- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
It works like this : first of all, provocateur #1 posts a remark that actually does tar all Israelis, or even all Jews, with the same brush, as warmongers, then provocateur #2 cites provocateur #1 - not just here, but elsewhere - as proof that "Glenn Greenwald's columns give aid and comfort to anti Semites." It is coordinated smearing, and you won't beat it by trying to deflect it every time it happens. I fear that you have to pay someone to censor the comments threads, if you really want to defeat this tactic.
As to Glenn's original and slightly unhappy phrasing - "It isn't just the American neocons, but also the Israelis, who are escalating the "Attack Iran" campaign. The Jerusalem Post yesterday "reported" that ..." - I think that he would have been wiser to put "It isn't just the American neocons, but also the Israeli neocons, who are escalating ..." since that is what he actually meant, and it is accurate to describe the JPost as an outlet for "the Israeli neocons."
About the question of whether "the neocons" are "fascists," or "trotskyites," or both, I would just point out that Ledeen himself has never been either a fascist or a trotskyite, but he has written on fascism, and it is true that Jabotinsky, the founder of revisionist zionism, accepted the support of Mussolini in training his cadres for a period. Given the conditions of the time, this is not as bizarre as it may seem in retrospect, but it does make for some great quotes, like this, from Lenni Brenner:
The March 1936 issue of L'Idea Sionistica, the magazine of the Revisionists' Italian branch, described the ceremonies attendant to the inauguration of the Betar squad's new headquarters: "The order 'Attention! A triple chant ordered by the squad's commanding officer ''Viva L'Italia! Viva Il Re! Viva Il Duce! resounded, followed by the benediction which rabbi Aldo Lattes invoked in Italian and in Hebrew for God, for the king and for Il Duce ... Giovinezza [the Fascist Party's anthem] was sung with much enthusiasm by the Betarim."
