McCarthyism Comes to Europe and the Levant:
The Zionist Targeting of Lebanon's Dr. Ibrahim Mousawi
By Franklin Lamb in Beirut and Ann El Khoury in Sydney
You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
-- Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy, April 1954
20/01/08 "ICH" --- - In a US Senate hearing just over fifty years ago, Boston lawyer Joseph Welch famously rebuked Senator Joseph McCarthy with these now immortal words. They have been immortalized because they have helped furnish what we understand McCarthyism to mean: extreme, mean and unreasonable persecution of people by means of witch-hunts and other tactics including guilt by association or through simple prejudice. This is done in order to achieve a political objective of silencing dissent and preventing the public from learning inconvenient truths.
In the human drama of Middle East theaters and in the wider context of the current Bush administration-spearheaded endless war, the New McCarthyism involves the mobilization of the global 'war on terror', in which we see once again the manipulation of fear and the corruption of public discourse in pursuit of narrowly partisan gain – chief among them, the Likudnik Israel-first hawks of the neoconservatives in the US and Israel.
The foot-soldiers of the Likud lobby around the world are applying pressure to stop people from attending academic and activist conferences. As with the McCarthyism of half a century ago, today's Middle East Studies McCarthyism perpetrated by the Likud Lobby is also a threat to our liberty, to academic freedom, and to basic, fundamental democratic rights and responsibilities.
A network of right-wing Zionist activists has intensified its online campaign based on a melange of distorted or provably false charges against critics of Israel. Zionist media 'megaphone' the charges, stoking the furor. When mainstream media ultimately notices, it generally focuses its coverage only on the furor rather than investigating and reporting the truth about the false charges.
McCarthyism 2.0: The War On Terror
After the collapse of the USSR, there were expectations in many quarters that there would be a 'peace dividend'. The military industrial complex had burgeoned during the Cold war, and vested interests therein were not going to give up their power, privilege and profit from war so readily, if at all.
Yet after the WTC attacks on Sept 11, 2001, a generalized 'war on terror' was sold to a stupefied electorate. Right out of the Red Scare playbook of the Cold War morphed the War on Terror playbook, with 'terrorist' substituted for communist as the new post cold war evil. With the scope widened, the demonization of the Arab/Muslim as the new monolithically conceptualized enemy commenced, and extended to the criminalizing of dissent and charity-giving: even social activists have been called terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.
Cynical campaigns to confound and confuse and whip up hysteria and ratchet up racism have abounded. Israeli-financed websites like Act of America, by their propagandist, the former Saad Haddad and Antoine LaHood operative, the Maid of Darkness, Bridgette Gabriel, spew obscene racist hatred against Americans and others of Arab or Muslim origin that would likely give even McCarthy pause.
Du
The Zionist Targeting of Lebanon's Dr. Ibrahim Mousawi
By Franklin Lamb in Beirut and Ann El Khoury in Sydney
You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
-- Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy, April 1954
20/01/08 "ICH" --- - In a US Senate hearing just over fifty years ago, Boston lawyer Joseph Welch famously rebuked Senator Joseph McCarthy with these now immortal words. They have been immortalized because they have helped furnish what we understand McCarthyism to mean: extreme, mean and unreasonable persecution of people by means of witch-hunts and other tactics including guilt by association or through simple prejudice. This is done in order to achieve a political objective of silencing dissent and preventing the public from learning inconvenient truths.
In the human drama of Middle East theaters and in the wider context of the current Bush administration-spearheaded endless war, the New McCarthyism involves the mobilization of the global 'war on terror', in which we see once again the manipulation of fear and the corruption of public discourse in pursuit of narrowly partisan gain – chief among them, the Likudnik Israel-first hawks of the neoconservatives in the US and Israel.
The foot-soldiers of the Likud lobby around the world are applying pressure to stop people from attending academic and activist conferences. As with the McCarthyism of half a century ago, today's Middle East Studies McCarthyism perpetrated by the Likud Lobby is also a threat to our liberty, to academic freedom, and to basic, fundamental democratic rights and responsibilities.
A network of right-wing Zionist activists has intensified its online campaign based on a melange of distorted or provably false charges against critics of Israel. Zionist media 'megaphone' the charges, stoking the furor. When mainstream media ultimately notices, it generally focuses its coverage only on the furor rather than investigating and reporting the truth about the false charges.
McCarthyism 2.0: The War On Terror
After the collapse of the USSR, there were expectations in many quarters that there would be a 'peace dividend'. The military industrial complex had burgeoned during the Cold war, and vested interests therein were not going to give up their power, privilege and profit from war so readily, if at all.
Yet after the WTC attacks on Sept 11, 2001, a generalized 'war on terror' was sold to a stupefied electorate. Right out of the Red Scare playbook of the Cold War morphed the War on Terror playbook, with 'terrorist' substituted for communist as the new post cold war evil. With the scope widened, the demonization of the Arab/Muslim as the new monolithically conceptualized enemy commenced, and extended to the criminalizing of dissent and charity-giving: even social activists have been called terrorists or terrorist sympathizers.
Cynical campaigns to confound and confuse and whip up hysteria and ratchet up racism have abounded. Israeli-financed websites like Act of America, by their propagandist, the former Saad Haddad and Antoine LaHood operative, the Maid of Darkness, Bridgette Gabriel, spew obscene racist hatred against Americans and others of Arab or Muslim origin that would likely give even McCarthy pause.
Du