Uri Avnery
Jan. 4, 2003
But Israel does:

"Joerg Haider does not propose to cancel the Austrian citizenship of people
who disagree with his obnoxious views, nor does Jean-Marie Le-Pen propose to
expel from the National Assembly every deputy who is not of pure French
blood."

Liberman's Supreme Soviet
http://www.avnery-news.co.il/english/index.html

I have received a lot of curses in my lifetime, and here and there some
compliments, too. But I have never received a compliment like this one: an
important party, represented in the Knesset, has mentioned my name in its
official election platform.

Under the heading "Legislation and strict supervision of organizations and
activists of the extreme left", the National Union party's program says:

"We shall anchor in legislation more severe measures, including the
cancellation of citizenship, against people like Uri Avnery, Leah Tsemel and
refuseniks of all kinds, who are defaming the country abroad."

I don't know whether to be proud, laugh or be angry.

To be proud, because my name is used to symbolize the whole peace camp. And
also because I appear side by side with Leah Tsemel, the valiant lawyer who
defends Palestinian prisoners, and the refuseniks, who represent the
conscience of Israel.

To laugh, considering the abysmal Chutzpa of this sentence. The leader of
the National Union party is Avigdor (Ivette) Liberman, a person brought up
in the Bolshevik education system of Stalin and who has absorbed - as we can
see - the racist and power-hungry attitudes of the red tyrant. He has come
here when everything was ready, to a state that we have created (literally)
with our blood, and now demands, no more no less, to cancel our citizenship.

To be angry, because Liberman, together with National Religious leader Effi
Eytam and some of the Likud leaders, is in the vanguard of the dirty column
that is besieging Israeli democracy. Last week they succeeded in inducing
the majority of the politicians in the General Election Committee to
disqualify two Arab Knesset-members (Ahmed Tibi and Azmi Bishara) and an
Arab election list (Balad) from participating in the elections, expelling in
practice 20% of Israel's citizens from the political arena.

If some people still entertain the illusion that this attack is directed
solely against the Arab citizens (a totally unacceptable act by itself),
they should be reminded of one of the most important sayings of the 20th
century, the murderous century of Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini.

The saying belongs to Martin Niemoeller, a German U-Boat commander in WWI
who later became a Protestant pastor and pacifist. The Nazis threw him into
a concentration camp. After miraculously surviving, he coined the following
unforgettable sentences:

"When the Nazis took the communists away, I was silent; after all, I was no
communist.

"When they put the social-democrats in prison, I was silent; after all, I
was no social-democrat.

"When they took the trade-unionists away, I did not protest; after all, I
was no trade-unionist.

"When they took me away, there was nobody left to protest."

Liberman's program shows clearly that something similar is happening now in
our country. They started with the incitement against the Arab citizens and
their expulsion from the political system. Now they speak of eliminating the
"extreme left". Is there any doubt, that in the next stage they will demand
the elimination of all the left, "moderate" and "patriotic" as they may be?
And then, following the historic precedents, it will be the turn of the
"liberal" Likud members.

An apocalyptic vision? Not really. The President of the Supreme Court,
Aharon Barak, this week compared our situation with Nazi Germany. In the
presence of the President of Israel, the Chief Justice, himself a Holocaust
survivor, said that "if it has happened in the country of Kant and
Beethoven, it can happen everywhere. If we do not defend democracy,
democracy will not defend us!" (It will be interesting to see how he will
conduct himself next week, when he will have to decide on the Tibi-Beshara
expulsion case.)

In Israel, we don't like to make comparisons with the dark regimes. The
memories are too fresh, and nobody in Israel advocates genocide. But
undoubtedly, parties and leaders who openly advocate "transfer", would have
been called anywhere else in the world Neo-Fascists (even if the term
"Neo-Bolsheviks" would be more appropriate, since it was Stalin who used to
transfer whole peoples in the Soviet Union.)

Joerg Haider does not propose to cancel the Austrian citizenship of people
who disagree with his obnoxious views, nor does Jean-Marie Le-Pen propose to
expel from the National Assembly every deputy who is not of pure French
blood.

For 54 years, the State of Israel has prided itself of being "the only
democracy in the Middle East". All Israeli propaganda abroad, and especially
in the United States, is based on this slogan. Now Liberman and the Libermen
come and try to destroy Israeli democracy, our creation, and to set up a
kind of Fascistan, somewhere between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

If somebody is "defaming our country abroad", it is surely this person.

