Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of MEMRI, has written a column for the New York Sun featuring his picks for the Top Ten Middle East Conspiracy Theories of 2005.
…And the number one conspiracy theory was:
Many Arab writers have attacked Detlev Mehlis, the lead U.N. investigator of the assassination of a former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Mr. Mehlis’s mother has been accused of being a prominent Zionist, as the Syrian judicial Web site Al-Nazaha reported on November 17. The deputy editor of the Egyptian government daily Al-Gumhouriyya, Abd Al-Wahhab ‘Adas, reported November 12 on his mother’s “major role in bringing Jews from Germany to Palestine” and that “Mehlis’s mother was killed on the Golan Heights by Syrian sniper fire.”
A bunch of Syrian puppets just put on a show in Lebanon. They held a National Conference to Support the Resistance against the Israeli-American plot to subjugate the Arab world under the banner of democracy.
I was kind of amused to read that they actually have a committee called the Permanent Conference to Confront the Zionist Cultural Invasion. They better act quickly, I see there are already bagel shops in downtown Beirut.
I guess the would-be revolutionaries over at The World Can’t Wait have been getting some negative reactions to their “Bush=Hitler” slogan. They’ve just published a lengthy essay rationalizing the parallels between Bush’s policies and, ya know, the Final Solution:
Even among those who hate the Bush regime, many feel that making such a comparison is too extreme or disrespects those who suffered and died under the Nazis.But the question must be asked, is it true? Are there similarities that merit recognition? Are there lessons we should be learning?
The answer is yes…It is faulty logic to dismiss the comparison to Hitler because George Bush hasn’t yet crushed all political opposition, murdered millions in death camps, or dispatched jack-booted storm troopers in the streets. The Nazis were genocidal before they committed or even planned genocide.
Didn’t anyone ever warn these people that the first person who mentions Hitler in a debate loses?
Blogger Laurence Simon is planning to launch a satirical Zionist conspiracy weblog at zog.isfullofcrap.com:
The goal is a simple one: We are acting as the Elders Of Zion and issuing commands to the millions of loyal followers to wreck society and drive the world to the brink of disaster to further cement our control over it.
I’ll wait and see how it turns out, though I can’t imagine it could be funnier than what the Elders have to say over at SimplyJews.
Happy New Year! (Unless, of course, you happen to be Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, or Zoroastrian)
Well, it’s vacation time. I’m leaving town and won’t be back until after the New Year. I have promised my family that I will not do any work or blogging while away, so I guess my next post will be in 2006.
Some recommended reading to pass the time during the holiday season: The Great Latke-Hamantash Debate. The best minds in academia debate which delicacy truly reigns supreme.
Best wishes for the New Year!
Well, I guess that Memri can no longer be disparaged as a disreputable “Zionist website,” now that the Dubai-based Al Jazeera magazine has just reprinted a transcript from Memri.
The transcript they chose? David Duke’s interview on Syrian television during his recent “goodwill tour” in Damascus.
And here’s the really surreal part. The editors have added the following introduction to the transcript:
Unfortunately many believe that Zionism is another synonym for Judaism, believing that the entire Jewish people are responsible for the actions of the Zionist government and the current bloodshed which has tainted the world in the last decades. This is a grave mistake!Below are excerpts from an interview with the American white supremacist David Duke, a former Louisiana State Representative and former leader of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the United States, aired on Syrian TV on last month, which draws people’s attention to the Zionist agenda, correcting the widespread misconception about the link between Judaism and Zionism.
Uh, let me get this straight…they published an interview with neo-Nazi David Duke to make the case that there’s no link between anti-semitism and anti-zionism? My brain hurts…
Fascinating article: The important role that Jews played in creating Indian cinema.
Ooops! The perils of having the “J” and “N” keys so close together on a computer keyboard.
Professor David Biale, director of the program in Jewish studies at U.C. Davis, argues that the campaign against anti-Israel bias and anti-semitism on U.S. college campuses is exaggerating the scope of the problem, and is possibly counterproductive:
It is interesting that those most vociferous in claiming pervasive or endemic anti-Semitism — like [Martin] Kramer, Daniel Pipes and Gary Tobin — don’t actually teach at American universities. From the outside, it may appear that a hateful comment by a professor represents the whole institution. From the inside, the picture is often very different.For example, when Palestinian professor Joseph Massad at Columbia University addressed an Israeli student in a fashion that certainly deserved censure, those eager to find an anti-Semitic conspiracy ended up turning him into a martyr and guaranteeing him tenure. Colleagues at Columbia have told me that their prior doubts about this instructor were drowned out by the din of external propaganda.
Before we say that the sky is falling, let’s keep some perspective. As someone who regularly lectures in France, I think I know what real anti-Semitism looks like on a university campus. And as someone who teaches the Holocaust, I have a sense of what it was like to be a Jewish student at the University of Berlin in 1933 or the University of Warsaw in 1938. We are very, very far from those situations and in a time when we have real enemies, let’s not inflate those who only marginally exist.
