Conyersblog.us Banned Me...

[Gold9472]

I didn't start with anyone... All I did was post relevant Cindy Sheehan information, and relevant 9/11 information, and relevant Iraq War Information, and relevant News, and I was banned.

[Gold9472]

Here's what I think happened... there were people on that site who were screaming, "The Dancing Israelis, The Dancing Israelis" in regards to 9/11, and that it was a "Zionist Plot", and obviously Mr. Conyers doesn't want to associate himself with people against Israel, so... he banned everyone who was talking about 9/11, including me.

[somebigguy]

Not familiar with him, but he is probably a putz.

[Gold9472]

Not familiar with him, but he is probably a putz.

Yes you are... Rep. John Conyers. The guy who held the "Downing Street Memo Hearings".

[Gold9472]

You'll remember there were people at the DSM Hearings that were handing out pamphlets saying that 9/11 was a zionist act, and committed by Israel, etc...

[somebigguy]

Yes you are... Rep. John Conyers. The guy who held the "Downing Street Memo Hearings".
Oh yeah???? Oh well, what are you gonna do. He probably didn't want all that nonsense on his website and you got swept up with it, like you said.

[Gold9472]

Oh yeah???? Oh well, what are you gonna do. He probably didn't want all that nonsense on his website and you got swept up with it, like you said.

Here's what I said to the admin..

#104

Since when did I say it was part of a "Zionist" plot? Please don't put words in my mouth. I stated earlier how influential AIPAC was, but it had nothing to do with 9/11. It's reality.

Secondly, I take NOTHING away from John Conyers. I'm simply stating a fact. If John Conyers were to stand up, and state that 9/11 needs to be re-investigated, it WOULD NOT put a bad light on him.

After all, Ray McGovern, Joe Wilson, AND Cindy Sheehan ALL question 9/11.

You can not, and SHOULD NOT stop seeking the truth, NO MATTER WHERE it leads.

All I ask is that John read a little. If after he reads, he decides to do something about it, I GUARANTEE the people will be behind him. As they have been in the past, and as they will be in the future.

PLEASE in the future DO NOT associate me with the idiot who continually posts "The Dancing Israelis".

IF Israel was involved in anyway, and again, ONLY a thorough investigation could show that, but if they were, then those in their Government involved, should be tried for crimes.

JUST LIKE anyone in OUR country involved.

In light of the fact that "Able Danger" has shown its' ugly head, I would think re-opening 9/11 should make more than enough sense.

That's just me.

[Thierry]

Greetings all!
Well, Jonathan, I've been banned too -- probably as part of an operation that can only be called "clean-truth-sweep". Doug, Lemon and others were banned too. I suspect they'll show up on here at some point.
I don't think Rep. Conyers had anything to do with it though. the 'admin' maybe has a slightly different agenda...

[Gold9472]

Greetings all!
Well, Jonathan, I've been banned too -- probably as part of an operation that can only be called "clean-truth-sweep". Doug, Lemon and others were banned too. I suspect they'll show up on here at some point.
I don't think Rep. Conyers had anything to do with it though. the 'admin' maybe has a slightly different agenda...

Welcome... who knows why... I can tell you that I didn't post anything on that site that wasn't "Mainstream"...

[Thierry]

I'm taking the liberty to quote Kertis who just blasted Admin on Conyersblog.us:

"Comment #23: Kertis (kertis.engle@gmail.com) said on 8/26/05 @ 8:20pm ET...
Admin
You took down my entire post. I put it back. You know how to take it down again. But I put forward that it would be better for all concerned, and a more effective way to accomplish the goal you have stated, to enclose in brackets and color the text which you think offensive, and state why, so that those of us not endowed with extra-sensory perception can figure out what the heck you are talking about. The method you are using is offensive and resembles quite closely the behaivior of the President.

You have denied us the company of such personell as Constant and Researcher, the use of certian words and phrases, and the ability to explore the ramifications of certian topics, without being at all forthcoming as to your reasons or standards. You seem to believe this blog exists to provide the Congressman with a cheer squad. In contrast, many of the participants, and former participants, have the impression that the pourpose is to provide the Congressman access to a wide varity of real peoples ideas, concerns, suggetions and discoveries. Particularly the discoveries. In order that he might overlook fewer important facts.

