Norway Terror Accused Breivik Loves Israel

Instead of trying to exterminate Europe's Jews, Breivik suggests Hitler ought to have enforced Zionism: "He could have easily worked out an agreement with the UK and France to liberate the ancient Jewish Christian lands with the purpose of giving the Jews back their ancestral lands," Breivik writes. "The UK and France would perhaps even contribute to such a campaign in an effort to support European reconciliation. The deportation of the Jews from Germany wouldn't be popular but eventually, the Jewish people would regard Hitler as a hero because he returned the Holy land to them."

Read More about Norway terror accused and Israel.

Also, Israelis debate on the web: did Norway get what it deserved?

Iraq: The Destruction Of A Civilization

By James Petras, Global Research.ca

The most important political force was also the least openly discussed. The Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC), which includes the prominent role of long-time, hard-line unconditional supporters of the State of Israel appointed to top positions in the Bush Pentagon (Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz ), key operative in the Office of the Vice President (Irving (Scooter) Libby), the Treasury Department (Stuart Levey), the National Security Council (Elliot Abrams) and a phalanx of consultants, Presidential speechwriters (David Frum), secondary officials and policy advisers to the State Department. These committed Zionists ‘insiders’ were buttressed by thousands of full-time Israel-First functionaries in the 51 major American Jewish organizations, which form the President of the Major American Jewish Organizations (PMAJO). They openly stated that their top priority was to advance Israel’s agenda, which, in this case, was a US war against Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein, occupy the country, physically divide Iraq, destroy its military and industrial capability and impose a pro-Israel/pro-US puppet regime. If Iraq were ethnically cleansed and divided, as advocated by the ultra-right, Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu and the ‘Liberal’ President Emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations and militarist-Zionist, Leslie Gelb, there would be more than several ‘client regimes’.
Top pro-Israeli policymakers who promoted the war did not initially directly pursue the policy of systematically destroying what, in effect, was the entire Iraqi civilization. But their support and design of an occupation policy included the total dismemberment of the Iraqi state apparatus and recruitment of Israeli advisers to provide their ‘expertise’ in interrogation techniques, repression of civilian resistance and counter-insurgency. Israeli expertise certainly played a role in fomenting the intra-Iraqi religious and ethnic strife, which Israel had mastered in Palestine. The Israeli ‘model’ of colonial war and occupation – the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 – and the practice of ‘total destruction’ using sectarian, ethno-religious division was evident in the notorious massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, which took place under Israeli military supervision.

...Israeli advisers have played a major role in instructing US occupation forces in Iraq on the practices of urban counter-insurgency and repression of civilians, drawing on their 60 years of experience. The infamous massacre of hundreds of Palestinian families at Deir Yasin in 1948 was emblematic of Zionist elimination of hundreds of productive farming villages, which had been settled for centuries by a native people with their endogenous civilization and cultural ties to the soil, in order to impose a new colonial order. The policy of the total deracination of the Palestinians is central to Israel’s advise to the US policymakers in Iraq. Their message has been carried out by their Zionist acolytes in the Bush and Obama Administrations, ordering the dismemberment of the entire modern Iraqi civil and state bureaucracy and using pre-modern tribal death squads made up of Kurds and Shia extremists to purge the modern universities and research institutions of that shattered nation.

Thanks Homeyra for the link.

''The Best Settlement Argument'': Really ?

The Israel Project, with an advisory board that includes 20 members of Congress from both parties, issued the confidential document to its supporters at about the time Obama came to power in January.

The report, marked as "not for distribution or publication" but since widely disseminated outside of the organisation, says that those who back the removal of the settlements should be told they are supporting ethnic cleansing and antisemitism. The guide offers what it describes as "the best settlement argument".

"The idea that anywhere that you have Palestinians there can't be Jews, that some areas have to be Jew-free, is a racist idea. We don't say that we have to cleanse out Arabs from Israel. They are citizens of Israel. They enjoy equal rights. We cannot see why it is that peace requires that any Palestinian area would require a kind of ethnic cleansing to remove all Jews," the guide says.

I am all for it. But when proponents of a one state solution advance the idea of one state for Jews and Palestinians, the defenders of Zionism, the same ones who label settlement freezing activity as ethnic cleansing, suggest that Palestinians may outnumber Jews and threaten the idea of Israel as a Jewish state.

I want a clear answer from zionists who often visit this blog as to what to do with population growth for Israeli Arabs; what to do with Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, and what to do with Palestinian refugees ? They really have no viable solution, neither a viable answer. Zionism is short on arguments because it does not want to choose between the Jewish identity of Israel and its expansionnist policies. It is a great cognitive dissonance that will lead to greater catastrophes as all cognitive dissonances, which are per essence irrational, do

Troubling Pro Israel Propaganda

Not different from the hate propaganda disseminated by Bin Laden.

Seen on Richard's Blog

Calls mount for Gaza war crimes inquiry

The Israeli military are accused of:
• Using powerful shells in civilian areas which the army knew would cause large numbers of innocent casualties;
• Using banned weapons such as phosphorus bombs;
• Holding Palestinian families as human shields;
• Attacking medical facilities, including the killing of 12 ambulance men in marked vehicles;
• Killing large numbers of police who had no military role.

Gaza Massacre comparable to Sabra and Chatila. And the USA is accomplice in this crime.

On Israel, racism, and when to consider armed resistance acceptable

Peter Beaumont, The Guardian

What has made the issue even more murky - as Conor Gearty, professor of human rights law at the LSE has noted - is the way in which terrorism is less and less regarded as a "technique", albeit a horrible one, in pursuit of a political agenda. Instead, it has been deliberately redefined, largely by states, to mean a "category of person" - making it easy to ignore the underlying causes while concentrating on the acts.

None of the above should be read as a defence of terror, or even as an argument for armed resistance. The tragedy of Gaza is the acceptance on both sides that killing and oppression have more value than negotiation. And while many in the international community - and in Israel - remain stuck on the idea that the Jewish state has a monopoly on the deployment of the language of "supreme emergency", more violence is inevitable.

I think resistance to opression and occupation by a powerful state should be rethinked and redefined in the era of state monopoly of violence. I would make a difference between Hezbollah and Hamas. I think Hezbollah's armed resistance has worked against Israel. Hamas's technique is not working. They are occupied and their society is exhausted. They should first rebuild the social fabric of Gaza and Palestinians in general before taking up armed resistance again. They have done it in the past and Israel, the US, and the international community, have worked hard to destroy the Palestinian society in the name of the fight against terrorism.
Now it is time to rebuild Palestinian society from the inside, even if it means renouncing armed resistance for a while. I have a suggestion, Israel should be attacked at its weakest point, the definition of Israeli society and democracy. As the two state solution has faded to a point of no return, the only way and option left for Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank to gain the same civil rights as Jews is to convert to Judaism, all of them. The racist rabbis will go nut and Israel will have to refuse them this right. And so Israel will appear to the world as it is, a racist state based on race and not religion. There are of course purely Muslim states in the ME as we are always reminded by zionists who refuse the fact that a state based on religion is not a democratic state. But anybody can convert to Islam. Can anybody convert to Judaism ? If I was to take the road of pacifist resistance to the state of Israel in order to rebuild Palestinian society, I would do it by confronting the central racist tenants of the zionist entity, the state of Israel.

The Balfour Declaration , The Israel Lobby, and The Zionist-Saudi Connection

Today marks ninety years since the Balfour declaration had been issued. It is a simple letter from Lord Balfour to lord Rotschild, dated November 2, 1917, promising Jews a homeland in Palestine on which Great Britain had a mandate. Balfour had worked on the declaration with Chaim Weizmann, head of the world's zionist organisation. Great Britain, who tried to rally Arabs against Ottomans during WWI, thanks to the activities of Laurence of Arabia, was able to have on its side Faisal bin Husayn, from the Hachemite dynasty of Saudi Arabia, who later became king of Iraq, under the British mandate. It is this same Faisal who signed with Weizman, on January 3, 1919, the Weizmann-Faisal agreement accepting the Balfour declaration in exchange for kingdoms in the Arab world given to him and his sons under the British mandate.

Faisal is seen here on the right, with Weizmann dressed as an Arab for the occasion.


Much have been said about the motives behind this 'gift' from the UK to zionism. Many suspect that it was the price the UK paid to reward the efforts of zionists for convincing the US to enter war against Germany. But to do this, zionists relied on people placed at very high positions in Germany, the US and the UK.

There are documents showing that many British Jews preferred assimilation and integration to an immigration to Israel. An early dissenter is Edwin Montagu. He was the secretary of state for indian affairs and he told Prime Minister Lloyd George. "All my life I have been trying to get out of the ghetto. You want to force me back there."

What surprises me is that here we are ninety years later with zionists, and some Arabs, playing exactly the same games, speaking in the name of Jews, or in the case of Saudis in the name of all Arabs, leading countries to war, for the egoistic interests of the few...It strikes me also that there must be a structural flaw to that great democracy that was the US in order to have become, over the years, so much vulnerable to lobbying, against its own interests. Absolute power and money are against a healthy democracy and those are the main flaws in the US. The zionist lobby seems to have been playing this game from the beginning but it is in the US that the game became so successful, because of the US imperial aspirations and its money fueled 'democracy'. And what game the Saudis are playing ? Preserving their own dynasty by any means.

"Weizmann first met Faisal in June 1918, during the British advance from the South against the Ottoman Empire in World War I. As leader of an impromptu "Zionist Commission", Weizmann traveled to southern Transjordan for the meeting. The intended purpose was to forge an agreement between Faisal and the Zionist movement to support Jewish settlement in Palestine. The wishes of the Palestinian Arabs were to be ignored, and, indeed, both men seem to have held the Palestinian Arabs in considerable disdain. Weizmann had called them "treacherous", "arrogant", "uneducated", and "greedy" and had complained to the British that the system in Palestine did "not take into account the fact that there is a fundamental qualitative difference between Jew and Arab".[1] After his meeting with Faisal, Weizmann reported that Faisal was "contemptuous of the Palestinian Arabs whom he doesn't even regard as Arabs"."

A comment from Angry Arab on the Balfour declaration.

An update from a commentator on this post on the anti-semitism of Lord Balfour and on the early and continuing collaboration between zionists and anit-semites.

"The Zionists have ruthlessly exploited antisemitism to achieve their aims."

"Many European Jews who lived in Palestine from 1939 to 1945 would have offered anything to save the lives of their family members stuck in Poland and Germany who were doomed to death camps"

You need to read Ben Hecht"s book regarding Zionist collaboration witn the Nazis during WWII. He accuses the Zionist establishment of seeking young able bodied Jews for Palestine and sending others to the concentration camps in Hungary.

Zionism is the other side of the coin and can best be illustrated with a quote by its patron ,the antisemite Lord Balfour in 1918.

"For as I read its meaning it is, among other things, a serious endeavor to mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilization by the presence in its midst of a Body which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. Surely for this, if for no other reason, it should receive our support."

Mr. Herzl, The father of Zionism also said:

"I will say to the German Kaiser: Let us go forth. We are aliens here".

In an editorial article in "Davar", the official newspaper of the governing Israel Labour Party (Mapai). Editor Sharun wrote:
"I shall not be ashamed to confess that if I had the power, as I have the will, I would select a score of efficient young men - intelligent, decent, devoted to our ideal and burning with desire to help redeem Jews - and I would send them to the countries where Jews are absorbed in sinful self-satisfaction. The task of these young men would be to disguise themselves as non-Jews, and plague these Jews with anti-semitic slogans, such as 'Bloody Jew,' 'Jews go to Palestine,' and similar 'intimacies.' I can vouch that the results, in terms of considerable immigration to Israel from these countries, would be ten thousand times larger than the results brought by thousands of emissaries who have been, for decades, preaching to deaf ears."(Lilienthal, Alfred; What Price Israel?, page 47)

As for the Russian Jews, many were economic refugees fleeing the collapse of the Soviet Union. Refugees only had to prove that one of their grandparents was Jewish.

Jews after the collapse of the USSR rose to prominence in politics and business. The First Lady , Mrs. Yeltsin was Jewish so it is hard to argue that the emigration was the result of antisemitism." (Thanks Issam)

Amis, Pipes, and Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

You cannot make a satire of something that is already a satire !

The Bad satire, with memorable quotes from famous people

-"The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children..." (Martin Amis, English writer)

- "brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene." (Daniel Pipes)

- "Individuals may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers... This is what I have dubbed the Sudden Jihad Syndrome, whereby normal-appearing Muslims abruptly become violent. It has the awful but legitimate consequence of casting suspicion on all Muslims." (Daniel Pipes)

The quotes from Daniel Pipes, who is among the organisers of the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (IFAW) with a special theme this first year on Muslim women, have now vanished from the web. At the time I published them they were still available. By the way, Lebanon's highest shiite authority has condemned recently honor killings but you will not see this anywhere during this IFAW.

Now the satire that, because of the bad satire, isn't a satire anymore.

And I will leave the conclusion to Ali Eteraz.

- "An ex-senator that opposes individual rights of women; a pundit that calls people "faggots" and considers Islam a "cult"; a Christian scholar who is considered a "polemicist" and an "Islamophobe" by conservative Christians themselves; and an intellectual who has received millions from "far right" organizations since 2001, are rising up for the rights of women, gays, and religious minorities in the Muslim world. This laughable spectacle is called the Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week. It will be coming to a university near you on October 22 - 26."

Also: Stef's Shiny Happy People and Rory's European Race Hate.

UPDATE: Amis wrote on October 12th to the Guardian denying that what he said were measures he condoned for Muslims. In his defence, he wrote:
"And my remarks were preceded by the following: "What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There's a definite urge - don't you have it? - to say that the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order. What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation - further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they're from the Middle East or from Pakistan ... Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children......"
Well I am glad Amis does not advocate such measures, but as a writer knowing the weight of words and his own status in the UK, he must know that his words mean something. This correction doesn't make him any better. It makes him appear as a man unable to control his racist 'urge' and who spits hate at other human beings.

Jean Bricmont on Why Bush Can Get Away With Attacking Iran

That's the Guy. I love everything he writes. One of the last few remaining true rational academics and a committed public intellectual.

"All the ideological signposts for attacking Iran are in place. The country has been thoroughly demonized because it is not nice to women, to gays, or to Jews. That in itself is enough to neutralize a large part of the American "left". The issue of course is not whether Iran is nice or not ­according to our views -- but whether there is any legal reason to attack it, and there is none; but the dominant ideology of human rights has legitimized, specially in the left, the right of intervention on humanitarian grounds anywhere, at any time, and that ideology has succeeded in totally sidetracking the minor issue of international law.

Israel and its fanatical American supporters want Iran attacked for its political crimes--supporting the rights of the Palestinians, or questioning the Holocaust. Both U.S. political parties are equally under the control of the Israel lobby, and so are the media. The antiwar movement is far too preoccupied with the security of Israel to seriously defend Iran and it won't attack the real architects of this coming war--the Zionists-- for fear of "provoking antisemitism". Blaming Big Oil for the Iraq war was quite debatable, but, in the case of Iran, since the country is about to be bombed but not invaded, there is no reason whatsoever to think that Big Oil wants the war, as opposed to the Zionists. In fact, Big Oil is probably very much opposed to the war, but it is as unable to stop it as the rest of us."

Relevant links:

Another proxy war with Iran ? Israel hit Missiles in Syria-The US pleased-story stinks.

A recent decision by German officials to withhold support for any new sanctions against Iran has pushed a broad spectrum of officials in Washington to develop potential scenarios for a military attack on the Islamic regime, FOX News confirmed Tuesday.

Zionism, Land Theft, and Racism, are Blatant Violations of Democracy and Human Rights by Israel

Last week the Knesset passed in preliminary reading a law that would require the Jewish National Fund (JNF) to allocate land that it owns only to Jews. Presumably this means that Jews who are not citizens of Israel would qualify, but Israel's Arab citizens would be barred from access to land owned by the JNF. A blatant violation of the norms of democracy.

And I am not going to cheer, like some bloggers, the courage of the few Israelis who voted against the law. They must have known before what Zionism means. These people have voted for the July war on Lebanon last year, they voted for all the other racial laws of their country, otherwise, they would not be sitting where they are retaining their right to vote on their country's laws. Their vote is only late posturing, and an attempt at clearing their conscience, against a very dangerous ideology.

Watch the video: Land theft continues in Palestine


Thanks Elizabeth

The Israeli sponsored US invasion of Iraq and the ethnic cleansening of Baghdad and the Middle East

Four years after the US invasion, an ethnic cleansening in Baghdad has been achieved.
Le Monde has a map of Baghdad's neighbourhoods in 1919, 1956 with an assessment of post-Saddam Baghdad. If you look at the 1956 map, the yellow covers mixed neighbourhoods in Baghdad. The light yellow is mixed neighbourhood with a Muslim majority and the strong yellow is simply a mixed neighbourhood with no majority.

It emerges that ethnic mix between Sunnis and Shias in Baghdad was well advanced in the fifties and maintained afterward by the Baath party secular regime. However, the US invasion has prompted an unprecedented ethnic cleansening in Baghdad with displaced families by the hundreds thousands and that is probably the only achievement of the US occupation.

It is ironic that today I read an article by former Israeli Knesset member and Gush Shalom director Uri Avnery about to which lenghts Israel is ready to go against those who, even by peaceful and legal means, defy its founding idea as democratic and an ethnically pure state. Avnery underlines the oxymoron that is the definition of Israel as a 'Jewish democratic state', democratic only for its Jewish population.

''According to Ha'aretz, the Israeli Security Agency... "would foil the activity of anyone seeking to harm Israel's Jewish or democratic character, even if that activity was carried out by legal means." This is an admission, ''not only that anyone who strives to alter the Jewish character of the state is considered an enemy and will be treated as such but that the secret service has no respect for democratic practices and procedures.''

Many reasons were advanced for the Iraq invasion, among them Oil. However, an invasion and an occupation of this magnitude might have more than one reason. And I believe that among the many reasons the US went to Iraq is the desire to create small ethnic states at the image of Israel, as we all know by now the prominent role of pro-zionists in the advocacy for the 2003 Iraq invasion. However these new small ethnic states will be unchallenging for Israel because of their submission to the US and because their forced divisions will bring about tens if not hundred years of internal strife leaving Israel the only superpower in the Middle East as the rest of the Middle east will be ruins. At least, the Iraq invasion seems to have achieved this objective very quickly. And the war of agression on Lebanon, despite failing to crush Hezbollah, succeeded in pushing the internal divisions of the country to the surface once again by underminig a fragile national dialogue through an inconditional support for the corrupted sanyura government from the US and the criminalisation of lebanon's high profile and popular party, the Hezbollah. As for Palestine and Israel, the new generation of Israeli Politicians like Gaydamak and Lieberman, if the Israeli electorate is not going to stop them, will make sure that the ethnic cleansening project will take place. Syria will be destabilised by continuous pressure, a refusal to broker a peace deal on the Golan, and support for anti-baathist islamist organisations, until the baathist regime falls apart to be overtaken by Islamist extremists who are already on the wait in Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the recently 'liberated' Lebanon from Syrian baathist influence.

It is easier to divide rather than unite. Breaking the fragile social and ethnic cannevasses of the Middle East and stigmatizing part of its population while providing the other part with support and weapons and access to supervised power, are certainly a 'good' start for the Neo-cons. However, despite their troubled history, the peoples of the Middle East have always lived together. Zionist and neo-cons may distort narratives, provoke wars, displace populations, implement government sponsored terror, the natural order of things for us, peoples of the Middle East, is to live together.

Bagdad, quatre ans après : la partition confessionnelle
LE MONDE | 10.04.07

©

L'extension de Bagdad au 20e siècle
LEMONDE.FR | 10.04.07

©

Un désastre américain en Irak, par Patrice Claude
LE MONDE | 10.04.07

©

Palestine: The Remembered Present

I came across this post from Abu Issa, a Palestinian Montrealer. It is a picture gallery of Palestine, mostly before 1948. You can access the gallery on Picasa directly from here. The pictures tell calmly and beautifully a story made of loss and dispossession

Debunking Zionism as a Racist Colonialist Ideology

There are some great debunkers now on the blogosphere. I want to highlight the latest contributions of Behemoth (KampfeBlog) on the subject.

The sinister roots of Zionism, failed ideological construct part two - A

The sinister roots of Zionism, failed ideological construct part two - B

More confirmation on "modern" Zionism's colonial origins

Criticism of Israel becoming mainstream in the US ?

Thanks to the paper on the Israel lobby by Mearsheimer and Walt and to the recent book by former president Jimmy Carter 'Peace not Apartheid', criticism of Israel is becoming mainstream in the US, despite current perceptions.

Read here the comments of Norman Finkelstein on Carter's book and on the attempt by some pro-zionist or zionist wary media to discredit Carter's arguments, most notably the comparison Carter makes between the state of Israel as it is now and the south African Apartheid.