Anti-racists are obsessed with race

By Theodore Dalrymple

(a British physician and contributing editor to City Journal)

National Post, January 7, 2003
www.nationalpost.com/

LONDON - Having worked briefly as a doctor in apartheid South Africa, I
think I can recognize the symptoms of racial madness. For example, I once
overheard a discussion by the police on the question of whether a white
woman whom they had found wandering naked in the street should be taken
into the white entrance of the clinic because she was white, or the black
entrance because she was mad. I never really expected to see such madness
in my own country, however: but the first signs of it are now clearly
visible.

Every so often, I receive an enquiry from my hospital asking me for my
ethnicity. Naturally, I disdain to answer: I conceive it my duty to ignore
such sinister nincompoopery. Last week, however, I received a further such
request, informing me that it was necessary because the ethnic categories
had changed since the last enquiry. The system of racial categorization had
become more complex than previously and there were now more categories,
though not yet as many as in colonial Saint Domingue under French rule,
where 128 were recognized, according to degrees of miscegenation. With a
little effort, I am sure we can easily surpass that number: After all,
Britain is now far more racially cosmopolitan than Saint Domingue ever was.

The enquiry started with the immortal words, "As you may know, we are
required to ethnically monitor our staff ..." The letter was written by The
Human Resources Unit. No personal names, no personal responsibility.

But who did the requiring, and why? The Gestapo, perhaps? We, the racially
monitored, were not informed: Presumably, it was none of our business. But
I still couldn't help thinking of the Dutch bureaucracy's refusal, as the
Nazis entered Holland, to destroy the census data that included religion, a
refusal that came in so very useful in the later deportation and
extermination of Dutch Jewry.

Of course, Britain is not Germany and Blair is not Hitler: So ethnic
monitoring is carried out for the purest of purely good reasons, namely to
ensure that employers are racially unprejudiced, and hire, fire and promote
people in exact proportion to their numbers in the population at large.
Only thus can a truly non-racialist society be erected. It is all done in
the name of equity and equality: the assumption being that these two are
not only compatible but actually require one another. If 0.25% of the
population is of Vietnamese origin, for example, does it not follow that
0.25% of hospital cleaners ought to be of Vietnamese origin? They must be
given a fair crack of the broom.

What if no Vietnamese really wants to be a hospital cleaner? Do equity and
equality demand that one or some should be dragooned into the job? What if
it is found that the number of doctors of Vietnamese origin exceeds the
quota in the population? Should one or some of these doctors be demoted to
cleaning duties? The ethnic monitors would appear to think so, for such is
the logic of their enquiries.

Ethnic monitoring, though, is de facto intended as discrimination against
whites, and can really have no other point. No one in a politically correct
state such as Britain would use ethnic monitoring (nor should they) to
reduce the number of Indian doctors, for example, or reduce the proportion
of medical students who are of Indian subcontinental origin, the latter
currently running at some 25%, that is to say between eight and 12 times
the proportion in the general population. Nor would anyone use such
monitoring to reduce the number of blacks in professional soccer teams,
where they are grossly over-represented. It is only when ethnic minorities
are statistically under-represented that racial injustice is assumed to
have occurred: no other explanation of under-representation 

being possible.

Of course, political correctness is but a gestalt switch away from fascism.
The statistics that at the moment serve to promote racial inclusion can be
just as easily made to serve racial exclusion. One of the prime arguments
of the Nazis, after all, was statistical: that the Jews of Germany, only 1%
of the population, formed an immense disproportion of the university
professoriate, cultural and professional elite. It was assumed that this
disproportion was the result of a conspiracy and that it could not have 

happened spontaneously or organically, as it were: precisely the 

same argument that career anti-racists use to explain the absence of 

Jamaicans from the British judiciary.

In the name of anti-racism, anti-racists are obsessed with race. People who
would deny that racial categories have any scientific or biological
validity collect racial statistics with positively Verwoerdian obsession.
They are conspiracy theorists, and would-be engineers of human souls. They
are mirror-image Nazis. The signs are as yet slight, and the cloud as yet
is only on the horizon. But I call upon the civilized world to impose drastic
sanctions upon Britain before it is too late.