Jeffrey Goldberg On Ahmadinejad On Wiping Out Israel

I do not buy the "he has no real power" argument.  If he has no real power, then why are the real powers in Iran allowing him to make statements like these that can only harm Iran's bargaining position regarding uranium enrichment.  The only answer can be is that the real power want him to say these things for them.  Therefore, the statements are as good as comming from the real power in Iran.

No, it means that they see a value in allowing him to make these statements. For example, this might be because they believe that having a "bad cop" without meaningful political power allows them greater leeway in negotiations (in a Nixon-going-to-China sense), or because the domestic consequences of stifling him outweigh the negative effects of his crazy talk.

I certainly disagree that Ahmadinejad is "harm[ing] Iran's bargaining position;" to the contrary, by having him set a rhetorical position well outside mainstream diplomatic borders, the Iranian leadership has a great deal of leeway in actual negotiations. Obviously, this breaks down if the negotiating partners think that no reasonable compromise can be made (e.g., Saddam Husayn's bad roll of the dice in re his nonexistent WMDs), but that's the value in having someone with high visibility but no actual power setting the goalposts.

Hi Dan, as a Persian I totally agree with you, Ahmaghinejad is a douche but he's harmless, the rahbar (supreme leader) is the man behind the curtains.  And NO ONE in Iran takes Ahmadinejad seriously, most of them believe his nutcase statements on Israel are red meat to his hezbollah supporters (in Lebanon, much less in Iran) and not something to be taken literally.

"Most of the Middle East hates America, but Iranians see a more appealing image. It's their own president they can't stand."

That WaPo article is ridiculous. As if the urban (former) elites are all of the Iranians.

the reality is that with israel's overwhelming, but hidden nuclear arsenal, anyone who might send a bomb its way is playing with fire. the response would be devastating, for sure. yet, everyone, including those in israel, need to lay off iran.  just because iran has decided to go its own way and not become a slave to the world bank, the imf and other international institutions, should not make it a target. of course, everyone, particularly the US and the neocon establishment, wants access to the iranian market, but instead of negotiating with iran as an equal, most probably prefers the disasterous tact taken in iraq, which is to bludgeon the place into submission, leaving upwards of a million dead and 4 million as refugees. demonizing iran has been part of american policy for a very long time....israel should not fall into that trap, lest it get caught itself in the entire mess. 

I am not sure why you spend so much time spelling (or misspelling) Ahmadinejad's name when you ignore his actions, such as arming Hezbollah and Hamas with missiles, blowing up the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina (yes, Argentina is not a direct neighbor of Iran or Israel to the Yale grad), and supplying EFPs to kill our troops in Iraq. Khamenei agrees with Ahmadinejad, and Ahmadinejad provides plausible deniability to Khamenei. Iranian children carried plastic keys to heaven as they marched over Iraqi minefields, there is no reason to believe that they wouldnt be as fanatic towards Israel, since they have been indoctrinated over a generation.

When you wrote "Permit me this Godwin's law violation..." you were, in fact, obeying Godwin's Law in making Hitler comparisons, not violating it.  What you were violating was probably your own "law" of avoiding mindless, lazy comparisons to something that we all realize had the duplicity to be both an example of some of the most "banal" human weaknesses and a demonstration of the most extreme evil.  

Michael --- since, technically, Godwin's law is simply that the probability of someone referring to Hitler approaches 1 as an argument on Usenet goes on, what I wrote was indeed not a technical violation but did violate the vulgar understanding of it, namely the maxim: "don't mention Hitler." I'm not sure I follow the rest of your comment.

"Say what you will about Zbigniew Brzezinski"

Okay, I have a question -- why shouldn't I like him?  What am I missing? The man seems quite reasonable generally. 

I was just noting that most people making comparisons to Hitler/Nazi's/etc. are trying to lazily prove that something is "evil" by showing its surface-similarity to some aspect [no matter how insignificant] of Nazi Germany.  I guess people do this because "Nazis = evil" is about the only moral compass that any given person [writing on Usenet, for example] can agree upon.

But I don't think making these arguments is only wrong because it's predictable and common, but because so much of what the Nazis did day-to-day had nothing to do with what made them evil, which makes any comparisons to them somewhat useless, unless you go out of your way to specify what evil aspect of the Nazis you are using in your comparison... 

......which you did: I thought your comparison of real Hitler to artist Hitler to Ahmadinejad was impressive in that you managed to avoid this pitfall by defining Hitler's evil by painting a picture of a non-evil [albeit anti-semetic] Hilter.  

