Whatever

This is truly the last time I shall comment on Israel, promise.

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I've truly tired of this country, as I'm sure many others have. As far as I'm concerned, if there is a single nation on earth truly capable of starting World War III out of sheer truculence and a piss-poor attitude, it is the Jewish state. It is amazing how not only Israeli leaders but Israeli citizens (and untold millions of supporters around the world), too, cannot conceive of said country doing harm to anyone. It doesn't matter that we now begin seeing, especially through the work of what are called The New (Israeli) Historians, that the state in question was founded upon planned ethnic cleansing. And it doesn't matter when a UN panel -or any other panel, for that matter- headed by a respected Jewish jurist finds Israeli leaders to have acted like war criminals: fuck it!, Israel can do whatever it wishes, and always hide behind the "we're defending ourselves" bullshit they've been uttering since 1948. And I say it's bullshit because, if it were true, the Jewish state would at least make an effort, which it never has, to not provoke or, worst, not start every war it's ever been involved in.

It is fast becoming an academic question whether or not those who founded and, since '48, ran Israel sought to ethnically cleanse the land, or to make a Palestinian state inviable. For even if we don't see a purely Jewish state (which, let's face it, is not an ethnic question, since Judaism is a religion, not a race or ethnicity), Palestinian statehood and Palestinian dignity are now (and have arguably been for a long time) an impossibility. Even if the US and, to a lesser extent, Western Europe, were to withdraw their financial and military support; and even if Arab (and Iranian) leaders were to somehow magically become even merely competent, Palestine and Palestinians are fucked (and it would be wise to mention the share of blame one can lay at Palestians' doorstep for their current state of affairs, since the leaders they have followed, whether optionally or not, either consisted of Nazi sympathizers, gangsters, religious fanatics, or those who were/are simply too bewildered to a decent job).

Eventually, most Arab states will be bribed into peace with Israel, very much like what happened with Egypt and Jordan. It won't, of course, be a real peace; the peace that Egypt and Jordan have with the Jewish state will only exist as long as these Arab states are ruled with an iron fist. But it will be enough for the Western world to congratulate itself endlessly and for Israelis to fool themselves into believing that they were indeed always looking for peace, and that it was those goddamn fucking sand niggers that continuously kept postponing the dream.

Like I said, whatever; I'm gonna go write about Michael Bolton or something, it'll be much more productive than commenting on a fixed game with inevitable results. So fuck Israel and the US for it's blind, unwavering support, fuck the Arab world for being so incredibly incompetent and inert, and a symbolic candle to Palestinians, who are fucked beyond return.

Ebeneezer, Conspiracy Theories, and Misunderstanding Occam's Razor

Ebeneezer, a very good friend of mine, is probably one of the more interesting people I know. He is, first of all, bright and clever -always a welcome combination (or not). Moreover, he is a man of extreme talent, ever ready to learn something new, whether in music, technology, or cooking fish. He has also studied political science, history, and psychology whilst in college and when completing his masters, but for some reason hates discussing any of these topics. Be it some dinner conversation on Brazil's future or some musing (at, say, a bar) on the political economy, Ebeneezer, for whatever reason, dislikes (or so he tells us) discussing these or similar matters.

He also gets extremely annoyed when someone does indeed start discussing history, political science, or psychology and says that a certain event has taken place for something other than the simplest of reasons. (This would be Neezer's insistence on Occam's Razor, though he's getting the definition wrong, as most people do, confusing topicality with simplicity). Like when I insist that the latest war in Iraq began for reasons other than messianism (i.e., bringing Jesus and free markets to those heathen Muslim protectionists for the sake of all civilization). According to him, these are conspiracy theories and therefor ridiculous.

Like many, many others, my friend of old assumes that there are no conspiracies, that people do not get together and conspire to do a, b, or c. Funny and tragic at the same time: being from Brazil, he should understand that not only do many conspiracy theories exist, but some of them are no longer theories, such as Globo Television attempting to defraud the 1982 Rio de Janeiro elections for Governor. To Ebeneezer, this would be absurd: never would Globo's owner, Roberto Marinho, do such a thing! Never would he have such power! Then again, there's that BBC documentary from 1993, Beyond Citizen Kane, which Globo had courts prohibit from circulating in Brazil, and the very helpful book on Globo by V.C Brittos and C.R.S. Bolaño, which detail (beyond doubt, in my opinion) just how powerful Marinho was and Globo continues to be. Ebeneezer would do well to check out these sources, but something tells me he won't.

