Zionism is Far-Right Bigotry, Hate of “the Other,” and Supremacy

Eliding a far-right racist’s own religious heritage

by Paul Haeder / February 3rd, 2025

They are trying to elevate France recognizing Josephine Baker as a hero, yet, Amy Goodman has the ability — and whatever else is going on with the Black journalist she interviews, French journalist Rokhaya Diallo — to sidestep the tribal and religious and historical and intellectual identity of this French monster, Éric Zemmour (above image).

He’s Jewish and he openly uses his Jewishness as a cuddle to get where he is today — published writer and candidate for office? Where is the money trail, that is the question. I ask this as I did get a reader’s comments (from the Dissident Voice newsletter where I am published) who is from California but has lived in New Zealand for 25 years. He’s a businessman, in hospitality, and he writes me from time to time. He is concerned with employees from South America, in his New Zealand restaurant, still skeptical of the Pfizer and how the NZ government makes it illegal to work without a series of jabs — booster madness is what 2022 will be. Just a little research on NZ —

New Zealand Terrorist Attack: The Israel Connection

“The corporate press is correct that Tarrant and Breivik follow the practices of the anti-Islam xenophobic movement on the rise in Europe, North America and now Oceania, but the key element they deliberately avoid mentioning is their strong collective affinity for the state of Israel.”

You know, the Christian Identity politics in the world, well, of course they are tied to Identity, and that is Christianity. The Jewish Identity politics (an entire country, Israel, Jewish, and like In God We Trust USA Christian nation) tie into of course, Jewish-ness. Zionism Identity, well, of course, Zionism is the identifier. Why would Jewish Amy Goodman not mention this person’s — Zemmour’s — Jewish identity? He’s anti-Muslim, and he’s a proponent of murder and mayhem. He’s misogynistic as HELL.

Oh, Josephine Baker —

‘Baker wrote about the injustices she had witnessed for a French paper, France-Soir. From Montevideo to Copenhagen, she gave talks about the evils of US segregation, and on 28 August 1963, she was the only official female speaker to speak alongside Martin Luther King at the March on Washington. In her French military uniform, Baker spoke about her own struggle for justice to a quarter of a million people. Looking out at the mix of races in the crowd, she declared: “Salt and pepper — just what it should be.”

Yet these actions did not go down well with the FBI, who had a file open against her since 1951 because of her “anti-United States statements and her fight for racial equality”. For 15 years, until Baker’s 60th birthday, they recorded her actions and called her a Communist Party apologist, not least because she occasionally partied with the Castro brothers in Cuba.’

Being the first black woman to become a global celebrity and to star in a major feature film – 1934’s Zouzou  undoubtedly made Josephine Baker an influential cabaret siren and fashion icon. Yet she was also so much more. A Second World War spy for the French Resistance, a civil rights activist, a suspected communist sympathiser, and a single mother to twelve adopted children from all over the globe, Baker refused to dance to anyone’s drum but her own.

Her words still resonate today: “Surely the day will come when colour means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one’s soul, when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free.”

(Ailsa Ross is a journalist living in the Canadian Rockies. She’s the author of The Woman Who Rode a Shark: And 50 More Wild Female Adventurers [AA Publishing, 2019])

So, how do we frame all of this through the lens and looking glass of racism and bigotry, a real foundation of Zionism, which is the founding force of the state of Israel? This by, Yoav Litvin, an Israeli-American doctor of psychology/neuroscience, a writer and photographer. His work can be found at yoavlitvin.com.

Early Zionists syncretised many aspects of European fascism, white supremacy, colonialism and messianic Evangelism and had a long and sordid history of cooperating with anti-Semites, imperialists and fascists in order to promote exclusivist and expansionist agendas.

In fact, throughout the past century, anti-Semites and Zionists have worked towards the mutual interest of concentrating Jews in Israel; the former as a means of scapegoating and expelling an unwanted population, and the latter to combat the “demographic threat” posed by native Palestinians. Further, both anti-Semites and Zionists construct Jews as a biological race, which needs to be segregated as part of a utopia of global apartheid.

