Controversial Bestseller Shakes the Foundation of the Israel

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet.

What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora is historically wrong?

What if the Palestinian Arabs who have lived for decades under the heel of the modern Israeli state are in fact descended from the very same "children of Israel" described in the Old Testament?

And what if most modern Israelis aren't descended from the ancient Israelites at all, but are actually a mix of Europeans, North Africans and others who didn't "return" to the scrap of land we now call Israel and establish a new state following the attempt to exterminate them during World War II, but came in and forcefully displaced people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia?

What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora -- the story recounted at Passover tables by Jews around the world every year detailing the ancient Jews' exile from Judea, the years spent wandering through the desert, their escape from the Pharaoh's clutches -- is all wrong?

That's the explosive thesis of When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?, a book by Tel Aviv University scholar Shlomo Zand (or Sand) that sent shockwaves across Israeli society when it was published last year. After 19 weeks on the Israeli best-seller list, the book is being translated into a dozen languages and will be published in the United States this year by Verso.

Its thesis has ramifications that go far beyond some antediluvian academic debate. Few modern conflicts are as attached to ancient history as that decades-long cycle of bloodletting between Israelis and Palestinians. Each group lays claim to the same scrap of land -- holy in all three of the world's major Abrahamic religions -- based on long-standing ties to that chunk of earth and national identities formed over long periods of time. There's probably no other place on Earth where the present is as intimately tied to the ancient.

Central to the ideology of Zionism is the tale -- familiar to all Jewish families -- of exile, oppression, redemption and return. Booted from their kingdom, the "Jewish people" -- sons and daughters of ancient Judea -- wandered the earth, rootless, where they faced cruel suppression from all corners -- from being forced to toil in slavery under the Egyptians, to the Spanish massacres of the 14th century and Russian pogroms of the 19th, through to the horrors of the Third Reich.

This view of history animates all Zionists, but none more so than the influential but reactionary minority -- in the United States as well as Israel -- who believe that God bestowed a "Greater Israel" -- one that encompasses the modern state as well as the Occupied Territories -- on the Jewish people, and who resist any effort to create a Palestinian state on biblical grounds
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The 2009 Inauguration Photo Book.

Photobucket has been selected as the online photo destination for the Barack Obama 2009 Presidential Inaugural Book. Learn more about the Inaugural Book Project

The 2009 Inauguration Book is unlike any other in history. President Obama wants to include you. Upload your photo showing how you experienced this historic inauguration. Be sure to add a description to your photo that tells your personal story.

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Paul Krugman's depression economics

On his way to Stockholm, the Nobel Prize winner and New York Times columnist takes time to explain the "awful" economy that looms ahead of us.
The revised and expanded edition of Paul Krugman's "The Return of Depression Economics," originally published in 1999 but back in bookstores last week, features, in a reasonably large font on the front cover, the mini-bio: "Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics." The choice of the (re)publication date couldn't be better. Not only are Krugman's predictions of economic doom, first made in the wake of the Asian financial crisis of 1997, even more relevant as 2008 comes to a close, but he is also accepting his award in Stockholm, Sweden, this week. When I reviewed "The Conscience of a Liberal" a year ago, I wrote, "Now is a good time to be Paul Krugman." I spoke too soon. Now is an even better time to be Paul Krugman.

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Mother sues daughter over bestselling 'abuse' memoir

A British lawyer who wrote a popular book recounting a childhood of alleged emotional and physical abuse is being sued for libel by her mother, who says the claims are fantasy.
Constance Briscoe defends the veracity of her book, "Ugly" -- the nickname she says her mother threw at her as a child. Her lawyer told London's High Court on Tuesday that the book contained some errors but was "quite properly put in the biography section of the bookshop, not the fiction section."
With its harrowing, inspirational and ostensibly true story, "Ugly" has sold more than half a million copies in Britain since it was published in 2006. It was followed by a sequel, "Beyond Ugly."
The child of Jamaican immigrants, Briscoe, 51, grew up in a poor part of London but went on to become a lawyer and one of the first black women in Britain to be appointed a recorder, or part-time judge.
In "Ugly," Briscoe alleges that her mother regularly beat and starved her before abandoning her when she was 13.
The book claims Briscoe's stepfather once stubbed a cigarette out on her hand, and says that as a teenager Briscoe needed surgery on her breasts because of trauma caused by her mother's assaults.
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Meltdown: The Greatest Transfer of Wealth in History!

by Ellen Brown author of The Web of Debt

How to Reverse the Tide and Democratize the US Monetary System?

October 15: the Presidential candidates had their last debate before the election. They talked of the baleful state of the economy and the stock market; but omitted from the discussion was what actually caused the credit freeze, and whether the banks should be nationalized.

