Neil DeGrasse Tyson has infectious enthusiasm. I can't think of a better spokesperson for the scientific community.

I'm glad QM is throwing "Geraldo Rivera" in as a spokesperson for the left. What a joke.

O'Reilley baited him from the first question, and it was over before it started. The spokesperson for an antagonistic group like that should be someone who can keep calm, not get defensive, stick to his three talking points and divert everything Bill says towards one of them without giving him the chance to argue. What a waste of a publicity opportunity. The only thing they talked about the entire interview was whether "scam" was an insult or not. After this interview, I certainly still have no idea why this groups exists, what their goals are, and if there even was a thought-out goal for this campaign.

I'm an atheist and I hate O'Reilley, but I thought it was an insult to religious people to say it's a scam. It's a stupid campaign if it's supposed to get atheists out of the pews because it's raised the cost of leaving. Now, to get out, not only will these people have to confront their families and social groups, change their public identity, and go through whatever other anticipated stress is preventing them from just leaving, but now they'll also have to admit to giving their lives over to a scam. In other words, this campaign just made it more attractive to stay in the church, and perhaps even become more militant about it.

Can you think of a better response to the Teabagger movement begun by the marketing department of Fox News? It's corperate interest vs corperate interest, at least it's happening in front of the camera this time. And with Stewart as spokesperson, some good might come of it. >> ^dag:

I'd be happer if this wasn't run by Viacom marketing.

I like how the spokesperson defends it as a way to shame people into losing weight.

Don't get me wrong, I'm against coddling obese people, but there is a difference between people who are simply overweight which is normal, and the morbidly obsese, which is NOT normal.

6'1" and 230lbs is not obese. It's overweight, sure, but being overweight isn't the problem, its the truly obese people that are the problem. I like how even the tiny girl right away said that while she liked it, it just wouldn't work in reality.

Besides, this isn't about shaming fat people into losing weight, it's about maximizing profits. The obesity epidemic is just a convenient excuse for airlines to hold passengers hostage for more money.

Wow, wth is going on in that CGI?

Translation:

Sarah Palin plans to run for President in 2012. In 2008, Republican presidential nominee Biden selects Palin to be his sidekick. At the time, very few people knew who she was. When the two lost the election, they parted ways, but Palin became the conservative party's hottie queen and rapidly gained popularity.

A <sarcasm> creditworthy news channel </sarcasm> invited her as a celebrity spokesperson to discuss various debated issues such as the BP Gulf oil spill.

Her family life had also come under public scrutiny. Rumors suggest that her daughter is following in her father's footsteps (?) and will be starring in a reality TV show.

Some people are concerned that she lacks experience but she is confident that she has a strong grasp of national policies.

As she grew in fame, Palin also worked to influence the local politics of New York City. She also invented new vocabulary and compared herself to Shakespeare.

This year, her political action committee, SarahPAC, has already fundraised $1.3 million USD. Such an aggressive act to raise funds has lead people to suspect whether she will be squaring off with Obama during the presidential election of 2012. If Palin is elected, it will represent the American people's willingness to defend conservative principles and "refudiate" Obama.

The NAACP did not call the entire tea party racist.

This is the same kind of thing where Obama says his health care plan will not have "death panels" and yet at then in a few weeks he recess appoints a guy to be in charge of rationing health care. I will dissassemble the weasel-speak of the NAACP, if I may...

http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/07/16/tea.party.resolution/

Instead of joining us to repudiate racism, Tea Party leaders have attempted a tit for tat and demanded that we condemn the New Black Panther Party for reported hate speech.

This statement implies that the Tea Party has not repudiated racism. This is a blatant falsehood. When racism shows up, the national movement has condemned it. They do so repeatedly.

http://thenationalteapartyfederation.com/press_room.html

"The Federation does not and will not tolerate any form of racism, violence or hate speech... We believe to our core that racism and hate speech have no place in civil political discourse and debate..."

So Jealous & the NAACP are full of crap. The Tea Party does condemn racism. That doesn't stop left wing astroturf from showing up to promulgate it, nor does it stop racist hanger-ons who just show up. But the accusation that the Tea Party does not reject racism is patently false.

