And to the Left

IC XC
✙
NI KA

IN THE BUILDUP to war following 9/11 the was a huge peace movement in the Bay Area. Given our history, this is not surprising and I – among others – had fantasies about a return to an era we looked at with Nostalgia although we had never lived through it (I was a toddler at the end of the 1960s). Visions of The People’s Park in Berkeley and the Jesus People in the Haight flooded my thoughts in the time leading up to the first protests in the Civic Center. The protests were organized by something called The Answer Coalition. Although they said, at the time, this was about peace, they only wanted support from some people most notably, at those first protests they refused to open the mic to Jewish peace groups unless they denounced Israel. So, there was a larger agenda than “no war”: it was your basic Marxist silliness, disguised as something ostensibly good.

A second thing happened in the ramp up to the first major protest. This one is a little less believable, frankly, and since I was the only witness I will leave it for you to accept or reject. At that time, I had a first floor apartment on an alley in SoMa, a few blocks from UN Plaza where everyone would be gathering. It was a sketchy area even then, but no where near as bad as now. Anyway, on the Friday night before the big event a bunch of homeless men gathered on Minna St in front of my window. Dressed in hoodies and looking for all the world like they were going to smash all the car windows on the street, they attracted my attention as I sat in the living room behind my curtains. Then – as now – I lived alone with my cat and no TV and so any noise outside was an easy distraction. I did not hear what was said as they stood in a circle filling the street, but I noticed when they went to several vehicles, opened the trunks and pulled out sleeping bags. And I noticed some had earpieces under their hoodies.

OK. Spies? Which side? Agents provocateur? There to stir up shit or there to watch the hippies being misled by the commies? The world may never know. But between the antisemitic lies from the “peaceniks” and the faux homeless of unknown intent, I was from that moment painfully aware that no politics were to be taken at face value ever again. Even now, when there is this one homeless dude that sleeps – most days – opposite the local Mosque outside the Yemenite Embassy, I can’t be sure if he’s really homeless or just watching. Perhaps it’s best not to ask in the current situation, but there’s a lot of pro-Palestinian graffiti in that neighborhood. I don’t know what to think most of the time. This is less about “gaming the system” than about just accepting that the system is trying to game us.

So the current situation in Israel.

Having access to social media I’ve had the most interesting things happen: all my friends had their lives entirely disrupted. Husbands, sons, daughters, drafted, wives left alone with children and pooling resources. A few folkes, however, terminally online, remain. They are suddenly English language news sources and curiously they are playing Christian worship music in the background. They were religious Jews previously. Marketing department, there’s a call from the Mossad on line one.

All of this rumination was caused by a two-year-old video (since replaced) that was exploring a question that has long bothered me: why does the American Left support the Palestinians? They are either conservative Christians (Orthodox, Catholic, or Evangelical) or Muslims. Nothing that the American Hippie holds dear would be supported there. Here’s the same presenter’s updated Video. Like I said, the one I watched was two years old, but in this one covers the same material while making reference to the current situation.

What is most interesting in this is the line the speaker draws from the Soviet Unions initial support for Israel to the present moment. See: the Soviet Union voted for accepting Israel at the UN – because the USSR felt that was screwing over the UK and Turkey and they wanted to get Israel into the Soviet Orbit. But then the Israeli Gov’t under Ben-Gurion decided to be a western-style Democracy. Suddenly Israel was the Enemy for the Soviets. They planted the seeds in the minds of the American Left which bear fruit to this day, compounded by all the pro-Marxist education that gets dished out in our schools and universities. (The Answer Coalition is just a Marxist Front org. You’d think that we’d be over that. But they still want to destroy the US.)

Strangely, the American Right – which should hold “cultural war Co–belligerent” status with the Palestinians in light of their moral code as opposed to the very secular state of Israel – supports Israel without reserve. This is not another reason the Left hates Israel but, in fact, is the flip side of the same coin: the American Right supports Israel because the Jewish State did not join the Soviet Block in the 50s and also because of a very strong stream in American Politics that holds to a type of Protestant theology called Dispensationalism. In this (mostly literalist) reading of Scripture, the poeple of Israel must “come home” in the end times to the Land of Israel. Then the people (and the land) must be misled by the AntiChrist. Then have a final conversion to the True Faith. And then, Jesus will return. So, supporting a Jewish state in Israel is a totally logical way of “causing” the Messiah to return. Curiously, in some Jewish readings, supporting Israel is a way to cause Messiah to come (the first time). So…

Politics is all 3D Chess.