Wednesday, April 30, 2014


Venezuela: Where the Wealthy Stir Violence While the Poor Build a New Society

April 28, 2014
Creativetimereports.org
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Just for information sake.It is not necessarily 
my position.
طبیعتا بهیج وجه دفاعش از دولت 'چه وز' مورد تائید نمیباشد.اینکه خود مردم بتوانند اقدام به تشکیل کمونها و انجمنهای مستقل (و نه وابسته به دولت)بکنند برای نویسنده این سطور قابل توجه و تقدیر میباشد.حال آنکه تحلیلش از گردانندگان "خیزشها" و اکثریت قریب باتفاق شرکت کنندگان در حرکتهای ضد دولت اقتدارگر 'مه دورو' عمدتا درست میباشد .بزبان دیگر دست کثیف سازمان جاسوسی سیا و یانکی امپریالیسم بغایت آشکار میباشد و میبایست کور بود تا ندید. تنها امید شخص من هر چه قویتر شدن آلترناتیو آنارشیستی در حیطه اقتصادی(کمونهای تولیدی و توزیعی) و سیاسی(جنبش مستقل افقی در تمامی حیطه های اجتماعی) میباشد .   
PaYmaN PieDaR
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Artist and documentary filmmaker Dario Azzellini argues the protests in Venezuela represent a vicious attack on the country's social progress under Hugo Chávez, spurred on by anti-Chavista politicians in affluent regions.

Protests in Venezuela - Comuna Under Construction - Dario Azzellini
The barrios of Caracas, Venezuela. Film still from Comuna Under Construction (2010), directed by Dario Azzellini and Oliver Ressler.
Before Hugo Chávez became president of Venezuela in 1999, the barrios of Caracas, built provisionally on the hills surrounding the capital, did not even appear on the city map. Officially they did not exist, so neither the city nor the state maintained their infrastructure. The poor inhabitants of these neighborhoods obtained water and electricity by tapping pipes and cables themselves. They lacked access to services such as garbage collection, health care and education altogether. 

Today residents of the same barrios are organizing their communities through directly democratic assemblies known as communal councils—of which Venezuela has more than 40,000. Working families have come together to found community spaces and cooperative companies, coordinate social programs and renovate neighborhood houses, grounding their actions in principles of solidarity and collectivity. And their organizing has found government support, especially with the Law of Communal Councils, passed by Chávez in 2006, which has led to the formation of communes that can develop social projects on a larger scale and over the long term.

What the wealthy in Venezuela are afraid of, and what mainstream media channels won’t show, is that a different world is possible—and Venezuela’s working classes are trying hard to build it.
You will not hear about the self-governing barrios in Western reports of protests spreading across Venezuela. According to the prevailing narrative, students throughout the country are protesting a dire economic situation and high crime rate, only to meet brutal repression from government forces. Yet the street violence that has captured the world’s attention has largely taken place in a few isolated areas—the affluent neighborhoods of cities like Caracas, Maracaibo, Valencia, San Cristóbal and Mérida—and not in the barrios where Venezuela’s poor and working classes live. Despite international media claims, the vast majority of Venezuela’s students are not protesting. Not even a third of all people arrested in connection with the demonstrations since early February are students, even though Venezuela has more than 2.6 million university students (up from roughly 700,00 in 1998), thanks to the tuition-free public university system that Chávez created. 

A look at recent arrests reveals that the “protest” leaders are really a mixture of drug traffickers, paramilitaries and private military contractors—in other words, the mercenaries typical of any CIA military destabilization operation. In Barinas, the southern border state with Colombia, two heavily armed barricade organizers were arrested, including Hugo Alberto Nuncira Soto, who has an Interpol arrest warrant for membership in Los Urabeños, a Colombian paramilitary involved in drug trafficking, smuggling, assassinations and massacres. In Caracas, the brothers Richard and Chamel Akl—who own a private military company, Akl Elite Corporation, and represent the Venezuelan branch of the private military contractor Risk Inc.—were arrested while driving an armored vehicle in possession of firearms, explosives and military equipment. Their car had been equipped with pipes to be activated from inside to disperse motor oil and nails on the streets, not to mention tear gas grenades, homemade bombs, pistols, gas masks, bulletproof vests, night-vision devices, gasoline tanks and knives.

The poverty rate in Venezuela has been more than halved since 1998, and extreme poverty has been cut by 70 percent.
After Chávez’s death in March 2013, Venezuela’s opposition politicians saw an opportunity to win presidential elections, perhaps assuming that the public merely cared about Chávez’s famous charisma. However, the opposition’s leading candidate, Miranda state governor Henrique Capriles Radonski, lost to Chávez’s successor, Nicolás Maduro. Having been defeated in 18 of 19 elections since 1998, part of the opposition decided not to hold out hope for electoral victory any longer but instead to destabilize the country and violently oust its elected government. Most often the municipalities where the riots are taking place today are governed by anti-Chavista mayors who support them, either by participating in violent actions themselves or by ignoring the barricades defended with petrol bombs and firearms, instead of sending in municipal police, and by neglecting to collect trash so that the relatively well-off are stirred to revolt. 

What the wealthy in Venezuela are afraid of, and what mainstream media channels won’t show, is that a different world is possible—and Venezuela’s working classes are trying hard to build it. This is the real reason why the country is under attack. And make no mistake: this is a vicious attack on Venezuela, its infrastructure and its very sources of hope.
On April 1, a group of rioters set the Ministry of Housing on fire with Molotov cocktails while 1,200 workers were inside the building. The fire was set close to the ministry’s nursery school, and 89 toddlers had to be evacuated by firemen. This lethal act is no anomaly. During the last several weeks, a university has been burned down, as have nurseries, subway stations, buses, medical centers, food distribution centers, tourist information sites and other civic spaces. In Mérida, the drinking-water reservoir was deliberately contaminated with fuel, and in Caracas, the nature reserve on the north side of the city was set on fire to destroy the power lines that supply the city with electricity. 

Most of Venezuela’s students are decidedly not protesting. But in truth, hardly anyone in Venezuela is protesting: they are waging war.
These attacks follow the same logic employed by the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s: assail easy targets that symbolize the improvements to living conditions achieved by the government or organized communities and thereby spoil any hope that there is an alternative to the rule of capital. Yet there are ample reasons for such optimism. Through nationalizing its oil and gas reserves and investing most of its budget in social programs, Venezuela has become the only country in the world that achieved the UN Millennium Development Goals set for 2015, and it looks as if not many more countries will achieve them. The poverty rate in Venezuela has been more than halved since 1998, and extreme poverty has been cut by 70 percent. Today inequality is lower than anywhere else in Latin America and the Caribbean (not to mention the United States). The majority of people in Venezuela are far better off today than they were before Chávez was elected.

