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The Protocols of the Elders of Java

By Andy Hume / January 15, 2009

I have to hand it to you guys: you’re nothing if not inventive. The latest wheeze dreamed up by the Jews in their relentless quest for world domination is, it seems, the humble coffee bean.

Radical leftists and Islamists (we really must find an umbrella term that saves me typing all that out every time, so closely do they self-identify these days) are busily spreading the rumour that the Israeli assault on Gaza is being bankrolled by Starbucks, who have apparently donated all their profits this past two weeks to the Zionist war effort. For further details, over to our old chum Yusuf Al-Qaradawi:

“They used to hand a sign on the doors of their shops: ‘We benefit our most important partner, which is Israel, we help in the education of students in Israel, we help build up the Israeli defense arsenal,’ and so on. People go and drink their expensive coffee. Instead of paying 2 riyals for a cup of coffee, they pay 20 riyals. This Starbucks is Zionist. Why do we not teach the nation to make do with its own products, when possible, even if they are of lesser quality? This is the only way the nation will rise. My brothers, put the boycott against the nation’s enemies into action. Every riyal you pay turns into a bullet in the heart of your brothers in Gaza and in other Islamic countries.”

I’m sure I need hardly add that this is, er, grande crappucino. Starbucks has no special charitable or business links with Israel (indeed, it closed all its Israeli stores in 2003) and, as Snopes.com points out, the myth about Starbucks profits being used to fund the Israeli military comes from a spoof letter purporting to be from Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, but actually penned by one Andrew Winkler and published on the ZioPedia website with a subsequent disclaimer clearly identifying it as parody. (Schultz himself is an avowed friend of Israel, which is no doubt how the story got started in the first place.)

Needless to say, satire is not the anti-war movement’s strong point. Several branches of Starbucks have been attacked in cities from Beirut to London and the chain forced to issue an official denial of this ludicrous story. But the fake Schultz memo sticks, like some ersatz internet version of the Protocols; websites republish the claims, Facebook groups pop up, and Starbucks is now semi-officially one of the financial props of the Zionist entity.

Nor is the damage restricted to overpriced coffee shops; British supermarket chain Marks and Spencer has also been targeted by demonstrators; ostensibly that’s because it stocks Israeli produce, like every other supermarket chain in Britain, but I wonder if it’s entirely coincidental that ‘Marks’ is one of this country’s more famously Jewish-founded businesses and a long-standing bugbear of anti-Semites throughout the Middle East. Indeed, if you tune into Iranian TV – and even Iranians watch the Superbowl – you will discover that there’s barely a large multinational anywhere that doesn’t siphon off profits to support the miracle on the Med. (Pepsi stands for “Pay Each Penny to Save Israel”, apparently, which I must admit sounds rather catchy.)

Of course, some might say that this is all rather handy, given those close links between the far left and the radical Islamist right; for your average member of the Socialist Workers Party, the only thing more satisfying than smashing a shopfront is surely the knowledge that you’re striking a blow for Palestine at the same time. But, deeper than that, as Brendan O’Neill points out at Spiked Online, it is arguably symptomatic of a wider malaise, what he calls a “cultural anti-Semitism” – “the projection of disillusionment with Western culture and values on to Israel, also known, in our politically illiterate times, as ‘the Jews’”.

How far that’s true I’m not sure; but it’s an interesting article and worth reading in full. In the meantime, you could do a lot worse than stopping off at Starbuck’s on your way home. Sure, it’s overpriced, but at least all those profits are being spent on shiny fighter planes.

POST A COMMENT

  • By Isaac 1/19/09 at 4:29 p.m. UTC

    Hehehe…

    Some people like to keep furry and easily provoked creatures in their handbags…

    Given the often challenging task of separating Ismail’s rhetoric from any sincere interest on his part in seeking and disseminating knowledge, it isn’t always easy to know which of his questions are really meant to be taken seriously. That said, I didn’t anticipate the offense he’d take to my addressing his concerns as selectively as he addressed mine. Rather, I figured that he’d appreciate such a move given my tendency to create a "swamp of prose".

    But the question he poses isn’t one that I have any trouble taking seriously, and I respect the fact that it was asked. The fact of the matter is that I don’t see much difference between strongly held belief and "smug moral certitude" — well, apart from perhaps the "smug" part. Other than that, I think that Hume’s words invite a profound realization (my interpretation of course, not being a professionally apprenticed philosopher). We can never really be sure of anything. And hence the importance today of such a writer as Andrew Sullivan, who is eager to (re-)introduce the crucial element of doubt into American cultural, political and religious discourse. Perhaps my stance is an unconventional one. But if there’s any belief in whose truth I possess a high degree of confidence, it’s that one: That we don’t really know anything for certain.

    Ideologues are becoming as unfashionable in America as they should become in the Middle East. And I suspect that this is part of a deeper dynamic that so vexes Ismail when it comes to Obama, and when it comes to Ismail’s rather dismal prospects for possessing reasonable and pragmatic political sensibilities generally.

    As for Israel being a pariah nation, I don’t have any doubt that the self-appointed betters of the world have successfully transferred their contempt for the same pariah people that they defamed for centuries onto that people’s statehood. What should be the ethical significance of this is something that Ismail will have to explain, though. You see, my knowledge of philosophy relies much too heavily on the principles taught in first-year logic courses, such as the invalidity of argumentum ad populum. Moral trials are best not reduced to popularity contests. But perhaps in this regard, as in my respect for the role of doubt, I am missing in my analysis something about which that wise polemicist Ismail is more expert.

