Saturday, October 08, 2005

I'M HONORED

This shiny happy website lists me thusly:
Duss, Matthew: This Seattle, Washington New Age Hippie Jew feels that Israel is an illegal occupier and colonizer. Really? Read this. He also a supporter of far left Jewish group, Brit Tzedek.

Is my writing really that good? Or is it my self-deprecating manner, my vaguely Semitic good looks, or my mania for smoked fish and latkes? As it happens, I am in fact not a member of the tribe, but thanks. I am a supporter of Brit Tzedek V'Shalom though, so they got me there.

The charge of "new age hippie," however, is one I consider worthy of pistols at dawn.

Readers with strong stomachs can follow the "Read this" link to get an idea of the sort of racist historical revisionism which characterizes that website, and which also prevails among many hardcore Zionists. Their central claim, most infamously elucidated in Joan Peters' book From Time Immemorial (which one might call The Bell Curve of Middle East Studies, though that might be giving Peters' work too much credit), is that there is no such thing as a Palestinian people, that the al Nakhba refugees of 1948 were recent Arab immigrants from surrounding regions who had been attracted to Palestine by Jewish enterprise and were "occupying" Jewish ancestral land, and that the Dome of the Rock was actually built in 1947 and specially painted to look "aged" (okay, Peters actually doesn't make that last claim, but it would not be out of place.) The book has been widely discredited, but unfortunately its central thesis, like so many poisonous-but-scholarly-sounding lies which serve to justify bigotry, persists.

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