Sunday, February 19, 2006

The Illegitimate Child of Ethnic Nationalism

By Mark Hand

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Posted 02/19 | Add a Comment

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  1. I haven’t read Michael Neumann’s book but based on your article maybe I’ll give it a read but he recently wrote in an article on CounterPunch the following incorrect analogy to make a certain point:

    For the Zionists to demand a state, any state, was therefore no small thing for anyone--like the Palestinians--falling within its proposed boundaries. But what the Zionists demanded was a Jewish state. Whether this was racism is not of any immediate concern. For one thing, to say that something is racist is not, for many people, immediately to say that it is unjustified: there are those, for instance, who accept affirmative action as ‘reverse’ racism yet still defend it. For another, the project might have begun as racist yet outgrown its racism by instituting sufficient protections for non-Jews. Or it might not have outgrown it altogether, but exhibited a form of racism that, though reprehensible, was not particularly virulent. It, therefore, does not seem particularly fruitful to examine whether Zionism was racism.

    I know of no one who defines Affirmative Action as reverse racism.  And those that do are very unlikely be in the defence of Affirmative Action.  Neocons defending Zionism have used this tactic to circumvent black leaders who may want empathize with Palestinian oppression.

    Blacks in the U.S. do not have sufficient power to deny whites political/economic advancement.  In addition Affirmative Action does not only apply to blacks but applies to white women who for a large part has been the major beneficiary of Affirmative Action programs.

    This very poor analogy halted me from reading his article on CounterPunch further as this typical neocon conflation adopted by left wing thinkers as false intellectualism is a major reason why blacks lose faith with alliances with whites (as Jews are represented in the U.S.) who need to circumvent blacks expression of justice where it may contradict with the politics of Zionism.

    Posted by Jack Harris from At the racial divide  on  02/20  at  06:35 PM

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