Zionism is a racist and settler colonialist movement, which opportunistically coopts aspects of Judaism in an attempt to justify its criminal practices of apartheid and genocide of indigenous Palestinians. White supremacy is dominant within Israeli society, which privileges white-skinned Ashkenazi Jews at the expense of dark-skinned African Jews, Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews as well as African refugees. African/black Jewish communities are often denied recognition by Israeli authorities with some members even deported.

Zionism is based on a distinctly secular outlook, which embraces aggression and expansion as an acceptable response to trauma and denounces the traditional Jewish pacifist approach of viewing hardship as divine punishment for sins. The Israeli regime capitalises on a dynamic of violence and inequality reinforced by fear-mongering and the rewards of resource acquisition to promote a privileged ruling class at the expense of colonised Palestinian people. Zionist strategists manipulate the past traumas Jews have endured to galvanise support for aggressive policies that disenfranchise Palestinians.

They call it double punishment, or at least that’s what Yonathan Arfi, vice president of the Representative Council of French Jews, describes it. False narratives from Jews, and then coming from people who are Jewish. Stephen Miller, anyone? Remember his prominence in Trump-Alt-Hatred politics? So, Zemmour is Jewish, espouses supremacist views of whites (Jews over Goyim, but he doesn’t yammer too much on that), and he thinks all women are baby breeders and do not have the capacity for politics and can’t be geniuses. So, the legitimacy he claims as a Jew with his Nazi patina, well, that is the double take, double tap, double punishment.

So many will question how much Zemmour truly engages with his Jewish identity – but, as philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy argues, that has become irrelevant. Despite rigorous criticism from the Jewish community, “what Mr. Zemmour does, whether he likes it or not, [is] in the Jewish name”. (source)

They all do land with parachutes, pariahs and war criminals, one and all.

Israeli military hegemony is indeed no long-term guarantee of US interests in the region, but the scale of the US-Israel military relationship and the close synchronization of US and Israeli strategy down to the present are determined by a strategic calculus, not by sentiment. Kissinger’s comments do reflect an important shift in US policy at this time, towards greater reliance on compliant Arab regimes to preserve the status quo. But Israel’s function as a “strategic asset” is no mere rhetorical flourish of Ronald Reagan’s campaign. US policy, in 1975 as now, aimed to enhance Israel’s strategic capacity in the region, consolidate friendly Arab regimes, and to isolate and debilitate the Palestinian movement.
— “Kissinger Memorandum: ‘To Isolate the Palestinians,’” Middle East Report, 96 (May/June 1981).

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Pulitzer-prize winner Alice Walker caused much controversy by recommending David Icke’s book And the Truth Shall Set You Free, claiming it was “a curious person’s dream come true”.

Many reacted sharply to Walker’s endorsement of what is widely considered to be an anti-Semitic book, accusing her of embracing Icke’s racist conspiracy theories; others, like Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa, defended Walker, claiming her ideas are anti-Zionist and not anti-Semitic. In her article, In defence of Alice Walker, Abulhawa claimed Palestinians are “killed, humiliated and destroyed in visible and invisible ways by Israel’s notions of Jewish supremacy”.
— Yoav Litvin, “The Zionist fallacy of ‘Jewish supremacy,’” Al Jazeera

This, Alice Walker, or …

Kissinger and the Tribe . . .

On December 2, Democracy Now— Read the transcript and see more of Diallo’s words.

We go now to France where we are joined by French journalist and filmmaker Rokhaya Diallo. Her latest op-ed for the Washington Post is headlined Josephine Baker enters the Panthéon. Don’t let it distract from this larger story. Thank you so much for joining us, Rokhaya. Why don’t you start off by telling us that larger story and then go into the significance of Josephine Baker being recognized?

Rokhaya Diallo: Thank you so much for inviting me. I am very happy—to me, it’s very good news to finally have a woman of color in the Panthéon, which is, as you said, one of the most prestigious places to welcome the most revered French figures. It is something that is very meaningful, because as well as being an entertainer, she was also a hero of resisting during the Second World War but also took part to the March on Washington. As you said, she was the only woman.