 Though, I do think you are going a bit far on a limb to define Godwin's Law as "don't mention Hitler." That would be like describing the 2nd Amendment as "go buy guns."  

I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. The man said that the decision of what should be done with Israel should be left up to the residents to vote on. His recommendation is an equal rights civil rights solution. Is that SCARY to Jews? Well shame on you.

You are just feeding into pro-war propaganda against Iran, a country which has never attacked another country. I'd say you are inciting to mass murder. What's new? I mean that's what being a Jew is all about right? Being "better" than other people, massacring people while claiming to be "ethically superior", lying constantly.

 The fact is, all decent people want Israel to stop being a Zionist state. And whether you "hope" it will happen or you "know" it will happen, it's just like we all knew the Berlin wall would come down someday. And it did. Blatant injustice can't last.

I'm not sure what you mean by that considering the Iran-Iraq war which claimed upwards of a million lives including young children many of whom were forced to fight

In regards to your other baseless comment,unless your name is German, you sound like a typical self hating Jew.Maybe you lie constantly and think you're better then other people but not all Jews are like you, so stop blaming your inadequacies on your race . I happen to like the fact that Israel is a Zionist state, it would suck if it was it was all nazis

Iraq attacked Iran to start the Iran-Iraq War.

somewhere I have read that Al Khamenei's title of Grand-Ayatollah was acquired via a short-cut. Since then I assume that the "real" Grand-Ayatollahs harbour resentment like all traditionalists everywhere when time-honored customs are ever so slightly discarded

- A'jad however sucks up to a real Grand-Ayatollah

- and as you referred to Hitler he was also good at sucking-up to the "right" people and quite suddenly a lot of previously powerfuls were marginalized

- therefore, ever since I found that info-bit about AlKhamenei having skipped exams I am waiting to read something more about those smouldering Ayatollah-embers. In case there isn't any smouldering going on, I definitely would have to revise my understanding of human nature.

"I'd say you are inciting to mass murder. What's new? "

Those pesky Jews. Always inciting mass murder. Just look at the Holocaust, the Crusades, the hundreds of pograms through Europe and the suicide bombers. Why can't those terrible Jews just leave the rest of the world alone? They are really asking for it. Ahmadinejad must be right: the Jewish state should be erased, then we'd have a final solution for those pesky Jews and all would be well in the world.

Is that what you meant Karin?

"I'd say you are inciting to mass murder. What's new? "

Those pesky Jews. Always inciting mass murder. Just look at the Holocaust, the Crusades, the hundreds of pograms through Europe and the suicide bombers. Why can't those terrible Jews just leave the rest of the world alone? They are really asking for it. Ahmadinejad must be right: the Jewish state should be erased, then we'd have a final solution for those pesky Jews and all would be well in the world.

Is that what you meant Karin?

The Myth of Jewish Powerlessness

Ethnic Ashkenazim and to a lesser extent German Jews were heavily involved in violent revolutionary activities, assassination and terrorism since the middle of the 19th century.

The three defining assassinations of modern Russia were planned and carried out by Jews:

1.) Alexander II,

2) Stolypin,

3) Nicholas II + family.

From the Russian revolution onward, ethnic Ashkenazim were up to their eyeballs in mass murder, ethnic cleansing and genocide.

Without this context, understanding both the mass murders of Jews during WW2 and also Zionist murderousness and genocidalism in Palestine is impossible.

The book is a sort of extended essay or memoir-like reflection of the role of Soviet Jews (more precisely Soviet Ethnic Ashkenazim) during 20s and 30s when Russian Ethnic Ashkenazim became the quintessential Soviet nationality. They lost this privileged status after the establishment of the State of Israel because at that point Russian ethnic Ashkenazim could claim a homeland outside the Soviet Union just like Soviet Chinese, Estonians, Finns, Germans, Iranians, Koreans, Kurds, Latvians and Poles, who were all persecuted and deported internally during the 1920s-30s often under the supervision of Soviet ethnic Ashkenazi officials in an official policy of alienization.(++)

Slezkine clearly mourns the passing of the Golden Age of Soviet Russian Ashkenazim in 1948 and hates Zionism with obvious venom, for every reference in the book to Zionism and to any Zionist leader is full of scorn.

Yet, he clearly misses the fundamental similarity in thinking and behavior of Soviet Russian Ashkenazim and Zionist Russian Ashkenazim.

On p. 310-311 he tells the following story of the Markish family.

