A Blog from David Crump
Journalist, editorialist and former lawyer, Briahna Joy Gray, explains the motivations and concerns of the campus protests now sweeping the world.
Guess what. The truth about student protesters has nothing to do with the anti-demonstration messaging coming from the corporate media and the political class.
“Words are not violence; Zionism is.”
Today the Journal of Holy Land and Palestine Studies published my article titled “Echoes of Slavery, Racial Segregation and Jim Crow: American Dispensationalism and Christian Zionist Bible-Reading.”
Below is the abstract, that is a brief summary of the article:
The apologetics of pro-slavery, pro-segregation Christians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were identical to the methods of biblical interpretation used by Dispensationalist Christian Zionists today. The ideology’s specific rules of ‘literal interpretation’ and ‘antecedent theology’ led both groups to similar conclusions about slavery and racial segregation, on the one hand, and Jewish privilege and Palestinian displacement, on the other. Abolitionist efforts to promote a Christ–like hermeneutic rooted in Christian morality points the way forward to correcting modern theologies, such as Dispensationalist Christian Zionism, that continue to sanction human oppression.
I believe that clicking the highlighted title above will allow access to the article online. However, if this does not work for you, let me know and I can send you a copy.
Yes, I too am disappointed by the numerous formating and editorial errors in my article. Yuck! Unfortunately, it is too late for me to do anything about it now…sigh…
Jewish students have been in the lead of the current anti-genocide campus protests. Here a Jewish student at Columbia clearly explains the difference between antisemitism and anti-Zionism, a distinction that our corporate media, as well as Congress, is working hard to erase.
Breaking the Silence is an Israeli organization made up of former soldiers. They share similar stories. The majority did their tour of duty in the Occupied Territory (the West Bank). Upon reflecting on their behavior when they wore the uniform; after thinking about the ways they treated Palestinians, all develop a guilty conscience. In order to ‘atone’ for their sins, and to educate the Israeli public about the evils of occupation, they tell their stories
Below is one recent example dealing with Gaza:
Professor Omer Bartov is a long-time Israeli scholar of genocide and
Holocaust studies. One of his recent books is titled Genocide, the Holocaust and Israel-Palestine: First-Person History in Times of Crisis, where he compares the Nazi holocaust with the Palestinian Nakba (the violent Israeli displacement of750,000 Palestinians in 1948).
Today he was interviewed by Amy Goodwin on Democracy Now. They talked about Gaza, student protests and antisemitism:
Several weeks ago I posted a breaking news story from +972 magazine discussing an Israeli military program blasphemously called “The Gospel” that used artificial intelligence (AI) to bomb civilian targets in Gaza.
Now +972 has broken a second story exposing two additional AI programs also being used for bombing Gaza. They are called Lavender and Where’s Daddy?
As the article describes, Israel’s favorite tactic is to bomb suspected — note SUSPECTED (Israel’s military leaders admit that the programs have as much as a 10% error rate) — Hamas fighters in their homes at night, slaughtering entire extended families in their sleep.
Apparently, the program title Where’s Daddy? is meant to be a cruel joke, as in: We know where daddy is sleeping, and we are going to bomb his entire family to smithereens. Ha ha ha.
Yes, Israel has intentionally been slaughtering civilians from the beginning of its war against Palestinians in Gaza.
It is no accident that the death toll is now more than 33,600 people, 70% of whom are women and children. Over 13,000 of them under the age of eighteen.
Compare that last figure to the approximately 500 children killed during the past two years of fighting in Ukraine. Here is more tragic evidence of the gruesome anti-Arab racism animating the Jewish-supremacist state of Israel.
Below is a brief excerpt of the +972 article followed by a video clip of an excellent editorial by Krystal Ball from Breaking Point news:
During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a “rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10 percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.
Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s residences.
You can read the entire article here.
Israeli civilians are gathering daily, with the help of the Israeli military, to prevent humanitarian aid trucks from reaching Gaza.
Publicly Israel insists that it has removed the obstacles to aid distribution. Don’t you believe. They have recently forbidden all aid from entering northern Gaza. Now it is being blocked in the south.
Palestinian children are literally dying of starvation. Yet, over the decades, Palestinians have been so terribly, so thoroughly, dehumanized in the eyes of Israeli Jews that even children are happy to see them starve to death.
It’s horrific. And it’s true.
Let’s watch a video together, then check out my analysis afterwards:
Yes, Frantz Fanon was an anti-colonialist writer, activist and fighter who worked to liberate both Martinique and Algeria from French colonialism.
