A regime so "leftist", it hosts the most right-wing man in Britain

[Originally posted at NOW]

Within hours of the savage butchery of a British soldier by a British citizen in Woolwich, East London, three weeks ago today, a hundred or so portly football enthusiasts congregated outside a local pub, costumed in balaclavas and England flags, to bellow semi-coherently about the demerits of “the Muslim scum” as well as to attack the very police force that had apprehended and arrested the soldier’s loathsome murderers.

The leader of these fine exemplars of contemporary British culture, who goes by the pseudonym Tommy Robinson, is habitually denounced for his craven, limp-wristed moderation by Nicholas Griffin, the British National Party leader, Holocaust denier, and Member of the European Parliament who has been spending quality time this week in Damascus as the guest of the Bashar al-Assad regime. Granted, says Griffin, Robinson may be perfectly sound on the question of the evil (or should that be ‘The Innocence’?) of Muslims. But he hopelessly fails to grasp the utter subservience of Downing Street to the machinations of global Jewry (euphemized by Griffin in public, though not in private, as “Zionism”).

Which is by no means all the man has in common with Hezbollah. Griffin’s is the instinctive bigotry of the parochial white reactionary, whose revulsion for foreigners is proportionate to the “alienness” of their appearance. Since Lebanese Shiites have shorter beards than Syrian Sunnis (and Assad doesn’t have one at all!), he’s cast his lot with the former, whom he said via Twitter were “doing [a] better job than the [London police] dealing with ‘British’ Jihadi cut-throats.” That Hezbollah fighters are themselves jihadists is evidently of scant concern – like the Israeli military establishment before him, Griffin has concluded that some ‘terrorists’ are more terrorist than others.

Surprised though some may have been to see the leader of Britain’s ultra-right shaking hands with the prime minister of a regime better known for befriending George Galloway, the contradiction only exists if you imagine Assad and his gargoyles were remotely “leftist” in the first place. From the first day of the uprising, Assad’s policy has been one of maximum violence, deliberately targeting the men, women and children of the Sunni majority sect. A seasoned hatemonger and thug like Griffin ought to feel right at home.

American "leftists" whitewash Nasrallah

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

Eager as they ever are to believe that no enemy of Israel can go far wrong, two prominent figures on the American “left” have penned a righteous critique of what they call a “disastrous” and “embarrassing” New York Times op-ed that portrays Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah as anti-Semitic.

Not the easiest blemish to brush off, one might have thought, but then such people are well-practiced in furnishing bigots with excuses they haven’t and wouldn’t make for themselves. After claiming the particular “supposedly anti-Jewish” quote attributed to Nasrallah in the Times is “in all likelihood a fabrication,” Phil Weiss and Max Blumenthal proceed to paste a lengthy tract by “widely-published Marxist thinker” Louis Proyect, who has concluded after “assiduous” research that there isn’t a scrap of evidence—anywhere—implicating Nasrallah in any kind of funny business on the Jewish question.

Now, the Times article certainly wasn’t fantastic, and I happen to share Weiss’ and Blumenthal’s distaste for the manner in which Israel’s defenders cry “pogrom” at the mildest political criticism. Yet as a secularist who actually lives in Lebanon, I’ve long wearied of reading hagiographies of the “Party of God” from pseudo-dissidents and laptop-Leninists 7,000 miles away.

Weiss and Blumenthal are probably right that the quote (“If we searched the entire world for a person more cowardly, despicable, weak and feeble in psyche, mind, ideology and religion, we would not find anyone like the Jew. Notice I do not say the Israeli”) comes from Amal Saad-Ghorayeb’s Hizbullah: Politics & Religion. Though it purports to quote Nasrallah, the footnote in fact cites an interview with Hezbollah MP Muhammad Fneish on August 15, 1997.

Thereafter, however, the writers quickly wade far out of their depth. Put aside the fact that Nicholas Noe, editor of the party-approved Voice of Hezbollah: The Statements of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah says the quote is genuine after all. Even if it were a fake, what Weiss and Blumenthal damningly omit to mention—presumably because they haven’t actually read her book—is that Saad-Ghorayeb also produces a number of further statements, directly attributed to Nasrallah, that are—how to put it?—difficult to read as philo-Semitic. These include:

· That Jews are “renowned for breaching covenants and promises, even with God and the prophets” (p. 171 in the 2002 Pluto Press paperback version; citing Nasrallah in Amiru’l-Zakira, February 23, 1992, p. 139).