There is no doubt that Venezuela is now going through a difficult economic situation; it has suffered high inflation and acute shortages of food and electricity during the last year. While mismanagement and corruption are problems, as the government itself has admitted, the shortages were caused mainly by speculation, smuggling and intentional reduction of production and hoarding by the private sector, just as before the U.S.-backed coup in Chile in 1973. Even so, during a visit to Caracas earlier this month, a representative of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) underlined the admirable efforts of the Venezuelan government to deepen the impact of social programs. In 2013 the FAO officially recognized Venezuela as one of 18 countries in the world to have achieved huge progress in reducing malnutrition, which dropped from a rate of 13.5 percent in 1990–92 to less than 5 percent in 2010–12. 

That’s why millions of Venezuelans continue to live their lives normally even if the effects of economic crisis always hit the poorest first. The protesters behaving violently and getting international media coverage identify with or are beholden to the classes least affected by the shortages and inflation. Most of Venezuela’s students are decidedly not protesting. But in truth, hardly anyone in Venezuela is protesting: they are waging war.
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This piece, commissioned by Creative Time Reports, has also been published by Alternet

Tuesday, April 29, 2014

تصویری تاریخی از نخستین زن روزنامه نگار ایران

به نقل از صفحه بالاترین 

thumbnail مزين السلطنه که دختر مير سيدرضا رئيس‌الاطباء پزشک قشون ناصرالدين شاه بود . تحصيلات خود را نزد پدرش ياد گرفت.او اولين روزنامه نگار زن ايران بود .در سال 1292 ه- ش مريم عميد نشريه‌ای با عنوان شکوفه منتشر کرد که در واقع اين نشريه به عنوان اولين نشريه زنان در ايران شناخته شده است او در سال 1330هـ ق مدرسه‌ای دخترانه با نام "مزيّنيّه" تاسيس کرد.

تورهای شجریان با سازهای ابداعی خودش

 و به آهنگسازى سعید فرجپورى تور کنسرت‌های اروپایی
 استاد «محمدرضا شجریان» آغاز می‌شود

بر خلاف شهرام ناظری ,کاسه لیس ولایت وقیح, شجریان در کنار مردم موند.دمش گرم !! صداشم البته خیلی بهتره و ساختن سازهای ابداعیش هم که حرف نداره. در مجموع انسان شریفی هست و دوست داشتنی. دختر و پسرش هم هنرمندند.حیف که اروپا نیستم برم کنسرتش.
پیمان پایدار 
استاد محمدرضا شجریان
استاد محمدرضا شجریان
موسیقی ایرانیان – پریا رحمانی: محمدرضا شجریان استاد بنام آواز ایران تور جدید کنسرت‌های خود را برگزار می کند.

به گزارش خبرنگار موسیقی ایرانیان، این اجراها با همراهی سازهای ابداعی و به آهنگسازى و حضور سعید فرج پورى و تصانیف جدیدى از خود با تنظیم و سرپرستى مجید درخشانى، سپتامبر امسال در شهرهایی از کشورهای آلمان٬ فرانسه٬ اتریش٬ انگلستان و سوئد به روی صحنه می رود.

شایان ذکر است که این اجراها به همت شرکت "تولیدی تار"("تار پروداکشن",بزعم نویسنده اصلی متن!!) به مدیریت مجید عبدی و در قالب گروه موسیقی «شهناز» برگزار خواهد شد.
خبرهای تکمیلی از برنامه کامل این کنسرت ها متعاقبا اعلام می شود.


منبع: موسیقی ایرانیان Musiceiranian.ir

Monday, April 28, 2014

Why America’s favorite anarchist thinks most American workers are slaves!؟


BY David Graeber  , April 17, 2014 

چرا معروفترین/ دوست داشتنی ترین آنارشیست آمریکائی
معتقده اکثر کارگران آمریکائی برده هستند!؟-و منم اضافه میکنم که همه کارگران دنیا برده (کارگران مزد بگیر)هستند : پیمان پایدار
A guaranteed basic income gives everyone access to the market, liberating workers to do the work they want to do, says London School of Economics professor David Graeber. Photo by Cole Hawkins/The Image Bank via Getty Images.
A guaranteed basic income gives everyone access to the market, liberating workers to do the work they want to do, says London School of Economics professor David Graeber. Photo by Cole Hawkins/The Image Bank via Getty Images.
Editor’s Note: Conservative proponents of the guaranteed income want a lump sum payment (Charles Murray suggests about $11,000 to all adults) to replace existing social welfare programs and downsize American bureaucracy. But some leftists oppose those government welfare agencies, too, London School of Economics professor David Graeber says. The leftist critique of private and public bureaucracies, Graeber explains, is that they “employ thousands of people to make us feel bad about ourselves.”

Bureaucrats pushing paper decide what we and our work are worth. But somewhat ironically, Graeber suggests, it’s those bureaucrats who perform the most meaningless work of all. If we gave everyone a lump sum basic income and eliminated those bureaucratic jobs, we’d all be better off, he says.

Graeber doesn’t self-identify as an anarchist (“anarchism is something you do”), but as an activist in the Occupy and student loan movements, this is all part of his concern that workers today are “wage slaves.”

With a basic income, everyone would have access to the market. Workers (including those government paper-pushers) could pursue the work they want, while society as a whole would benefit from their scientific breakthroughs and artistic talents. 

From the Beatles to Derrida, Graeber says, this form of public assistance has supported people who would otherwise be “lifting boxes,” or performing some other mundane job as a condition of welfare.

Graeber appears in our Making Sen$e segment on Switzerland’s basic income debate and its appeal in the United States, below. Paul Solman’s extended conversation with him about how a basic income would liberate wage slaves follows.

So you like this idea?
I think it’s great. It’s an acknowledgement that nobody else has the right to tell you what you can best contribute to the world, and it’s based on a certain faith — that people want to contribute something to the world, most people do. I’m sure there are a few people who would be parasites, but most people actually want to do something; they want to feel that they have contributed something to the society around them.

The problem is that we have this gigantic apparatus that presumes to tell people who’s worthy, who’s not, what people should be doing, what they shouldn’t. They’re all about assessing value, but in fact, the whole system fell apart in 2008 because nobody really knows how to do it. We don’t really know how to assess the value of people’s work, of people’s contributions, of people themselves, and philosophically, that makes sense; there is no easy way to do it. So the best thing to do is just to say, alright, everyone go out and you decide for yourselves.

But Friedrich Hayek famously wrote that the market system is an un-replicable way of everybody with their own little piece of knowledge telling you, the producer, what to make and what to use — how much of this, how much of that — via the price system, right?

Right, well, giving people money isn’t eliminating a market system. You could make the argument that that would be true if everybody started with the same amount of money in the market, but when the market is as skewed as it is, where some people control almost all the wealth, and most people have none at all, the market communicates what people with lots of money want.

