Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish American political scientist and author, specializing in Jewish-related issues and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was invited to give a speech at the University of Waterloo in which a Jewish girl threw the Holocaust card to silence criticisms of the Israeli government’s crimes against the Palestinian people. 

And here is what Dr. Finkelstein had to say in response.

[via:bradicalmang]

We’ve been posting more and more stuff from Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald because, well, he’s a national treasure. How he exposes political hypocrisy is like John Stewart for the non-cable-watching set. In his column today, Greenwald takes on the grossly abused “terrorist” label and holds the wide-angle historic lens to Irgun Zvai Leumi and how Israeli politician Tzipi Livni has attempted to revise history.

Greenwald recounts:

I happened to come across a typical though highly illustrative example of this manipulation when reading this NYT interview yesterday with Israeli politician Tzipi Livni.  After railing against the Terrorists in Gaza, Livni said this:

NYT: Your parents were among the country’s founders.

Livni:  They were the first couple to marry in Israel, the very first. Both of them were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters, and they met while boarding a British train. When the British Mandate was here, they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons.

If any group meets the definition of “terrorism,” the Irgun does.  In July, 1946, the group (led by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin) notoriously bombed the King David Hotel, which housed British government offices, killing 91 people (Irgun claimed they warned of the bombing in advance, a claim denied by many British officials).  Israel and its defenders love to point to the naming of a public square after a Terrorist by the Palestinian Authority, while ignoring the fact that the current Israeli Prime Minister, in 2006, actually led a celebration of the King David Hotel bombing with an official commemorative ceremony and plaque outside the building.  Irgun also perpetrated numerous armed attacks on civilian structures, train stations, government buildings, and bridges.

[…]

It was once commonly accepted that Irgun members were Terrorists.  But that was then and this is now.  Bombings, stealing and killing in pursuit of statehood by some groups is Terrorism and by other groups it is “freedom fighting.”  And thus does Israel, which justifies the most extreme brutality and violence based on the pure evil of Terrorism, celebrate those acts as ”freedom fighting” when done by its own side.  This would be all tolerable if it were merely about rhetorical inconsistencies.

Livni’s revisionism is just one recent example of how political ideology aims to recast history, however heinous, to serve political aims. Of course, it’s not the exclusive tactic of the Israeli government. Americans have quite literally witnessed this with the revisions to Texas’ history text books.

The consequences are have short-term and long-term affects. Policy based on a loosely defined term like “terrorist” has manifested in Obama’s “assassination program,” which shreds the Constitution with its very existence. And in the long-term, as in the case with Texas’ text books, generations are schooled in a false history that dares them to make future socio-political mistakes without the corrective lessons that a “politically untainted” history provides. Imagine the millions of Chinese student who have no idea what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989 or German children who have been shielded from the history of the Holocaust?

This sounds outrageous because it is. Yesterday’s terrorists cannot be rehabilitated as “freedom fighters” without treading a dangerous path that isn’t unlike the sin of a Holocaust-denier.

Lindsey Hilsum, UK’s Channel 4 News International Editor

Hilsum challenges the rationale behind banning of the aforementioned items not allowed into the Gaza Strip by Israel’s blockade. If the interests for the blockade were solely for self-defense (as many apologists are quick to argue), then what does a prohibition of chocolate, pencils and notebooks have anything to do with stopping missiles from being fired into Israel? It doesn’t, because the blockade is a means to a political objective. As Joshua Holland, editor and senior writer from AlterNet put it, “The siege of Gaza is, and always was, meant to crush Gaza’s economy, impose severe suffering on the population and ultimately make it impossible for Hamas to govern.” By the use of such collective punishment, Israel wields a brutality that comes ever closer to another instance of collective punishment that Israel, by her existence, does not let the world forget.

Let’s give credit to those who aren’t intellectually lazy and do care about facts, having sources, documented history…and then there is everyone else, like teabaggers, Holocaust-deniers, Bible literalists, and xenophobes.

(via azspot:Pat Bagley)