"And the New Black Panther Party is not a member of the NAACP. What we are asking the Tea Party to eschew is not the racism of some outside organization, but the bigotry within."

So - because the NBP aren't members of the NAACP means that their racism is OK and not worth condeming? A lot of the people who are accused of being racists aren't members of the Tea party officially (show me the proof) - so by his logic that makes them OK, right? This is a hypocritical double-standard of the worst kind and for the NAACP to make this argument makes them the lowest form of race hucksters.

With increased influence comes increased responsibility

Physician - heal thyself.

In fact her response has been to claim there are no racist elements in the tea party.

in the first place, Palin isn't a representative of the Tea Party as far as I am aware. She agrees with their positions, but is not a spokesperson. Second, she's right. The OFFICIAL position of the Tea Party - their mission statements and their objectives - have absolutely no racist element to them whatsoever. Period. End of story. As shown above - their official position is to condemn racism and racists.

What is happening here is the NAACP & left wing kooks are using the actions of a small fraction of extremist hanger-ons to try and condemn a larger movement. It is disingenous, false, and slimy. To use such tactics makes THEM the racists - not the tea party - because they are deliberately (and falsely) using race to advance their cause. The tea party does not do this, which is why they make the charges of reverse racism at the NAACP. And the charge has merit because the NAACP is the one running around looking at the world through race colored lenses.

Did you wake up the neighbors laughing as you wrote that?

Not a bit of it. The NBP have a history - as an organization - of racism and advocating violence. This is the NEW BP organization I'm talking about - not the BP (which is different). The NBP site here is plainly motivated by race from start to finish. Just look at thier objectives. Every single one of thier objectives is filled with racial terms. Stuff like, "Black police officers are black men first and police officers second..." and "100% opposed to white takeover of the inner city" and "we affirm that governments, corporations, and white private citizens ... have enslaved, discriminated against, robbed, and disenfranchised our people in ... countless ways" sure sound like racist terms to me.

http://www.newblackpanther.com/newsite/92.html

Being a 'racist' means you look at things through a prism of race. It cannot be denied that the NBP organization is racist. 100% through and through. But I can find no Tea Party organization that makes race a major platform of its goals or objectives or even talks about race at all. Show me the quote from an official spokesperson who is authorized to speak for the Tea Party that is making these so-called racist statements. There is no such animal.

http://www.teapartypatriots.org/mission.aspx
http://theamericanteaparty.org/

Small government. Free Markets. Constitution. Fiscal responsibility. What's absent? Race. The Tea Party opposes POLICIES, not color. I don't get how so many people who otherwise seem reasonable can fall for such a blatantly obvious lie. The last time I saw this level of blind, wilful idiocy was the defense of Bill Clinton's perjury and the whole "It's only about sex" bilge.

And you need to learn to seperate the message from the messenger wulf. Just because the HuffPo is a neolib leftwing haven doesn't mean they don't get some of thier facts right. Just like Breitbart is a neocon rightwing bastion and sometimes does really good reporting alongside their screeds.

The site I linked is clearly a right wing bunch, and some of their stuff is good and some of it isn't. But the videos in the main page are what they are and show the ugly face of racism - and it ain't in the Tea Party. "Minister" King Samir Shabazz is what the link says. The NBP organization's leader is Malik Shabazz - also a known anti-semite, racist, and mysoginist. Samir talked about the killing of 'cracker babies' and the closest Malik ever got to repudiating it was saying he 'didn't agree in that context'. Nice.

The NAACP issues charges of racism at the Tea Party with no evidence but unverified comments from random, unidentified kooks. At the same time they ignore clear, blatant racism from orgs like the NBP. And then they wonder why no one takes them seriously anymore.

Okay Jerry Day, I'll take your new turn as a constitutional spokesperson. Jerry Day is actually a singer/song writer I believe.

Explain to me how the government is supposed to frame socio-economic-political policy with no access to data that would create information that would allow that to occur?