I mean, think about it: I have a friend — the story is very typical — who’s a musician. He had a hit record — he’s very talented obviously — but having just one hit record won’t set you up for the rest of your life. Eventually, he lost his contracts, so what did he do? He went off and became a corporate lawyer. Pretty much anybody with any brains can get a job as a corporate lawyer, so what does that tell you?

In our society we have a very, very limited demand for brilliant poet-musicians, but we have an infinite demand for corporate lawyers; anybody who can get a law degree will get a job. Well, is that because most people think that corporate lawyers are better to have around than poet-musicians? No. Almost everybody, given the choice, would go for the poet-musicians, but people with lots of money like to have corporate lawyers, so that’s what the market actually ends up saying.

So you think the market is so skewed that a dramatic move against it would be an improvement?
Yes… If everybody has the same means to vote, then the market will actually represent what most people want.
When they’re voting with their dollars?
Yeah, exactly.

So in that sense, the minimum income is a total welfare improvement?
I think it would mean that people’s spending patterns would reflect what they actually want. First of all, survival needs would be taken care of, so that skews people, and you could see what people think is actually important in life. I think that’s why even a lot of libertarians, whom I don’t agree with on a lot, actually kind of like the idea of basic income — because they know that it would make the market work the way they say a market should work.

The libertarians I talk to all said this is great, but great because it will eliminate all the government programs that are otherwise skewing the way these people behave.
Yeah, and there’s something to that. I think that one big problem we have on the left is we don’t really have a strong critique of bureaucracy. It’s not because we like bureaucracy very much; it’s just that the right has developed a critique. I don’t think it’s a very good critique, but at least it’s there. I think this is a perfect left critique of bureaucracy: Who are all these people — and this goes for private bureaucracies as well as public ones — sitting around watching you, telling you what your work is worth, what you’re worth, basically employing thousands of people to make us feel bad about ourselves. Just get rid of those people; just give everybody some money, and I think everyone will be much better off.

So would you get rid of government programs?
It depends on which. The amounts of money that they’re now talking about giving people aren’t enough to take care of things like health care and housing. But I think if you guarantee those sorts of basic needs, you could get rid of almost all the programs on top of that. In huge bureaucracies, there are so many conditionalities attached to everything they give out, there’s jobs on jobs on jobs of people who just assess people and decide whether you are being good enough to your kids to deserve this benefit, or decide whether you’re trying hard enough to get a job to get that benefit. This is a complete waste. Those people [making the decisions] don’t really contribute anything to society; we could get rid of them.

So you’d get rid of, say, the food stamp bureaucracy?
If we had a basic income, we wouldn’t need to decide who needs food and who doesn’t.

Strange Bedfellows?

Libertarians have said to me that this would make people more responsible; there would be more communitarianism…
In fact, that actually has happened in places. In Namibia, they did an experiment where they used to give aid, and instead they just gave everybody a flat sum of money. And the first thing people did was get together, take half the money, put it in a common pool, and that created a democratic system. They decided what they really needed was a post office, which is something no aid group would ever have thought of. These people actually do know their communal needs better than somebody from outside.

So in fact, I think there’s a certain communal tradition that might not exist in a city like London. It might take some changes for people to bring that together, but it would at least give us the opportunity to get together and create common projects in a way that we haven’t been able to do before.

Are you surprised that there’s right wing support for this?
Not at all. Because I think there are some people who can understand that the rates of inequality that we have mean that the arguments [for the market] don’t really work. There’s a tradition that these people are drawing on, which recognizes that the kind of market they really want to see is not the kind of market we see today.

Adam Smith was very honest. He said, well obviously this only works if people control their own tools, if people are self-employed. He was completely rejecting the idea of corporate capitalism.

Smith rejected corporate capitalism because it became crony capitalism.

Well, he rejected the corporate form entirely; he was against corporations. At the time, corporations were seen as, essentially, inimical to the market. They still are. Those arguments are no less true than they ever were. If we want to have markets, we have to give everybody an equal chance to get into them, or else they don’t work as a means of social liberation; they operate as a means of enslavement.

Enslavement in the sense that the people with enough power, who can get the market to work on their behalf…
Right — bribing politicians to set up the system so that they accumulate more, and other people end up spending all their time working for them. The difference between selling yourself into slavery and renting yourself into slavery in the ancient world was basically none at all, you know. If Aristotle were here, he’d think most people in a country like England or America were slaves.

Wage slaves?
Yes, but they didn’t make a distinction back then. Throughout most of recorded history, the only people who actually did wage labor were slaves. It was a way of renting your slave to someone else; they got half the money, and the rest of the money went to the master. Even in the South, a lot of slaves actually worked in jobs and they just had to pay the profits to the guy who owned them. It’s only now that we think of wage labor and slavery as opposite to one another. For a lot of history, they were considered kind of variations of the same thing.

Abraham Lincoln famously said the reason why we have a democratic society in America is we don’t have a permanent class of wage laborers. He thought that wage labor was something you pass through in your 20s and 30s when you’re accumulating enough money to set up on your own; so the idea was everyone will eventually be self-employed.Do People Like to Work? Look at Prisons.

So is this idea of a guaranteed basic income utopian?
Well, it remains to be seen. If it’s Utopian, it’s because we can’t get the politicians to do it, not because it won’t work. It seems like people have done the numbers, and there’s no economic reason why it couldn’t work.

Well, it’s very expensive.
It’s expensive, but so is the system we have now. And there’s a major savings that you’ll have firing all those people who are assessing who is worthy of what.

Philosophically, I think that it’s really important to bear in mind two things. One is it’ll show people that you don’t have to force people to work, to want to contribute. It’s not that people resist work. People resist meaningless work; people resist stupid work; and people resist humiliating work.

But I always talk about prisons, where people are fed, clothed, they’ve got shelter; they could just sit around all day. But actually, they use work as a way of rewarding them. You know, if you don’t behave yourself, we won’t let you work in the prison laundry. I mean, people want to work. Nobody just wants to sit around, it’s boring.

So the first misconception we have is this idea that people are just lazy, and if they’re given a certain amount of minimal income, they just won’t do anything. Probably there’s a few people like that, but for the vast majority, it will free them to do the kind of work that they think is meaningful. The question is, are most people smart enough to know what they have to contribute to the world? I think most of them are.

What Is Society Missing Without a Basic Income?

The other point we need to stress is that we can’t tell in advance who really can contribute what. We’re always surprised when we leave people to their own devices. I think one reason why we don’t have any of the major scientific breakthroughs that we used to have for much of the 19th and 20th centuries is because we have this system where everybody has to prove they already know what they’re going to create in this incredibly bureaucratized system.

Because people need to be able to prove that they’ll get a return on the investment?
 Exactly. So they have to get the grant, and prove that this would lead to this, but in fact, almost all the major breakthroughs are unexpected. It used to be we’d get bright people and just let them do whatever they want, and then suddenly, we’ve got the light bulb. Nowadays we don’t get breakthroughs like that because everybody’s got to spend all their time filling out paperwork. It’s that kind of paperwork that we’d be effectively getting rid of, the equivalent of that.