But there are two things that left me with mixed feelings. First, the fact that France tends to use the fact that it has been very welcoming to African Americans throughout the 20th century to picture itself as a very open and welcoming country. But the thing that we tend to forget is that while Josephine Baker was celebrated and dancing on Parisian stages, France was a very violent colonial power, so it was also colonizing Africa and Asia and also the Caribbean, and perpetrating very much violence to people who were colonized and also displaying them in what was called at that time the Colonial Exhibitions, which were basically human zoos where you could see people coming from the colony to be seen by visitors from Paris and from other regions of France.

So there was a double standard with African Americans being welcomed because they were American and didn’t have any historical agreement to settle with France. At the same time, other people of color were actually submitted to the French state.

I go back to New Zealand, because it is very easy to believe New Zealand is this great, well-run, law abiding, great place!

Sources:

1. “New Zealand’s Hidden Role at the Biggest US Bombing Base in the Middle East”
   A recent issue of Air Force News revealed that a senior NZDF officer served a six-month posting at the Qatar base, placing New Zealanders at the heart of the main targeting and bombing center in that region

2. “World’s Super Rich Buying Pandemic Escape Mansions in New Zealand”
   A number of the planet’s richest people, including billionaire co-founder of Paypal Peter Thiel, are escaping to New Zealand to shelter in luxury bunkers amid the COVID-19 pandemic.FacebookTwitter

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Paul Haeder's been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.

 

Zionism: Jews and Penguins




by M. Shahid Alam / January 27th, 2025

Zionists have sought to delegitimize Palestinian opposition to Zionism or Jewish settler-colonialization of their lands, by accusing them of antisemitism, that is, of harboring hatred for Jews as such, not because of what they had/have been doing to Palestinians.

Yahweh gave Palestine to the Jews in perpetuity: thus the story goes in the ancient literature of the Hebrews as recorded some 2,500 years ago in Genesis. Why would the Palestinians refuse to handover their country to the ‘original’ Ashkenazi title-holders to Palestine: if not for their hatred of Jews – if not for their inveterate hatred of Jews? Is there be any merit to this accusation? Could it be that in fact, this accusation is a smear – one instance of the weaponization of antisemitism – employed by Zionist Jews to malign their Palestinian victims? Indeed, this smear is hurled at anyone with the temerity to disagree with the narrative that Zionist Jews have constructed to justify their European exclusionary settler-colonialism in Palestine, now ongoing for more than a century.

It is as if the Whites in the United States were to accuse the Blacks of anti-white racism whenever they demanded their human rights. It appears that the Whites in the USA have not thought to be this creative when defending their apartheid, their exclusion of Blacks from the rights of citizenship. That is not to say that they have not been nearly as creative in other ways.

Consider a simple test to discover where the truth might lie in this matter, with the Jewish accusers or the Palestinians accused? Imagine a replay of the history of Palestine starting with the announcement of the Balfour Declaration on November 2, 1917.

In this infamous Declaration – actually a letter written by one British Lord, Sir Arthur Balfour, to another British Lord, Lionel Walter Rothschild, a prominent member of the Rothschild banking family in Britain. In this letter, Lord Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary – tersely and artfully – conveyed the British government’s commitment to create a “a national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. In other words, the British Empire would use all the authority at its disposal to enable European Jewish Zionists to create a Jewish colonial-settler state in Palestine.

Soon after the Balfour Declaration, European Jews began arriving in Palestine, under the military protection of the British colonial government in Palestine. Over the next thirty-one years, these Jewish colonial-settlers – drawn almost entirely from Europe – built the political, social, administrative and military infrastructure of an exclusionary Jewish state in Palestine – one that rigorously excluded Palestinians – with the fullest support and cooperation of its British colonial government.

