Regular radio guest Jeff Blankfort's latest Chomsky critique has elicited yelps of outrage from the followers of His Noam-ness. (Jeff debated Richard Curtis on my show last month, and skewered Chomsky back in April.)
Methinks they doth protest too much. What's really going on here, it seems to me, is that Chomsky and his fellow-left-Jewish-Zionist acolytes are trying to police the pro-Palestinian movement in the US, and Blankfort is calling them on it. Specifically, the Chomskyites don't want pro-Palestinians challenging the legitimacy of the Zionist state or engaging in effective action against it. And the most effective possible action -- the exposure of the Zionist Fifth Column in America as prime enemy of both American ideals and the American people -- is what Zionists posing as pro-Palestinian lefties truly fear and loathe. As Blankfort suggests, these folks, who are extremely prominent and numerous on the left, have effectively hobbled the pro-Palestinian movement in America.
I know this from personal experience. In the late 1990s, I dared to express the Muslim-majority viewpoint on Zionism -- that it is just another Crusade whose days are numbered, that it is an artifact of the vast power of the Zionist Power Configuration (ZPC) in the US, and that the best way to fight it is for pro-Palestinians to be American patriots and expose the ZPC as an enemy parasite on our body politic. For saying things like this on the al-Awda (Madison, WI) forum, I was viciously attacked by a Jewish left-Zionist bully named Allen Ruff, who is well-known in Madison for his physical as well as verbal aggression against fellow activists.
Ruff never physically attacked me, as he has apparently attacked several other local activists. (Here he is punching Mike Delaney because Delaney dared to wear a "Zionists Did 9/11" T-shirt.) Though my face remains unacquainted with his fist, Ruff has repeatedly offered me snarls of verbal abuse accompanied by fierce grimaces.
The last time I was in Rainbow Cooperative Bookstore, where Ruff works, he saw me browsing and charged me, stopping only when his unsightly mug was a foot or so from my face. "Get out of here," he screamed. I held my ground and stared him down, informing him that it was a public, cooperative bookstore. Ruff continued screaming at me. Another bookstore worker appeared and asked me to leave, apparently assuming that I had caused the disturbance. I explained that I was just looking at books when this maniac (Ruff) came screaming out of nowhere for no apparent reason. The worker continued to ask me to leave, then retreated as I ignored both her and Ruff and continued examining the bookshelves, under Ruff's angry glare, for another ten minutes or so before leaving.
This sort of thing happened dozens of times between roughly 1997 and 2007. What made it so bizarre was that I had never evinced the slightest shade of antagonism toward Ruff. On the contrary, I always treated him politely, usually with attempts at friendliness. (I somehow held out hopes of winning him over as an ally.) Then finally, in 2007, after having been unilaterally abused at least several dozen times, I finally verbally unloaded on him after he approached me in a public place and snarled "I hear you're a holocaust denier." The corpulent bully seemed to wilt under the heat of my words. Apparently he isn't accustomed to people standing up to him.
Of the dozens of incidences of verbal abuse I've endured from Ruff, the most bizarre occurred just seconds before I introduced David Ray Griffin at his nationally-televised C-Span talk at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I was standing at the podium getting ready to introduce Dr. Griffin when a visibly apoplectic Ruff, a fanatical enemy of 9/11 truth, got up from his seat, approached me, and growled from close proximity: "We're keeping a file on you! That right, WE ARE KEEPING A FILE ON YOU!" The next morning, he mass-emailed an attack on me, the gist of which was that I was a bad guy because one of the endorsers of the Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance for 9/11 Truth, Israel Shamir, was a bad guy. He then began circulating rumors falsely (and ridiculously) claiming that I had accused him of being a Mossad agent.
What explains such out-of-control animosity? A Palestinian graduate student, intimately familiar with the movement, explained it to me: "Ruff and other Jewish lefties -- who are not really opposed to Zionism -- are trying to dominate the pro-Palestinian movement in the USA. They insert themselves between the Palestinians and the American people, and do everything they can to keep the Palestinians marginalized and ineffective, and to make sure that nobody ever talks about the elephant in the living room -- the Zionist Power Configuration. Anybody who lets Muslims or Palestinians speak for themselves, or who shares the fully anti-Zionist views of most Muslims and Palestinians, becomes a target for 'anti-Semite' mudslinging. You, Kevin, are their worst nightmare. You're an articulate white American Muslim and a committed anti-Zionist, and you know and openly say that the neocon Zionists did 9/11. You're plainly not anti-Semitic, yet you know and say that the only way to beat the Jewish lobby is to expose them as an anti-American fifth column. This terrifies them. No wonder you take so much abuse from the likes of Ruff."
And no wonder Blankfort takes so much abuse from the acolytes of Noam "it wouldn't matter if 9/11 was an inside job" Chomsky.
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[Note: Along with his attempts to intimidate me, and his verbal and physical attacks on other activists, Ruff has authored a deceptive hatchet job on James Petras, the only American academic with the guts to research and tell the truth about Zionist power in the US. (Listen to last Tuesday's interview with Petras here.)]
