Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: George Jonas: Hating Israel, each for their own reasons [View all]LeftishBrit
(41,205 posts)But I don't think George Jonas, unless he's changed quite a bit in the last couple of years, is a suitable person to quote on DU.
Here's what I posted about him in 2009:
'Here is a taster:
http://www.georgejonas.ca/recent_writing.cfm?id=674
'Actually, a European Union-type of techno-corporate state seems a greater threat to a free society. The EU's kind of supra-national bureaucracy, less bloody and more sophisticated than a communist state, is nearly as coercive and more likely to succeed.
I think the force with the greatest capacity for becoming a threat to liberal democracy is liberalism itself -- meaning loony-liberalism, a kind of ideological ménage à trios between Timothy Leary, Karl Marx and Al Gore, at once passionate and arid, that in Western societies has all but captured the educational and judicial machinery of the state. In some, it's a virtual state religion, whose matriarchal, environmentalist, multicultural, anti-male, anti-family, anti-individual and public-hygiene shibboleths are enforced by Orwellian regulatory agencies, commissions and tribunals, better known as the smoke-, smut-, seat-belt-, thought-, language-and calorie-police.
Some of loony-liberalism's ideological strands, e. g., feminism and environmentalism, transcend borders and religions. Like all successful ideologies, they can absorb other kinds of self-identifications and loyalties. They can even absorb each other, as demonstrated by the 1990s movement of "eco-feminism." As millennial ideas, they hold out the promise of a new beginning, a fundamental change in human society. Both matriarchy and environmentalism combine mysticism with a quasi-scientific stance, much like fascism and communism did.
...Democracy, far from being eco-fascism's enemy, seems to be its friend. Its enemy is liberty. That's why I think liberty has as much to fear from democracy as from autocracy.
So, is it going to be Sino-Russian autocracy versus Western-style democracy, as Kagan suggests? I wouldn't rule it out. Nor would I rule out democracy allying itself with a kind of pseudo-scientific health-worshipping eco-maniacal post-family feminism, culminating in a whopping tyranny to make autocracy, or even oriental despotism, look like a Boy Scout jamboree.'
Just as I do not think that the likes of Ron Paul should be cited to justify pro-Palestinian views, I do not think that the likes of George Jonas (in some ways, a more intellectual version of Ron Paul) should be used to justify pro-Israeli views.'
I am here not 'shootingthe messenger' because I disagree with the message. As I said, I broadly agree with this particular message. I am shooting the messenger because I think this particular messemger is fundamentally toxic!