Census gathering is a corner stone of government policy around the world, it's like covered in Civics in like grade 8 the reasons behind it seem pretty clear and transparent to me. This just seems like paranoid anti-socialist anti-government shtick to me.

Yes I agree there are infractions in the US with regards to government power but really is fucking Census gathering the most important one? What about corporate lobbying or even worst corporate funding for political parties that was passed through the supreme court.

It's like these people always find the silliest fucking thing to protest about when there are far larger issues to be covered. The most important thing is the lack of any real political oversight between two parties that seem more alike then different in their policies.

You're missing the point there. They boarded at international waters, that is a crime

This statement is factually incorrect. The blockading of a group involved in an armed conflict is legal. Hamas (controlling Gaza) and Isreal are in a state of armed conflict. Maritime law allows the boarding, siezing, and ATTACKING of ships in international waters - even those flying neutral flags - when there is reasonable cause to believe their intent is to violate a blockade. Greta Berlin (flotilla spokesperson) openly stated the purpose was not to deliver relief, but to make a polical statement. The flotilla refused repeated offers to unload the goods in Ashdod. The vessel captains ignored repeated warnings and orders to divert courses - which were all full steam ahead to violate the blockade. There were videos previous to the ships leaving port of groups of known militant activists shouting death threats about Isreal. The passenger manifests were filled with persons with known histories of anti-Isreal activity, Hamas ties, and other terrorist affiliations.

The picture some people are trying to paint of the flotilla being an innocent bunch of peaceful college professers and celebrities on their was to deliver food is a blatant lie. There were probably some of that kind of useful idiot along for the ride, but the overt stated purpose of the entire flotilla by its sponsors and leaders was to illegally violate the blockade to Hamas and provoke a confrontation with the intent of obtaining sympathetic media coverage. End of story.

>> ^Hybrid:

Any player who replies to ANY reporter with that kind of response immediately paints himself as guilty anyway. Sutton did himself no favours by acting like this. Players should be well-versed in handling the media, and be able to handle that question from a reporter. Essentially, what we have here is a player who thinks they just owned the media, without the foresight of realising that the viewing public is watching and this interview just helped to confirm the fact he's guilty.
Sutton handled the reporter badly. End of story.
>> ^mentality:

Bullshit. Here's the hit, slow mo at 2:05. Sutton's elbow was by his side the whole time. Vicious but that's what happens when you keep your head down and fail to notice a 6'6 250lb defenseman flying towards your face. It's not dirty at all and no penalty was called.
And yet this douche of a reporter goes up and lays a trap by asking: "You didn't know your elbow came up?" Ostensibly a yes/no question, as long as Sutton answers the question, he would be implying that his elbow was up illegally. Sutton does the right thing by calling BS on the reporter, and you people call Sutton a douche? FAIL for everyone who upvoted that fail comment.



He's paid to play hockey, not to be a PR spokesperson. And no one but you is insisting that Sutton thinks he owned or was even trying to own the media.

The fact that ignorant people who watch this video out of context may get the mistaken impression that Sutton is guilty is inconsequential. How many people who don't watch hockey have even seen this interview? You think Sutton cares about proving his innocence to people who don't even know who he is? The fans who know what actually happened know it's a perfectly reasonable response to such a douchey question..

Handled the reporter badly? No, Sutton doesn't have to explain himself to douchy reporters or to ignorant people on the internet who can't be bothered to look up what really happened. Even if he did handle the reporter badly, you still fail for calling the wrong man a douche. End of story.

For me, celebrities that I don't have a huge amount of sympathy for are those who, like mentioned in above comments, milk it with the media and books. It's funny how you don't hear that much about the private lives of some celebrities like Scarlett Johansson or Famke Janssen yet I know everything about Britney and Lohan.
It is very possible to stay out of the gossip column everyday if you wanted.

If a celebrity is going through depression, surely you would be better off trying to get better without absolutely everyone knowing and judging you? And if their intentions are to bring depression to the open and to help others, I would have more respect for them if they did not make money out of it by doing free events or donating earned monies from appearances to charities of the cause.

