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Old June 22nd, 2010 #2
Karl Radl
The Epitome of Evil
 
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Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: The Unseen University of New York
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Hypocrisy 2.0

A Book Review of Denis MacShane’s, 2008, ‘Globalising Hatred: The New Anti-Semitism’, 1st Edition, Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London

Denis MacShane is a person that if you don’t follow British politics with a particular interest in anti-Semitism and the jews you wouldn’t even know existed. MacShane is currently the Labour Member of Parliament for Rotherham and something of a philo-Semite par extraordinaire. He chaired the 2006 ‘All-Party Parliamentary Group against Anti-Semitism’, which produced a report that might as well have come from Tel Aviv as it showed little to no critical understanding of jewish claims and reports regarding ‘anti-Semitic incidents’ and in fact showed an extreme bias in simply accepting whatever it was told by jews. (1)

It was due to his sterling service to the jews; and particularly to the British ‘Israel Lobby’ (so-called), that the jews gave MacShane the chairmanship of a favourite jewish mouthpiece on the subject of anti-Semitism: ‘the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism’, which predictably conflates anything that could be considered as detrimental towards jews (such as somebody chucking a bucket of water over a jew by mistake causing the jew to be late to Shul) and actual anti-Semitism (i.e. actual opposition to jews). MacShane is also an advisory board member for the adjunct Israeli organisation ‘Just Journalism’, which ‘monitors’ the British media and howls with rage whenever anything remotely critical; or even neutral, about Israel is written by a British journalist.

MacShane’s personal character is rather shady as well as since the 2009 Expenses scandal he is alleged, by ‘The Daily Mail’, to have claimed £125,000 over 7 years for his garage, which he claims he uses as an office. An expensive office indeed! MacShane was also caught lying outright on British television when he claimed to not have described Gordon Brown’s ‘five economic tests’ as a ‘red herring’, but was actually recorded on a Dictaphone doing so (which was played back to him to his great embarrassment). MacShane then amusingly publicly wondered why on earth he had been removed from the top post as ‘he hadn’t done anything wrong’. It is also worth noting that MacShane’s father; Jan Matyjaszek, was supposedly Polish, but given MacShane’s almost inexplicable unconditional love for Israel and the jews (despite being on the political left who are normally critical of Israel and the jews) we are forced to wonder if there isn’t a jew or two hiding in his father’s family tree.

MacShane’s 2008 book is really just a statement of his own personal convictions and is only interesting because of the prominence of the author rather than because of its actual intellectual content (or rather lack of it). Although that said we should note that MacShane seems to have deliberately made it semi-impossible to look up the sourcing for his claims as either he or his; jewish, publisher; Weidenfeld & Nicholson, have decided to not use footnotes or a conventional sourcing system, but rather have put their notes at the back of the book with only references to page numbers beside each without elaborating on what specific point they are supposed to evidence. This makes it rather difficult to expose what I suspect MacShane has been up to this work: systematically misrepresenting the literature to make it seem to be much more supportive of his general thesis than it is. As it is MacShane almost exclusively uses popular pro-Israeli and pro-jewish sources and cites basically no academic literature. Rather MacShane prefers to lose himself in making the most pointless remarks about his opponents or creating the rather novel thesis that there is an anti-Semitic conspiracy against the jews. That said this thesis isn’t exactly new as it is has other notable advocates who are often just as silly and absurd as MacShane such as the corpulent John Loftus and Mark Aarons. (2)

Perhaps the reader may think I am being overly harsh and it is probably true that in some respects I am, but my reason for being so is rather simply that MacShane should firstly know better than to make the dozens of breathtakingly stupid claims and arguments and secondly that MacShane as an individual sheds a foul light upon his distortions, half-truths and outright fabrications in ‘Globalising Hatred’. In so far as he is not some bamboozled stuffed shirt with about as much common sense as your average wooden plank, but rather a slimy little toad who dresses his self-importance and outright egocentrism up as some sort of original and thought-provoking treatise.

