From: David Lubkin (extropy@unreasonable.com)
Date: Tue Apr 23 2002 - 15:51:31 MDT
At 09:15 AM 4/23/2002 -0700, jeff davis wrote:
><snippage of stuff that departs the credible universe>
>
>I'm perfectly willing to take the heat for the Schoenman piece, but not
>anything at the Balkan Unity site.
The Balkan Unity site refers to a weekly radio program by Schoenman, on
which he promises to "document the role of the U.S. government in
instigating and orchestrating the events of September 11th."
The guy is clearly a loon.
I did a web search on "Hidden History of Zionism". Virtually all the sites
that refer to it are either self-described Marxist or Socialist (like
socialistaction.org, marxismalive.org and marxists.de) or sites that focus
on conspiracy theories. Schoenman is described (in admiration) as an
"American Jewish Trotskyist."
I looked for a rebuttal of his book but couldn't find one. Everyone
outside his cadre seems to be ignoring him.
Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary evidence. I didn't see it in
the book.
What I saw:
(1) Profuse footnoting (which encourages you to think that the work is
scholarly) but no links to any of the sources so that one could confirm
that he accurately reflected the source material. (One site that discussed
his work suggested that a lot of his references were lifted straight from
other authors, particularly Noam Chomsky.)
(2) Correct translations of names from Hebrew.
(3) Some correct names, titles, quotations, and dates, and some that were
wrong.
(4) The first half of the book makes an attempt at appearing
objective. The second half is much more polemic. By the end, you expect
him to rise to his feet, and shout "Viva, Che!"
(5) His book is absolutely black-and-white. The Jews / Zionists / Israelis
are evil, and are not credited with doing anything right, except those who
have the integrity to report on how evil the rest of their society is. The
Arabs / Palestinians are noble, victims, and have never done anything
wrong. Americans and Europeans are good when they act in opposition to the
Zionists and evil when they are in cahoots.
(6) He omits many historic events that don't fit his thesis, like the 1929
Arab riots in Palestine, the collaboration between the British and the
Palestinian Jews to fight the Nazis during the latter part of WW II, or the
Mossad teams that tracked down and assassinated Nazis in hiding.
(7) He gets some facts hilariously wrong, like in chapter 4, where he
writes that in Israel, "in order to be entitled to live on land, to lease
land, or to work on land one must prove at least four generations of
maternal Jewish descent." I know this is wrong from personal experience:
we didn't have to, and neither did the Baptists down the road. But it also
should appear absurd to a casual observer; if it were true, where do the
1,000,000 Arabs who are Israeli citizens live and work?
(8) Smear by false reasoning. In many places, his logic is of the
form: "Nazis had a salute. They were evil. The Irgun had a salute.
Therefore, they were also evil."
(9) I was pleased, however, to see friends of the family mentioned. My
father designed advanced technology for the Israeli (and American) military
and was science and technology advisor for the Liberal wing of the Likud.
Had we not returned to the US, he would have been in the Knesset when Begin
won. So he knew a lot of the generals and cabinet ministers cited. I think
some of the war criminals were at my Bar Mitzvah reception....
-- David.
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