    I don’t doubt that Israel has achieved a degree of bellicosity that wouldn’t make me at all comfortable. Living among so many pledged to your extinction will tend to do that. Although one wouldn’t know it judging by Ismail’s words, context is important. But "depraved"? Well, I’ll have to refer you to the paragraph above.

    The idea that the Palestinians have extracted no concessions from Israel is a canard. They could achieve many more, I’ll admit. But how this obviates their need to engage Israel politically, to institute a government that represents them, and to recognize the requirement that they face up to their own responsibilities (all fruits of Oslo), or worse - how this makes one of their leaders a traitor for proceeding with the only process available for resolving their dispute with Israel in a legally permissible way! - is something that perhaps Ismail might want to explain. But it looks like it’s too late for that.

    As for our friend’s parting shots at the president-elect, I was initially going to delve into an effort at analyzing and better understanding the numerous weird and overly conspiratorial assumptions (and social pathologies) that might be at play there. But I’ve already done enough damage today. And even I can only permit myself to cause so much hurt to Ismail’s smug sense of pride – no matter how wrongly misplaced that pride is.

  • By Isaac 1/18/09 at 9:37 p.m. UTC

    Whatever academic work you did, it’s obvious that your understanding of it hasn’t been updated in a very, very long time.

    If Descartes is too antiquated to bring to a discussion on the relationship between knowledge, evidence and ideology in the 21st century, then you have only yourself to blame for bringing him up. I was going to do you the favor of moving on to Hume (i.e. David Hume, 18th-century Scottish philosopher and not the author of the post we’re commenting on) – who is more relevant to the discussion (and if you truly did major in philosophy, you must have realized this but probably neglected to instead mention him in order to sate the appetites of your own connivances) - before you chimed in, and will get to him soon enough. In the meantime, I have to face the oddity of someone who claims to have a background in both philosophy and neuropsychology expressing his bafflement over my mentioning the tabula rasa construct of human knowledge.

    For the benefit of the reader, the idea I just mentioned originated with Aristotle and was most recently and extensively addressed to the public in a book of the same (translated) name in 2002 by noted linguist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. Perhaps Ismail’s heard of him. While I can apparently never hope to have the incredibly sophisticated handle on 17th-century European philosophy that Ismail claims, I can at least update my knowledge in the 21st according to the works of accomplished neuroscientists who might even manage to make it into Ismail’s neck of the New England woods every now and then. Hell, the guy might even make use of observations regardless of whether or not they were discovered in a lab. But perhaps he should take that up with Ismail.

    As far as concerns the alleged non-philosophical nature of questions that can be settled empirically, perhaps Ismail is too hoity-toity to regard theology as falling within the province of philosophy. If this is also truly the case, I admit my ignorance on that score as well. But last I checked, there are a whole bunch of quandries that theologians have found themselves in when it comes to that whole evolution thing. Since their concerns apparently can’t be touched by appeals to either evidence or philosophy, I suppose Ismail is calling them stupid. If he wants to do that, such is his right. And I don’t even know that I have good standing to disagree with him. But again, I don’t see much reason to get into futile brawls that he is infinitely more qualified to facilitate and participate in, and waste his time with, than I am.

    Regarding Hume…

    From him we have a valuable musing that is infinitely more relevant to the discussion. It goes like this and is predicated upon the observation that all knowledge is provisional (a point obviously lost on Ismail):

    "A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence."
    My reason for harping on this point is that it illustrates Ismail’s inability to separate opinion from fact – a crucial precondition required of reasonable individuals before  attempting to reconcile the two. For some people, especially those hanging on to the intellectual streams that defined older generations, the theme encapsulated by a particular political cause is so romantic and captivating that no facts may be allowed to modify its meaning and significance. With the Palestinian cause, Ismail boils everything down to a call for the stirring rebel to square off against the imperial oppressor. When the mundanities of everyday politics are allowed to enter the discussion, Ismail’s sense of ideology and excitement gives way to disappointment and betrayal, and hence his habit of larding up descriptions of politicians who don’t fit the purpose of his narrative with defamatory and nonsensical labels.
    Allow me to relate some examples: For, one presumes, his adeptness with such customary political skills as common sense and compromise, Mahmoud Abbas has earned himself Ismail’s epithet of "quisling". For exercising the same while possessing rhetorical gifts of which Ismail can only dream, Barack Obama was labelled by Ismail as a "con man of Olympian proportions". One can only assume, based on deduction, that Ismail will apply these taunts to any political figure who commits the grievous sin of deviating from a script so obsessed with motif and theme that it can never yield to what must be, in Ismail’s view, such an intolerable absurdity as a credible plot.
    And so it goes, that, with discussions of factual matters, Ismail will attach every device known to man in an effort to sustain a theme so irredeemably beyond hope that the intensity of one’s emotion in imagining it is the only thing that matters. Every clause of his, every metaphor, every turn of phrase, is but another meathook in the carcass of a sentiment forever wandering, moving along the conveyer line in search of an argument, but never finding one. And apparently he finds it difficult to deviate from this approach even when discussing the subjects in which he received formal training: Philosophy and neuroscience.
    Ok. Maybe that was a bit harsh. But you get the point.
  • Ilya Aleksandr
    By Fishman 1/17/09 at 3:19 p.m. UTC

    Ismail is the Charles Dickens of Jewcy.com.  The coherence of any thought he expresses is drowned in his rich albeit useless (given the  medium of blog) vocabulary. 

    Please, try for clarity.  

  • Sara K. Eisen
    By Sara E 1/16/09 at 5:38 a.m. UTC

    …I believe, is De-Nihilists.

    Ismail, you write beautifully. Too bad about the content being a whole amalgamation of un-truths, repackaged. I guess Keats was wrong.

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