Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
Phil Weiss is here.
Mondoweiss.net is the website.
The war of ideas in the Middle East.
And it's primarily Philip Weiss and his buddy Adam Horowitz.
But there are other writers on there too from time to time.
Always great stuff and almost always focused on Israel issues.
Welcome back to the show Phil, how are you doing man?
Good Scott, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, good to have you here.
That's great, yeah, I'm happy to be here.
Let's start with this.
Help Mondoweiss stay afloat with a voluntary subscription.
How does that work?
You know, we're just like everybody else on the web right now.
We're trying to figure out how to stay afloat.
You know, news sites, we've got to raise money.
So we're trying to get people to commit to, you know, $5 a month.
We've thought about a lot of things, like a voluntary firewall, you know, something like that.
But this is where we're asking them to give $5 a month.
So we'll see, you know.
I don't know what – I went to Netroots, you know, a couple weeks ago.
And I went to this panel on people who are making money on blogging and stuff.
Oh man, I should have gone to that.
Yeah, and then I – it was like I was prepared to be, wow, let's see all these people making all this money.
And no one's making money.
You know, they're all in the same position of really sweating it out and trying to figure it out.
And, you know, just what the major news organizations are doing.
They're sweating too.
Everybody's sweating.
So anyway, so that's the long answer to your question.
Well, no, it's good that people know that you're doing this.
You know, everybody's got to raise a little bit of money in order to, you know, keep doing what you're doing.
So, I mean, we've got to face the market test, right?
Do people value Mondo Weiss or not?
They better.
Right.
Yeah, hey, thanks, man.
Yeah.
No, I mean it's a hard – it's hard to figure out.
You know, I think we'll be around.
We've been around five years.
And, you know, that's the way things are – you know, who knows where things are going.
It's the most exciting thing that's ever happened to media, you know, since the invention of the printing press.
So we're all just lucky to be here, you know, and be alive and halfway compus mentis for this.
So, hey, you know, I'm excited.
It's totally turning, really, the whole world upside down, but especially journalism.
Isn't it great?
Completely upside down it is.
It's a revolution, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, it's just such a privilege.
I mean, as someone who participated in the mainstream media for a long time and made a very good income and then saw my privileges shattered by the onset of the Internet, hey, bring it on.
Right.
It's the best thing that's ever happened.
You know, on the issues that you and I care about, I mean, where would the opposition to the Iraq War be without the Internet?
I don't know.
Yeah.
Well, and the rest of it, too.
It's just – it's amazing to think back to, like, how did we do it in 1993?
How did people talk?
Just telephone trees and stuff, I guess.
Yeah.
I know.
I know.
It's like – and then they felt like second-class citizens.
You know, that was the other part of it.
They felt like second-class citizens that, you know, maybe they got to have a letter in the paper every once in a while, and it even wouldn't be edited, but, you know, they weren't the experts who were on the big newspapers.
Those were the people who really knew what was going on, and, you know, screw that.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I'm not that old, but I lived a lot of my life where you had, I guess, you know, the Post and the Times, whatever the Austin American-Statesman is reprinting from the Post and the Times, and then you got your three TV channels, and whatever Rather, Brokaw, and Jennings agree on is the way it is.
Simple as that is how it all was.
Top down.
Whole time can't yell back or nothing.
You try.
Yeah.
I mean, that's crazy.
I mean – But those days are over.
You know, in fact, we're going to be talking about the Gaza Flotilla here in a second.
Let's go ahead and get there by way of segue.
Remember a year ago when Eliot Spitzer had Glenn Greenwald on.
Who's Glenn Greenwald?
He's a lawyer who decided he would start blogging all the time, and he's such a damn good blogger that he ended up breaking through and became a guest on MSNBC, and Eliot Spitzer had no idea what he was getting into bringing Glenn Greenwald on the show to talk about the Gaza Flotilla massacre, and it was a massacre, and Glenn Greenwald just destroyed him.
That was a perfect test, I think, of the new paradigm.
What are you going to do, NBC, with the Glenn Greenwalds of the world?
You're going to lose to them.
Right, right, and they'll keep them off.
That's the way they'll resolve it.
They'll keep them off.
But it doesn't work, though, because he probably has more readers than they have viewers.
Yeah, yeah, there's that.
Absolutely.
You got it.
All right, so now let's get to this current flotilla thing.
I saw on your show, on your blog, on Friday, I was actually in the middle of interviewing a guy who is one of the organizers of the Americans going on this new flotilla, and during the interview I hit refresh on your blog, and there it says, Hillary Clinton hands the Israelis a license to kill Americans, basically.
Can you elaborate a little bit, maybe back down a little from my hyperbole?
Well, I mean, the thing is that the State Department has repeatedly said that Israel has a right to defend itself against this flotilla, whatever defend itself means.
