On what must have been a pleasant autumn evening, a group of moderately educated young people met and discussed favorably the following propositions:

The Red Cross is a bad organization because it is neutral. Neutral organizations are bad.

The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a sexist document.

The Middle East peace process is bad for the Arab Palestinians.

Foreign aid is bad for the Palestinians.

The sure path to liberation of the Catholic Philippines and gay people is to join the cause of Muslim extremism and wipe out Jewish self- determination. Only Zionism stands in the way of liberation of these oppressed peoples.

Bad people are always white and probably Zionist. Good people are colored and are therefore oppressed.

This meeting did not take place in the closed ward of a mental institution or in Kim Il Sung University in PyongYang, People’s Republic of Korea, but in an American University campus financed by the state of California. The attendees were undergraduates and graduate students, America’s leaders of tomorrow. A partial transcript is here: BDS to Destroy Israel.

The “teach-in” was sponsored by an improbable coalition of Muslims, Filipino Catholics and gay people. A partial list of sponsors:

Al Awda – The Palestine Right to Return Coalition, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), Anak Bayan East Bay, Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), BAYAN USA, The Bay Area Campaign to End Israeli Apartheid (BACEIA), General Union of Palestine Students SFSU (GUPS), Justice for Palestinians San Jose, NorCal Friends of Sabeel, Muslim Student Association Berkeley (MSA), Queers Undermining Israeli Terrorism (QUIT), San Francisco Women in Black, Seventh Native American Generation (SNAG), Students for Justice in Palestine Berkley (SJP), United States Palestinian Communities Network (USPCN)

A very broad coalition supports this sort of Loughnerism. Perhaps Laughner’s only misfortune is that he did not focus on “Zionists” – he could have had massive support. The Quakers (“Friends”) of course were (nonviolently) in favor of genocide and the Hamas, against the peace process and the Red Cross. BAYAN, in case you are wondering, is a Filipino organization, reputedly a communist front, possibly associated with Filipino Muslims.. Evidently, they convinced themselves that Teddy Roosevelt was a Zionist, that the Spanish monarchy was Jewish or Zionist, and that it is the Jews (“Zionists”) (who else?) who are responsible for the current ills of their homeland.

Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jews. If the students meant to give the Jews a different horizon for national liberation, they did not say so. Filipino nationalism and Arab Palestinian are good according to the students, Jewish nationalism is evil, because, one supposes, Jews are supposed to be evil. They all seemed to agree, as usual, that thrashing the Kikes would save their cause:

… the center of all our work has to be fighting against Zionism – …. The end goal is the end to Zionism that should be the end goal. And unless that is the focus and center of your activism and organizing when it comes to Palestine and joint struggle and solidarity then there’s a problem, because that really is the key to ending, or the goal to liberation also of Palestinians is the ending of Zionism…

If you aren’t interested in whacking the Jews, these people don’t want your help.

That was the comparatively coherent part. It unmasks the various sponsors (including the Quakers, who may as well remove their pacifist masks) for what they are. It shows, for any who may have doubted, what the struggle is about: genocide and hate mongering. Here is a bit more:

There’s sort of a power solidarity and joint struggle and I’m going to explain them both how I see it. Power dynamics is central to these different definitions I want to talk about when it comes to solidarity. The first one which I call Power Solidarity is folks who have a lot of power in society in terms of class, race, gender and sexuality. So, for example, a heterosexual white male, upper class white male is someone who has power in our society. And a lot of folks who fit those identities are in solidarity with the Palestinian people. And then I see something called Joint Struggle. Joint Struggle are folks on race, class, gender and sexuality who experience a lot of struggle depending on how they identify. And the term Joint is key here. They struggle jointly with the Palestinian people. Because the Palestinian people suffer according to race, class, gender and sexuality . The problem area is in this power solidarity, is folks who have a lot of power who tend to not have a justice centered approach to solidarity. So, in other words, they take up space from those who’ve experienced the most injustice…

…The Peace Process isn’t trying to come up with a just answer to the Palestinian cause or what’s going on…

…Humanitarianism is the prevalent ideology of NGO’s, organizations like the Red Cross. And these organizations make little distinction between the oppressor and the oppressed. Red Cross in its mission statement says its impartial, neutral and independent irrespective of the people involved and the situation on the ground…

…the UN Declaration of Human Rights instead of granting a right for sexual freedom actually has language that does the opposite…

These young people, and their holier-than- thou Quaker sponsors, are against the peace process, humanitarianism, the Red Cross and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. If you’re wondering about the connection between Catholics in the Philippines and Muslims in Gaza, here are some attempts to explain it:

…I would like more folks to start speaking of solidarity in terms of joint struggle especially folks in this room, is a lot of different communities, here we have Anak Bayan, SJP who are folks from communities of color who experience different types of injustices similar to that of Palestinians and that’s why we’re joint struggle with each other….

