Archive for February 15th, 2010
List of posts from Feb. 9 to 16, 2010
Posted by: adonis49 on: February 15, 2010
657. Why Japan was nuked? (Feb. 9, 2010)
658. What’s with ancient Athens? (Feb. 10, 2010)
659. “The passionate story of my life”; (Feb. 11, 2010)
660. Charters of emancipations by black leaders; (Feb. 12, 2010)
661. “I was one year old; mother was made to separate from me”; (Feb. 15, 2010)
662. “A shadow swept me off”; (Feb. 15, 2010)
663. “Psychological barriers?” What’s that! (Feb. 16, 2010)
“Psychological barriers?” What’s that!
Posted by: adonis49 on: February 15, 2010
“Psychological barriers?” What’s that! (Feb. 16, 2010)
Here you have two old Jewish Zionists chatting in a sort of interview.
Amos Oz is 70 years old and born in Palestine during the British mandate, and the other one is Jean Daniel who was born in Algeria during French colonialism.
One was raised to speak only Hebrew because his parents were worried that, if he learned another language, he will necessarily immigrate to Europe and die during the many wars among European nations. His father could read in 11 languages and his mother spoke 5 languages.
The French Jean Daniel, owner of the weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, claims that his father loved his village in Algeria by the mountain; his father loved this village so much that he believed that anti-Semitic feelings will pass over quickly and Arabs in Algeria will quickly squelch this European colonial sentiment.
The Israeli author and activist Amos OZ had organized the “Peace Now” movement 2 decades ago and the movement is currently not doing well in Israel. Amos published “Help us to divorce”; “how to heal a fanatic”; “A story of love and darkness”; and his latest “Scenes of village life”.
Amos said in an interview with the “Nouvel Observateur” that the establishment of two states Palestine and Israel is inevitable because the psychological barrier between the two people is being eroded.
In the last two decades, the Israelis, especially the Jews in Diaspora, insisted on calling a Palestinian an Arab on the basis that there are no Palestinians in their midst; it was what late Golda Meier PM loved to dream and had blurting: “There is no Palestinian”.
The same process was true to the Palestinians, especially the Palestinian refugees, who preferred to view Israel as a Zionist State, a cancerous State, an artificial State, and an apartheid racist State (which are entirely valid, since the Palestinians owned the land and were forcefully displaced to made room for new comers from everywhere in the world).
Now, both parties have agreed to recognize the existence of one another (a sort of extending legitimacy to the existence of one another).
The tearing down of the psychological barrier is assumed making room for rational and pragmatic policies and programs: the two parties have got to live side by side since no one is about to vanish anytime soon.
Amos Oz was in favor of the two latest preemptive Israeli wars in Lebanon (2006) and Gaza (2008) on the ground that the wars should not last more than two days! Sorry, Amos was disappointed that the pre-emptive wars dragged on for more than a month; as if this 70 years old activist knew no better of the Israel’s history of making damaging wars.
Amos Oz resumed his talk: “Israel cannot be but a deception since it is a State built on a dream.”
There are so many ideological tendencies within the Jewish Diaspora and they all converge into Israel to apply their particular ideological dreams. The result is a vast deception of what the State of Israel came to represent.
The other Jewish Zionist, French Jean Daniel, is the founder of “Nouvel Observateur” and the author of “Is God fanatic?” and “The Jewish prison”.
Daniel is terribly worried that the Jewish Zionist lobby in France is rallying to the Likud extreme right party (late terrorist and Menuhin Begin PM) while the Zionist lobby in the USA is splintering to support Barack Obama’s resolution of a two State.
Daniel is worried at the emergence of religious fanaticism on both sides. To Daniel, this situation is a very serious deterioration and handicap to fruitful peace negotiation.
I contend that religious fanaticism is a consequence of the growing proportion of citizens on both sides who prefer rational and pragmatic negotiations in order to live in peace.
The fanatics are running out of excuses Not to establishing two separate States and have no recourse but to appealing to mythical divine claims in order to usurp Palestinian rights.
I understand the Palestinian religious fanaticism: after over 60 years of the creation of Israel, the Palestinian is still a legal non-entity. The Palestinian religious extremists must infuse divine rights to Justice and Humanity, since the successive US government, Congress, and Senate refused legitimate natural and human rights to Palestinians as a nation.
The two kinds of religious fanaticism (Jewish and Islam) differ in the long-term. Palestinian fanaticism will fade away as the Palestinian State is on the right track and seriously guaranteed by the UN, the USA, and the European Union.
The Zionist fanaticism is not to fade away; simply because it would never relinquish its preferential treatments and many advantages extended by the Israeli government budget, financial private supports, and religious monopoly over daily life of the Israeli citizens.
“A shadow swept me off”
Posted by: adonis49 on: February 15, 2010
“A shadow swept me off”; (Feb. 15, 2010)
“I was an exuberant kid and first in my class in New England. I gladly helped my classmates in their homework and we were good bodies regardless of the color of the skin in this ramshackle wood small school. One day, an idea made its way to distributing invitation cards; it cost 10 cents the packet of cards. Then, a tall blonde newcomer girl refused my invitation card and looked at me with a haughty contempt. A shadow swept me off: I raised a veil between me and the white schoolmates: I since felt that I was looked at as different and separate.
Since then, I never had the desire to tear down that veil or to surreptitiously slide across it. Everything behind that veil was despicable and opted to live in a mythical world of a sky more blue than theirs when I outdone my schoolmates in study and in running games.
With years behind me, this veil was a shred of desires for the same opportunities enjoyed by whites. I lived with double visions of this world, mostly though the world of how white folks wanted to view me. I was living this double conscious of being American and a black, two souls, two systems of values, two irreconcilable struggle within a single body. I was fighting the good fight to remaining whole.” (The souls of black people, 1903)
William Edward Du Bois (1868-1963) was the first US black to earn a PhD in Harvard. Du Bois was born in Massachusetts and died in Ghana; the same night that Martin Luther King was assassinated. Du Bois was the architect behind “Encyclopedia Africana” and co-founder of NAACP in 1910. “Whites lay down the norms as universal; blacks have to exist within the vision of what white people have of them” Du Bois wrote.
“I was one year old; mother was made to separate from me”: Frederick Douglas (1818-1895)
Posted by: adonis49 on: February 15, 2010
“I was one year old; mother was made to separate from me”; (Feb. 15, 2010)
“I was 7 of age when mother died, or around that. I don’t know the date of birth: No records were kept for slaves. Slaves were told they were born during periods of sawing, reaping, gathering cherries, or extraordinary events. Horses too had no birth certificates: it drove me mad because everyone knew my father was the white master of the plantation.
Masters had win-win situations: they sent black slave mothers to another remote plantation, a year after caring for the child. Worn out female slaves would bring up the kids instead of the mothers.
Mother used to walk over 10 miles at night to see me occasionally. When I woke up she was long gone: she is to be whipped if she shows up at the remote plantation late to work.
I think that I saw mother 5 times in her short life; and only at night.” (Memories of a slave, 1846)
Frederick Douglas (1818-1895) was born in Maryland (Talbot County, USA) and fled the plantation in 1838 to the northern states after forging a safe exit conduct. He became a brilliant orator within the abolitionist movement and gave conferences in England.
Douglas was officially freed in 1846 and was close to President Abraham Lincoln. Douglas convinced Lincoln to enroll blacks in the Federal army during the civil war. Douglas was appointed president of the Bank of Freed Slaves, then consul in Haiti.
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