why he was returning to “the hell of Gaza after we allowed you to leave.” To this he responded that he wanted to be a voice for the voiceless. He was told he was a “trouble-maker”.

The security men also demanded he show all the money he had on him, and particular attention was paid to the British pounds he was carrying. His Gellhorn prize money had been awarded in British pounds but he was not carrying the entire sum on him bodily, something the investigators refused to believe.

After being unable to produce the prize money, he was ordered to strip naked.

“At first I refused but then I had an M16 (gun) pointed in my face and my clothes were forcibly removed, even my underwear,” Omer said.

At this point Omer broke down and pleaded for an end to such treatment. He said he was told, “you haven’t seen anything yet.”

Full story

Dying to live

One of the astonishing things about the part of the country where Machetera lives, a backward and super-provincial, reflexively capitalistic and hyper-nationalistic (not in a good way) kind of place, is that even here, the truth still escapes all the mostly effective attempts to blockade it. Back when Machetera was suffering from the triple virus and had to haul her computer into the shop, she took it in without bothering to remove the bumper sticker taped below the screen which says “Only free men can negotiate” (Nelson Mandela), with the subtitle, “Palestine. Dying to live.” At the end of the week when she went to retrieve it, an older gentleman, dressed like a lumberjack and waiting to retrieve his own computer, stared fixedly at the sticker, while Machetera’s heart sank. Surely an evangelical tirade about Israel was brewing. Finally, after a few minutes, he asked with the utmost politeness where the sticker had come from because he wanted one for himself. “It’s so true,” he said, shaking his head.

With that in mind, today’s contribution to the destruction of the information blockade is the news about Mohammed Omer, the 24 year old Palestinian journalist who is in critical condition after being tortured nearly to death by Israeli troops for the crime of trying to return home after accepting the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism in London. He and Dahr Jamail shared the prize. You can read more about Omer here, where you will also find a link to his acceptance speech, introduced by John Pilger.

And in other ethnic cleansing news from Palestine, this arrived in Machetera’s mailbox this morning: