NOVANEWS
Posted by: Sammi Ibrahem, Sr
By Danny Schechter
Dear Cousin Alvin,
When I grew up in a Workman’s Circle family in the Bronx, my father always spoke of you as our “Chicago cousin,” as “the” learned Jewish intellectual in the family who they respected.
I am not clear if we ever met, but I knew of you for decades, from a distance, as a member not just “of the Tribe” but of my own extended family.
I am horrified by your latest vicious attack on critics of Israeli policies in the name of fighting antisemitism.
If there is a moral emptiness here, Cousin Alvin, I am afraid it is your own. Note also how the New York Times published their letter in the least read Saturday edition, at the bottom of the page, towards the back of the first section—not exactly prominent pplacement and all too representative of the disgraceful media coverage of this savage war.
http://forward.com/articles/204790/moral-emptiness-of-holocaust-survivors-who-took-on/
I am writing on this Labor Day, an occasion the old Forward would have marked as an outlet that stood in solidarity with the Yiddish speaking working class. My dad, Jerry, and Grandfather Max, were members of the old ILGWU, a cutter and presser respectively, who taught me the principles of labor solidarity and empathy with oppressed people, not just “my own kind.” They introduced me to the Forward in its glory days.
They also supported my work in the civil rights movement, and later in the fight to end apartheid in South Africa. I wrote a biography of Nelson Mandela, whom I covered in several films.
As you know, however inexact the parallels, over a hundred thousand South Africans marched there led by Nobel Prize winner Desmond Tutu in solidarity with Gaza, even if the official line of the message-point driven Zionist command which you serve so loyally, and with whom one must never disagree, is that there is no parallel. (Noam Chomsky, as you may know, also sees no direct parallel either, believing that Israel and South Africa are notthe same because Israel is worse!)
I can’t tell you how upsetting it was to find you, Cousin Alvin., getting up on a high moral horse in Hoosier country and lecturing holocaust survivors and their families about betraying our people by daring to question the policies of an extreme right-wing government in Israel who destroyed a modern city and punished its population, collectively.
It is also significant that you show no concern about the violence that Israel’s acts have caused in Israel itself with an emboldening fascist response to all critics—see the article aboutt Israel Prize winner, the renowned scholar Zeev Sternhell in Ha’aretz, who fears the collapse of Israeli democracy, and compares the current atmosphere there with that of 1940’s France.
“The time we have left to reverse this frightening trend is running out,” he warns.
Say nothing about the insights of peace activist and former Israeli independence hero, Avi Avnery, who says the War on Gaza accomplished nothing. Zero. Zip.
And, then, say nothing, Cousin Alvin, to how this violence has spread to the streets of London where Israel critic and MP George Galloway was brutally assaulted in a hate crime and sent to the hospital by the kind of fanatic your writing inspires. It is headed here!
The whole world could see clearly how Israel lost what’s left of its moral compass in a brutal military campaign, campaign justified as self-defense that claimed the lives of over 500 children and mostly civilians.
Q: Why aren’t you leading a campaign to rebuild Gaza? A: Because they are the wrong victims in your universe!
Now, to add insult to injury, we learn that the government of the bullies who act in the name of a frightened and debased Zionism, have announced over 700 new Palestinian arrests and the seizure of another 1000 hectares of Palestinian land on the West bank. Even the United States Government that slavishly kowtowed, funded and rearmed Israel’s military campaign says this is an example of overreach by gloating victors.
Isn’t it embarrassing to you that l00 members of the 100 member Senate were browbeaten to give Israel a black check in an institution that can’t get a majority for air conditioning on a hot day? Sounds like the unanimity the old Soviet politburo!
What world are you living in, Cousin Alvin? Why you so embedded in such a self-righteous bubble of knee-jerk defense of policies that violate human lives and rights? Are you a scholar or a hatchet man for the lobby who now specializes in criticizing critics, liberals and progressives?
Soon, you will win the David Horowitz Neo-con award for service to empire.
Do your credentials as a specialist in antisemitism give you the right to tell others how to think and what to feel and to define “moral emptiness” while a city lies in ruins and morgues overflow with bodies of people who happen to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Is Elie Wiesel who supports settler groups in Jerusalem above political criticism? Is he some celebrity God whose suffering and testimony taught so many of us about the suffering of the holocaust, but who now affiliates with the right- wing politics of the AIAPAC zealots and propagandists. Does that exempt him from challenge?
Sadly, I fear Elie stopped being a moral leader for universal human rights for all a long time ago, and I say this as someone who produced a TV show with him on the World of Elie Wiesel for New York’s Channel 13 and admired him. Jesse Jackson was on that show! (Somehow you managed to work in contempt for Jesse and Al Sharpton in your diatribe, just to signal the US right what side you are. There was not an ounce of compassion for the slain Michael Brown of Ferguson, in a community whose militarized police were, we are told, advised by unnamed Israeli security companies.
I grew up in a community that celebrated the resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto every April 19th. We stood with the victims, not the killers. We knew crimes when we saw them, There were Zionists among us but of different varieties, not just one politically correct branch now dominated by an unelected “Security Cabinet” of Generals and militarists (with unlimited budgets supplied by doting American politicians) who order around a subsidized Air Force run by settlers and fueled by Bibi-esque broadsides demanding “quiet.”
What arrogance, but ultimately that’s what you want too, Cousin Alvin, quiet on the western front, silence from critics who you demand get along by going along.
As one of the American taxpayers who is paying for today’s aggression, I have a right to speak without having my own leanings derided.
Open your eyes, Cousin Alvin, and put down your polemics and hatreds of those who fight for justice for all including Palestinians whose rights are conspicuous by their absence in your bitter scolds.
This is the ultimate shonda, Cousin Alvin, designed to delegitimize and vilify Jews who find Israel’s conduct beyond the pale of the pale.
I admired your early work, especially on the humanities and Blake’s poetry—my mother Ruth Lisa Schechter was a poet—and I know that as a friend and promoter of Elie Wiesel, you felt compelled to rush to his defense.
But, surely, you are also aware of the saying that “there is no business like Shoah Business.” I know you are one of the guiding official scholars at the Holocaust Museum with a Presidential appointment, no less. You are lucky to be among the officially funded Lobby mandarins on the subject who is undoubtedly well supported and encouraged to go for the jugular.
What is striking that in your bio you seem to delight in being thought of a “controversial,” by which you mean not self-reflective or independent of the Lobby. but as a scholarly “attack dog” to use your credentials as Professor of English to impugn others as you have in the past with your putdowns of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, the late historian Tony Judt, the poet Adrienne Rich and the Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen among others.
You have used the cover of the American Jewish Committee to stir up debate (and hate) that puts you at the visible center of high profile and emotional tirades. Sorry, Cousin Alvin, isn’t this a tad self-promotional? No fear, Fox News will soon be here.
Happily, you have critics who noted that you are smearing critics of the Iraq War and trying to censor, not just put down people of much greater accomplishment. The Forward for which I wrote a piece years back has been a reliable outlet for your ravings.
Significantly, Theodore Mann, a former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, blasted you for labeling progressives and implying that they are all somehow antiSemites.
” Throughout his essay, Alvin Rosenfeld seeks to make the label ‘progressive’ a derogatory term, just as three decades ago neoconservatives made ‘liberal’ a derogatory term. Yet today, isn’t it obvious that if there is any subset of Jews that has caused an increase in antisemitism in the United States, it is the neocons who served in the Bush administration and who, rightly or wrongly, are regarded by countless Americans as largely responsible for dragging America into an unwinnable war in Iraq?”
Others will respond more forcefully than I. I am just a semite, Cousin Alvin, as are most Arabs. We need to learn to live together in peace. Your work is undermining that cause, as you know, and has moved from academic analysis to polemic and propaganda.
Where is the humility, tolerance and compassion?
Yours, in hope that this unexpected family feud can lead eventually to some common ground, not more bitterness and hostility on the graves of so many on all sides who continue to die.
Sincerely,
your Cousin Danny,
Danny Schechter
New York, New York