Another example I always give is the John Lennon argument. Why are there no amazing new bands in England anymore? Ever since the ’60s, it used to be every five, 10 years, we’d see an incredible band. I asked a lot of friends of mine, well, what happened? And they all said, well they got rid of the dole. All those guys were on the dole. Actually in Cockney rhyming slang, the word for dole is rock and roll — as in, “oh yeah, he’s on the rock and roll.” All rock bands started on public relief. If you give money to working class kids, a significant number of them will form bands, and a few of those bands will be amazing, and it will benefit the country a thousand times more than all of those kids would have done had they been lifting boxes or whatever they’re making them do now as welfare conditionality.

And in the United States, the entire abstract expressionist movement, whatever you think of it — Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock — was all on the WPA [Works Progress Administration], on the dole.

Absolutely, look at social theory. I remember thinking, why is it that Germany in the ’20s, you have Weber, Simmel, all these amazing thinkers? In France, you have this endless outpouring of brilliant people in the ’50s, Sartre… What was it about those societies that they produced so many brilliant thinkers? One person told me, well, there’s a lot of money — they just had these huge block grants given to anybody. And you know, again, 10 out of 11 of them will be people we’ve completely forgotten, but there’s always that one that’s going to turn out to be, you know Jacques Derrida, and the world changes because of some major social thinker who might otherwise have been a postman, or something like that.

They Can't Represent Us!: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy

They_can_t_represent_us__cmyk_

How the new global movements are putting forward a radical conception of democracy.
Mass protest movements in disparate places such as Greece, Argentina, and the United States ultimately share an agenda—to raise the question of what democracy should mean. These horizontalist movements, including Occupy, exercise and claim participatory democracy as the ground of revolutionary social change today.

Written by two international activist intellectuals and based on extensive interviews with movement participants in Spain, Venezuela, Argentina, across the United States, and elsewhere, this book is an expansive portrait of the assemblies, direct democracy forums, and organizational forms championed by the new movements, as well as an analytical history of direct and participatory democracy from ancient Athens to Zuccotti Park. The new movements put forward the idea that liberal democracy is not democratic, nor was it ever.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

"سرزمین شیرین فلفلی من"; فیلم تازه ‌گلشیفته فراهانی


فیلم تازه ‌گلشیفته فراهانی؛ "سرزمین شیرین فلفلی من"
گلشیفته فراهانی در فیلم جدید خود "سرزمین شیرین فلفلی من" در نقش یک آموزگار پرکار و صبور کُرد ظاهر می‌شود. این فیلم در اروپا با استقبال چشم‌گیر منتقدان و تماشاگران روبرو شده است.
 
سرزمین شیرین فلفلی من از کارگردان سرشناس کُرد هینر سالیم، تازه‌ترین محصول کردستان، آلمان و فرانسه است. این فیلم برای نخستین بار در بخش نگاه دیگر جشنواره‌ی جهانی فیلم کن ۲۰۱۳ به نمایش در آمد. نام هینر سالیم دو دهه‌ی پیش با کار‌های بیادماندنی مانند ودکا و لیمو و اگر بمیری، می‌کشمت بر سر زبان‌ها افتاد. 

 
سرزمین شیرین فلفلی من


کردستان مستقل
"سرزمین شیرین فلفلی من" یک وسترن کُردی طنزآلود است که در طبیعت مسحورکننده‌ی "کردستان آزاد" فیلم‌برداری شده است. کردهای این منطقه پس از سرنگونی صدام حسین در سال ۲۰۰۳ سرانجام توانستند در "انتخابات آزاد" شرکت کنند و در سال ۲۰۰۵ احزاب و رهبرانشان را خود تعیین کنند.
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جامعه‌ی آزاد بی‌قانون
تازه‌ترین کار هینر سالیم نیز به روابط و مناسبات اجتماعی کردستان، پس از پیروزی و کسب استقلال می‌پردازد؛ جامعه‌ای پدر سالار با بافت‌های گسست‌ناپذیر سنتی که هنوز در آن قانون و قانون‌مندی جائی ندارد و اسلحه و خشونت حرف اول و آخر را می‌زند.
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گذشته‌ی غم‌انگیز
هینر سالیم که سال‌ها در مهاجرت بسر برده و برای نخستین بار در سال ۲۰۰۸ برای تهیه‌ی مقدمات این فیلم به زادگاهش بازگشته، سرنوشت و آینده‌ی "کردستان موجود" را به نقل از پدربزرگ خود این‌گونه تعریف می‌کند: «گذشته‌ی ما غم‌انگیز است، زمان حال‌مان هم همین‌طور. باید خوشحال باشیم که آینده‌‌‌ای نداریم.» این برداشت، اغلب در نماهای زیبای فیلم با رنگ‌آمیزی‌های گویا بازتاب می‌یابد.
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رئیس پلیس و آموزگار
داستان فیلم "سرزمین شیرین فلفلی من"، داستان آشنایی و مبارزه‌ی باران (کرکماز ارسلان) و گوند (گلشیفته فراهانی) علیه استبداد و بی‌قانونی است. اولی در صف پیش‌مرگان کُرد برای استقلال زادگاهش تا پای جان جنگیده و دومی در رویای رسیدن به این استقلال، تحصیل کرده تا بعدها به "میهنش" ادای دین کند.
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مبارزه با قاچاقچیان
باران در نمایی از فیلم می گوید: «قبلا که مبارزه می‌کردیم، آسون‌تر بود. حالا باید بسازیم.» وظیفه‌ی این مبارز پیشین در مقام رئیس پلیس، برقراری نظم در منطقه‌ای در مرز ایران و ترکیه است که به مرکز قاچاق نفت و دارو و مشروبات الکلی و بسیاری کالاهای نایاب دیگر تبدیل شده است. گوند هم آموزگار متعهدی است که بر خلاف میل ۱۲ برادر رشید خود و کدخدای ده، راهی این روستا می‌شود تا به "بچه‌ها" سواد یاد بدهد.
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عشق و پیروزی
این که گوند و باران در راه انجام وظیفه‌ی خود و ادای دین با دشواری‌های بسیاری روبرو می‌شوند، از ابتدای فیلم روشن است. این که این دو به یکدیگر دل می‌بازند، هم همین‌طور. در این نما، باران آموزگار از روستا رانده‌شده را سوار بر ترک اسب خود به شهر نزدیک می‌برد.
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وسترنی کُردی با طنز خشک
فیلم "سرزمین شیرین فلفلی من" نه به‌دلیل موضوع داستان (که برای بیننده‌ی اروپایی قطعا خالی از جاذبه نیست)، بلکه به دلیل پرداخت تصویری و طنز خشک هینر سالیم (که خاص فیلم‌‌های او است)، مورد استقبال منتقدان قرار گرفته است. در این نقدها بازی گلشیفته فراهانی نیز در کنار سایر ویژگی‌های فیلم تحسین می‌شود.
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"سنگ صبور"
گلشیفته فراهانی از هنگامی که فعالیت هنری خود را در خارج از کشور آغاز کرده، همواره مورد تقدیر منتقدان اروپایی قرار گرفته است؛ از جمله در فیلم "سنگ صبور" به کارگردانی عتیق رحیمی. او در این فیلم در نقش زن وفاداری بازی می‌کند که به امید بهبودی همسر بیمار خود برای تامین معاش خانواده، حتی تن به خودفروشی می‌دهد.
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"درباره‌ی الی"
گلشیفته فراهانی با بازی در فیلم "درباره‌ی الی" به کارگردانی اصغر فرهادی به شهرت جهانی رسید. این فیلم روایت‌گر زندگی چند خانواده است که برای گذراندن تعطیلات به شمال سفر می‌کنند: سپیده، مربی مهدکودک دختر خود، "اِلی" نامی را هم به این سفر دعوت می‌کند تا با احمد آشنا شود. با ناپدید شدن الی در ساحل دریا، این سفر به یک فاجعه بدل می‌شود.
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"یک مشت دروغ"
گلشیفته فراهانی هنگامی که هنوز در ایران زندگی می‌کرد، به بازی در فیلم "یک مشت دروغ" به آمریکا دعوت شد. او در نماهایی از این فیلم در کنار "لئوناردو دی کاپریو" نقش‌آفرینی کرد. اما پس از بازگشت به ایران دچار مشکلات و "مزاحمت‌های ناشی از بی‌قانونی" شد: اداره‌ی گذرنامه پاسپورت فراهانی را توقیف کرد و وزارت اطلاعات بارها از او بازجویی به عمل آورد.
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"خورش آلو با مرغ"
گلشیفته فراهانی هم‌چنین در فیلم "خورش آلو با مرغ"، ساخته‌ی مرجان ساتراپی و ونسان پارونو (۲۰۱۱) بازی کرده است. این فیلم داستان عشق نافرجام یک نوازنده‌ی ویلون به نام "ناصر علی خان" را بازگو می‌کند که به زنی به نام "ایران" دل می‌بندد، به بیماری افسردگی دچار می‌شود و سرانجام خودکشی می‌کند.
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"یک رویای خصوصی"
فراهانی در خارج از کشور روی صحنه‌ی تئاتر هم ظاهر شده است. تازه‌ترین کار او نمایشنامه‌ی "یک رویای خصوصی"، نوشته‌ی ایرج جنتی عطایی است که سپتامبر سال پیش با بازی بهروز وثوقی و سوسن فرخ‌نیا در هتل ماریتیم شهر بن آلمان به اجرا در آمد. در این نمایش گلشیفته فراهانی نقش دوستی‌ را بازی می‌کند که برای مراقبت از زوج مسنی مدتی‌ در خانه‌ی آن‌ها زندگی می‌کند.
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"تبعیدی سلحشور"
گلشیفته فراهانی در گفت‌وگویی اختصاصی با دویچه وله "معضلات اجتماعی تبعید" را که در نمایش "یک رویای خصوصی" نیز بازتاب یافته، بر می‌شمرد و به این نتیجه می‌رسد که «ما تبعیدشدگان، قربانی نیستیم، سلحشوریم.»

