Even the Atlantic says Mondoweiss is anti-Semitic
The Atlantic has condemned the anti-Semitic Mondoweiss blog as... well... anti-Semitic. But what's more interesting is that in the process they go after Peter Beinart's Open Zion blog, which is published by Newsweek on the Daily Beast website.Yesterday, Peter Beinart's pluralistic blog, Open Zion, published a post by Alex Kane, a staff writer for a website called Mondoweiss.It's impossible to peer into the hearts and minds of the people who edit the site, but Mondoweiss often gives the appearance of an anti-Semitic enterprise. Site founder and editor Phil Weiss, a former writer for the American Conservative when Pat Buchanan was editor, wrote this past May, "I can justly be accused of being a conspiracy theorist because I believe in the Israel lobby theory ... certainly my theory has an explanation of the rise and influence of the neocons. They don't have a class interest but an ideological-religious one."We call them Jewish anti-Semites. There are no worse anti-Semites around. You can tell a lot about a person by the company he keeps. Peter Beinart keeps company with the people who write Mondoweiss. Decide for yourselves what that means.
An April 2011 article on the site strongly implied that Mossad agents were involved in the murder of Italian activist Vittorio Arrigonni, an assertion for which there's no factual evidence. In 2011, contributor Max Ajl argued against "left-wing" condemnation of the Itamar massacre, in which attackers killed five members of a settler family, including a three-month old baby. In 2009, Jack Ross, who has contributed to the white nationalist, Holocaust-denying journal The Barnes Review, argued on Mondoweiss that "it was not the appeasement, but the internationalist hubris and bellicosity of Chamberlain which started World War II." In other words, lay off the Nazis.
"Iran has never officially denied the Holocaust," Mondowess claimed in April of this year. This statement might be technically true, but it is functionally false. It also reflects a troublingly dismissive attitude towards Holocaust denial on the part of high-ranking Iranian officials.
One winner of Mondoweiss' recent "New Yorker parody contest" was a bizarre entry in which former Israeli Prime Minister has a teary reunion with the ghost of his long-lost father: Adolf Hitler.
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Is Alex Kane, the Mondoweiss writer whose post was featured on Newsweek's Open Zion, responsible for all this? Of course not. But he is a Mondoweiss staff reporter. Publicly, he does not challenge the site's lunacy. And Open Zion, in carrying a byline from Mondoweiss, incorporates not just Kane but the Mondoweiss reputation and all of its sordid baggage into its larger conversation.
Kane and Mondoweiss are marginal. Open Zion, Peter Beinart, and Newsweek are not, and neither is their subject matter. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a century-long tangle of ethnic, religious, political, and historic sensitivities, and everything from superpower politics to the 25th chapter of the Book of Genesis has the potential to scramble or intensify it. It's easy to lose faith in the possibility of a rational, humanizing discourse when so many communal and even theological imperatives have been clashing for so long, and when something like the re-opening of a ten foot-wide passageway can spark riots that kill dozens of people. But cynicism is hardly an excuse for letting the discourse backslide or corrode.
Publishing anti-Semites, or people who work for websites that traffic in anti-Semitic innuendo or conspiracy theories, empowers ideas aimed at obscuring the humanity of one side of an already-violent conflict.
Labels: Jewish anti-Semitism, Mondoweiss, Peter Beinart
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:46 PM
4 Comments:
As of today Salon.com is partnering with Mondoweiss.
"You can tell a lot about a person by the company he keeps."
I agree with Carl. So I want to see the Green $$lime washed off! Next round underway:
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-vows-more-money-green-energy-when-i-try-something-doesn-t-work-then-i-don-t-try
If the total $lushfund $lime is $9 bil and a quick google comes up with over $3 bil for just a few Israeli companies, then a carwash needs to be constructed to wash it off. It is goo that will pacify Israel to allow civilian Jews to be smashed in a variety of ways.
(I think the $9 bil figure is to do with grants. The loan guarantees may be an addition amount, so the $3 bil out of $9 bil may not be accurate. The loans may as well be grants except that I guess if the enterprise makes any money rather than defaulting, then they pay back. On the other hand, the $3 bil figure is only a trio of companies I've come across just in ordinary media articles.)
BTW, there are a bunch of American technology companies who need even more of a carwash. I'm not meaning to single out the Israeli companies. As a retired aerospace guy told me today, the solution to all this stuff is to VOTE THESE OBAMA PEOPLE OUT so they won't be able to keep pouring ca$h into this high dollar public trough anymore!!!!!
It was I who commented on Mondoweiss that Iran had not officially denied the Holocaust. What on earth does "technically true but functionally false" mean? I did not say that Ahmedinejad's Holocaust denial does not matter, but I pointed out additional facts that are usually omitted and are important to a proper understanding of the situation. First, in the Iranian system the head of state is the "supreme leader" and not the president, so what Ahmedinejad says is not quite as important as many people think. Second, that the broadcasting on Iranian TV of a documentary about the Holocaust strongly suggests high-level opposition to Holocaust denial, because in Iran's authoritarian system such a documentary could not have been broadcast otherwise.
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