MacShane begins his ‘book’ with the following statement of his ‘intellectual’ position, which amounts to little more than philo-Semitic filibustering and blathering:

‘Organised neo-antisemitism is like a rat in our entrails preventing just and equitable solutions to key world problems and replacing hope with hate. Combating neo-antisemitism should now be a major political priority for progressive politics. I am neither Jewish nor does the politics of ‘Israel, right or wrong’ make any sense to me. But I have spent my political life fighting racism, intolerance, hate and denial of a people’s or a state’s right to exist. I am intolerant of intolerance.’ (3)

This is obviously a piece of absurd rhetoric as opposed to the statement of an intellectually valid position on MacShane’s part. As firstly his politics are ‘Israel, right or wrong’, which can be shown by pointing to his uncontested involvement in adjunct Israeli organisations like ‘Just Journalism’, his quoting ‘right-wing’ Israeli sources; such as MEMRI, (4) without even the pretence of any criticism or filibustering about ‘taking a critical view’ and his extremely lavish praise upon Phyllis Chesler’s rather absurd and poorly received book: ‘The New Anti-Semitism’. (5) One is left wondering just how much of the substantial literature on the subject of anti-Semitism that MacShane has actually read and what he seems to have read is only what one can only class as ‘hard-line Zionist’ material of which Chesler can be considered a second tier proponent. (6)

We are thus within reason to meet MacShane’s assertion that the intellectual left; which is predictably undefined by MacShane (being the rather deceitful character that he seems to be), with outright laughter in regards to its sheer absurdity. I quote:

‘Many French intellectuals and political activists on the left suspend critical judgement when it comes to the Middle East.’ (7)

Here MacShane shows his utter hypocrisy by accusing French ‘left wing’ intellectuals and political activists of ‘suspending critical judgement’ on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but yet we find MacShane obviously suspending his own critical judgement; assuming that he has the ability to do so, when it comes to pro-jewish and pro-Israeli sources, but being overly critical of anti-jewish and anti-Israeli sources. One would be within reason to ask MacShane on what basis he has ‘taken a side’ and why on earth he is pretending to be ‘objective’ on the conflict when it is painfully obvious to any reader from either side of the debate that he is not and belongs to the ‘hard-line Zionist’; if you will, camp.

This can be illustrated simply by pointing out that MacShane does not even mention the jewish terrorism that was the foundation of the state of Israel or that these terrorist attacks were specifically targeted against British soldiers and civilians (whose descendents he supposedly represents in the British parliament). Instead MacShane simply makes the standard vapid claim; which is made by just about every Zionist and professional or amateur apologist for Israel in world, that Israel is justified in existing, because the Arabs already have plenty of land for themselves. (8) So therefore would MacShane support a policy of say Londoners from Britain re-colonising New York State, because there is plenty of space in the rest of the United States for the Americans from New York to go live? I think not, but then this simple logical problem with his argument doesn’t even seem to enter MacShane’s head and he is much too busy copying the argument; without obvious attribution I might add (which as they say constitutes plagiarism as it occupies intellectual ground that is already occupied [ironic: isn’t it?]), to give any critical consideration to his own; often wild and obviously untrue, statements.

One prominent example of where MacShane’s ‘hard-line Zionist’ nature comes to the fore is on the subject of Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer’s famous 2008 book: ‘The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy’, which MacShane dismisses in a few paragraphs that could well be out of an Alan Dershowitz book or Israeli Foreign Policy brief. I quote the most pertinent passage of MacShane’s claimed ‘demolition’ of Walt and Mearsheimer’s work:

‘The article and the book made allegations that American Jews decided US foreign policy on Iran, Iraq and Syria, and both the article and subsequent book were entirely solipsistic. There is not a single reference to any of the European policy discussions on the Middle East or a book published in a European language.’ (9)

This is truly rather pathetic as I am sure even someone as apparently incapable of rational cognition as MacShane; in spite of his academic doctorate, would realise as MacShane is criticising a book about United States Foreign Policy (i.e. focusing on the Anglophone world not any other bits of this planet) for not including reference to European policy discussions or having included non-English language literature. This is obviously absurd. We can realise this by simply giving an alternative example: if you wrote a book about say modern English social history and you only used English language sources then MacShane is asserting that your work would simply be an ‘invention of your own mind’ (the meaning of ‘solipsism’) and that it would simply be intellectually invalid, because it didn’t include German language reference materials regarding German social history.

MacShane is hardly making sense intellectually let alone logically now is he?

As we have discussed MacShane shows his deceitful side in the passage just quoted in so far as he presents an obviously ludicrous argument to his reader as ‘the truth’ knowing full well that it completely false, but yet because he doesn’t want to break his argument down into a convincing case he hides his meaning in ‘big, scary intellectual-sounding words’ (if you will). If MacShane had a real intellectual case: I would imagine (or rather I’d like to; as otherwise MacShane’s mindset beggars belief) he would make it openly and simply without plagiarising Israeli propaganda or profusely blustering amateurish rhetoric in place of a sound detailed intellectual argument.