I know someone who uses the sentence I'm so depressed much too often. Instead of saying how an xyz situation made her upset or downed her mood a bit, she would always say that it made her depressed. I'm so depressed today, going to Tescos and seeing all these people makes me depressed, that dog makes me depressed, my hair makes me depressed, adverts make me depressed.
Guess what I want to say to this person? Stop cheating on your boyfriend, find a job and GET OVER IT.

Anyhoo, something that people may be missing is this is comedy. Do we believe everything that comedians say for a laugh? Many comedians make up situations and opinions posing them as real ones. After watching and listening to Gervais for quite a while, I am quite sure that he wouldn't tell someone with a real issue like depression or alcoholism to "get over it". Here he is addressing the attention whores.
In any case, he generalised and exaggerated because he's a comedian and not a spokesperson for the NHS.

Diagnosing Benny Morris
The Mind of a European Settler
by Gabriel Ash


Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949 is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

In anticipation of the publication of the revised edition, Morris was interviewed in Ha'aretz. The major new findings in the revised book, based on fresh documents, further darken the picture.

The new archival material, Morris reveals, records routine execution of civilians, twenty-four massacres, including one in Jaffa, and at least twelve cases of rape by military units, which Morris acknowledges are probably "the tip of the iceberg." Morris also says he found documents confirming the broader conclusions favored by his critics: the expulsion was pre-meditated; concrete expulsion orders were given in writing, some traceable directly to Ben Gurion.

Morris also found documentations for Arab High Command calls for evacuating women and children from certain villages, evidence he oddly claims strengthen the Zionist propaganda claim that Palestinians left because they were told to leave by the invading Arab states. Morris had already documented two dozen such cases in the first edition. It is hard to see how attempts by Arab commanders to protect civilians from anticipated rape and murder strengthen the Zionist fairy tale. But that failed attempt at evenhandedness is the least of Morris' problems. As the interview progresses, it emerges with growing clarity that, while Morris the historian is a professional and cautious presenter of facts, Morris the intellectual is a very sick person.

His sickness is of the mental-political kind. He lives in a world populated not by fellow human beings, but by racist abstractions and stereotypes. There is an over-abundance of quasi-poetic images in the interview, as if the mind is haunted by the task of grasping what ails it: "The Palestinian citizens of Israel are a time bomb," not fellow citizens. Islam is "a world in which human lives don't have the same value as in the West." Arabs are "barbarians" at the gate of the Roman Empire. Palestinian society is "a serial killer" that ought to be executed, and "a wild animal" that must be caged.

Morris' disease was diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that "the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil � The native is declared insensitive to ethics � the enemy of values. � He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it � the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces" (from The Wretched of the Earth). And further down, "the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms" (let's not forget to place Morris' metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations for Palestinians: Begin's "two-legged beasts", Eitan's "drugged cockroaches" and Barak's ultra-delicate "salmon"). Morris is a case history in the psychopathology of colonialism.

Bad Genocide, Good Genocide

When the settler encounters natives who refuse to cast down their eyes, his disease advances to the next stage -- murderous sociopathy.

Morris, who knows the exact scale of the terror unleashed against Palestinians in 1948, considers it justified. First he suggests that the terror was justified because the alternative would have been a genocide of Jews by Palestinians. Raising the idea of genocide in this context is pure, and cheap, hysteria. Indeed, Morris moves immediately to a more plausible explanation: the expulsion was a precondition for creating a Jewish state, i.e. the establishment of a specific political preference, not self-defense.

This political explanation, namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless generalization: "if it can, [Islamic society] will commit genocide."

But Morris sees no evil. Accusing Ben Gurion of failing to achieve an Arabian Palestine, he recommends further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens. Not now, but soon, "within five or ten years," under "apocalyptic conditions" such as a regional war with unconventional weapons, a potentially nuclear war, which "is likely to happen within twenty years." For Morris, and it is difficult to overstate his madness at this point, the likelihood of a nuclear war within the foreseeable future is not the sorry end of a road better not taken, but merely a milestone, whose aftermath is still imaginable, and imaginable within the banal continuity of Zionist centennial policies: he foresees the exchange of unconventional missiles between Israel and unidentified regional states as a legitimate excuse for "finishing the job" of 1948.

