Zizek, Israel & fellatio for fellow travellers

Zizek writes in the Independent-

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that, if you are attacked for the same text by both sides in a political conflict, this is one of the few reliable signs that you are on the right path.

Sartre had shit for brains. It is when both sides celebrate your great discovery and seek to claim you for one of their own that you know you are on the right track. By contrast, if everyone says you are stupid fuckwit then maybe it is time to get that job delivering pizzas your Mummy promised to find you if only you'd stop playing with yourself so incessantly.

In the last decades, I have been attacked by a number of very different political actors (often on account of the same text!) for antisemitism, up to advocating a new Holocaust, and for perfidious Zionist propaganda (see the last issue of the antisemetic Occidental Observer).

Zizek hasn't been attacked by 'political actors'. He is a cretin without any influence anywhere. He may be attacked by other cretins. But they are not actors of any type. Making faces at the mirror isn't acting unless you are Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver saying 'you talkin' to me?'

So I think I’ve earned the right to comment on the recent accusations against the Labour Party regarding its alleged tolerance of antisemitism.

But I earned that right simply by doing the thing. Contra Zizek, nothing more is needed. I didn't say to my neighbor- 'kindly attack me for some shite I wrote so that I can earn the right to write some other type of shite.' On the other hand, it is true my neighbor attacked me nevertheless. It tried to bite me. Puppy dogs can do that you know.

I, of course, indisputably reject antisemitism in all its forms

I don't. I welcome antisemitism which comes to me in the form of a delicious cake. The first thing I do is to eat up the frosting which reads 'fuck off to Israel, if you love it so much, Iyer you fat black cunt'.

, including the idea that one can sometimes ”understand” it, as in: “considering what Israel is doing on the West Bank, one shouldn’t be surprised if this gives birth to antisemitic reactions”.

This is silly. One shouldn't be surprised if some action by a member, or members, of a particular community gives rise to a prejudice against that entire community. It isn't antisemitic to say 'it would not be surprising, if Semites were actually doing all the things some of them are charged with doing, that antisemitic sentiments began to flourish'.

More precisely, I reject the two symmetrical versions of this last argument: “we should understand occasional Palestinian antisemitism since they suffer a lot” as well as “we should understand aggressive Zionism in view of the Holocaust.”

Zizek rejects both not because they are silly but because he is. We readily forgive a Palestinian who, in the heat of the moment, utters an antisemitic slur because we say 'the man lost his Mom to an Israeli bullet'. What would be unforgivable is if we refused to link Zionism to pogroms and Holocausts. Why? We would be behaving in a manner less than human.

One should, of course, also reject the compromise version: “both sides have a point, so let’s find a middle way…”.

No one should not. Either there are genuine grievances on both sides- in which case a modus vivendi involves finding a middle way- or else there is no moral reason we should get involved in the dispute.

Along the same lines, we should supplement the standard Israeli point that the (permissible) critique of Israeli policy can serve as a cover for the (unacceptable) antisemitism with its no less pertinent reversal: the accusation of antisemitism is often invoked to discredit a totally justified critique of Israeli politics.

Why should we do so? Why not admit we have no locus standi? Nothing we say will make the slightest bit of difference. All we can do, and all that Zizek is doing here, is advertising an imbecility no one was not already aware of.

Where, exactly, does legitimate critique of Israeli policy become antisemitism?

When it uses the word Jews instead of Israelis in a condemnatory context.

More and more, mere sympathy for the Palestinian resistance is condemned as antisemitic.

This is the crux of the problem. I am aware that my unconscious plays tricks on me. It does not say to me 'you are a fat greedy bastard'. Thus, if I find, at the end of the day, that I've eaten up all the chocolate eclairs I bought to hand around the office tomorrow, I say to myself 'I wonder why I did that? Perhaps I'm under too much work related stress. How strange!' However, this is not a sentiment I care to express to my work colleagues. They would burst out laughing at the idea that I actually do any productive work.

Similarly, I may be disguising my prejudice against people of another ethnicity by pretending to myself that what I really object to is some hardship others of their race have inflicted on a people remote from my sphere of activity.

Take the two-state solution: while decades ago it was the standard international position, it is more and more proclaimed a threat to Israel's existence and thus antisemitic.

Why? It is because two decades ago Syria looked okay, Lebanon was recovering, ISIS hadn't yet reared its hydra head- people thought the Palestinians would sober up and Arafat's successors would show some basic level of competence.

Now, the picture has changed back to what prevailed between '38 and '68 when Arabs in Palestine were seen as incapable of state formation. They would have to be under the tutelage of Egypt, if it could be persuaded to accept so poisoned a chalice, or Hashemite Jordan or (the British solution) receive a subsidy from the Jewish portion of the land- i.e. function like a Reservation or 'Bantustan'.