Why Honor a Racist Rabbi ?حمایت آمریکا از ربای (آخوند) مرتجع صهیونیست

The Extremist Origins of Education and Sharing Day: Why is the US Honoring a Racist Rabbi?

April 7, 2014 
By Alison Weir
Counterpunch – If things proceed normally, President Barak Obama will soon proclaim April 11, 2014 “Education and Sharing Day, U.S.A.” Despite the innocuous name, this day honors the memory of a religious leader whose lesser-known teachings help fuel some of the most violent attacks against Palestinians by extremist Israeli settlers and soldiers.
The leader being honored on this day is Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, charismatic head of a mystical/fundamentalist version of Judaism. Every year since 1978, a Presidential Proclamation, often accompanied by a Congressional Resolution (the 1990 one had 219 sponsors), has declared Schneerson’s birthday an official national day of observance.

Congress first passed a Resolution honoring Schneerson in 1975. Three years later a Joint Congressional Resolution called on President Jimmy Carter to proclaim “Education Day, U.S.A.” on the anniversary of Schneerson’s birth. The idea was to set aside a day to honor both education and the alleged educational work of Schneerson and the religious sect he headed up.

Carter, like Congress, dutifully obeyed the Schneerson-initiated resolution, as has every president since.  And some individual states are now enacting their own observances of Schneerson’s birthday, with Minnesota and Alabama leading the way.

Schneerson and his movement are an extremely mixed bag.
Schneerson has been praised widely for a public persona and organization that emphasized “deep compassion and insight,” worked to bring many secular Jews “back” into the fold, created numerous schools around the world, and had offered, in the words of the Jewish Virtual Library, “social-service programs and humanitarian aid to all people, regardless of religious affiliation or background.”

However, there is also a less attractive underside often at odds with such public perceptions. And some of the more extreme parts of Schneerson’s teachings – such as that Jews are a completely different species than non-Jews, and that non-Jews exist only to serve Jews – have been largely hidden, it appears, even from many who consider themselves his followers.
As we will see, such views profoundly impact the lives of Palestinians living – and dying – under Israeli occupation and military invasions.

Who was Rabbi Schneerson?
Schneerson lived from 1902 to 1994 and oversaw the growth of what is now the largest Jewish organization in the world. The religious movement he led is known as “Chabad-Lubavitch,” (sometimes just called “Lubavitch” or “Chabad,” the name of its organizational arm). Schneerson was the seventh and final Lubavitcher “Rebbe” (sacred leader). He is often simply called “the Rebbe.”

Founded in the late 1700s and originally based in the Polish-Russian town of Lubavitch, it is the largest of about a dozen forms of “Hasidism,” a version of Orthodox Judaism connected to mysticism, characterized by devotion to a dynastic leader, and whose adherents often wear distinctive clothing. (Spellings of these terms can vary; Hasid is also written as Hassid, Chasid, etc.)

There is an extreme cult of personality focused on Schneerson himself. Some followers consider him the Messiah, and Schneerson himself reportedly sometimes implied this was true. Some Lubavitch educators consider him divine, making such claims as, “the Rebbe is actually ‘the essence and being [of God] … he is without limits, capable of effecting anything, all-knowing and a proper object of worshipful prostration.”
While many secular Jews and Jews from other denominations disagree with its actions and theology, Chabad-Lubavitch is generally acknowledged to be a powerful force in Jewish life today. According to a 1994 New York Times report, it is “one of the most influential and controversial forces in world Jewry.”