Morris speaks explicitly of another expulsion, but, in groping for a moral apology for the past and the future expulsion of Palestinians, he presents a more general argument, one that justifies not only expulsion but also genocide. That statement ought to be repeated, for here is a crossing of a terrible and shameful line.

Morris, a respectable, Jewish, Israeli academic, is out in print in the respectable daily, Haaretz, justifying genocide as a legitimate tool of statecraft. It should be shocking. Yet anybody who interacts with American and Israeli Zionists knows that Morris is merely saying for the record what many think and even say unofficially. Morris, like most of Israel, lives in a temporality apart, an intellectual Galapagos Islands, a political Jurassic Park, where bizarre cousins of ideas elsewhere shamed into extinction still roam the mindscape proudly.

Nor should one think the slippage between expulsion, "transfer," and genocide without practical consequences. It is not difficult to imagine a planned expulsion turn into genocide under the stress of circumstances: The genocides of both European Jews and Armenians began as an expulsion. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was the product of decades of thinking and imagining "transfer." We ought to pay attention: with Morris's statement, Zionist thinking crossed another threshold; what is now discussed has the potential to be actualized, if "apocalyptic conditions" materialize.

The march of civilization and the corpses of the uncivilized

It is instructive to look closer at the manner in which Morris uses racist thinking to justify genocide. Morris' interview, precisely because of its shamelessness, is a particularly good introductory text to Zionist thought.

Morris' racism isn't limited to Arabs. Genocide, according to Morris, is justified as long as it is done for "the final good." But what kind of good is worth the "forced extinction" of a whole people? Certainly, not the good of the latter. (Morris uses the word "Haqkhada," a Hebrew word usually associated with the extinction of animal species. Someone ought to inform Morris about the fact that Native Americans aren't extinct.)

According to Morris, the establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: "Yes, even the great American democracy couldn't come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds." Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Morris's supremacist view of "Western Civilization," that civilization values human life more than Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of "progress." Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of "human" is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this: killing Arabs -- one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is merely technical -- is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying the core logic of Zionism so well.

The color of Jews

Morris assures us that his values are those of the civilized West, the values of universal morality, progress, etc. But then he also claims to hold the primacy of particular loyalties, a position for which he draws on Albert Camus. But to reconcile Morris' double loyalty to both Western universalism and to Jewish particularism, one must forget that these two identities were not always on the best of terms.

How can one explain Morris' knowledge that the ethnic Darwinism that was used to justify the murder of millions of non-whites, including Black African slaves, Native Americans, Arabs, and others, was also used to justify the attempt to exterminate Jews? How can Morris endorse the "civilizational" justification of genocide, which includes the genocide of Jews, even as he claims the holocaust as another justification for Zionism? Perhaps Morris' disjointed mind doesn't see the connection. Perhaps he thinks that there are "right" assertions of racist supremacy and "wrong" assertions of racist supremacy. Or perhaps Morris displays another facet of the psychopathologies of oppression, the victim's identification with the oppressor.

Perhaps in Morris' mind, one half tribalist and one half universalist, the Jews were murdered to make way for a superior, more purely Aryan, European civilization, and the Jews who are today serving in the Israeli army, both belong and do not belong to the same group. They belong when Morris invokes the totems of the tribe to justify loyalty. But when his attention turns to the universal principle of "superior civilization," these Jews are effaced, like poor relations one is ashamed to be associated with, sent back to the limbo they share with the great non-white mass of the dehumanized. In contrast, the Jews of Israel, self-identified as European, have turned white, dry-cleaned and bleached by Zionism, and with their whiteness they claim the privilege that Whites always had, the privilege to massacre members of "less advanced" races.

False testimony

It would be marvelous if Morris the historian could preserve his objective detachment while Morris the Zionist dances with the demons of Eurocentric racism. But the wall of professionalism -- and it is a very thick and impressive wall in Morris' case -- cannot hold against the torrent of hate.