As Noam Chomsky once observed (actually, he did so many times, since he is incredibly repetitive), a lot of folks, usually from sectors of the establishment, like to dismiss any notion that several individuals might conspire against the public good as, again, conspiracy theories. They do so with disgust, a frown or menacing look on their faces. So when we suggest Florida's Secretary of State, Kathleen Harris, helped steal the 2000 election for George W. Bush, it's a conspiracy theory. When it is pointed out that wars are started to increase corporate profits, (amongst other reasons, obviously) we're lunatics, the kind of people that think no one ever landed on the moon. When it is suggested that the American Media purposefully presents the Israel-Palestine conflict in a very biased fashion, with an obvious favoritism towards the Jewish State, we're crazy, prone to hateful "anti-semitic" propaganda (the quotes are due to the fact that anti-semitic is used in a mistaken fashion in the US and much of the world, implying that only Jews are Semites). And, of course, the latest episode recently seen in the news showing a willingness by some of its major participants to conspire against the public good is the latest financial crisis, with Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke continuously cheating the American public out of hundreds of billions, soon to be trillions of dollars to help out banks, financial institutions, and other major corporations that, since the eighties (at least), have been making one outrageous mistake after another, creating a shitball of ill-conceived choices that has ultimately led us to the present state of things -that, my friends, is just hippie Marxist ranting.

I'm sure Neezer would simply read a post like this and piss all over it, since it is presumably full of crap: to my good friend, Iraq was but a series of debacles born of dumbfounding incompetence, oil was never a real issue; Globo and its (thankfully) now-defunct owner Marinho aren't/weren't as powerful or mean-spirited as they are/were made out to be; the 2000 US Presidential election was never stolen, it was simply organization incompetence at work; wars are started with a dynamic all their own (very true), but never due to private interests (laughable); Israel just chanced into unbridled, unquestioning support from the American government and population; and Paulson and Bernanke would never act out of naked self-interest or to shamelessly help out their rich finance mates. In Ebeneezer's magical world, when something doesn't happen in a vacuum, we can always understand events as people fucking up or getting really lucky; otherwise, the explanation's faulty. There are no class interests, folks don't conspire, people don't scheme.

Again, it would be funny were it not tragic; it's like a brilliant mind going to waste. Ultimately, I understand complaints that the lament I just uttered in this post is without importance, for indeed it is; actually, this post is here just so I can tell Ebeneezer, should he ever again make fun of my "tendency to believe in conspiracy theories", that he can go fuck himself, with evidence provided. But all kidding aside, I do hope that this post might help my ever-talented, ever-skeptical good friend and bandmate to see the world is actually more complicated than his misreading of Occam's Razor would have him believe.

Obs. 1: Neezer, in case you're wondering: yes, I love you, and for trashing you I owe you a nice single malt and a blowjob, though I guess you'll only want the former.

Obs. 2: The video concerning the American Media's bias towards Israel is quite revealing but I can't embed it; I strongly urge the reader to see it, though, it brings to light issues with which many are not familiar.

Back From the Holy Land

In response to Marcos's comments on my post "Trip to the Holy Land":

1) The Monthly Review is a pretty decent publication: it's authors write well, back themselves up, and serve a clearly-stated editorial line. The magazine's been around for some thirty years, it's founders were two well-known economists (Sweezy and Huberman), and many of its writings seem vindicated on economics (our current meltdown) and Israel (given PM Olmert's latest statements and what Israel must do to obtain peace).

2) I criticize Brazil and the US just as much, probably more. Israel is just that much worst because it is automatically suppose to be a Saintly nation, its people innocent of any wrong-doing, and all of us Jews are apparently to stand by its side right or wrong. It's annoying, and these old men from São Paulo are exactly the type of fascist assholes that get on my nerves. And the reason I started this blog is to give my nerves a break.

Mini Trip to the Holy Land, continued

My post "On Jews and Being Jewish" also mentioned the conflict between religious and secular sectors of Israeli society. The following post from MuzzleWatch clarifies this a great deal.

