Pantheon of Far Right-Wing Delusion: Plaut Calls the Fascist Kettle Black
by Kurt Nimmo Thursday, Jun. 16, 2005 at 12:58 AM

Betar Tagar UK supporter Plaut calls Israel's critics fascist -- and yet the history of Zionism is a textbook example of fascism, including an unhealthy fascination for Mussolini.

Zionist settler Steve Plaut is up to his tricks again. In a recent article on ChronWatch, Plaut, a snobbish professor in Israel who believes one has to have an academic degree to form a political opinion (thus relegating billions of people to the status of insensate farm animals), the Zionist professor of Israeli economics believes the “correct representation of the political arena is as a circle, with the Far Left and the Neonazi Right smack alongside one another and closely collaborating,” a rather startling paranoid delusion, even for an Israeli settler.

In Plaut’s bizarre world, shaped (or warped) by radical Zionism, anybody who disagrees or is morally outraged by settlers killing Palestinian school kids (and 545 of them have been killed by Israelis since the outbreak of the al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000) is a “neonazi.” It is hardly unique or surprising that over-the-deep-end right-wingers so effortlessly redefine the political lexicon to suit their propagandistic purposes. Plaut, however, takes this revisionism to new heights.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, defines a neo-Nazis as a “member of a fringe group inspired by Adolf Hitler’s Nazis,” a term more suitable for right-wingers who embrace racist nationalism and national expansion (as defined by the above dictionary), for instance the Likudites in Israel who are demonstrated racists simply because they assign an inferior status to members of non-Jewish ethno-national groups, the same way the racists in the Antebellum South of the United States did before the Civil War (actually it is more accurate to characterize the Zionist racists as Afrikaner nationalists who embrace apartheid; “God created the Afrikaner People with a unique language, a unique philosophy and their own history and traditions,” declared an Afrikaner in 1944, “in order that they might fulfil a particular calling and destiny here in the southern corner of Africa,” a sentiment shared by many Orthodox Jews in Israel who believe their God gave them the right to steal land at gunpoint and ethnically cleanse indigenous people).

Actually, the history of Zionism is a closer match to Nazism (or more accurately, fascism) than anything on the so-called far left, as Plaut would have it. Avraham Stern, the founder and leader of the Zionist underground terrorist organization later known as Lehi and also known as the “Stern Gang,” attempted to make an agreement with the Nazis in 1941. “Stern felt that the only salvation for the Jews was to produce their own Zionist form of totalitarianism,” writes Lenni Brenner. “He had seen the WZO [World Zionist Organization] make its own accommodation with Nazism by means of the Ha’avara; he had seen [Ze’ev] Jabotinsky [an admirer of Mussolini] entangle himself with Italy; and he personally had been intimately involved in the Revisionists, dealings with the Polish anti-Semites.” The Revisionist Party eventually mutated into Herut and finally Likud, the current political party ruling in Israel. Even though Likud is based on racism, terrorism, violence, territorial expansion, rabid nationalism, and ethnic cleansing, as was its predecessors, Steven Plaut believes Likud is guilty of “cowardice” (even as it repeatedly violates the Geneva Conventions and ignores United Nations resolutions by the dozen). In other words, according to Plaut, the Likudites are wimps and Ariel Sharon, indicted as a mass murderer and war criminal, is too “timid.”

As a scurrilous fabricator of lies and half-truths, Plaut likes to throw around the Nazi label, even as he ignores the very real fascistic past of his own political ideology, closer to Nazism than Noam Chomsky or Juan Cole will ever be. As a liar and unethical propagandist for the likes of Horowitz’s hate pubs (amply lubricated with far right-wing money), Plaut has no problem spinning slanderous lies—for instance, that I have something to do with the alleged “Holocaust Denial Barnes Review,” a revisionist publisher I never heard of until Plaut, who obviously has a Holocaust denial fetish and likes to poke around on anti-Semitic websites more than your garden variety skinhead, made mention of it.

For the careful observer, Plaut’s lies and character assassination is nothing less than a desperate attempt to obfuscate the truth, as pointed out by Cole, Chomsky, Justin Raimondo (all deemed “neonazis” by Plaut), and others of various political stripe—Plaut’s adopted homeland is predicated on a history of systematic mass murder and ethnic cleansing and is currently ruled by a party with ideological roots based on extraordinarily vicious racism and active collaboration with both Italian and German fascists.

Addendum

It should be noted that Steven Plaut writes for Betar Tagar UK, another example of his affinity for fascism. As Tom Barry notes in his portrait of Douglas Feith, Betar was “a Zionist youth movement founded by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, an admirer of Mussolini. Betar, whose members wore dark brown uniforms and spouted militaristic slogans modeled after other fascistic movements, was associated with the Revisionist Movement, which evolved in Poland to become the Herut Party, which later became the Likud Party.” Betar Tagar UK enshrines the following “Betaris” as “brave individuals: Zeev Jabotinski, Menachem Begin, Joseph Trumpeldor, Shlomo Ben Yosef, Yaakov Weiss, and other Zionist fanatics and land stealers. Joseph Trumpeldor was the leader of the Haganah, created to fight “against an Arab horde” (as the “Betaris” in the UK call the people of Palestine). Part of Haganah splintered into the notorious Irgun Zvai-Leumi, famous for killing Arabs and Brits. Betar was created after Trumpeldor was killed “defending” the Upper Galilee against Arabs who didn’t take kindly to being evicted and killed by Zionists. Shlomo Ben Yosef was an Irgun terrorist (see this photo of the lad in his fascist inspired uniform) who was sent to the gallows by Brit colonialists after shooting up an Arab bus (demonstrating that the Zionists have not changed much over the last sixty odd years). Yaakov Weiss was another Irgun terrorist hanged by the Brits. Menachem Begin, of course, was the prime minister of Israel, demonstrating how dearly loved terrorists are there (Begin was the leader of Irgun and responsible for the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, killing 91 people). Amnon Kapeliouk has quoted the soft and fuzzy Begin as declaring the Palestinians are “beasts walking on two legs” before the Knesset, the only “democratic” government in the Middle East (democratic, that is, if you’re not an Arab).

Betar UK states the following in regard to Betar’s (brownshirt) ideology: “The love of the entire land of Israel. Betar supports the concept of a Jewish state with a Jewish Majority in its biblical-homeland (check out this map to see precisely where that “homeland” is)… The entire land of Israel as given to the Jewish people by G-d with it’s eternal capital Jerusalem. We therefore wholeheartedly support the settlement of all of Israel including Judea, Samaria, Gaza and the Golan Heights… When can it truly be said that our country has ceased to be ‘Palestine’ and become Eretz Yisrael? Only then, when there will be more Jews that non-Jews; for the first condition of a national state is national majority… the basis upon which is founded the entire Betarian viewpoint of building a Jewish state. It means the creation of a state comprising a Jewish majority on both sides of the Jordan.” In other words, Betar (with its vaguely socialistic ideology, or rather socialism for Jews at the expense of everybody else who lives in the neighborhood) demands further expansion—primarily into Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan—and the displacement (ethnic cleansing) of the people who live there. In other words, Betar and the Zionists embrace a truly Nazi geopolitical concept: Lebensraum.

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