For example, Morris lies about his understanding of the 2000 Camp David summit. In Ha'aretz, Morris says that, "when the Palestinians rejected Barak's proposal of July 2000 and Clinton's proposal of December 2000, I understood that they were not ready to accept a two state solution. They wanted everything. Lydda, and Akka and Jaffa."

But in his book Righteous Victims, Morris explains the failure of the negotiations thus: "the PLO leadership had gradually accepted, or seemed to�Israel...keeping 78 percent of historical Palestine. But the PLO wanted the remaining 22 percent. � At Camp David, Barak had endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state�[on only] 84-90 percent of that 22 percent. � Israel was also to control the territory between a greatly enlarged Jerusalem and Jericho, effectively cutting the core of the future Palestinian state into two�" Morris' chapter of "Righteous Victims" that deals with the '90s leaves a lot to be desired, but it still strives for some detached analysis. In contrast, in Ha'aretz Morris offers baseless claims he knows to be false.

If Morris lies about recent history, and even grossly misrepresents the danger Jews faced in Palestine in 1948, a period he is an expert on, his treatment of more general historical matters is all but ridiculous, an astounding mix of insinuations and clich�s. For example, Morris reminds us that "the Arab nation won a big chunk of the Earth, not because of its intrinsic virtues and skills, but by conquering and murdering and forcing the conquered to convert." (What is Morris' point? Is the cleansing of Palestine attributable to Jewish virtues and skills, rather than to conquering and murdering?)

This is racist slander, not history. As an example, take Spain, which was conquered in essentially one battle in 711 A.D. by a small band of North African Berbers who had just converted to Islam. Spain was completely Islamized and Arabized within two centuries with very little religious coercion, and certainly no ethnic cleansing. But after the last Islamic rulers were kicked out of Spain by the Christian army of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, a large section of the very same Spanish population that willingly adopted Islam centuries earlier refused to accept Christianity despite a century of persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. 600,000 Spanish Muslims were eventually expelled in 1608.

Obviously, Islamic civilization had its share of war and violence. But, as the above example hints, compared to the West, compared to the religious killing frenzy of sixteenth century Europe, compared to the serial genocides in Africa and America, and finally to the flesh-churning wars of the twentieth century, Islamic civilization looks positively benign. So why all this hatred? Where is all this fire and brimstone Islamophobia coming from?

Being elsewhere

From Europe, of course, but with a twist. Europe has always looked upon the East with condescension. In periods of tension, that condescension would escalate to fear and hate. But it was also mixed and tempered with a large dose of fascination and curiosity. The settler, however, does not have the luxury to be curious. The settler leaves the metropolis hoping to overcome his own marginal, often oppressed, status in metropolitan society. He goes to the colony motivated by the desire to recreate the metropolis with himself at the top.

For the settler, going to the colony is not a rejection of the metropolis, but a way to claim his due as a member. Therefore, the settler is always trying to be more metropolitan than the metropolis. When the people of the metropolis baulk at the bloodbath the settler wants to usher in the name of their values, the settler accuses them of "growing soft," and declares himself "the true metropolis." That is also why there is one crime of which the settler can never forgive the land he colonized -- its alien climate and geography, its recalcitrant otherness, the oddness of its inhabitants, in sum, the harsh truth of its being elsewhere. In the consciousness of the settler, condescension thus turns into loathing.

Israeli settler society, especially its European, Ashkenazi part, especially that Israel which calls itself "the peace camp," "the Zionist Left," etc., is predicated on the loathing of all things Eastern and Arab. (Now, of course, we have in addition the religious, post-1967 settlers who relate to the Zionist Left the way the Zionist Left stands in relation to Europe, i.e. as settlers.) "Arab" is a term of abuse, one that can be applied to everything and everyone, including Jews. This loathing is a unifying theme. It connects Morris' latest interview in Ha'aretz with Ben Gurion's first impression of Jaffa in 1905; he found it filthy and depressing.

In another article, published in Tikkun Magazine, Morris blames the "ultra-nationalism, provincialism, fundamentalism and obscurantism" of Arab Jews in Israel for the sorry state of the country (although Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and most of Israel's generals, leaders, and opinion makers of the last two decades are European Jews). For Morris, everything Eastern is corrupt and every corruption has an Eastern origin.