The Lebanese daily Star Rami Khoury's ''Israel's dominance may be going into slow reversal'' offers us an analysis of the moves by the Israeli government during the last six monts and concludes that since the July war on Lebanon, Israel is in trouble.

Check Sabbah's post featuring two opinions on the central question in Carter's book: Israel as an apartheid state.

UPDATE: I received an insult from one commentator on this post but I did not publish it. However I can publish the IP of this commentator who is from the US:205.188.117 (aol commercial)
That's just a proof that insults are one of the methods Zionists resort to in order to silence criticism...Other means are: lobbying, Blackmailing, Bombing, Intimidating and Targeted Killings...

It Is Official: Zionists Declare a Global War on 'Islamic' Extremism

Despite a UN report reasearched and written by a group of experts stating that there is no clash of civilisation between the West and Islam and that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the main cause of Muslim discontent and Islamist extremism, the head of the ADL, Abraham Foxman would like you to think otherwise.

Contrary to the UN report, Abraham Foxman states that the cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is 'Islamic' extremism !

''The point is that the unending Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far less a cause of Islamic extremism's rise, and far more a product of its ideology and its power. Reduce the impact of this ideology, and not only will relations between the Islamic world and the West improve, but the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians can be resolved.''

Zionism is always arguing that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is to blame on Arabs and Palestinians. To that effect, zionist narrative is always struggling with memory when it comes to pin the blame of the ongoing conflict in a precise fashion and not only on Arabs and Palestinians in general; in this case 'Islamic' extremism as Foxman words it. This is ironic because memory, but only Holocaust memory, is the bread and butter of zionism. It is also ironic that when Israel conquered land in palestine, it was mainly thanks to Jewish extremism at a time 'Islamic' extremism did not exist in Palestine and the Arab world ! Of course, for history and news illiterates and media sheeps, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict starts on September 11th !
Zionism is then culpable of the most blatant revisionnism of our modern history. Now, Mr. Foxman, when would you like me to start your Holocaust in order to shift the blame from Nazis to someone else, and why not Zionists ? History has never been an exact science and the media have never been History luminaries. So why not take advantage ?

This will be of course viewed as a 'clash of civilisations and religions'. Many of us, anti-zionists, believe however that Zionism is an ideology competing agressively, not only with the religions of Arab and Iranian ennemies in the ME but even with Judaism. Behemoth has an abrasive and forcefully argued post on this subject.

Alleged 'Lawrence of Arabia syndrome' among British leftists and Israeli Paternalizing

Bradley Burston wrote yesterday in Haaretz that, by authorizing individual boycotts of Israeli universities and academics, the British academic left is repeating the Lawrence of Arabia syndrome. He accuses British leftists of wanting to succeed where Palestinians failed and playing heros for Palestinian rights:

''There's something quietly Kipling about this, something understatedly White Man's Burden about this, something subtly racist about this.
Oh, yes, there it is again. Lawrence of Arabia Syndrome.
Who, after all, is the real hero of the struggle for Palestinian rights?
Paul Mackney, apparently. Mackney is secretary-general of the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE), the largest university and college lecturers' union in Britain.''

Burston's statement seems to allude that the British lecturer's attitude is racist because in doing something on behalf of the Palestinians the lecturers show a lack of consideration for the ability of Palestinians to fight for themselves.

However, Burston never considered that this might be about the feeling people have of the occupier's willingness to destroy the natives by means which are incommensurable with the natives ability to defend themselves. He also never considered that the overprotection given to Israel by a powerful ally, the US, and the international community, is the product of an intentionnally induced mechanism of the 'white man's burden' he is referring to, initiated by zionists, perpetuated by the state of Israel and made eternal by the memory of the shoah. Or may be he considers that the burden of the white man should only consist of the guilt toward jews, excluding all other human calamities and horrors, just because Israel seems to consider that its 'calamity' is heavier and more important than others: the Palestinian people and their own intractable existence.

Burston should be more cautious about labeling the British boycott as a 'Lawrence of Arabia' syndrome: There is not one side to the story of Lawrence of Arabia. Lawrence of Arabia's portrait as the hero of the liberation of Arabs from Ottomans, immortalized by his famous book 'Seven pillars of wisdom' and by David Lean's movie with Peter O'toole, is misleading.