Mini-Trip to the Holy Land

As stated in a previous post, I've been termed self-loathing because, amongst other reasons, I:

1. Don't consider myself Jewish, and
2. Don't like Israel. At all.

As for item 1, it is explained, to a certain degree, in the post I mentioned ("On Jews and Being Jewish"). As for item 2, well, the evidence just seems to mount, year after year, as to why Israel is not the victim it always claims to be. One example amongst many -and the many can be found in the link to the If Americans Knew website I've put on my blog- is this one, where the Israelis are planning a renewal of Jaffa by simply expelling its Palestinian residents.

A few years back, if someone told me that I was a self-hating Jew for doubting Israel, I would've been a bit shaken. However, as I keep reading about the state of Israel, I become surer by the day that if not supporting what said state does means I hate myself, then so be it.

On Jews and Being Jewish

Supposedly, I'm Jewish. However, something tells me there's no such thing as "Jewish" as much as Hebrew, say. What there is is Jews, or the Jewish religion. And religion, as I have expressed earlier, is shit. I have no qualms in being egalitarian, so to speak, in holding in contempt not only "my" religion, but everybody else's (and I include here the militant atheism of Dawkins and Co.), especially the three religions of the Book, which are particularly hateful and which these days add nothing but ignorance and despair to whatever humanity it is we have left.

However, since the Church made sure that it would be the world's bastion of violence and ignorance for centuries on end; and since Islam has revealed itself to be particularly inept at living in a post-Enlightenment world (hell: it is still, for all practical purposes, stuck in the Middle Ages), Jews have been seen as reasonable, sane, down to earth, different from the other two more "barbaric" religions.

Which is why this makes me smile. Seriously, it makes me smile. It reminds me that not belonging to anything that can be remotely close to this nonsense is a profoundly wise decision, all modesty aside.

It also reminds me that the difference between ultra-orthodox Jews in Israel and ultra-orthodox Muslims in Afghanistan taking or having power, is a matter of timing and historical forces. Concerning the history, we once again have the issue of Judaism having not only faced the Enlightenment but also having learned and matured from it (which is why, up until Hitler, there were so many assimilated Jews in Europe who simply didn't care that they were Jews), which Muslims clearly did not. So, with Israel, we have a violence towards Arabs that many times stems from a series of sources, such as religion itself, ethnicity, and nationalism, whereas the Taliban is not nationalistic in the slightest, though they claim otherwise.

But how long before this small group of ultra-orthodox Jews we see in the article above see their behavior become the norm? It's a walk in the park to find Jews in Israel or the United States who have no issue with Israel being a terrorist state, since the Arabs are non-white/Muslim/choose-your-prejudice (and, for that matter, there seems to be no problem with evangelical Christians on this front, as verified by the US's Republican Party's stance towards Israel). If the Israeli government were to pursue an actual peace plan (with a US green light, of course), it is very likely a civil war would ensue in said state. After all, what would a militaristic soceity, run by warriors and religious hot-heads, do with itself if all of a sudden it were left without its principal enemy?

However (there's always good news somewhere), a growing number of Israelis (as evidenced by the mushrooming local peace movement, led by B'Tselem) and an ever-increasing number of practicing Jews throughout the world are already beginning to question openly what Israel is about, and whether it can ever move past its enmities, real or imagined; whether the state in question will be more than a watchdog for America and a playground for nationalist and religious zealots in its free time. They are finally beginning to realize that you either have a theocracy (Israel is, after all, a Jewish State) or a democracy. There is no meeting point between the two.

It has been suggested that I am self-loathing, principally because I refuse "my" religion (and "my" state, or so it would seem). I cannot comprehend, however, how it is that I and these ultra-orthodox Jews pictured in the Guardian's article share anything in common, save our common humanity, which they seem to utterly despise. But their attitudes are grounded on a doctrine, a doctrine available for anyone to read, for anyone to share or not. I choose not to. I refuse to be identified with people who, at the end of the day, are the real Judaism, the Judaism found in the Torah, the one where women, homosexuals and non-Jews are the scum of the Earth. I don't belong to a Chosen People, unless the chosen are unconditionally you and me, and I can't agree to be amongst those that pick and choose, based on words written by barbarians from thousands of years ago, who they will and will not consider their friends and foes.