For the first time, the Soviet state had turned on some of its loyal and privileged subjects [Russian ethnic Ashkenazim] according to a clear -- and apparently non-Soviet -- principle. [Slezkine discusses the issue somewhat differently, but Stalin and other non-Jewish Soviet officials probably felt that they had been swindled by politically connected ethnic Ashkenazim into granting de facto recognition to the State of Israel.] For the first time, Hodl and her children [a reference to Sholem Aleichem's character Tevye the Milkman] found themselves among the aliens. For the first time, many of them began to doubt their Soviet faith -- and the culpability of previous aliens. As Ester Markish put it,

Only our own grief made us realize the horror of our lives in general: not only the suffering of the Jews or the suffering of the intelligentsia, but the suffering of the whole country and all the social groups and peoples that lived in it. After the arrest of [Perets] Markish, our maid, who had lived in our house for more than fifteen years and had, in effect, become a member of our family, said to me: "You are crying now, but you did not mind when my father was being dekulakized, martyred for no reason at all, and my whole family thrown out in the street?"

Just as the Soviet elite (often Russian ethnic Ashkenazim) made native populations of the Russian Empire aliens in their own country, stole everything they had, deported them, and murdered them, likewise Zionist Russian ethnic Ashkenazim made the native population of Palestine aliens in their own country, stole everything they had, deported them, and murdered them.

We have here two levels of obliviousness: the inability of the author Slezkine to perceive the similarity of Soviet Russian ethnic Ashkenazim to Zionist Russian ethnic Ashkenazim in their thinking and behavior as well as the complete unawareness of the Markish family about the true feelings of their maid.

I attended a panel discussion at Harvard on The Jewish Century and afterward spoke with Steven Zipperstein, who was one of the panel members. He is The Daniel E. Koshland Professor in Jewish Culture and History and Co-Director of Jewish Studies at Stanford University.

I described the reaction of the reviewer from the Israeli Paper Yediot Aharonot (Late News) to Hanna Elias' movie The Olive Harvest, which is a love story/family drama set in the context of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. One of the characters early in the movie remarks that the settlements are a cancer on the land. The reviewer completely missed the movie's story, and only expressed shock and outrage that Palestinians would actually say and believe that "we Israelis are a cancer on the land."

I would almost equate the reviewer's obliviousness to Palestinian hostility to the Markish family's lack of awareness of the maid's anger except that after working in Israel and the Occupied Territories for 10 years, I cannot believe that any Israeli would be surprised by the hatred of Palestinians. I have to consider the reviewer to have been posturing in order to portray Hanna as some sort of propagandist.

Zipperstein only remarked sarcastically that Slezkine gets the translations wrong and a reviewer from the Israeli paper Haaretz (The Land), would have agreed with the Palestinian character. The blindness of the Markish family and the convenient obliviousness of Zionists seems to persist as denial among ethnic Ashkenazi Americans like Professor Zipperstein.

(+) Because of his lack of Hebrew and Yiddish, Slezkine misinterprets the phrase Loshen Kaudesh, which is just one German Jewish pronunciation of Leshon Qodesh (Holy Language). The term is not a pun on the German dialect pronunciation of Kuh as Kau as Slezkine claimed. Cattle dealer jargon was usually called Loshen.

(++) The whining of American Ashkenazim and Russian ethnic Ashkenazim about mistreatment since the 1950s was somewhat hypocritical because treatment of Russian ethnic Ashkenazim was hardly unique in the Soviet Union. In fact after the establishment of the State of Israel, the Soviet Union applied a formula to Russian ethnic Ashkenazim that had for the most part been developed by Russian ethnic Ashkenazim for other nationalities within the Soviet Union. Russian ethnic Ashkenazim were angry that they were being hoist upon their own petard. It is hard to sympathize.
NOTE 1
Slezkine uses Tevye the Milkman's daughter Chava as a symbol for American Russian ethnic Ashkenazim and Zionist Russian ethnic Ashkenazim. I may misremember, but I believe that Chava committed suicide with Tevye's help in a later short story. I guess there really is no going back, but as a non-Jewish relatively disinterested observer -- who reads Yiddish -- I consider the Yiddishists and Zionists just as much metaphorically patricidal as the first generation of Soviet Russian ethnic Ashkenazim. Tevye also has a tremendous anger toward traditional Eastern European Jewish culture, and I have the impression it is rather common in members of his generation even if they could not break from the tradition.
NOTE 2
While I was not impressed by Professor Zipperstein's sensitivity to Palestinian feelings, he is actually one of the better historians of Russian Ashkenazim. I can recommend his book entitled, The Jews of Odessa, A Cultural History, 1794-1881, with the qualification that his focus on the Jews of Odessa is sometimes too narrow. He describes the conflicts of Odessan Jews with other Odessan ethnic groups but never seems to have researched such conflicts from the standpoint of any group but that of the Jews.