His two famous anti-colonial books (which I have read), The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks, advocated violence as the necessary means for overthrowing western, colonial rule throughout Asia and Africa.
On the basis of this association, the Christianity Today (CT) video implicitly assumes that, like Fanon, all anti-colonial movements must advocate and engage in violence, by definition. Since this particular video is set within the broader context of CT’s current pro-Israel, pro-Zionist video series, I can only assume that this critique of “violent” anti-colonial ideology is somehow related to Israel’s current war in Gaza.
The most common framing of anti-Zionist criticism of Israel nowadays is to describe the country as a settler-colonial state in need of an anti-colonial deconstruction. Hamas is sometimes described as an anti-colonial, revolutionary movement.
Implicitly, then, CT is portraying the Hamas attack against southern Israel on October 7, 2023 as a contemporary example of Frantz Fanon’s violent, anti-colonial philosophy working itself out before our very eyes.
Again, by saying that “anti-colonialism is not value neutral” we are meant to conclude that all anti-colonialism embraces Fanon’s perspective on the use of violence. Hamas becomes the implicit proof of this implied conclusion.
So, what’s wrong with all of this?
First, notice how much of the heavy lifting in this CT presentation is being done through implication. Very little is said explicitly. The supposed lessons to be learned about the inherent violence of anti-colonial movements today – which includes the majority of folks, like me, who are criticizing Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank – are a subtle subtext resonating between the lines of what CT is saying out loud.
This method of communication is a common feature of political propaganda: don’t openly accuse your opponents of being horrible monsters, but sprinkle enough rhetorical breadcrumbs to lead your listeners to the intended, malicious conclusion. It will become embedded in their consciousness as an “obvious” conclusion they arrived at under their own steam.
The second, more important problem with the CT video is its implication that Frantz Fanon’s embrace of violence is representative of all anti-colonial movements. But, of course, this is not true. One of the largest and most successful anti-colonial movements of the twentieth century was led by Mahatma Gandhi, a staunch advocate of non-violent resistance. Gandhi led the campaign to shed India of British colonial control and succeeded through using a variety of non-violent actions.
It is simply alse to suggest, as this video does, that all anti-colonial activists embrace violence as a legitimate means of resistance.
It is also worth noting that this argument is not only historically false, it is also illogical. The CT video draws out its false implication by means of something called a false syllogism. Here is an example of a false syllogism:
The conclusion (C) is obviously false even though the two premises (A, B) are both true. That is the essence of an illogical false syllogism.
The illogical argument embedded in the CT video goes something like this:
The scurrilous accusation implicitly embedded in the CT video – that I, for instance, encourage violence and warfare because I embrace an anti-colonial philosophy – is a politically conservative, pro-Zionist attempt to demonize my criticisms of the way Israel is prosecuting its war against the people of Gaza.
It is also ignorant of, or deliberately ignoring, the many Palestinian activists who follow the way of Gandhi by embracing non-violence in their anticolonial, anti-Zionist activities. Some of these brave men and women are my friends, and I have seen how frequently they are physically assaulted by violent Israeli soldiers while maintaining their peaceful behavior.
In this way, the video perpetuates American misinformation regarding the Palestinian people and the oppressive circumstances under which they live in Gaza and the West Bank.
In any case, according to international law, the Palestinian people have every legal right to employ violent measures in their attempts to rid themselves of Israeli colonial rule. Personally, I am a passivist, and my sympathies lie with my non-violent friends who are pursuing peaceful means of resistance.
And, yes, Hamas committed war crimes on October 7th for which the guilty should be prosecuted. But as a matter of law: Palestinians have a right to use force to free themselves, despite the video’s protestations. Here is another matter where American’s display their ignorance of Israel’s history and the current realities on the ground.
Israel is the blatant aggressor in the current Gaza conflict.
No amount of scare-mongering, illogical argument, false syllogism, or historical falsehoods can change that fact. Don’t allow yourself to be fooled by CT’s lazy, malicious tomfoolery.
Nothing I can say will add to the significance of this heartbreaking interview with Dr. Haddad.
Remember, his family has been slaughtered with American weaponry.
Krystal Ball at Breaking Point news offers a penetrating look at anti-Palestinian media bias.
The way in which people and events are described in news reports tells us a lot about the prejudices, likes and dislikes of news producers and reporters.
In western media Jews and the state of Israel are generally covered very positively. Whereas, Palestinians and the victims of Israel’s aggression in Gaza are portrayed rather negatively.
Check out the evidence offered below. It’s titled “Study Reveals How Media Whitewashes Genocide”: