Zionism's Reach

On Nakba day (15th May) this year, the Palestinian Embassy held a program at a local hotel in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

This was purely a Palestinian initiative. In the last thirty years, according to the embassy, there may have been one or two public discussions on Palestine in Bangladesh. Maybe.

The next day I looked up the major newspapers for any report, however skimpy, on the program. There was none. (Only an obscure local vernacular posted a 1 inch by 1 inch report.)

I have written before on the 'Biddable Intelligentsia'. But the intelligentsia is hyper-cautious: it doesn't wish to be seen to be contaminated even remotely by the Palestinian cause. That would jeopardize all that cash and career dished out by the United States and the western world in general.

The People of Egypt and Israel

We thought that America-backed dictators and their regimes were for Israel: now that Hosni Mubarak is gone, and the military has affirmed its ties to Israel, did The People object?

No.

Apart from the Muslim Brotherhood, I doubt if anybody in Egypt cares about the Palestinians. In fact, it would be easier to run a corrupt democracy than a corrupt autocracy, for then the west would have The People's consent to their pro-Israeli policy.

If there's one thing worse than a corrupt autocracy, it's a corrupt democracy: we know; in Bangladesh, we know.

Corrupting Morality

If I tell you to give $100 to a third person because then I will give you $200, are you being moral or corrupt? For this is how NGOs are financed by western donors. This is the final corruption: the corruption of morality.

Suppose, then, I tell you to preach democracy, and you get a further $100, are you sincere in your preaching? Psychologists call this 'cognitive dissonance' and it has been found that the lower the reward for lying about your true feelings, the greater the stress. No wonder donors pay handsomely to reduce stress.

What is at work here is that you never internalise the morality: it remains external and your whole life a sham. This is what western donors and we have done to ourselves.

Then I say, if you say anything about Palestine in public, you will lose all your $200, then naturally you clam up about Israel and Palestine. This is what has, in fact, happened: there is never any public discussion on Palestine in Bangladesh, according to the Palestinian Embassy. The anniversary of the death of Yasser Arafat goes unmarked and unnoticed, year after year, while the death of a democracy activist the preceding day in 1987 is regarded as a holy event.

Of course, there are subtler forms of corruption. I might tell you that if you speak about Palestine (in public), I will not give you a scholarship to a prestigious western university, or finance a junket abroad, or I'll blackball you from all academic events.

Thus, the finest part of our society - the thinkers - are the most corrupt.

The Mind of a Zionist

Louis Brandeis has been described as "A Robin Hood of the law" (The Economist, 26th September, 2009). And well might he be called that, for one of his cases has gone down in history as a fight for the little man, or, rather, the little woman.

Curt Muller, a laundry owner, was charged in 1905 with permitting a supervisor to require Mrs. E. Gotcher to work more than 10 hours and was fined $10.An Oregon law passed in 1903 prohibited women from working more than 10 hours in one day. The case went to the Supreme Court, where Muller's lawyer argued that the statute violated Mrs. Gotcher's Fourteenth Amendment right to due process by preventing her from freely contracting with her employer.

Brandeis produced data to establish that women needed to work fewer hours than men: the court agreed, stating that a woman “is properly placed in a class by herself, and legislation designed for her protection may be sustained, even when like legislation is not necessary for men, and could not be sustained.”

Again, in 1905, to remedy abuses by life-insurance firms, Brandeis devised a system, used in Massachusetts (from 1907), New York, and Connecticut, whereby life insurance was offered over the counter by savings banks at rates within the means of the average working man.

He became known as the people's attorney.

He was the first Jew to sit on the US Supreme Court (1916 - 1939). He must have been a remarkably sensitive as well as intelligent person. Although never a practicing Jew, he dedicated himself to supporting the Zionist cause of setting up a Jewish state in Palestine.

A man of his sensitivity must have lamented the lot of the American Indians as well as that of the Arabs who were to be displaced. It seems not.

He wrote: "As against the Bedouins, our pioneers are in a position not unlike the American settlers against the Indians."

He had an atom of pity for neither the Native Americans nor the Arabs: truly, a people's attorney, a veritable Robin Hood of the Law.

Nakba Day

CJIP - Nakba Day



Today is Nakba Day - the day when, in 1948, Palestinians were thrown out of their own country by the Zionists.

In Bangladesh, this day is never observed: in Bangladesh, we oscillate between a cursed nationalism and an absurd cosmopolitanism. We observe International Women's Day, May Day and even Valentine's Day, Mother's Day,....

But we never observe Nakba Day. If any proof were needed that our intellectuals are slaves of the Zionists, then this is it.

We must teach each other to observe Nakba Day, if only in private: to identify with the Palestinians in their suffering and in their humiliation. We have a home: they do not.