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Swim Against the Current: Ordinary Americans Can Make Change

The fight for our country's future is still in our hands. Grassroots movements are breaking free from corporate control.

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God's Profits: Faith, Fraud and the GOP Crusade

A look into the shady finances and manipulative politics of America's leading televangelist hucksters.

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Curveball: The Iraqi Defector the Bush Team Used to Sell the War

A interview with the author of a new book on the Iraqi defector code-named "Curveball," whose made-up intelligence on Saddam's WMD programs was central to the Bush Administration's case for invasion.

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Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace

All my life, I have wanted to keep soldiers safe from war. During World War II, my cousins in uniform stayed at our house on their way to and from military bases in California , the Pacific, and Europe . I heard veterans—including my mother, a refugee, a medic—talk story about the war that was killing and maiming right now as they spoke. Listening to people who had lived to tell the tale, I believed that it was the telling that kept them alive. They had survived hell and come back to warn us at home.
Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace




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Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps

There are some things common to every state that's made the transition to fascism. Author Naomi Wolf argues that all of them are present in America today.

More stories by Naomi Wolf

Editor's note: This is adapted from Wolf's forthcoming book "The End of America: A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot."

Last autumn, there was a military coup in Thailand. The leaders of the coup took a number of steps, rather systematically, as if they had a shopping list. In a sense, they did. Within a matter of days, democracy had been closed down -- the coup leaders declared martial law, sent armed soldiers into residential areas, took over radio and TV stations, issued restrictions on the press, tightened some limits on travel and took certain activists into custody.

They were not figuring these things out as they went along. If you look at history, you can see that there is essentially a blueprint for turning an open society into a dictatorship. That blueprint has been used again and again in more and less bloody, more and less terrifying ways. But it is always effective. It is very difficult and arduous to create and sustain a democracy, but history shows that closing one down is much simpler. You simply have to be willing to take the 10 steps.

As difficult as this is to contemplate, it is clear, if you are willing to look, that each of these 10 steps has already been initiated in the United States by the Bush administration.

Because Americans like me were born in freedom, we have a hard time even considering that it is possible for us to become as unfree, domestically, as many other nations. Because we no longer learn much about our rights or our system of government -- the task of being aware of the Constitution has been outsourced from citizens to professionals such as lawyers and professors -- we scarcely recognise the checks and balances that the founders put in place, even as they are being systematically dismantled. Because we don't learn much about European history, the setting up of a department of "homeland" security -- remember who else was keen on the word "homeland"? -- didn't raise the alarm bells it might have.

It is my argument that, beneath our very noses, George Bush and his administration are using time-tested tactics to close down an open society. It is time for us to be willing to think the unthinkable -- as the author and political journalist Joe Conason has put it -- that it can happen here. And that we are further along than we realize.

Conason eloquently warned of the danger of American authoritarianism. I am arguing that we need also to look at the lessons of European and other kinds of fascism to understand the potential seriousness of the events we see unfolding in the United States.

(Click on the source link below to read the rest of the article)

Source: AlterNet: War on Iraq: Fascist America, in 10 Easy Steps

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United States v. George W. Bush et al.

United States v. George W. Bush et al.

from Tomdispatch.com

in association with Seven Stories Press

Elizabeth de la Vega

“U.S. v. Bush et al. is much more powerful than The 9-11 Commission Report. A tour de force.”

—CHALMERS JOHNSON

Description

What if there were a fraud worse than Enron and no one did anything about it?

In United States v. George W. Bush et. al., former federal prosecutor Elizabeth de la Vega brings her twenty years of experience and her passion for justice to the most important case of her career. The defendants are George W Bush, Richard Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Colin Powell. The crime is tricking the nation into war, or, in legal terms, conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Ms. de la Vega has reviewed the evidence, researched the law, drafted an indictment, and in this lively, accessible book, presented it to a grand jury. If the indictment and grand jury are both hypothetical, the facts are tragically real: Over half of all Americans believe the President misled the country into a war that has left 2,500 hundred American soldiers and countless Iraqis dead. The cost is $350 billion -- and counting.

The legal question is: Did the president and his team use the same techniques as those used by Enron’s Ken Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, and fraudsters everywhere -- false pretenses, half-truths, deliberate omissions -- in order to deceive Congress and the American public?

Take advantage of this rare opportunity to “sit” with the grand jurors as de la Vega presents a case of prewar fraud that should persuade any fair-minded person who loves this country as much as she so obviously does. Faced with an ongoing crime of such magnitude, she argues, we can not simply shrug our shoulders and walk away.

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Source: United States v. George W. Bush et al. - from Tomdispatch.com in association with Seven Stories Press, Seven Stories Press

Technorati tags: books, media, Seven Stories Press, Elizabeth de la Vega, war crimes, opinion