If this is the crux of our misunderstanding, you need only clarify, and then a loyal cheer squad will be what YOU will have turned this blog into. And then Chairman Conyers will have what Rush Limbaugh has. Ditto-heads.

Addressing now the concern you specified; 1) anti-semitic or suggest anti-semitism, 2) disrespectful of other posters, or 3) advocating violence and threatening other commenters.

The part that it would seem you mean to apply to me is the second part of point one : Or suggest anti-semitism.

This is quite irritating. Is it possible that you do not understand the meaning of the phrase "entirely subjective"? I have not been disscusing "those damn Jews", nor do I recall having EVER had a poor reaction to someone, or to any number of people, based on the fact of religion or ancestry. I have been disscussing Israeli Spies. It is well understood by all that almost all Israeli Spies are Jewish, and so what? Does being Jewish make it O.K. for someone to be a foriegn Spy in the United States? Does being Jewish have anything at all to do with the fact that Isreal puts more effort into Spying in the United States than anyone puts in anywhere? Or is it rather the case that spurious charges of anti-semitism is the first layer of the armor that protects Israeli Spies from the questions which thier behaivior raises. Questions raised by thier behaivior, not thier religion or thier ancestry. Raised by thier behaivior, not thier religion or thier ancestry. Thier behaivior, not thier religion. Behaivior, not religion.

Behaivior.

Do you get it yet? I don't care if they are Jews. Why do you?
Kertis "

[ehnyah]

No, anti-Zionism is not anti-semitism

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,1098625,00.html

As an idea, a Jewish homeland was always controversial. As a reality, Israel still is - and it is not anti-Jewish to say so

Brian Klug
Wednesday December 3, 2003
The Guardian

From the beginning, political Zionism was a controversial movement even among Jews. So strong was the opposition of German orthodox and reform rabbis to the Zionist idea in the name of Judaism that Theodor Herzl changed the venue of the First Zionist Congress in 1897 from Munich to Basle in Switzerland.

Twenty years later, when the British foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour (sponsor of the 1905 Aliens Act to restrict Jewish immigration to the UK), wanted the government to commit itself to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, his declaration was delayed - not by anti-semites but by leading figures in the British Jewish community. They included a Jewish member of the cabinet who called Balfour's pro-Zionism "anti-semitic in result".

The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 has not put an end to the debate, though the issue has changed. Today, the question is about Israel's future. Should it become a "post-Zionist" state, one that defines itself in terms of the sum of its citizens, rather than seeing itself as belonging to the entire Jewish people? This is a perfectly legitimate question and not anti-semitic in the least. When people suggest otherwise - as Emanuele Ottolenghi did on these pages last Saturday - they simply add to the growing confusion.

Ottolenghi contends that "Zionism comprises a belief that Jews are a nation, and as such are entitled to self-determination as all other nations are". This is doubly confused. First, the ideology of Jewish nationalism was irrelevant to many of the Jews, as well as non-Jewish sympathisers, who were drawn to the Zionist goal of creating a Jewish state in Palestine. They saw Israel in purely humanitarian or practical terms: as a safe haven where Jews could live as Jews after centuries of being marginalised and persecuted.

This motive was strengthened by the Nazi murder of one-third of the world's Jewish population, the wholesale destruction of Jewish communities in Europe, and the plight of masses of Jewish refugees with nowhere to go.

Second, you do not have to be an anti-semite to reject the belief that Jews constitute a separate nation in the modern sense of the word or that Israel is the Jewish nation state. There is an irony here: it is a staple of anti-semitic discourse that Jews are a people apart, who form "a state within a state". Partly for this reason, some European anti-semites thought that the solution to "the Jewish question" might be for Jews to have a state of their own. Herzl certainly thought he could count on the support of anti-semites.

What is anti-semitism? Although the word only goes back to the 1870s, anti-semitism is an old European fantasy about Jews. The composer Richard Wagner exemplified it when he said: "I hold the Jewish race to be the born enemy of pure humanity and everything noble in it." An anti-semite sees Jews this way: they are an alien presence, a parasite that preys on humanity and seeks to dominate the world. Across the globe, their hidden hand controls the banks, the markets and the media. Even governments are under their sway. And when revolutions occur or nations go to war, it is the Jews - clever, ruthless and cohesive - who invariably pull the strings and reap the rewards.

When this fantasy is projected on to Israel because it is a Jewish state, then anti-Zionism is anti-semitic. And when zealous critics of Israel, without themselves being anti-semitic, carelessly use language, such as "Jewish influence", that conjures up this fantasy, they are fuelling an anti-semitic current in the wider culture.

But Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip is no fantasy. Nor is the spread of Jewish settlements in these territories. Nor the unequal treatment of Jewish colonisers and Palestinian inhabitants. Nor the institutionalised discrimination against Israeli Arab citizens in various spheres of life. These are realities. It is one thing to oppose Israel or Zionism on the basis of an anti-semitic fantasy; quite another to do so on the basis of reality. The latter is not anti-semitism.

But isn't excessive criticism of Israel or Zionism evidence of an anti-semitic bias? In his book, The Case for Israel, Alan Dershowitz argues that when criticism of Israel "crosses the line from fair to foul" it goes "from acceptable to anti-semitic".

People who take this view say the line is crossed when critics single Israel out unfairly; when they apply a double standard and judge Israel by harsher criteria than they use for other states; when they misrepresent the facts so as to put Israel in a bad light; when they vilify the Jewish state; and so on. All of which undoubtedly is foul. But is it necessarily anti-semitic?

No, it is not. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a bitter political struggle. The issues are complex, passions are inflamed, and the suffering is great. In such circumstances, people on both sides are liable to be partisan and to "cross the line from fair to foul". When people who side with Israel cross that line, they are not necessarily anti-Muslim. And when others cross the line on behalf of the Palestinian cause, this does not make them anti-Jewish. It cuts both ways.

There is something else that cuts both ways: racism. Both anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim feeling appear to be growing. Each has its own peculiarities, but both are exacerbated by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the invasion of Iraq, the "war against terror", and other conflicts.

We should unite in rejecting racism in all its forms: the Islamophobia that demonises Muslims, as well as the anti-semitic discourse that can infect anti-Zionism and poison the political debate. However, people of goodwill can disagree politically - even to the extent of arguing over Israel's future as a Jewish state. Equating anti-Zionism with anti-semitism can also, in its own way, poison the political debate.

· Brian Klug is senior research fellow in philosophy at St Benet's Hall, Oxford, and a founder member of the Jewish Forum for Justice and Human Rights


http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,1098625,00.html

How to Criticise Zionism

from Jacqueline Rose

Anthony Julius (Letters, 21 July) objects to the link between Messianism and Israeli identity that I suggest in The Question of Zion, as well as to the idea that Israel may be bent on a path of self-destruction, a fear which has been expressed inside Israel by writers such as David Grossman, and by the former head of Shin Bet, Yaakov Perry. As regards Messianism, the issue is how far Israeli society as a whole has been complicit with the settlers and their ideology. In their recent book, Lords of the Land: The Settlers and the State of Israel, Idith Zertal and Akiva Elder describe how every Israeli government, every branch of the legal establishment and of the Israeli army have helped the settlement enterprise to flourish. In 1982, a group from Gush Emunim, the settlers? movement, plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock in messianic counterpoint to the felt desecration represented by the Egypt-Israel peace treaty of 1979 which handed part of the Sinai back to Egypt. Judge Finkelman described Yeshua Ben-Shushan, the brains behind the plot, as a Jewish hero. No one would suggest that Messianism is characteristic of the whole of Israeli society, but this complicity with the settlers is something for which the whole nation, in the violence of the evacuation from Gaza, is now paying the price.

Julius is a distinguished lawyer. It is therefore surprising that, in his history of the conflict which makes up the substantial part of his letter, he does not feel the need to acknowledge, let alone address, the arguments of the new historians ? Tom Segev, Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, Nur Musalha and Benny Morris ? whose work of the past two decades has decisively challenged every single detail of the narrative he proposes.

Finally, why does Julius give a figure only for the Israeli war dead of 1948? The Palestinian dead are unmentioned, the refugees unnumbered (?many Palestinians left ? some willingly, many not?). The omission makes clear who really counts in this conflict, a fact which is itself playing a huge and tragic part in its continuation.

Julius?s letter is another demonstration of the difficulty those who rush to the defence of Israel have in seeing it as a powerful state capable of aggression towards another people. It will be impossible to resolve this conflict and secure the better future for Israel and the Palestinians which Julius and I both wish for as long as Jewish people continue, against all historical evidence, to view themselves always as victims.

