Parallax Views w/ J.G. Michael J.G.

On this edition of Parallax Views, in 2009 a documentary came out entitled Defamation. Directed by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir, the film sought to explore the phenomena of antisemitism, the perceptions of what is an isn't antisemitic, the question of whether criticism of Israel is the same as antisemitism (or, in the words of many Israel supporters "The New Antisemitism" that seeks to dress hatred of Jews up in a critique of Israeli and its policies), and related issues. The genesis of Defamation begins with Shamir's previous documentary, the equally controversial Checkpoint. Checkpoint took a "fly on the wall" approach to examining the interactions between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian citizens along the border of the occupied territories. Despite the cinema verite fly on the wall" approach of the film, some felt that it painted a slanted, negative picture of Israel that in turn led to accusations that Shamir was the "Israeli Mel Gibson". Gibson, of course, had at that point been known for having an antisemitic outburst after a DUI arrest and, before that, his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ was heavily criticized as promoting hatred of Jewish people in its depiction of Christ's death.
Yoav Shamir, was surprised that anyone would call him the "Israeli Mel Gibson". He also had not experienced antisemitism himself as someone who lives in Israel. So he ventured out to embark on a journey that would take him from the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, where race relations between Jewish and Black residents have long been troubled, to Ukraine and even Poland. He met with the Anti-Defamation League's Abe Foxman and was given unprecedented access to the Anti-Defamation League's office where he got a rare inside look of their operations. Additionally he spoke Jewish academic and noted critic of Israel Norman Finkelstein and the international relations scholar John Mearsheimer, who alongside Stephen Walt co-wrote the book The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. And he went with a group of young Israelis to a state-funded trip to Israel in which teenaged Israelis learn about the horrors of the Holocaust in Poland. What Shamir's documentary shows, however, is up for the viewer to decide. From Shamir's purview, victimhood narratives are holding Israel, and perhaps even the Jewish people more broadly, back. However, his documentary nonetheless paints a poignant picture of all its major players and humanizes all the participants from Abe Foxman to his polar opposite Norman Finkelstein. There's moments of the film that are dramatic, but also uneasy moments of what can only be described as comedy or farce, such as when two young Israelis on the Poland trip mistakenly assume that the Polish men they approached in the street were calling them cuss words (it turns out the men simply did not know the Hebrew language and were trying to explain they didn't understand them).
It's hard to describe in both the written word or even a podcast what Defamation documents. As such it is highly recommended that either before or after this podcast you view the whole documentary at Yoav Shamir's Youtube channel. You can also watch Yoav's previous documentary Checkpoint on his Youtube channel as well and that too is recommended.
At the end of the conversation, we speak a bit about Yoav's latest documentary The Prophet and the Space Aliens about the Raelian UFO cult and discuss Elon Musk's retweeting of Defamation and get Yoav's thoughts on antisemites that have sought to use the film for their own agenda. We'll also discuss strife in Israel amongst it's inhabitants beyond the Palestinians. In other word: Mizrahi vs. Ashkenazi Israelis, etc. There's a lot of ground covered in this discussion and hopefully it supplements Yoav's documentaries well.

On this edition of Parallax Views, investigative journalist Ken Silverstein returns to the show hot off the major story he broke for The New Republic last week: "Off Leash: Inside the Secret, Global, Far-Right Group Chat | The New Republic". Ken has blown the lid off a secret chat group created by Erik Prince, the founder of the controversial private military company Blackwater, that includes a who's who of influential figures of the global right-wing including Congressman Ryan Zinke, Congressman Mark Green, Tucker Carlson, Gen. Michael Flynn, and many others. Silverstein's reporting on this provides an insight into where a number of major figures, including some with intelligence and military connection, stand in 2024 behind-closed-doors on issues ranging including Iran, the Israel-Hamas War/Gaza War, Israel/Palestine, MAGA vs. the Democratic Party, U.S. foreign policy, and much, much more. He's found communications that reveal what friend of the show, American Conservative contributor, and Senior Advisor at the Quincy Institute Kelley Vlahos describes as a "batshit crazy chat group that includes Erik Prince, Lara Logan, and every rightwing grifter, politician, influencer, ex-military psycho" that want to "nuke, napalm, and 'take out' everyone." There was even discussion in the group of rounding up the American right's domestic enemies for Nuremberg-style tribunals. And, on the U.S. foreign policy front, there were calls for covert assassination of political leaders from countries seen as adversarial to the U.S. There were even inclinations in the chat group towards the idea of using nuclear weapons against Gaza. There's also some opaque discussion of Erik Prince having "the right people in place" to deal with Iran, which many of the members of Off-Leash have hawkish foreign policy views on, and some rather interesting discussion pertaining to the plane crash that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Talk of the need for a MAGA "revolution" and fighting against a cabal of Marxists, Islamists, and globalists that many members of the chat view as destroying the U.S. and Western civilization are also prominent in the communications that Silverstein uncovered. We'll discuss all of this and much more in the conversation, but its highly recommended you consult both Ken's original report on this for The New Republic AND his Washington Babylon Substack which will be covering this further going forward. You'll also hear us discuss Donald Trump and domestic repression, Russiagate, the RFK Jr. connection to Off-Leash, Ken's thoughts on President Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump, and much, much more.