We further see MacShane malicious and deceitful side in another; this time veiled but obviously partisan, reference to Walt and Mearsheimer’s work:

‘I go to a bookshop in Paris and there is a French translation of a book by two American professors claiming to reveal that American foreign policy is controlled by Jews.’ (10)

This obviously refers to Steven Walt and John Mearsheimer as there were no two other American professors who had just authored a book in 2008 that would have got quick translation and also argued that jews had a significant (as opposed to complete) say in American foreign policy. Of course MacShane knows he is lying by deliberately distorting Walt and Mearsheimer’s thesis given that they make it explicitly clear on numerous occasions that their use of the term ‘Israel Lobby’ includes both jews and non-jews as well as that the latter have a significant role to play in said lobby.

MacShane’s lying takes on a whole new dimension in other places since he isn’t just sneering at people he doesn’t like, but actually outright making up insane claims that have no basis in historical fact what-so-ever. For example on page sixty-six MacShane claims that jews have never had any legal rights in the gentile world. This is simply absurd as of course they have had legal rights as that was the very basis of the contract between the jews and the state and is covered in detail by any good history of the jews.

Two prominent examples of well-known scholarly works that directly address this topic in detail are Benjamin Ginsberg’s ‘The Fatal Embrace’ (which deals with jewish legal status in relation to the state generally) (11) and Guido Kisch’s ‘The Jews in Medieval Germany’ (which deals specifically and in great detail with the legal status of jews within medieval Germany). (12) Both are standard works written by jewish academics on this subject, but yet MacShane simply ignores them and lies through his teeth to his reader in asserting that the jew has always; by implication, been mistreated and is really just a misunderstood poor darling of a creature.

Yes: I think we have gathered now that MacShane’s projection of what the jew is really what is solipsistic here, but then one doubts whether MacShane really understands the actual application of all the ‘big words’ he likes to throw into the mix to distract the reader from his lack of intellectual rigour.

We could go further into the huge number of factual and intellectual errors, which veritably howl from the pages of ‘Globalising Hatred’, but to prevent the reader becoming bored: we shall stop our amusing gander at the diseased mind of an ‘intellectual’ philo-Semite there.

What is Denis MacShane? Is he a liar, cheat and a sophist? Yes: he is all of those things and more, but the most damning thing we can note about Denis MacShane is that he advocates complete and utter subservience to jews as the supreme arbiters of truth and to that affect we quote MacShane:

‘The right wing Jew-baiter, the Islamist Jew-hater or all those liberal-leftists who proclaim they are not antisemitic but who deny Jews their Jewishness in the full sense of being Jewish, including their affection for the one state in the world where by definition antisemitism cannot exist, now have to come to terms with antisemitism being what Jews feel and say it is.’

That about sums up the extreme intellectually-absurd philo-Semitism of Denis MacShane: don’t you think?

I do.

References


(1) All the information that I present by way of biographical detail can be easily found as uncontested facts on Denis MacShane’s Wikipedia page, which can be found at the following address:
Denis_MacShane Denis_MacShane
.
(2) Mark Aarons, John Loftus, 1994, ‘The Secret War against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People’, 1st Edition, St. Martin’s Press: New York
(3) Denis MacShane’s, 2008, ‘Globalising Hatred: The New Anti-Semitism’, 1st Edition, Weidenfeld & Nicholson: London, pp. viii-ix
(4) Ibid, p. 90
(5) Ibid, p. 63. The full reference for Chesler’s ‘book’ is as follows: Phyllis Chesler, 2005, ‘The New Anti-Semitism: The Current Crisis and What We Must Do About It’, 2nd Edition, Jossey-Bass: New York
(6) Chesler can be simply evidenced to be ‘hard-line Zionist’ in the fact she collaborates and works closely with Alan Dershowitz (who incidentally endorsed ‘The New Anti-Semitism’) despite the two being as disparate in political and intellectual ideology as it is possible to be (Chesler is a radical leftist and feminist and Dershowitz is a hawkish conservative). One would also get this impression by reading Chesler’s ‘book’ and ascertaining for one’s self the scale of her ‘intellectual’ depravity.
(7) MacShane, Op. Cit., p. 46
(8) Ibid, p. 66
(9) Ibid, p. 128
(10) Ibid, p. 3
(11) Benjamin Ginsberg, 1993, ‘The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State’, 1st Edition, University of Chicago Press: Chicago
(12) Guido Kisch, 1949, ‘The Jews in Medieval Germany: A Study of their Legal and Social Status’, 1st Edition, University of Chicago Press: Chicago
(13) MacShane, Op. Cit., p. 5

This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...ocrisy-20.html
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