The other thing which has changed is that, Globally, politics has moved in a chauvinistic and right-ward direction. Moreover, the ubiquity of Social Media means that we all come into contact with utterly vicious hate-mongers spewing their bile at all the usual targets as well as some idiosyncratic ones (not that my jihad against Iyengars is not perfectly justified).

Things get really ominous when Zionism itself evokes the traditional antisemitic cliché of roots.

Zionism did so because Judaism and its Revealed Text have always insisted on the indissoluble link between the Jewish People and the 'Promised Land'. That promise was made by the All High not Theodore Herzl.

Alain Finkielkraut wrote in 2015 in a letter to Le Monde: “The Jews, they have today chosen the path of rooting.”

The guy is a silly Leftie who supports the crackpot 'two-state solution'.

It is easy to discern in this claim an echo of Heidegger who said, in a Der Spiegel interview, that all essential and great things can only emerge from our having a homeland, from being rooted in a tradition.

How is this surprising? Heidi is part of the same bogus academic availability cascade as the stupid Frenchman or the cretin Zizek. All these fuckers can do is echo each others imbecility.

The irony is that we are dealing here with a weird attempt to mobilise antisemitic clichés in order to legitimize Zionism: antisemitism reproaches the Jews for being rootless; Zionism tries to correct this failure by belatedly providing Jews with roots.

How is this ironic? If you call me a thief it is not at all ironic if I reply 'I am not a thief. I have kept receipts, or can otherwise prove title, for every one of my current possessions.'
 The anti-semite said the Jews had no home country and so could, or should, be massacred. The Jews then retook their ancient homeland and fucked up anybody who tried to fuck with them. That isn't irony, it is merely doing the only sensible thing it is in your power to do. The fact is the Jews succeeded in creating an economically and militarily viable state. The Palestinians failed. There can't be a 'two state solution' because the Palestinians can't form a state.

No wonder many conservative antisemites ferociously support the expansion of the State of Israel.

Conservative anti-semites hate Muslims more than Jews because, currently, it is crazy Muslims who are trying to blow them up or hack them to pieces. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

However, the trouble with Jews today is that they are now trying to get roots in a place which was for thousands of years inhabited by other people.

 The Americans and Australians and so forth experience the same trouble. In any case, there were always some Jews in the Holy Land. Israel isn't the only place which has seen 'demographic replacement'. Lebanon was once Christian majority. Bhutan, it is true, expelled the Nepalese- which is why it claims to be the Happiest country in the world- while Nepalese refugees in the United States have the highest suicide rate of any ethnic group.

That’s why I find obscene a recent claim by Ayelet Shaked, the former Israeli justice minister: “The Jewish People have the legal and moral right to live in their ancient homeland.” What about the rights of Palestinians?

Many Palestinians do live in Israel and have some rights. The difference between the Jews and the Arabs is that the former, not the latter, were willing to accept partition. The latter wanted nothing less than complete ethnic cleansing of the other party. But that meant war and the Arab military performance, probably for purely institutional reasons, was markedly inferior to that of the Jews.

For me, the only way out of this conundrum is the ethical one: there is ultimately no conflict between the struggle against antisemitism and the struggle against what the State of Israel is now doing on the West Bank. The two struggles are part of one and the same struggle for emancipation.

But Zizek himself is no more a part of either struggle than I am.

Let’s mention a concrete case. Some weeks ago, Zarah Sultana, a Labour candidate, apologised for a Facebook post in which she backed the Palestinian right to “violent resistance”: “I do not support violence and I should not have articulated my anger in the manner I did, for which I apologize.”

Sultana told a guy to move to Israel. That's racist. How would she like it if she were told to go to Pakistan? She is young and has apologized so let us drop the matter. No doubt, some cousin of hers is just itching to stab her for not covering her face. By pretending to be a warrior in the jihad against Israel, she may be allowed to live a few years longer.

I fully support her apology, we should not play with violence, but I nonetheless feel obliged to add that what Israel is now doing on West Bank is also a form of violence.

And what Zizek is doing when, or if, he washes his filthy beard is violence against the millions of microbes which reside there.

The fact is, in every decade, millions of people in the West find themselves evicted from property that they think off as their home. Sometimes coercive means are used to effect these evictions. The homeless as well as the traveler community often find themselves moved on from place to place. Why bother about what is happening in a far country when many of our own kith and kin are at risk of losing their homes?

