Posted April 30, 2002

Informative

I am sorry to hear that [Ran HaCohen] ... may have received threats from some individuals blind or indifferent to some of the Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians. (Of course the Palestinian suicide bombing has not helped their own position). I want to say that your Letters from Israel have been very informative and revealing of your intentions to achieve and maintain peace not only in the Mideast but for the rest of the World. I myself, from the U.S. have made a contribution to Jewish Voices Against the Occupation, a group which has already placed a sizable ad in the New York Times calling for an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. I hope that this was the right thing to do. Nevertheless, please keep up the good work you are doing. God bless you!

~ Dr. David K., Michigan

Goldstein's Theory

Justin Raimondo's reply to Dave Stratman about the Meaning of Jenin does not answer the issues raised by Mr. Stratman.

[Justin Raimondo's] ... essay, "The Meaning of Jenin," presents a theory, proposed by Emmanuel Goldstein, to explain the the modern Israeli state's destructive bender, of which the slaughter at Jenin is the most recent event confronting us all. The theory is that:

• the culture of Israel has changed from a decent culture to a barbaric culture;
• the Israeli culture used to be decent because the majority of the people in Israel was from the West, which has a decent culture;
• the Israeli culture has turned barbaric because now the majority of people in Israel is from the Orient (in its broad sense), which has a culture of barbarity.

Mr. Stratman has pointed to instances of Israeli barbarity at the beginning of modern Israel's history, and asks if these incidents don't invalidate the theory's first part. He has also pointed to instances of barbarity on the part of the West, and asks if these incidents don't invalidate the theory's second part. These seem valid points to raise. Justin's response, that the Arabic cultures really are bad, and, by the way, so are leftists, does not advance the debate at all.

...Goldstein's theory is not valid if it cannot fit reality. Is it defensible in these terms?

~ Doug Barrett, Edmonton, Canada

Null and Void

Will the western governments, columnists, writers, and intellectuals urge the French government to declare the recent success by Le Pen null and void? Would they encourage the French military to declare a state of emergency in order to thwart the possibility of Le Pen becoming the next French President? -- since this what they did, especially the French government, with regards to an election in Algeria several years ago.

~ SS

Le Pen

I felt uneasy when reading [Justin Raimondo's] ... defense of Monsieur Le Pen, and far more so after reading this article in The National Post. A man who fakes a heroic past as a member of the Resistance, spends his time sucking up to former S.S. and Vichy officials, champions "family values" but hangs out with a notorious Parisian pimp, divorces his wife then immediately remarries a foreigner (in spite of his "France for the French" rhetoric), is called "obnoxious and a liar" by his first wife, gets literally stabbed in the back by one of his daughters, and has his political career made possible by inheriting $10,000,000 from some alcoholic relative just ain't my idea of a good guy. He sounds more like some sleazeball Republican politician of the Newt Gingrich stripe in the good ole U.S.A.

Of all his sins, the part about him sucking up to former SS and Vichy officials disturbs me the most. By being overly kind to him you needlessly open yourself and your great website to charges of anti-Semitism and hard right extremism.

~ Ken E.

Jenin/My Lai

I like your reporting on the West Bank invasions. I lived and worked in Israel, including living with an Arab family in Jericho, but that was 20 years ago. Things have really changed since then and I think some analysts are missing the point.

For one thing, to be surprised that Colin I-see-no-massacre Powell would refuse to go to Jenin is absurd. Has everybody forgotten that Powell was the officer assigned for the official Army investigation in My Lai? He refused to even contact the soldiers who wrote complaining about the massacre, his report stating no murders were committed. We all know the real story.