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Thanks Thor I have now have a greater appreciation for why my great grandparents and their families suffered from virulent and violent anti-semitism in Poland, Russia and Lithuania. And I thought it was just because the christians of that time and place didn't like Jews.

Like Germans, Serbs, Czechs, Poles, Rumanians, Greeks, etc.

Why should Jews be any different? Or are we racists that believe Jews are less subject to self delusion than other ethnic groups?

Der Nister witnessed ... religious and political persecution during his lifetime, he must have been certain that this sect [Bratislaver Hassidim] would vanish for good, forever to be misunderstood. In the 1920s, the mainstream Jewish community had even turned on its own religious sects in the Soviet states, echoing the government's pogroms, and Der Nister's novel reflects that internal feud. As Book Two ends, the town seeks to drive out the sect, suspecting that somehow the group's strange habits have brought the curse of financial ruin upon everyone. [page 2, "The final work of a doomed Yiddish novelist," below]

A previous blog entry Arun Gandhi and Sholem Aleichem discusses the destructive and violent tendencies within Eastern European Jewish (Yiddish) culture. A group so willing to abuse whole segments of its own population certainly would have no compunction about eradicating the traditional Arabic culture of Palestine.

Like much material in Yiddish studies the essay below is subtly dishonest as I have discussed elsewhere, but the key point in understanding Jewish self-deception about Jewish murderousness comes from the failure to identify the policing of the Soviet Jewish community and of Soviet Yiddish literature as an almost entirely Jewish activity.

Gennay Estraikh notes in Soviet Yiddish: Language Planning and Linguistic Development, p. 117:

It is safe to say that the Soviet Yiddish orthographical reform – which would be widely seen as a (or even the) hallmark of denationalized and moribund Jewish culture – had been actually instigated by a group of non-communist Yiddishist. In fact, by the time of the 1917 revolution there were no real Yiddish philologists and writers in the Bolshevik party. We know (see Ch. 2) that Soviet Jewish institutions had to start working by and large through former Bundists, Poale Zionists, anarchists, and members of other political currents. For these Yiddishists-monists of every stripe, the revolution formed auspicious conditions to eclipse the power of tradition and to put their plans into practice (See Holmshtok 1932; 49-50;Beznosik 1932:76).

Non-Jewish communists paid no attention and were uninterested, but the Soviet Jewish communist leadership felt their status as the quintessential Soviet class threatened if non-Jewish communists ever realized that there was an autonomous Yiddish culture that existed beyond the Soviet Union and communism. This fear turned extreme after the creation of the State of Israel, and the concerns of the Soviet Jewish communist elite doubtlessly played a role in Stalin's decision to execute Der Nister and other Soviet Yiddish authors. The shooters were almost certainly Jewish.

The behavior of the Soviet Jewish elite feeling itself threatened should serve as a warning to Americans because the Zionist Jewish elite feels itself very threatened today by the discussion of the Israel Lobby and by a presidential candidate with Muslim family connections. The final work of a doomed Yiddish novelist By Elizabeth Mitchell One day in 1934, Pinchus Kahanovitch, a fifty-one-year-old Ukrainian writer of Yiddish stories, fairy tales, and criticism, decided he did not want to disappear. Within a group of novelists and short story writers that included David Bergelson, Peretz Markish, and Moyshe Kulbak, Kahanovitch had been something of an idol, having published in the great Y.L. Peretz's journal, Yudish, in the 1910s under the pen name Der Nister (meaning "the Hidden One"). The novelist Israel Joshua Singer later recalled a visit to Kiev around 1920 in which a member of the Culture League announced during a meeting that, "had writers of the whole world been given a chance to read Der Nister's work, they would have broken their pens."

The clique's reverence, however, provided little insurance for Der Nister in the Soviet Union of the mid-1930s. The Soviet government looked suspiciously on any group that set itself apart from the main social body. Though the government officially acknowledged Yiddish—mainly to show a peaceable face to the international community—as the language of a Jewish minority, libraries were throwing out Yiddish books, Yiddish schools and institutes were being shuttered, and newspaper presses stopped. In 1934, Der Nister explained to his brother in a letter, "The writing of my book is a necessity; otherwise I am nothing; otherwise I am erased from literature and from life."