When the Palestinians organized to resist the settler-colonization of their lands, the British colonialists were ready to use brutal force against them. Starting in 1936, as the resistance gained momentum, the British responded with blunt and brutal force. They made mass arrests of Palestinians, incarcerating them in concentration camps without trial; they demolished homes and villages suspected of supporting the resistance; and clamped curfews on villages and cities to disrupt the movement of Palestinian fighters. By the time the Palestinians resistance was crushed in 1939, nearly all the leaders of the resistance had been executed – often staged as public spectacles – sentenced to long prison terms or exiled. In other words, the British had created the conditions for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the Jewish colons.

In 1947, the Ashkenazi Jewish colons began to employ their superior societal, state and military power to initiate the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. By the end of 1948, they had captured 78 percent of mandatory Palestine; simultaneously, the Jewish military and militia perpetrated dozens. of massacres to expel 80 percent of the Palestinians from the lands conquered for the Jewish state. Israel banned the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes inside Israel, and those attempting to return were repulsed with deadly force.

Of the Palestinians who remained inside Israel, many lost their homes, agricultural lands and businesses. In addition, all were placed under military rule that would not be lifted until December 1966. After military rule ended, these Palestinians have lived under a variety of restrictions that remain in force to this day. Israel has been an apartheid society since its inception, with two sets of laws, one for Jewish colons and another for Palestinians.

In a mere thirty-one years, then, the European Jewish colons had created a Jewish state in Palestine after ethnically cleansing more than half its population, a unique achievement in the history of settler colonialism. In June 1967, Israel conquered the rest of Palestine – East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip and the West Bank – while also expelling another 200,000 Palestinians from these areas.[1]

All the other European colonial-settlers in the Americas, Oceania and Southern Africa had taken centuries to create their own state, something the Jewish colons in Palestine achieved in a mere thirty-one years. In addition, the Jewish colons achieved this without a natural ‘mother country.’ How did a tiny, hated, weak and persecuted minority manage to achieve this miracle?

In our replay of this history, we will not change any of the events of this history of the settler-colonization of Palestine. We will only change the identity of the colons; we will replace the European Jewish settler-colonists with Penguin settler-colonists from Antarctica. These Penguins too will enter Palestine to establish an exclusionary Penguin settler-colonial state after expelling 80 percent of the Palestinians from 78 percent of Palestine. In other words, the Jews and Penguins do not differ in their aims, methods or achievements as
colonial-settlers in Palestine. They differ only in their identity: one group consists of Jews – at first overwhelmingly from Europe – another consists of Penguins from Antarctica.

If Palestinian opposition to the Zionist project was motivated by their antisemitism or prior hatred of Jews – then we should expect them to react differently to an identical settler-colonial project, now undertaken by Penguins from Antarctica. The Palestinian reaction has to be different because the Penguins are not Jews, and no one could accuse the Palestinians of antipenguinism, or an ancient hatred of Penguins because of their Penguin identity.

No Orientalists – Jewish, Christian, or secular: English, French or German – have accused Islam, the Qur’an, Prophet Muhammad, Muslim rulers, Muslim theologians, Muslim poets – Hafiz, Rumi, Omar Khayyam – Muslim philosophers – Al-Kindi, Avicenna, Averroes – of teaching the Muslims to hate the Penguins.

Simply stated, the Palestinians could not have brought a prior anti-Penguinism to their encounter with the Penguin settlers-colonists in Palestine. Without prior hatred of Penguins, therefore – using the logic of the Zionists – we can expect the Palestinians to welcome the Penguin settlers who begin arriving after November 1917. Since the Palestinians not infected with anti-Penguinism, they would not object to their dispossession by the Penguins.

Indeed, if the Penguin settlers could cite ancient Penguin could cite chapter and verse from their ancient scriptures to prove that a feathered Yahweh, some 5000 years ago, had awarded Palestine in perpetuity to the progeny of a Penguin Abraham and Jacob, we might expect the Palestinians to honor the feathered Yahweh’s pledge, since there is only one God, whether he reveals himself to Penguins, Jews, Arabs, Ostriches or Kangaroos. We might even expect the most devout Muslims among the Palestinians to insist on serving the divinely chosen Penguins as their slaves in perpetuity.