Jacqueline Rose
Queen Mary, University of London

From Pablo Mukherjee

Anthony Julius asserts that Zionists fought for a single binational state between 1881 and 1948, when their idealist vision foundered in the face of Arab hostility. Although the single state ideal was put forward in Herzl?s The Jewish State (1896) and Altneuland (1902), it was displaced by the ?practical Zionism? of Weizmann, the ultra-nationalism of Jabotinsky and the ?pragmatic Zionism? of Ben-Gurion. All of them advocated, to varying degrees, the economic, cultural and political disempowerment of the Arab majority in Palestine. To no one?s surprise (least of all the Zionists?), the Arabs were hostile to this offer of ?shared? polity.

Julius says that there was room in Palestine for both peoples, and that the Arabs rejected statehood in 1937 and 1947. The Arab rejection was not simply about land-sharing. The 1937 rebellion followed a dramatic increase in illegal Jewish immigration into Palestine, a steady increase in Jewish ownership of land, the Peel commission?s proposals for ?partition? and the ?transfer? of Arab majorities, and was also influenced by regional anti-imperialist feeling. The 1947 rejection of UN Resolution 181 was based on the sound logic that a Jewish minority of 37 per cent was not entitled to 55 per cent of the land, of which they owned about 7 per cent.

Julius makes much of Palestinian Arab anti-semitism but nothing of the equally virulent and entrenched Zionist racism towards Arabs. As early as the 1880s, the Zionist settlers Yosef Vitkin and Chaim Hissin referred to Arabs as ?submissive servants? and ?degenerates?. This attitude survives, and has become respectable in the current climate of Islamophobia.

Finally, Julius blames Israel?s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza on the Six-Day War, which he says was instigated by Egyptian hostilities in the Gulf of Aqaba and Sinai. In fact, the Six-Day War was precipitated by the Samu raid carried out by Israel against Jordan on 13 November 1966, and by Israeli escalation on the Syrian front. Moshe Dayan told the journalist Rami Tal in 1976 that more than 80 per cent of the clashes that led to the war were started by his army. The ?peace offerings? made by the Israeli cabinet on 19 June did not include an offer to withdraw from Gaza. There are no records of Israel telling any Arab states in 1967, directly or indirectly, that it would make a conditional withdrawal.

Pablo Mukherjee
Oxford

From Virginia Tilley

Two UN subcommittees on the question of Palestine were established in 1947. The first, UNSCOP (United Nations Special Committee on Palestine), dominated by Western and European powers and established explicitly to consider partition, generated the report that became Resolution 181. The second subcommittee, established to consider ?alternatives to partition?, was composed mostly of Arab or Muslim states: Afghanistan, Colombia, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Yemen. Its carefully documented and legally rigorous final report concluded that the only legal and just solution in Palestine was a binational state. It held that while a ?national home for the Jewish people? was admissible under the terms of the British Mandate, a Jewish state was not, because it would violate the political rights of the indigenous population which the Mandate was also charged to protect. The subcommittee called instead for a unitary democratic state in which minority rights (clearly understood here as those of the Jewish community) would be secured by constitutional guarantees.

The subcommittee concluded that ?it is a matter for regret? that UNSCOP ?should have evolved a scheme which would, in fact, destroy whatever prospects still exist of friendly co-operation between the two communities and lead to most tragic consequences.? Instead, it argued presciently, a Jewish state that came into being ?against the bitter opposition of the Arabs of Palestine and of the inhabitants of the adjoining countries? would only ?jeopardise peace and international security throughout the Middle East?.

Virginia Tilley
Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Geneva, New York State
Madagascar

From Tony French

In his review of Christopher Browning?s The Origins of the Final Solution, John Connelly says that in early 1941 the Nazis were still, ?in all seriousness?, intending to get rid of Europe?s Jews by shipping them to Madagascar (LRB, 7 July). How could it have been practicable to send masses of people from Eastern Europe to Madagascar while Britain still held the Suez Canal ? not to mention Aden, the Sudan, Kenya and Tanganyika? The notion is so bizarre that I have often wondered whether ?Madagascar? was not another Nazi euphemism.

Tony French
Heidelberg, Victoria

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n16/letters.html

http://www.livejournal.com/users/mparent7777/1808015.html