One shouldn't, therefore, doubt Morris when he proclaims himself a traditional Left Zionist. There is hardly anything he says that hasn't been said already by David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. Loathing of the East and the decision to subdue it by unlimited force is the essence of Zionism.

Understanding the psycho-political sources of this loathing leads to some interesting observations about truisms that recur in Morris' (and much of Israel's) discourse. Morris blames Arafat for thinking that Israel is a "crusader state," a foreign element that will eventually be sent back to its port of departure. This is a common refrain of Israeli propaganda. It is also probably true. But it isn't Arafat's fault that Morris is a foreigner in the Middle East. Why shouldn't Arafat believe Israel is a crusader state when Morris himself says so? "We are the vulnerable extension of Europe in this place, exactly as the crusaders."

It is Morris -- like the greater part of Israel's elite -- who insists on being a foreigner, on loathing the Middle East and dreaming about mist-covered Europe, purified and deified by distance. If Israel is a crusader state, and therefore a state with shallow roots, likely to pack up and disappear, it is not the fault of those who make that observation. It is the fault of those Israelis, like Morris, who want to have nothing to do with the Middle East.

Morris is deeply pessimistic about Israel's future; this feeling is very attractive in Israel. The end of Israel is always felt to be one step away, hiding beneath every development, from the birthrate of Bedouins to the establishment of the International Court of Justice.

Naturally, every Palestinian demand is such a doomsday threat. This sense of existential precariousness can be traced back to 1948; it was encouraged by Israel's successive governments because it justified the continuous violence of the state and the hegemony of the military complex. It may eventually become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this existential fear goes deeper. It is rooted in the repressed understanding (which Morris both articulates and tries to displace) of the inherent illegitimacy of the Israeli political system and identity. "Israel" is brute force. In Morris' words: "The bottom line is that force is the only thing that will make them accept us." But brute force is precarious. Time gnaws at it. Fatigue corrodes it. And the more it is used, the more it destroys the very acceptance and legitimacy it seeks.

For Israel, the fundamental question of the future is, therefore, whether Israelis can transcend colonialism. The prognosis is far from positive. In a related article in The Guardian, Morris explains that accepting the right of return of the Palestinian refugees would mean forcing Israeli Jews into exile. But why would Jews have to leave Israel if Israel becomes a bi-national, democratic state? One cannot understand this without attention to the colonial loathing of the Middle East which Morris so eloquently expresses.

But taking that into account, I'm afraid Morris is right. Many Israeli Jews, especially European Jews who tend to possess alternative passports, would rather emigrate than live on equal terms with Palestine's natives in a bi-national state. It is to Frantz Fanon again that we turn for observing this first. "The settler, from the moment the colonial context disappears, has no longer an interest in remaining or in co-existing."

Related Articles:

* The Education of Benny the Barbarian by Ahmed Amr
* Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion by Adi Ophir

Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is a regular contributor to Yellow Times.org, where this article first appeared (www.yellowtimes.org). Gabriel encourages your comments: gash@YellowTimes.org

if you still dont understand after reading the comments above, chances are youll never understand.

there is no such thing is gay rights, or black rights, or womens rights so show me any spokesperson be they martin luther king junior or a ten year old with an overactive vocabulary and ill show you a person who doesnt understand human rights

It's interesting to see the reaction of Scientologists when they're asked about this. They almost all deny it publicly. Journalists really shouldn't let them get away with it. It's universally reported to exist by ex-scientologists who have reached the training level, it's come up in public court documents, and it's seen in copies of L Ron Hubbard's notes.

In the past, the Scientology celebrity center had a nice african women as a public spokesperson. She would deny all the claims about Xenu whenever she was asked about it. But someone eventually figured out that she was not even at the training level of operating thetan. You only learn about Xenu at operating thetan level 3. So sometimes even their public speakers don't really know anything about the church.

In Tommy Davis's case, I'm pretty sure he knows about Xenu. According to wikipedia, he's both denied it in the past, and also referenced Xenu's existence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_W._Davis