However, we would be sorely disappointed in these expectations. Once we grant the Palestinians their humanity – and we have to, willingly or not – surely they will oppose the Penguin settler-colonists – as they had resisted the Jewish settlers-colonists – but not because of any prior hatred of their Penguin identity. The Palestinians would oppose the Penguin settlers because of what they must do to them as exclusionary settler-colonists. Like their Jewish counterparts, they too will use terror to ethnically cleanse them, and establish an exclusionary Penguin settler-colonial state in Palestine.

In other words, the Palestinians will oppose the Penguins because they have arrived in their land with the same intentions as the Zionist Jews. Notwithstanding their disparate identities, both are exclusionary settler-colonists entering Palestine under the military protection of a British colonial government. Regardless of why the Jews or Penguins may have launched their exclusionary settler-colonial project, regardless of who they are, both will use terror to expel the Palestinians from their lands. Since the Palestinians are humans, as human as the Jews, no more and no less, their human instincts of self-preservation, their human pride in their history and culture, their human love for their homes and their children will persuade them to oppose both the Jewish and Penguin colonial project. Indeed, they have the right and moral obligation to resist settler-colonialism, no matter who the colons are, no matter the promises the deities may have made to the colons, no matter the national mythologies they believe or pretend to believe in.

We may now summarize the argument of this essay. Since an exclusionary settler-colonialism seeks the total or near total erasure of another people, the natural instinct for self-preservation (common to all forms of life) will propel its victims to resist and repel the settlers. The victims’ instinct for self-preservation is not predicated on any prior hatred towards the settler-colonists; their present revulsion over the past and ongoing actions of the colons will suffice to activate their instinct of self-preservation. In other words, the Palestinians resisted Zionism because it sought their erasure as a people, not because the people who sought their erasure were Jews, real or fictive descendants of the Hebrews.

One has to conclude that Zionist accusation of antisemitism against Palestinians is based on the premise that the latter do not possess the instinct for self-preservation. In the Zionist narrative, the Palestinians opposed Zionists not because they were opposed to their own erasure, but because this erasure would be effected by the hated Jews. They would have welcomed their own erasure if only this were to be effected by any other people – Yemenis, Vietnamese, Nepalese or Australian Aboriginals – or any other species – Penguins, Kangaroos, Koala Bears or Dolphins.

Notwithstanding the pretext of Zionism – claiming that the European Jews were reclaiming their divine patrimony – the mostly secular Zionist leaders must have understood that this was a cover for their exclusionary settler-colonial project. The white settlers who effected the erasure of native Americans also sought cover for their slaughter in divine sources. Many of them thought of themselves as the new chosen race, and of America as their promised land. Other white settlers in North America spoke of their manifest destiny: this was part of God’s plan to create a new freer, Christian society in a new land.

The Jewish Zionists owe their success to brute force, not originally their own, but the brute force of antisemitic Western imperialist powers. This is not to suggest that the results of brute force cannot endure. I will claim exemption from such naïvet&eacute. No doubt, the Jewish Zionists were inspired by the many successful European colonial-settler states in the Americas and Oceania. There were many failures too. I am thinking of the many European settler-colonies in North Africa, East Africa and Southern Africa that were dismantled in the second half of the twentieth century. There were also two settler-colonial states that belong in this category: South Africa and Southern Rhodesia.

Certainly, history will decide whether Zionism belongs in the first or second category of settler-colonialisms, not time that is measured in years or decades, but historical time that is witness to the birth and death of hundreds of states.

Unfortunately, it may be the case – and I may be wrong about this – that the pioneers of Zionism were not thinking of historical time. Smart as they were, they may have been misled by their own recent successes and by their envy of European nation states.

---

Notes

1. Israel also captured the Golan Heights and the Sinai, territories belonging respectively to Syria and Egypt.

M. Shahid Alam is professor emeritus of economics at Northeastern University. He is author of two books of poetry: Intimations of Ghalib (Orison Books, 2018) and Yardstick of Life (KDP, 2024). He may be reached at moc.oohay@06720malaqla.