If you are going to defend Richard perle, you need as much background on this delightful chap as, say, Gorgeous George Galloway. Though not as much as Seymour Hersh...who incidently Perle promised to sue..in England..but then did not!

Don't get sucked into the trap of defending all that your enemy attacks.
Your readership are not idiots. You will loose credibilty. And that would be a crying shame. Because you have turned out to be pretty damned good at slapping the hysterical.

I know a lady who worries about paying her council tax on her meager pension. In her spare time she does all that she can to defend Israel and indeed her community against people like Gorgeous George.
Richard perle, from Hollinger to the Iraq (it will be a cake walk) war, and plenty besides has much to answer for.
So what if Perle is jewish. So is Naom Chomsky..and I dont want to defend Chomsky either.

Never defend the indefensible unless you are being paid huge sums to do so..or you are a fellow traveller?? And I trust you are niether.

This is barely worth responding to, but where does Mark Gardner "defend" Richard Perle? Or have you missed the point entirely?

Jo, isn't Mark Gardner's point about Richard Perle the same as our more general point about Israel? Mark objects, as I read it, to Perle being demonized in a racist way:

Perle is described by the Jones-Galloway double act as a "snarling" coward - "ready to fight to the last drop of other people's blood" - a little, fat, oily, weak toad-like <strong>[JEW]</strong>. A piece of trash, snarling, bragging, killing - a "puceball".

You don't need to defend Perle to defend him from an antisemitic attack. And you don't need to defend Israel to defend it from being demonized as illegitimate, uniquely evil, racist, Nazi, Apartheid etc. etc.

If someone makes claims about Jewish capitalists running the world, then it doesn't mean we have to defend the Rotschilds or Roman Abranovich.

If someone says that Jewish Bolshevism didn't turn out so well it doesn't mean that we have to defend Leon Trotsky.

We might want to defend the Rotschilds, or Abramovich or Trotsky - we might not. But we defend them from antisemitism first.

Jews supporting Hitler, Jews forced to leave their "happy" existence in Arab countries after 1948 due to "Zionist" dirty tricks, Jews blowing up synagogues.

There is enough material in this Jones -Galloway discussion to paint a little mustache on both, have them raise their right arms at a 90 degree angle and repeat a few Zig Heils! for the crowd.

It is amazing that an MP in 2005 can recite a lexicon of 1930 Nazi held anti-semitic beliefs and still be picking up a government check. Ah, democracy! Well, I guess his constituents really support him and that support is a better litmus test of who they are than could any polls enlighten us.

But you can't pin all the blame on Galloway.

Just like Hitler wouldn't have had the "success" in his Final Solution endeavor without the cooperation of much of Europe including Vichy France, most of Austria, much of Poland and Eastern Europe.

Today, Galloway has his "anti-Zionist" co-operation as well - the BBC is as much an important ally for Galloway as Sweden was for Hitler. Sweden was "non-aligned" as the BBC is "objective". The Swedes sent Germany steel for their tanks and planes and men for the German SS just as the BBC media demonizes Israel as an aggressor and consistently portrays the palestinians as victims.

The Nazi extermination camps didn't get much public notoriety and the BBC makes sure most murders and executions of Jews by Arabs is also kept to a minimun while Israeli reactions to those murders is front page news on your TV screens and newsprint.

Goebbels, if around today would smile and Hitler would revel in his closely held belief that England is a "natural and racial" ally in the fight against Jewish perversion and racial inferiority.

Oh, sorry, make that "Zionist dirty tricks" and "Zionist sociopaths".

I think that one of the points that comes out of Mark's comments turns on the need to distinguish what is going on now from that of the 1930's. Whilst drawing on many of the themes of the nazi era, contemporary antisemitism cannot be, and should not be, reduced to the nazi exploitation and practice of it. Apart from anything else, the political and social context in which it now exists, and in which it is developing, is unlike that of the earlier era. Comparing Galloway to Hitler as well as present institutions and organisations to those of the past does not help in the understanding of either. It also overlooks the fact that since modern Jewish emancipation, antisemitism has appeared in diverse ways at diverse times. Nazism was not a "culmination" but a specific mode of antisemitism.

From my own perspective, what I find most interesting about Mark's posting is the "detachment" of Zionism/Zionists from Jews. This shift represents Zionism in classic antisemitic terms - a "secret society" acting against the legitimate interests of the world. Its a new ingredient is that Zionism now acts contrary to Jewish well-being. (As with most antisemitic narrative, this latest fabrication is a fraudalent distortion of a factual situation; that many Jews, prior to their extermination, did oppose Zionism (i.e. Bundists, Second International Marxists, and so on.). This position is present also today.)

The advantage of this distinction for Galloway and other anti-Zionsist is that it says to Jews what Bush said to the world; "you are either with us or against us" (Or, in Schmitt's terms, “you are a friend or enemy”). Either you join us by recognising that Zionism is an alien force "even" to you, in which case we will welcome you as an "authentic" member of the left; OR, if you fail to do so, you have cast your lot in with the "master-puppeteer" and mark yourself ("as a Jew") as the enemy. This presentation of the issue expresses itself in erasing the possibility of a serious critique of Israel, one in which Israel can be criticised without the shrill and antisemitic demand for its annulment. As with all forms of antisemitism, thought and judgement are among its first casualties.

I am a Zionist, and proud of it.

I wasn't born a Zionist, so who was it who made me into one? Interestingly, it was neither an "ordinary" Jew nor a "Zionist" Jew. It was not Theodore Herzl, nor Zeev Jabotinsky, nor Lord Balfour, nor George Eliot (Daniel Daronda), nor David Ben Gurion! It was not even the multitude of Biblical prophecies which predict a mass return of Jews to their homeland "Zion" after a long, frequently unhappy, sojourn in Exile....!

It was, simply, the strident Anti-Semitism I experienced during my childhood in England that prompted me to became interested in "Zionism". And neither the frequent attempts by Arab states to destroy Israel via all-out warfare nor the 80+ years of coldblooded, ruthless Arab terrorism by the comrades of Herr Gerg von Galloway und Herr Alex Jones will ever convince me to leave Israel, the land of my forefathers. Thus, paradoxically, it is the enemies of Zionism, whether Arab or Leftwing anti-semites, who create Zionists, and the more they splash about in the stinking sewers of Anti-Semitism/Anti-Zionism, the more Zionism amongst Jews (and even non-Jews) will result.