· That Jews are “the enemies of God [and] humankind” (p. 175; citing a Nasrallah speech in Beirut’s southern suburbs on August 8, 1997).

· That God “imprinted blasphemy” on the Jews’ hearts (p. 176; citing Nasrallah, August 8, 1997).

· That the Jews fabricated the Holocaust in order to advance their plot to control the world (pp. 181-2; citing a Nasrallah speech in Beirut’s southern suburbs on “Jerusalem Day,” January 24, 1998).

When I pointed this out to Blumenthal on Monday morning, he replied, “I do not consider [Saad-Ghorayeb] reliable, though I don’t doubt Nasrallah has used some f’ed up rhetoric.” Regarding the first half of that statement, one might direct his attention to, say, this video from 2006, in which Nasrallah begins by lamenting that Salman Rushdie hasn’t been murdered yet, and then goes on to say the following:

“A few years ago, a great French philosopher, Roger Garaudy, wrote a scientific book […] in which he discussed the alleged Jewish Holocaust in Germany. He proved that this Holocaust is a myth. The great French philosopher Roger Garaudy was put [on] trial […] Why? Because freedom of expression extends [only] to the Jews.”

Regarding the second half, if Blumenthal was already in no doubt that Nasrallah was an anti-Semite, why did he contribute to an article strongly suggesting the very opposite might be the case? A curious undertaking for any “leftist,” let alone one who so piously accused Christopher Hitchens of “enabling Holocaust-deniers” (echoing—hilariously enough—Henry Kissinger, who quickly shut up after Hitchens’ lawyers threatened a libel suit). Curious also that the argument the authors set out to disprove—namely, that certain elements on the “left” are too ready to give the benefit of the doubt to Jew-baiters—is ultimately the one they succeed in advancing.

Holocaust "mostly horseshit", says Mel Gibson

[Originally posted at NOW Lebanon]

In what must surely count as one of history’s most tersely-phrased utterances of five-star fruitcakery and fanaticism, the actor Mel Gibson recently described the Holocaust as “mostly a lot of horseshit”, according to a letter penned by a Hollywood screenwriter with whom Gibson was working on a now-scrapped film about the Jewish historical figure Judah Maccabee.

Of course, this kind of bigotry is more or less routine for Gibson, whose previous outbursts include informing a Los Angeles police officer that “the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” and telling his then-girlfriend that she deserved to “get raped by a pack of niggers”. Even so, one finds oneself whistling at the sheer variety of epithets in this latest trove.

As the letter says: “[Gibson] continually called Jews “Hebes” and “oven-dodgers” and “Jewboys” […] [He] said most “gatekeepers” of American companies were “Hebes” who “controlled their bosses […] [He] said the Torah made reference to the sacrifice of Christian babies and infants […] [He said] the mothers of the last three Popes of the Catholic church were Jewish [and] there was a Jewish/Masonic conspiracy to destroy the Catholic church […] [He] referred to Pope John Paul as “the devil” [who] “destroyed the church”” by implementing Vatican II, which famously repealed the charge of Christ-killing against world Jewry (a theme to which he repeatedly returns throughout the letter). “Perhaps most disturbing [was his comment that] “What I really want to do with this movie […] is to convert the Jews to Christianity.””

Indeed, what interests me much more than the crude insults and petty racism is his obsession with the supposed threat posed by Jews to his faith, which in its rank paranoia and delusion exceeds even the efforts of Osama Bin Laden. The religious underpinnings of Gibson’s habitual explosions are still poorly understood by the wider public. As the late Christopher Hitchens noted in a 2010 article titled ‘Mel Gibson Isn’t Just an Angry Narcissist’, Gibson is a member of a “schismatic crackpot sect” of Catholicism, “headed by [his] father, Hutton Gibson” that has “never forgiven the Vatican for lifting the charge of deicide against the Jews”. Seen in this context, Gibson’s latest remarks are yet another reminder – if anybody needed one – of the infinite ways in which religious ideologies nurture and cultivate, rather than restrain, the cancers of hatred and extremism.