The Bar at Le Baron hotel, Aleppo.

Last year we visited Syria, a beautiful country where different layers of civilisations coexist sometimes in one archeological site, from 6000 before Christ to Alexander the Great, to the beautiful roman Palmyre, the Omeyyades, the crusaders, the Ottomans, the French and other distant invaders. In Aleppo, every tourist pays a visit to 'Le Baron' where Lawrence used to enjoy a drink. As other tourists, we undertook the ritual with a sense of historical grandeur. Seated in the same room and drinking at the same bar the great man used to visit, we discovered, during our conversations with the 'natives', that they never considered Lawrence as a saviour, they rather considered him as a spy bringing political, social and geographical divisions to the middle east by imposing the Hejazi king Fayçal Ibn Husayn (1), an outsider, on the ME people and leading his army to occupy and divide part of the fertile crescent (Lebanon, Irak, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Palestine) into different kingdoms attributed to Fayçal's sons(2). Fayçal, an imported king, well domesticated by the British, signed the Weismann-Fayçal agreement which recognised the Balfour declaration authorising a jewish state in Palestine. After all, this was not the land of his ethny, he comes from Saudi Arabia and what was important to him was to maintain his statute as a king with the help of the British. Lawrence was instrumental in all this. For local populations of the ME, this came as a blow, surprising them at the end of the Ottoman occupation, unprepared as they were to resist the British and their own rulers in their support for zionism, not well organised and therefore incapable of displaying a unified military and political front against the zionists.

There is one more obvious reason why I wouldn't compare the British boycott of Israeli academics to a 'Lawrence of Arabia' syndrome : not only the Israeli empire is not on the brink of collapse like the Ottoman when Lawrence conducted his 'mission', but the British lecturers asscociation does not work for the British government; unlike Lawrence, they are not motivated by political and personal ambitions but by moral concerns.

Can we finally raise and understand, without conceptual confusion, the moral issue behind the demand for the boycott, without being labeled as anti-semites and accused of having a 'lawrence of Arabia' syndrome ? Can we simply recognise that the pro-boycott people, leftists or not, have a moral problem with the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians ?

(1) Faisal bin Husayn (Arabic:فيصل بن حسين May 20, 1883 – September 8, 1933) was for a short while king of Greater Syria in 1920 and king of Iraq from 1921 to 1933. He was a member of the Hashemite dynasty. He was born in Taif (in present-day Saudi Arabia) in 1883, the third son of Hussein bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, the Grand Sharif of Mecca. In 1913 he was elected as representative for the city of Jeddah for the Ottoman parliament. In 1916, whilst on a visit to Damascus, he joined with the Al-Fatat group of Arab nationalists, and his father became king of Hijaz. Faisal also worked with the Allies during World War I in their conquest of Transjordan and the capture of Damascus, where he became part of a new Arab government in 1918.

He led the Arab delegation to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and, with the support of the knowledgeable and influential Gertrude Bell, argued for the establishment of independent Arab emirates for the area previously covered by the Ottoman Empire. His role in the Arab Revolt has been well described by T.E. Lawrence in "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" On January 3, 1919, Faisal and Dr. Chaim Weizmann, President of the World Zionist Organization signed the Faisal-Weizmann Agreement, in which Faisal accepted the Balfour Declaration. On March 7, 1920, he was made king of Greater Syria by the Syrian National Congress. But in April 1920, the San Remo conference gave France the mandate for Syria, which led to the battle of Maysalun on July 24, 1920; Faisal was expelled from Syria by the French and went to live in the United Kingdom in August that year.

The British government, mandate holders in Iraq, were concerned at the unrest in the new country. They decided to step back from direct administration and create a monarchy to head Iraq while they maintained the mandate. Following a plebiscite showing 96% in favor, Faisal agreed to become king; so, in August 1921 he was made king of Iraq. He was instrumental in making his country fully independent in 1932. He died on September 8, 1933, when he had a heart attack whilst he was staying in Bern. He was succeeded on the throne by his son Ghazi. He was portrayed by Alec Guinness in the 1962 movie Lawrence of Arabia.

(2) The British had, in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence previously promised the Hashemite family lordship over most land in the region in return for their support in the Great Arab Revolt during World War I.