There are approximately 3,600 Chabad institutions in over 1,000 cities in 70 countries, and 200,000 adherents. Up to a million people attend Chabad services at least once a year. Numerous campuses have such centers and the Chabad website states that hundreds of thousands of children attend Chabad summer camps.

According to the Times, Schneerson “presided over a religious empire that reached from the back streets of Brooklyn to the main streets of Israel and by 1990 was taking in an estimated $100 million a year in contributions.

In the U.S., the Times reports, Schneerson’s “‘mitzvah tanks’ – converted campers that are rolling recruiting stations whose purpose is to draw Jews to the Lubavitch way – roamed streets from midtown Manhattan to Crown Heights. And the Lubavitchers’ Brooklyn-based publishing house claimed to be the world’s largest distributor of Jewish books.”

Non-Jewish souls ‘satanic’
While Chabad sometimes openly teaches that “the soul of the Jew is different than the soul of the non-Jew,” Schneerson’s specific teachings on this subject are largely unknown.
Quite likely very few Americans, both Jews and non-Jews, are aware of Schneerson’s teachings about the alleged deep differences between them – and about how these teachings are applied in the West Bank and Gaza.

Let us look at Schneerson’s words, as quoted by two respected Jewish professors, Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky, in their book Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel (text available online here. This book, praised by Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and many others is essential reading for anyone who truly wishes to understand modern day Israel-Palestine. (Brackets in the quotes below are in the translations by Shahak and Mezvinsky.)

Some of Schneerson’s rarely reported teachings:
“The difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish person stems from the common expression: “Let us differentiate.” Thus, we do not have a case of profound change in which a person is merely on a superior level. Rather, we have a case of “let us differentiate” between totally different species.”
“This is what needs to be said about the body: the body of a Jewish person is of a totally different quality from the body of [members] of all nations of the world … The difference in the inner quality between Jews and non-Jews is “so great that the bodies should be considered as completely different species.”
“An even greater difference exists in regard to the soul. Two contrary types of soul exist, a non-Jewish soul comes from three satanic spheres, while the Jewish soul stems from holiness.”
“As has been explained, an embryo is called a human being, because it has both body and soul. Thus, the difference between a Jewish and a non-Jewish embryo can be understood.”
“…the general difference between Jews and non-Jews: A Jew was not createdas a means for some [other] purpose; he himself is the purpose, since the substance of all [divine] emanations was created only to serve the Jews.”

“The important things are the Jews, because they do not exist for any [other] aim; they themselves are [the divine] aim.”
“The entire creation [of a non-Jew] exists only for the sake of the Jews.”
Most people don’t know about this aspect of Schneerson’s teaching because, according to Shahak and Mezvinsky, such teachings are intentionally minimized, mistranslated, or hidden entirely.

For example, the quotes above were translated by the authors from a book of Schneerson’s recorded messages to followers that was published in Israel in 1965. Despite Schneerson’s global importance and the fact that his world headquarters is in the U.S., there has never been an English translation of this volume.

Shahak, an Israeli professor who was a survivor of the Nazi holocaust, writes that this lack of translation of an important work is not unusual, explaining that much critical information about Israel and some forms of Judaism is available only in Hebrew.

He and co-author Mezvinsky, who was a Connecticut Distinguished University Professor who taught at Central Connecticut State University, write, “The great majority of the books on Judaism and Israel, published in English especially, falsify their subject matter.”

According to Shahak and Mezvinsky, “Almost every moderately sophisticated Israeli Jew knows the facts about Israeli Jewish society that are described in this book. These facts, however, are unknown to most interested Jews and non-Jews outside Israel who do not know Hebrew and thus cannot read most of what Israeli Jews write about themselves in Hebrew.”

In Shahak’s earlier book, Jewish Religion, Jewish History, he provides a number of examples. In one, he describes a 1962 book published in Israel in a bilingual edition. The Hebrew text was on one page, with the English translation on the facing page.

Shahak describes one set of facing pages in which the Hebrew text of a major Jewish code of laws contained a command to exterminate Jewish infidels: “It is a duty to exterminate them with one’s own hands.” The English version on the facing page softened it to “It is a duty to take active measures to destroy them.’”

The Hebrew page then went on to name which “infidels” must be exterminated, adding “may the name of the wicked rot.” Among them was Jesus of Nazareth. The facing page with the English translation failed to tell any of this.

“Even more significant,” Shahak reports, “in spite of the wide circulation of this book among scholars in the English-speaking countries, not one of them has, as far as I know, protested against this glaring deception.”

Praised by Said, Chomsky, etc., Shahak is almost unknown today.This pattern of selective omission, it seems, applies to Shahak himself, whose work is largely unknown to Palestine activists today, even though he was considered a major figure in the struggle against Israeli oppression of Palestinians, and his work was praised by diverse writers.

While Shahak was alive, Noam Chomsky called him “an outstanding scholar,” and said he had “remarkable insight and depth of knowledge. His work is informed and penetrating, a contribution of great value.”

Edward Said wrote, “Shahak is a very brave man who should be honored for his services to humanity … One of the most remarkable individuals in the contemporary Middle East.” Said wrote a forward for Shahak’sJewish History, Jewish Religion.
Catholic New Times said: ‘This is a remarkable book …[It] deserves a wide readership, not only among Jews, but among Christians who seek a fuller understanding both of historical Judaism and of modern-day Israel.”

Jewish Socialist stated: “Anyone who wants to change the Jewish community so that it stops siding with the forces of reaction should read this book.”

The London Review of Books called Shahak’s book “remarkable, powerful, and provocative.”
Yet, very few Americans today know of Shahak’s work and the information it contains.

American tax money & Jewish Extremism in Palestine
If they did, it’s hard to believe that Americans would allow $8.5 million per day of their tax money to be given to Israel, where such teachings underlie a powerful minority that is disproportionately influential in governmental actions.
Nor is it likely that a fully informed American public would allow donations to religious institutions in Israel that teach supremacist, sometimes violent doctrines to be tax-deductible in the U.S.

One organization raised over $10 million tax-deductible dollars in the U.S. in 2011 alone – removing money from the U.S. economy and enabling illegal, aggressive Israeli settlements in Palestine. And some of this money went to benefit individuals convicted of murder – including the murderer of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

The New York Times obituary on Schneerson reported that Schneerson was “a major political force in Israel, both in the Knesset and among the electorate,” but failed to describe the nature of his impact.

One of a sprinkling of writers willing to publicly discuss Shahak and Mezvinsky’s findings is Allan Brownfeld, who is less reticent. Brownfeld is editor of the American Council for Judaism’s periodical Issues and contributor to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

In a review of Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Brownfeld describes Schneerson’s views on Israel:
“Rabbi Schneerson always supported Israeli wars and opposed any retreat. In 1974 he strongly opposed the Israeli withdrawal from the Suez area. He promised Israel divine favors if it persisted in occupying the land.”
Brownfeld reports that after Schneerson’s death, “[T]housands of his Israeli followers played an important role in the election victory of Binyamin Netanyahu. Among the religious settlers in the occupied territories, the Chabad Hassids constitute one of the most extreme groups. Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer of Palestinians, was one of them.”