I also see a very demoralized IDF. Having been also in Vietnam in '71-'72 I can see the pattern. When I first saw the video of 20 soldiers sitting around oblivious to a woman bleeding to death, cracking jokes while the children cried, is horrifying beyond belief. IDF soldiers I knew 20 years ago never would have acted like that. This also compares to the troops at My Lai. Most were draftees and consolidated into single units (like penal battalions) of disciplinary problems. Calley was a subliterate called by Capt. Medina, in front of his soldiers, 'Lt. Sh*thead.' The troops had suffered casualties from command-detonated mines with wires leading to the hamlets. They were in no mood when they entered. Worse was the inability of the officers to control the men, even though some stood off to the side and refused to participate. This just all sounds very similar to the eyewitness accounts coming out of Jenin. It was a guessing game for Palestinians which type of soldier they would come across.

~ David M.

Strategy

As a hard-ass, uncompromising '70s liberal, I have to agree with most Backtalk respondents that the coverage on Antiwar.com, and [Justin Raimondo's] ... editorials, are just about the best I've found on the web. I am a huge fan of your site, so I hope you take a little constructive criticism in the spirit in which it's intended.

For a long time, I got a good chuckle out of your offhand bashing of the cookie-cutter, go-along orthodox "left" that the Clinton era represented. First of all, much of it seemed very accurate -- I'm no fan of Hillary or Bill, particularly the second four years because I think they're -- well, right-wing nutballs, and so do most of the other hard-assed liberals I know. The idea that Clinton was any kind of "liberal" is one of the great masterstrokes of propaganda in the 20th century. And the erosion of Americans' rights that took place under Clinton's watch was absolutely horrifying, and he did a lot to destroy the integrity of the Democratic Party (and, obviously, I'm not talking about Monica or Whitewater or Travelgate or any of that other crap. I'm talking about the same thing that bugs you Libertarian folks -- expansion of Federal power).

But tell me this: Is it really necessary to use phrases like "Hare-brained Lennonists" -- in any context? Sure, John Lennon had some stupid ideas, but he also did a lot for the antiwar movement (if more through performance art than politics). I mean, personally, I don't take offense that easily, but, strategically, I'm not sure this is wise. At a certain point, inflammatory terms like this just make it harder to build the coalition we need to stop this administration's imperialistic, expansionist foreign policy dead in it's tracks.

But what I felt was really ill-considered was this paragraph from your "Le Pen" editorial:

"In that battle, there can be no compromise, no neutrality: you are either with the defenders of national sovereignty (including libertarians as well as nationalists), or you are with the Euro-crats."

Here, you're not only being divisive, but I think you're really not thinking clearly. I know you're trying to draw some kind of contrast between yourself and W here, but you're actually making the same mistake. The wiser way is to not attack the EU head on. Drawing the battle lines this clearly is like bombing Afghanistan: the problem just isn't that simple.

I'm no political strategist, but my hunch is that the key is to undermine the economic, political, and social hegemony of the EU, while retaining the basic structure to address issues like the environment, overpopulation, and issues that truly require international cooperation.

Also, I have to agree with some of the other Backtalk respondents who have discouraged you from bickering with your War-blogging detractors, responding to their editorials, etc. Please try to keep this to a minimum. Consider the possibility that when you go on a tirade against, say, Andrew Sullivan, you may be playing directly into his hands. Every minute you spend arguing with these dimwitted, unprincipled clowns is a minute that could be spent working on the more difficult, challenging problems that face us in the future.

In this respect, the Chicken Hawks are not so stupid. They know -- if only on some feral, bestial level -- that if the anti-drug law and anti-gun-law camps can ever unite, and rally around their common causes, we will be completely unstoppable, and we can restore some integrity to government in this country. Your enemies are desperate to keep us all bickering with them and with each other -- and by "us," I mean the old-guard liberals, the libertarians, the principled republicans, the almost-principled republicans, the moderate anarchists who aren't thinking clearly, the cookie-cutter Clinton "liberals" who are having second thoughts, etc. Because if we can ever act in a united way about a few basic issues that we all agree on, the Chicken Hawks (what I call 'neocons,' because they're wimps) will be finished. We can do what the hard-assed liberals got lazy and failed to do after Watergate: crush the fascist right decisively in this country, so they won't be resurrected for at least another century or two.

~ MJ, Hollywood