On this edition of Parallax Views, recorded in May, a lengthy, almost 3 hour conversation with Yakov Hirsch. You can Yakov's writings at his new Substack here.
Although Hirsch is perhaps best-known as professional poker player, he has in recent years began commenting on the psychology of what he calls "Hasbara Culture". Hasbara, for those unfamiliar, is more or less a term that means propaganda and apologia for the state of Israel. Hirsch's concept of hasbara culture, however goes far beyond that. He argues that prominent commentators in the U.S. like Bari Weiss, Eve Barlow, Brett Stephens, and The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg have come to internalize hasabara so much that it has become a culture, a mindset, an identity in and of itself that distorts reality in ways that are harmful to not only Palestinians but also Jews, both in Israel and abroad.
Hirsch's thinking on these matters first came to prominence through and article he wrote for Tablet Magazine entitled "Hasbara Culture and the Curse of Bibi-ism". Although Tablet is a generally understood as a right-wing and adamantly pro-Israel publication, it nonetheless viewed 's commentary and thoughts on the concept of hasbara culture relevant and important. Hirsch argues that his examination of this hasbara culture is not about left-wing vs. right-wing or even pro-Israel vs. anti-Israel but instead an attempt to look at a phenomenon that is denying ground-level realities in favor of an alternate reality that exists only in the minds of its proponents.
Among the topics discussed in this conversation are Benjamin Netanyahu as the embodiment of hasbara culture; sacred macho victimhood and victimhood discourses; Anti-Antisemitism; the Daniel Goldhagen vs. Christopher Browning debates on the Holocaust (Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners vs. Browning's Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland); Hannah Arendt and the trial of Adolf Eichmann; cognitive empathy and how it is shut down by hasbara culture; the ideology of hasbara culture; the Gaza War and Israel/Palestine; "Never Again" journalists; the "real world" vs. the "separate reality" of hasbara culture; the concept of betrayal in hasbara culture discourse; the Iran nuclear deal and Bibi-ist ideology; John Kerry's warning to Israel about needing to understand the perception of Palestinians; Peter Beinart's The Crisis of Zionism and the significance of Beinart's witnessing the tears of a Palestinian child in the West Bank crying out for his father; the pro-Palestinian protests happening across college campuses; hasbara culture's cultivation of narratives and tactics of agitation; Bill Maher vs. Bill Burr on Hamas, the Gaza War, and the youth;  serious people vs. unserious people; the significance of Israeli politician Yair Golan; Ehud Barak's comments on Palestinians and how he'd probably have been a terrorist if he'd grown up as a young Palestinian; Netanyahu's holy war and the coming Jewish schism; pro-Netanyahu demonization of Barack Obama; "us vs. them" mentalities and narratives; the October 7th Hamas attack; the ADL's response to the BDS movement; the question of irrational hatreds vs. legitimate grievances; the "Whataboutism" arguments of hasbara culture discourse; the attacks on Jewish studies culture Derek Penslar, the embattled co-chair of the Harvard's antisemitism task force; the Israel lobby; the IHRA working definition of antisemitism; ethnocentricity and ethnocentrism;