Another such Chabad Hassid is Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburg (also sometimes written as “Ginzburg” and “Ginsburgh”), who studied under Schneerson in Crown Heights and who heads up a major Chabad institution in the West Bank.
Ginsburg praised Goldstein, the murderer of 29 Palestinians while they were praying, and considers all non-Jews subhuman.
According to author Motti Inbari, Ginsburg “gives prominence to Halachic and Kabbalistic approaches that emphasize the distinction between Jew and non-Jew (Gentile), imposing a clear separation and hierarchy in this respect.”

In his book Jewish Fundamentalism and the Temple Mount: Who Will Build the Third Temple? Inbari states, “[Ginsburg] claims that while the Jews are the Chosen People and were created in God’s image, the Gentiles do not have this status and are effectively considered subhuman.”

Professor Inbari, an Israeli academic who now teaches in the U.S., writes that Ginsburg’s theological approach continues “certain perceptions that were popular in medieval times.”
“For example,” Inbari writes, “the commandment ‘You shall not murder’ does not apply to the killing of a Gentile, since ‘you shall not murder’ relates to the murder of a human, while for him the Gentiles do not constitute humans.”

Inbari reports, “Similarly, Ginzburg stated that, on the theoretical level, if a Jew requires a liver transplant to survive, it would be permissible to seize a Gentile and take their liver forcefully.”

While the mainstream American press almost never reports this kind of information, an April 26, 1996 article in Jewish Week by Lawrence Cohler reported on Ginsburg’s teachings, including their problematic roots in Jewish texts.

Cohler reported that a professor of Bible at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Rabbi Moshe Greenberg, “called for radically revising Jewish thinking about some Jewish texts on the grounds that scholars such as Rabbi Ginsburgh are far from aberrant in their use of them.”

Cohler quoted Greenberg’s concerns:  “‘There’ll be a statement in Talmud… made in circumstances where it’s purely theoretical, because Jews then never had the power to do it,’ he explained. And now, he said, ‘It’s carried over into circumstances where Jews have a state and are empowered.’”
A rabbi associated with Ginsburg coauthored a notorious Israeli book, The King’s Torah, which claims that Jewish law at times permits the killing of non-Jewish infants. American donations to the Chabad school Ginsburg heads up, and that published the above book, are tax-deductible in the U.S. Ginsburg, who endorses the book, teaches classes throughout Israel, the U.S. and France.

Such extremism is opposed by the majority of Israelis, and major Jewish religious authorities condemn it, a Chief Rabbi, for example, stating: “’According to the Torah, every man is created in God’s image.”

Yet, such extremist views continue to exert a powerful influence.
Israeli military manuals echo extremist teachings: “kill even good civilians”
Israeli military manuals sometimes replicate extremist teachings. For example, a booklet authored by a Chief Chaplain stated, “In war, when our forces storm the enemy, they are allowed and even enjoined by the Halakhah to kill even good civilians…” Such teachings by the IDF rabbinate were prominent during Israel’s 2008-9 attack on Gaza that killed 1,400 Gazans, approximately half of them civilians. (The Palestinian resistance killed nine Israelis during this “war.”)
Chicago writer Stephen Lendman has described these teachings, giving a number of examples.

Lendman writes, “In 2007, Israel’s former chief rabbi, Mordechai Elyahu, called for the Israeli army to mass-murder Palestinians:
“If they don’t stop after we kill 100, then we must kill 1000. And if they don’t stop after 1000, then we must kill 10,000. If they still don’t stop we must kill 100,000. Even a million.”

Lendman reports that some extremist Israeli rabbis teach that “the ten commandments don’t apply to non-Jews. So killing them in defending the homeland is acceptable, and according to the chairman of the Jewish Rabbinic Council:
“‘There is no such thing as enemy civilians in war time. The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them…. A thousand non-Jewish lives are not worth a Jew’s fingernail.’”

Lendman writes, “Rabbi David Batsri called Arabs ‘a blight, a devil, a disaster…. donkeys, and we have to ask ourselves why God didn’t create them to walk on all fours. Well, the answer is that they are needed to build and clean.’”
Another such rabbi is Manis Friedman, a Chabad-Lubavitch rabbi inspired by Schneerson who served as the simultaneous translator for a series of Schneerson’s talks. (Friedman is currently dean of a Jewish Studies institute in Minnesota.)

A 2009 article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reports, “Like the best Chabad-Lubavitch rabbis, Manis Friedman has won the hearts of many unaffiliated Jews with his charismatic talks about love and God; it was Friedman who helped lead Bob Dylan into a relationship with Chabad.

“But Friedman, who today travels the country as a Chabad speaker, showed a less warm and cuddly side when he was asked how he thinks Jews should treat their Arab neighbors.”
In Moment magazine’s article, “Ask the Rabbis // How Should Jews Treat Their Arab Neighbors?” Friedman answered:
“I don’t believe in western morality, i.e. don’t kill civilians or children, don’t destroy holy sites, don’t fight during holiday seasons, don’t bomb cemeteries, don’t shoot until they shoot first because it is immoral.

“The only way to fight a moral war is the Jewish way: Destroy their holy sites. Kill men, women and children (and cattle).”
Lendman reports, “Views like these aren’t exceptions. Though a minority, they proliferate throughout Israeli society…”
They also, Lendman notes, work to prevent peace in Israel-Palestine.

Shahak and Mezvinsky note that when the book containing Schneerson’s statements quoted above about Jews and non-Jews was published in Israel, he was allied to the Labor Party and his movement had been provided “many important benefits” from the Israeli government.

In the mid-1970s Schneerson decided that the Labor Party was too moderate and shifted his support to the more right-wing parties in power today. The authors report, “Ariel Sharon was the Rebbe’s favorite Israeli senior politician. Sharon in turn praised the Rebbe publicly and delivered a moving speech about him in the Knesset after the Rebbe’s death.”

Roots in Some Early Texts
Brownfeld decries the fact that few Americans are properly informed about the fundamentalist movement in Israel “and the theology upon which it is based.”
He notes that Jewish Americans, in particular, are often unaware of the “narrow ethnocentrism which is promoted by the movement’s leading rabbis, or of the traditional Jewish sources they are able to call upon in drawing clear distinctions between the moral obligations owed to Jews and non-Jews.”
Teachings that Jews are superior and gentiles inferior were contained in some of the earliest Hassidic texts, including its classic text, “Tanya,” still taught today.

Brownfeld quotes statements by “the revered father of the messianic tendency of Jewish fundamentalism,” Rabbi Kook the Elder, and states that these were derived from earlier texts. [Kook, incidentally, was also an early Zionist, who helped push for the Balfour Declaration in England before moving to Palestine. He was the uncle of Hillel Kook, an agent who went by the name “Peter Bergson” and created front groups in the U.S. for a violent Zionist guerilla group that operated in 1930s and '40s Palestine.]