The book Der Nister labored over would not be a revolt against the modern Yiddish literary tradition, but revolutionary in its adherence to that tradition during a time when Yiddish culture was under attack. That book, The Family Mashber, was conceived as an epic tale of at least three volumes, relating how a generally happy, successful Jewish family in the Polish-Ukrainian town of N (actually Der Nister's hometown, Berdichev) lost that happiness completely within one short year in the 1870s.

At least that is how the book ends now.

The modern Yiddish literary movement had been flourishing since 1864, when S.Y. Abramovitsh published the first installment of his very popular "The Little Person" in the Yiddish newspaper supplement Kol Mevasser. The novella, enjoying the wide Eastern European circulation of the paper, offered a witty, masked social critique of corruption within the Polish and Russian power centers and the Jewish community itself. Yiddish fiction found its most famous voice in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, who published his first stories in a Polish literary journal before immigrating to the United States in 1935. Book One of The Family Mashber appeared in Russia in 1939. (Book Two would be printed in the United States, also in Yiddish, in 1948.) The completed third volume disappeared when Kahanovitch did, on a Saturday in February 1949. Kahanovitch received the Soviet secret police at his door in Moscow with a smile. "Thank God you came at last," he is reported to have said, "I have waited for you for so long." When one of the arresting officers asked about the whereabouts of his manuscripts, he replied: "Forgive me, gentlemen, that matter is none of your concern. It was not for you that I wrote my manuscripts and they remain in a safe place." He was charged with conducting "hostile nationalistic activity" and thrown into Lefortovo prison. The following year he died, at age sixty-seven, of bleeding hemorrhoids in a labor camp.

In his lifetime, Kahanovitch had witnessed the worst of human nature. As a young man, he hid under assumed names to avoid czarist military service. In 1921 he escaped to Germany, but was lured back in 1927 by Stalin's false promises that Yiddish culture would be celebrated in the Soviet states. In Moscow, he lived and taught with a group of Yiddish artists, including his good friend Marc Chagall, at the Malakhovka children's colony, a school for orphans of the pogroms. There he tried to synthesize lessons in Jewish culture with Communist propaganda. In 1949, during Stalin's campaign against "Cosmopolitans," he saw many of his artist friends hauled away to prisons and labor camps, where they perished. In the months before his arrest he waited at home with his wife for the tragic ending he had imagined for himself to come to pass, and which indeed he had committed to paper—in a symbolic way—in the last pages of the second volume of The Family Mashber.

The first two volumes of The Family Mashber have just been reprinted in English, as a single paperback, by New York Review of Books Classics. (This translation, by Leonard Wolf, first appeared in 1987 as a Summit Books hardcover; in The New York Times Book Review, Ruth Wisse called it "a large, sprawling historical novel reminiscent of Dostoyevsky in its concentration on the human soul.") Although Kahanovitch fought for Yiddish works to be published in Yiddish, he might have been pleased to know that the memories he struggled to preserve would be carried forth in the minds of new American readers. In his preface to The Family Mashber, he writes, "The world depicted in this book—the economic base on which it rested, its social and ideological conflicts and interests—disappeared long ago. . . . In depicting those people, who are physically and spiritually extinct, I have taken pains not to contend with them, not to cry out that they are doomed. Rather, I have let them proceed quietly on their historically necessitated way toward the abyss."

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Next Thors will prove that Black Americans were responsible for slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, etc.

What is up with mathematicians'/computer programmers' mental requirements for a binary 100 % culpable/100% blameless standard when it comes to criticizing cultures and societies for the various conflicts that occur between and within them? Ted Kozinski had/has a similar mindset. People are not numbers and one statement, fact or work of literature is not the lynchpin of a proof. People like this simply must have some kind of deficiency whereby a compulsion for making mathematical formulae out of everything overwhelms their mind's capacities for moral reasoning and actually gathering the information that must be considered before plugging and chugging. 

"And NO ONE in <strike>Iran</strike> GERMANY takes<strike> Ahmadinejad </strike>HITLER seriously, most of them believe his nutcase statements on JEWS <Strike>Israel </strike> are red meat to his <Strike> hezbollah</strike> BROWN SHIRT supporters<Strike> (in Lebanon, much less in Iran)</strike> GERMANY and not something to be taken literally."

There I fixed it for you