On this edition of Parallax Views, Rutgers University's Director of the Center for Security, Race, and Rights, Sahar Aziz, returns to the program to discuss the recent House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearings on antisemitism and why they resemble something more akin to the McCarthyite witch hunts of the House on American Activities during the Cold War than an honest effort to combat antisemitism. These hearings, she argues, are more about shutting down political criticism of Israel than fighting antisemitism. We'll also delve into some of the key points covered in Sahar's book The Racial Muslim: When Racism Quashes Religious Freedom and discuss the Islamophobia-industrial complex that's especially been prevalent in America since 9/11 and the Global War on Terror. Moreover, Prof. Aziz will offer her thoughts on the Anti-Defamation League, which has received harsh criticism in recent years with Jonathan Greenblatt at its head, and its activities against pro-Palestinian and Arab American political activists. Most importantly, however we focus on how the House Commitee on Education and the Workforce investigations into antisemitism, which involves figures like Rep. Elise Stefanik and Rep. Virginia Fox, have attacked the Center for Security, Race, and Right as well as academics like Noura Erakat and Juan Cole. Sahar will address some of the allegations made by the House Commitee against CSRR and delve into how this is connected to broader Republican Party efforts to tamper down academic freedom and discourse (ie: how it connects to GOP attacks on DEI and CRT, right-wing promotion of book-banning, etc.).

On this edition of Parallax Views, Israeli investigative reporter Meron Rappaport joins the show to discuss a MAJOR story he helped break last week with 972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian: Israel's Covert War Against the ICC. According to the bombshell reporting Meron and others have done, Israel has engaged in a nearly long surveillance program against the International Criminal Court. Surveillance was aimed at both current chief prosecutor and his predecessor Fatou Bensouda. Additionally, Palestinian human rights groups like Al-Haq, Addameer, Al Mezan, and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) were targets of surveillance and there are connections to the controversial and scandal-besieged Israeli private cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group's Pegasus spyware to this story. This story includes allegations of illegal activity, intimidation, and blackmail.
Read the story HERE: Surveillance and interference: Israel’s covert war on the ICC exposed
We'll  discuss a numbe of issues-related to this story including how figures at the highest-levels of Israel's government, specifically Benjamin Netanyahu, figure into the surveillance program as well as the military (ie: IDF) and intelligence services (ie: Shin Bet) tie into it as well. Moreover, we'll look at how Israeli officials were initially enthused about Karim Khan taking over as chief prosecutor at the ICC until "everything changed" with the October 7th Hamas attack and the Gaza War. At the beginning of the conversation Meron will give his thoughts on the state of the Israeli free press in light of the recent attack on Haaretz's Tel Aviv headquarters where the main doors of the HQ's entrance were smashed.
In the final portion of the conversation Meron discusses the Land for All movement that he helped cofound which offers a Confederation approach to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Many argue that the Confederation approach amounts to a push for a de facto one-state solution, but figures like Dahlia Scheindlin as well as Meron argue that it is actually a two-state solution for the 21st century that addresses the failures and missteps of the Oslo generation. All that and more on this edition of Parallax Views.

On this edition of Parallax Views, longtime California-based progressive activist Mirvette Judeh tells the story of her only political journey and how she and a group of activists scored a victory for the the #CeasefireNow movement that is seeking to make calling for a ceasefire in Gaza a priority in California Democratic Party politics. Mirvette recently penned a piece that appeared in Antiwar.Com entitled "Our Fight To Get the Democratic Party To Call for a Ceasefire in Gaza" in which she chronicles how the fight to get proper recognition of the Palestinian plight in a call for ceasefire resolution. We'll also discuss Mirvette's experiences as a Palestinian, her family's experiences under the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, what "Free Palestine" means for her and what she wants for the Palestinian people, her experiences at the UCLA encampment and what she witnessed there, the "Progressives Except for Palestine" problem, antisemitism, anti-Palestinian racism and Islamophobia, the brutal nature of Israel's assault on Gaza and the cultural destruction it has wrought on Palestinian society, the importance of speaking to Palestinian voices, settler violence in the West Bank and pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank, feelings of being portrayed by fellow Democrats who she's worked with over the years when it comes to the past 8 months of Israel's assault on Gaza, why she doesn't refer to what's happening as the "Gaza War", land theft and resource access in Israel/Palestine, Rashida Tlaib and other politicians standing up for Palestinians at this moment, problematic language in the original ceasefire language that Mirvette and other activists fought to change, and much, much more!