Brownfeld quotes Kook: “The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews—all of them in all different levels—is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle.”
Brownfeld explains that Kook’s teaching, which he says is followed by leaders of the settler movement in the occupied West Bank, “is based upon the Lurianic Cabbala, the school of Jewish mysticism that dominated Judaism from the late 16th to the early 19th century.”

Shahak and Mezvinsky state, “One of the basic tenets of the Lurianic Cabbala is the absolute superiority of the Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. According to the Lurianic Cabbala, the world was created solely for the sake of Jews; the existence of non-Jews was subsidiary.”
Again, Shahak and Mezvinsky report that this aspect is often covered up in English-language discussions. Scholarly authors of books about Jewish mysticism and the Lurianic Cabbala, they write, have frequently “willfully omitted reference to such ideas.”

Shahak and Mezvinsky write that it is essential to understand these beliefs in order to understand the current situation in the West Bank, where many of the most militant West Bank settlers are motivated by religious ideologies in which every non-Jew is seen as “the earthly embodiment” of Satan, and according to the Halacha (Jewish law), the term ‘human beings’ refers solely to Jews.”

Israeli author and former chief of Israeli military intelligence Yehoshafat Harkabi touches on this in his 1988 book Israel’s Fateful Hour.
Harkabi writes that while such extremist beliefs are not “widely dominant,” the reality is that “nationalistic religious extremists are by no means a lunatic fringe; many are respected men whose words are widely heeded.”
He reports that the campus rabbi of a major Israeli university published an article in the student newspaper entitled “The Commandment of Genocide in the Torah,” in which he implied that those who have a quarrel with Jews “ought to be destroyed, children and all.” Harkabi writes that a book by another rabbi “explained that the killing of a non-Jew is not considered murder.”

Brownfeld writes, “Although messianic fundamentalists constitute a relatively small portion of the Israeli population [most Israeli settlers are motivated by the subsidized lifestyle US tax money to Israel provides], their political influence has been growing. If they have contempt for non-Jews, their hatred for Jews who oppose their views is even greater.”

Brownfeld cites the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had started to make peace with the Palestinians, writing that it was just one “in a long line of murders of Jews who followed a path different from that ordained by rabbinic authorities.” Brownfeld reports that Shahak and Mezvinsky  “cite case after case, from the Middle Ages until the 19th century.”

The authors report, “It was usual in some Hasidic circles until the last quarter of the nineteenth century to attack and often to murder Jews who had reform religious tendencies…”
They quote a long article by Israeli writer Rami Rosen, “History of a Denial,” published by Ha’aretz Magazine in 1996. This article, which cannot be found online, at least in English, is also cited in the book Brother Against Brother: Violence and Extremism in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination, by Israeli professor Ehud Sprinzak.

In his Ha’aretz article Rosen reported: “A check of main facts of the [Jewish] historiography of the last 1500 years shows that the picture is different from the one previously shown to us. It includes massacres of Christians; mock repetitions of the crucifixion of Jesus that usually took place on Purim; cruel murders within the family; liquidation of informers, often done for religious reasons by secret rabbinical courts, which issued a sentence of ‘pursuer’ and appointed secret executioners; assassinations of adulterous women in synagogues and/or the cutting of their noses by command of the rabbis.”

While Rosen’s article may seem shocking, in reality, it simply shows that members of the Jewish population, like members of Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and diverse other populations, have at times committed atrocities, sometimes allegedly in the name of their religion. The difference, as Shahak and Mezvinsky point out, is that such information is largely covered up in the U.S. Such cover-ups, however, don’t make facts go away. They merely bury them, where they smolder and at times eventually lead to exaggerated perceptions.

U.S. media rarely report that some extremist Israeli settlers are intensely hostile to Christians, and in one instance threatened peace activists who came to the West Bank to participate in nonviolent demonstrations, “We killed Jesus and we’ll kill you, too.” There is also a record of official hostility. For example, a few years ago an Israeli mayor ordered all New Testaments to be rounded up and burned.
Schneerson’s “schools”

While Schneerson is honored on national “Education” days, the reality is that the elementary schools he created often failed to teach children  “basic reading, writing, spelling, math, science and history,” according to a graduate.
In his article “National Education Day and the Education I Never Had,” Chaim Levin reports on his experience at the Chabad school “Oholei Torah” (Educational Institute Oholei Menachem) in Crown Heights, New York – the site of Chabad’s world headquarters:
“I have profound respect for the late Rebbe and his legacy. However, I remember very clearly those talks that [Schneerson] gave – the ones we studied every year in elementary school about the unimportance of ‘secular’ (non-religious, formal) education, and the great importance of only studying limmudei kodesh (holy studies). As a result of this attitude, thousands of students were not taught anything other than the Bible throughout our years attending Chabad institutions.”
The goal of such schools, Levin writes, was to produce “schluchim,” missionaries who would promote Chabad all over the world.

Meanwhile, he notes, “Failure to provide basic formal education cripples children within Chabad communities. We cannot ignore the harm done…” Levin writes, “Until this day, Oholei Torah and many other Chabad schools — particularly schools for boys and a few for girls in Crown Heights and in some other places — do not provide basic formal education.”

Education and Sharing Day 2014
In his 2000 article, Brownfeld writes that Shahak and Mezvinsky’s book should be “a wake-up call “to Americans, particularly Jewish supporters of Israel.”

Fourteen years later, however, very few people are aware of these books and their powerful information, and U.S. tax money continues to flow to Israel. The main author, Israel Shahak, is now dead, as is Edward Said; Noam Chomsky rarely, if ever, mentions him; and Shahak’s co-author, Norton Mezvinsky (uncle of Chelsea Clinton’s husband), is a member of a Lubavitch congregation in New York.

In many ways, little seems to have changed since 1994, when Congressmen Charles Schumer, Newt Gingrich, and others introduced legislation to bestow on Schneerson the Congressional Gold Medal. The bill passed both Houses by unanimous consent, honoring Schneerson for his “outstanding and lasting contributions toward improvements in world education, morality, and acts of charity.”

And in two weeks, Americans will be officially called on to observe a day that honors Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson and the Lubavitcher movement.
That is, unless masses of people contact their Congressional representatives to demand a whole new direction: a “National Education and Sharing Day” that honors an individual who values education, and who believes that all people – in the words of the Declaration of Independence – are created equal.
Alison Weir is executive director of If Americans Knew and president of the Council for the National Interest. Her book, Against Our Better Judgment: How the U.S. was used to create Israel, contains additional information on Rabbi Kook’s family connection to American front groups for Israeli terrorists. (Kook was unusual in his support for political Zionism; most Jewish religious leaders at the time considered the movement heretical). Weir is NOT the British historian.)