Now, the flotilla, as I'm sure your listeners know, is this effort by an international effort to break the siege on Gaza that Israel has maintained by sending boats there, many with humanitarian aid on them.
But the flotilla is a political act.
The organizers of the flotilla regard the siege of Gaza as illegal, as the Goldstone Report does, as almost all international reports on it.
It's a form of collective punishment.
For Goldstone, it's a war crime.
So they're trying to break this siege.
And the United States has sided with Israel on this, against the flotilla, and has said even though there are dozens of Americans planning to sail to Gaza to break this siege, none of them are armed.
The United States has said that Israel has a right to defend itself against these people.
So once again, we see the American government siding with the militarist government of Israel against the Arab Spring, against these efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East.
Here's an effort where people are trying to just create a land bridge, a lifeline to these people who have been in a ghetto with barbed wire around them for five years now.
And our government is saying if Israel shoots you and kills you, we're not going to do anything about it.
And that's American policy because if you'll remember the attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 where 34 American sailors were killed, no investigation, no follow-up by the American government.
Israel got away with that.
If you remember the killing of Rachel Corey in 2003 trying to stop an Israeli bulldozer from destroying a Gazan's house in Gaza, this place that's under siege, no investigation.
The American government has never stood up for the Corey family.
And there have been no consequences to Israel of that action.
A year ago, Israel killed Furkan Dogan, a 19-year-old Turkish-American, an American citizen who was on the Mavi Marmara, a previous flotilla into Gaza.
No consequences for the killing of Furkan Dogan.
Shot at point-blank range five times.
Dogan was holding a camera that he was trying to record this raid by Israeli commandos on the flotilla in the middle of the night in which they killed nine people, including him.
So there have never been consequences when Israel hurts Americans.
I think of Emily Hanakowitz, a young artist from New York, who was blinded by Israelis the same day that Furkan Dogan was killed.
And the American government has never protested the blinding of this young artist.
Well, here they are giving permission before the fact.
Go ahead and kill him, Hillary says.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm sorry.
Hold it right there, everybody.
It's Philip Weiss from the Mondo Weiss blog, mondoweiss.net.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Philip Weiss from the Mondo Weiss blog.
And of concern today is the upcoming, I guess, what, fourth attempt, third or fourth attempt to break the Gaza blockade by peaceful activists attempting to bring humanitarian goods to Israel.
And we already talked about how Hillary Clinton already characterized anything that the Israelis do, that their military forces do to this peaceful flotilla of civilian ships as justified in self-defense.
So I don't know if we need to stay on.
Maybe you have more to say about the American politics of this thing, Phil, or maybe we can go ahead and skip to the actual situation in Gaza, what it is that these people are willing to risk their lives for.
Well, Scott, I'm just curious.
Do you think – I live in the middle of all this.
When this Hillary thing happens, to me it's just another naked exposure of the power of the Israel lobby in our politics.
Do you think that my perception is broadly shared?
Yeah, well, broadly shared?
No, I don't know.
I mean I think probably most people didn't even hear it at all, don't know much about it, or think that the Palestinians are occupying Israel.
They don't know nothing about it really.
But what about the fact that Netanyahu came here in May and gave a speech in Congress where he talks about the biblical right of Jews to the West Bank and all this hokum, and he gets 29 standing ovations from the Congress?
Actually, you're probably better to answer that than I am because I'm kind of too far away.
There in D.C., from what I could tell, it seemed like maybe that was a little much and that people kind of reacted against that.
Right, right, but I mean even if people out where I live actually in upstate New York and where you live are not registering this, I think that that kind of embarrassment, the ruling class in this country such as it is, I mean all the journalists and politicians and big finance people, I think they're embarrassed by that.
I think it's repulsive and even to them that they regard this as, and they realize that our foreign policy has gone off a cliff on this issue because of special interest.
Well, you know, I don't know what it would take to get the American people to really pay attention to this issue, but I think if there was anything like a fair portrayal of what's going on here in the media that the Israel lobby would be overmatched by the American's lobby really fast.
Yeah, I hope you're right.
I think that it is going to happen.
I think that's slowly beginning to happen.
I mean just today I have an item about Andrew Sullivan, a very popular blogger and commenter, on his site saying, hey, American Jews, would you ever walk away from Israel?
Could they do anything that you'd walk away from Israel?
And that's a vital question to my people.
We have to answer that question.
What would make you decide that you don't want any part of this place?
So, I mean, that's my engagement here is as a Jew who's really concerned for Jewish life and for American life.
Well, and they claim to speak for you is the thing, right?
Right, they do.
You know, a state's a state's a state, you know?
It has to be somehow where all Jews in the world are – their will is expressed through whoever happens to be running the Likud party over there or something, which couldn't possibly be true, you know?
Right, and their passports – if I was living over there, my passport would say, what's my nationality?
Jewish.
So they regard me as being of the same nationality.