If we consider it illegitimate for a Jew to acquire property previously owned by an Arab, why are we not defending our own people's rights to property which has been alienated to people of a different race who may only have migrated to our country within living memory?

No doubts that Israel sincerely wants peace on the West Bank; occupiers by definition want peace in their occupied land, since it means no resistance.

The occupied want peace, not resistance, even more fervently, because the occupier kills not just resisters but also innocent bystanders in an asymmetric manner. This is not to say the day may not come when an Israeli Trump decides to simply slaughter the Arabs- perhaps in retaliation for a WMD attack. Peace is the best option for the weaker, not the stronger, party.

So if Jews are in any way threatened in the UK, I unconditionally and unequivocally condemn it and support all legal measures to combat it–but am I permitted to add that Palestinians in the West Bank are much more under threat than Jews in the UK?

You are permitted to make a fool of yourself. Indeed, there seems little other point to your existence. Jews in the UK are smart and tough. We know that if they choose to retaliate, they will do so in a far more effective manner than knife wielding nutters of Pakistani or Somali descent. Muslim terrorism is bad enough. Do we really want to see what Jewish terrorism would look like? Don't be silly. The State will protect the Jews because if it doesn't the Jews will find allies and exterminate their persecutors.

Without mentioning Corbyn by name, the Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis recently wrote in an article for the Times that “a new poison–sanctioned from the top–has taken root in the Labour Party.” He conceded: “It is not my place to tell any person how they should vote,” though went on to add: “When December 12 arrives, I ask every person to vote with their conscience. Be in no doubt, the very soul of our nation is at stake.” I find this presentation of a political choice as a purely moral one ethically disgusting–it reminds me of how, decades ago, the Catholic Church in Italy did not explicitly order citizens to vote for Christian Democracy, but just said that they should vote for a party which is Christian and democratic.  

Zizek is being silly. Italian Catholicism was right to champion Democratic rather than Fascist or Monarchical Parties. Since some Communists and many Socialists claimed to be truly Christian, the Church's advise had some point to it. At the margin, if you are a Socialist or a Marxist, support the candidacy of the politician who considers the message of Christ to be compatible with that Credo.

Today, the charge of antisemitism is more and more addressed at anyone who deviates from the acceptable left-liberal establishment towards a more radical left–can one imagine a more repellent and cynical manipulation of the Holocaust?

Certainly. Anytime anyone refuses to give me a bj, I could argue that failure to do the needful is a crime similar in kind to the atrocious genocide the Nazis committed against innocent men who simply happened to like getting their cocks sucked.

When protests against the Israel Defense Forces' activities in the West Bank are denounced as an expression of antisemitism, and (implicitly, at least) put in the same line as Holocaust deniers–that is to say, when the shadow of the Holocaust is permanently evoked in order to neutralise any criticism of Israeli military and political operations–it is not enough to insist on the difference between antisemitism and the critique of particular measures of the State of Israel.

But why insist on anything in the first place? The real issue here is the complicity of the entire Western world in granting legitimacy to what is in effect Holocaust denial by people who won't suck my cock on demand.

One should go a step further and claim that it is the State of Israel that, in this case, is desecrating the memory of Holocaust victims, ruthlessly using them as an instrument to legitimise present political measures.

One should go several steps further and claim that it is the disgusting state of Zizek's own beard which is desecrating the memory of Holocaust victims by putting of people who want fellatio from demanding it off him.

As Mirvis wrote, the soul of our nation is indeed at stake here–but also, the soul of the Jewish nation. Will Jews follow Finkielkraut and “take roots”, using their sacred history as an ideological excuse, or will they remember that ultimately we are all strangers in a strange land?

Jews are smart. Fuck will they want to follow some stupid fucker? Has he cured cancer? No? Then tell him to fuck off.

Will Jews allow Israel to turn into another fundamentalist nation-state, or remain faithful to the legacy that made them a key factor in the rise of modern civil society?

Fundamentalist nation-states are utterly shite. Jews are smart. Zizek isn't. He should concentrate on cleaning his beard so that he can properly honor the memory of Holocaust victims by giving everybody a b.j.

(Remember that there is no Enlightenment without the Jews.) For me, to fully support Israeli politics in the West Bank is a betrayal not just of some abstract global ethics, but of the most precious part of Jewish ethical tradition itself.

But this supposed betrayal has no consequences whatsoever. Nobody cares about Zizek or Frinkilfart or any other cretinous Credentialized shithead. The most precious part of every, not just the Jewish, ethical tradition consists of ignoring stupid gobshites.  If he really is so much holier than us, why does he not clean his beard and get down on his knees to offer fellatio to every fellow traveler on the public thoroughfare?