...The first thing is that in addition to a common shared struggle. Another thing I want to focus on – is there is a common enemy. Right? So, in the Philippines… So, common struggle and a common enemy. So, I want to talk a little bit first about the common enemy. Who is the common enemy and how do we identify who this is, right. And how we look at it, is to ask the questions “why”. Why is the United States funding the Philippine military to advance its agenda in the Philippines? Why is the United States funding Israel to advance its agenda in the Middle East? So, just to back up real quick – a lot of it is deeply rooted on the geo-political perspective of the United States, right…

Barack Obama to the contrary notwithstanding, the U.S. is “white.” White is bad. The Jews (“Zionists) must be part of the evil plot, right? Where do gay people and Quakers fit in? It doesn’t matter, right? It makes no difference that the young people in this auditorium never saw Hamas leader Ismail Hanniyeh, who is white, or his Jewish Ethiopian victims. Logic is bourgeois, facts are for pedants, right? The important thing is for American students in an American University who never did any useful work and never suffered in any way to rail against white oppression, right? The struggle is the important thing, right?

It is hard to understand why gay people and Filipino activists, possibly communists, would believe that their own cause could somehow be bettered by “ending Zionism” and furthering the advance of radical Islamism - but it seems that they do.

Young people, who have mostly never seen a real live Zionist, never lived in a Muslim country and have little background information about the Philippines or the Middle East, might accept these doctrines as valid. The reasoning behind them is no better or worse than that of Pohl Pot or Ulrike Meinhoff or Mao Tse Tung, but those doctrines were after all believed by millions, and they got “results.” Pohl Pot killed three million people in Cambodia. Ulrike Meinhof left a trail of victims and a cult of people who justified her “ideology,” Mao Tse Tung killed about 20 billion in China.

Next to these masters, Jared Loughner, who killed a small number of people in Arizona, was a pathetic failure. It was not his fault. He was not more illogical than the successful ideologists. He didn’t understand how to market his product and make it chic. He did not target “Zionists.” Therefore he was disowned and derided as insane. If Loughner had killed a respectable number of people, and if he had been backed by petrodollar- funded public relations, he would no doubt be written up by Time magazine as an anti-Zionist hero. At the very least, he would be given a column somewhere.

The gathering at Berkeley was a “teach in” in which the young attendees absorbed a way of thinking and a set of doctrines that would otherwise be the subject of psychiatric analysis. When one person thinks this way, he is isolated as a psychopath. When groups of people think this way, they have an “ideology.” It is organized and funded. The “ideology” of the teach-in will not be confined to eccentric student groups. Graduate students grow into professors, journalists and officials. Professors write texts. Officials make policy. Journalists determine how you perceive reality. Today’s student yahoo yelling incoherently about oppression is tomorrow’s authoritative opinion maker and policy maker.

What do these groups and their members have in common? The world is full of Jared Loughners. The do not really have a coherent picture of geography or politics. They hate. They fear. But some are more coherent than others. They can provide a voice, organize a demonstration, get weapons. Groups like these provide a warm home for the Jared Loughners of the world.

The Loughnerization of thought processes about Israel has been going on for years. It did not begin just now in Berkeley. The teach-in in Berkeley may be viewed as a dress rehearsal for the special meeting of the U.N. General Assembly that will be held in September 2011 in New York, to commemorate the Durban “anti-Racism” conference. The Berkeley Loughnerites and many others will no doubt send delegations as well. If not, they will be there in spirit, right? All the big names in Middle East Loughnerism will probably be there, including Muammar Ghaddafi of Libya and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian Jared Loughner. Think of the possibilities. Imagine if Loughner had an atom bomb instead of a lousy Glock!

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Psychopathology of anti-Israel discourse
www.zionism- israel.com/ israel_news/ 2011/01/25/ psychopathology- of-anti-israel- discourse/