I'm in the same nation.
And I'm sorry, I live in the American nation.
You know, that's my nation.
And this effort to define Jews as a nation is really where I'm engaged.
And, you know, the problem is, just as – you know, let's go back to the heart of this.
You know, this ideology called communism failed 60 years ago or 50, 40 years ago and finally collapsed because it became obvious that it was not – it failed on its own terms.
It wasn't creating opportunity for poor people.
It was creating this incredible bureaucracy, lack of opportunity, and, you know, slow destitution in those societies and backwardness.
And here's this ideology that I've been involved with and Jews have been involved with for 120 years now called Zionism.
And what has it created?
It has created a ghetto, a concentration camp, virtual – well, a careful concentration camp.
But it's a barbed wire ghetto for 1.6 million people in Gaza.
And 600,000 young Arabs are living there.
And these people are being punished because their parents happened to vote for Hamas in elections five years ago.
And they are – these kids are being denied all opportunity.
And you just think of the rage that's building in that society and in Palestinian society throughout the West Bank too.
It's just in – where there's endless checkpoints and settlers are colonizing their land.
Jewish settlers are taking their water because of the Jewish nationality and our ancient claim to that land.
And I can move over there tomorrow and take their well and displace them.
It's just outrageous.
And so it's this failed ideology.
It's essentially – it has proved to be racist in its application.
Whatever glory and idealism was associated with Zionism at any other time, it's proving to be racist in its application.
Yeah.
And what do you call that thing, the opposite of Aliyah where Jews leave Israel and never come back?
It's called Yorid.
I'm Yorid.
That means going down.
Aliyah means going up.
If I move to Israel, I'll be going up.
And the people who live in America are Yorid.
They're down.
They're below.
Really?
Yeah.
That's interesting because I was actually reading this thing about a bunch of – I think it was like a whole town worth of Jews that had all left Russia and gone to Israel.
And they decided they hated it there, and they went back to Russia.
They were living out on the edge of Siberia anyway, and they had their own little economy and their own little village.
And everybody treated everybody with respect and no militarism, no high taxes.
It was great.
Yeah.
I mean there's a lot of statistics showing that one out of five of those Russians, since they moved there, has moved out.
I mean they don't like it over in Israel.
And there's this huge – just like Jews in Europe were looking for the right papers 70 years ago when things were getting bad over in Germany and central Europe, everyone wanted the right papers.
Now in Israel, something like – they say that nearly half the population may have foreign passports.
And they also want the right papers because they know that things are not looking good for a Jewish state.
It's, again, a failed ideology.
We're talking about something that is just anachronistic, out of step, and the Arab Spring is only exposing the intolerance of Zionism even more.
And it's interesting the way Americans are so in favor of this most of the time when separation of religion and state is one of our paramount virtues here.
And the idea that this is a Christian nation, like which kind of Christian, or any of those things.
Codifying that in law, that's barbaric.
That's old world madness.
We're better than that.
We have been for 300 years or something.
Absolutely.
200.
And you look at my people's presence in American society and how we fought that.
We've been liberals on that issue and actual libertarians on that question.
And meanwhile we're maintaining this kind of medieval distinction over there.
Yeah.
Terrible.
And I don't know about everybody else or whatever I guess, but I do know that I learned about in America freedom of religion matters before I learned about even the existence of George Washington and the cherry tree or David Crockett or anything.
Freedom of religion is the most important thing of all.
How can you say, oh, this is a Jewish state when it's what, a quarter of the people aren't?
Right, right, right.
What does that mean?
It's crazy.
Yeah, and I mean from my standpoint there are a lot of screwy states around the world, a lot of screwy countries that have these weird ethnic distinctions.
And there's a limit.
I mean I'm a libertarian on that.
Other states want to try other ways of constructing their constitutions.
Israel doesn't even have a constitution because it wouldn't want to put this in writing.
But other states have screwy ways of doing things.
Hey, you know what?
Just don't make me a party to it.
Don't make me an accomplice to it.
Don't make me part of your oppressive structure.
So that's where – that's hurting my brand as an American, an American Jew.
Yeah.
Well, and especially when the answer is so obvious at least as far as, well, the Jewish state thing, I don't know.
But as far as ending the occupations, they could just end the occupations tomorrow.
Close down the settlements.
Give up the West Bank and Gaza.
Let it be a Palestinian state.
Oh, boo-hoo, I'm so scared of Hamas.
Like Israel can't handle Hamas.
And then everything would be fine.
You wouldn't need – half the population wouldn't need passports.
They got passports because they're scared everything is about to fall apart.
Right, right.
The solution is right there.
Well, I don't know if they can still pull that one off though, Scott.
They don't want to even try it.
But that's what the Arab League would say.
You'd have peace if you did that.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, thanks as always for joining us on the show and all your analysis on the great blog there.
Mondoweiss.net, everybody.
