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Pro Semitism
(1) Israel To
Be Major http://www.debka.com/headline.php?hid=1263
(2) Roger Uchtmann
(3) Israel boycott feud resurfaces
(4) Proto-ubermensch?
(6) Intel to Build $3.5Bn Chip Plant In Israel
(1)Moscow plans main hubs in Turkey and Israel for Russian and Azerbaijani oil and gas exports to southern Europe and China
Russian president Vladimir Putin discussed the plan with Turkish prime minister Tayyep Erdogan and Silvio Berlusconi of Italy at the inauguration Thursday of the Blue Stream pipeline network laid on the Black Sea bed by the Russian Gazprom and Italian Eni oil giants.
DEBKAfile adds: Putin spoke of extending this pipe network to the Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. A new underwater branch would then be built to connect Ceyhan with Israel's Ashkelon oil port, from which an existing pipe wouldl carry the oil from the Mediterranean to Eilat. Facilities at this Red Sea port would need to be expanded to accommodate Russian oil and gas tankers bound for China through the Indian Ocean.
As a main regional transit hub for Russian oil exports, Israel can look forward to stronger trade ties with Russia and Turkey, thousands of new jobs and royalty revenues running into hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
Our sources add that Israel's infrastructure minister Binyamin Ben Eliezer on a recent visit to Cairo proposed to President Hosni Mubarak that Egypt link an underwater pipe planned to carry natural gas to the Gaza Strip with the Israeli transit station at Ashkelon. Egypt would thus hook up to the projected Russian-Turkish-Israel pipeline scheme.
Posted by Ted Belman at November 19, 2005 07:10 AM (2) From: roger.uchtmann@semiotik.net Date: 11/20/05 07:11:15 Subject: alienation
I think we have to
distinguish two different "traces" of aliens at least. One is human
made, the other perhaps is not. From studies in structural
anthropology/mythology we know that even native ethnicities
signified their enemies as "aliens".
(3)
Israel boycott feud resurfaces
The battle lines of the academic boycott of Israel are being redrawn. After the international row over the Association of University Teachers' plans to boycott two Israeli universities, which were eventually overturned after an emergency conference in May, the union was hoping the debate would disappear over the summer break. But it's a row that won't go away.
The British Committee for Universities of Palestine (Bricup), the pro-boycott organisation, is relaunching its campaign with a campus tour of public meetings involving speakers from Palestinian universities. The aim is to put the boycott back on the agenda by presenting the reality of living under the occupation, says Hilary Rose, one of the architects of the academic boycott and a founder of Bricup. "The boycott is moving on, extremely well judged by the amount of support coming into us and the willingness of universities to set up meetings to discuss it," she says. Meetings so far scheduled for this term include Birmingham, York, University of East London and Sussex. The boycott proved to be the most divisive episode in the AUT's history. In a rushed debate at the union's conference, members voted to boycott Haifa and Bar Illans Universities for supporting the Israeli state and restricting academic freedom. The facts of the cases were disputed and the AUT became the focus of the global media and was severely criticised. The boycott was overturned at an emergency conference a few weeks later. This Friday, a two-day conference at the School of Oriental and African Studies will bring the subject to the national arena for the first time since spring, in what is being described as a "post-boycott" debate. The conference, Fear of the Other and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, is the first to be organised by the Faculty for Israeli-Palestinian Peace UK, a new wing of the American Fipp organisation. It encourages visits to Palestinian universities to raise awareness of conditions there, but also collaboration with sympathetic Israel academics to help build bridges between the two. It is largely suspicious of the boycott but, crucially in the post-boycott debate, does not assume those behind it to be anti-semitic. Irene Bruegel is a founding member of Fipp UK. "This conference comes out of the boycott and the accusations that being in favour of a boycott was anti-semitic. This is a post-boycott debate to investigate the role of racism in the conflict." Lynn Segal, also of Fipp, says: "We want to try to prevent the total polarisation in this debate and look at the way in which different racisms are exploited and used - so that anyone who criticises Israel is anti-semitic and anyone who doesn't support the total full-withdrawal of Israel is accused of failure to support the Palestinians, of Islamaphobia," she says. Engage (Liberoblog.com), the group of academics and AUT members that formed to oppose the boycott last spring, is also involved in the conference. Jon Pike, a founding member, argues that the boycott had an edge of anti-semitism. "What reason is there for singling out Israel and only Israel? What makes Israel peculiar? It's institutionalised anti-semitism. People aren't overtly anti-semitic; old style anti-semitism is pretty non-existent. There is a new anti-semitism that's come out of Middle East politics." But for the boycott proponents, there is no "post-boycott" debate: the academic boycott is still very much on the agenda. Rose is refusing to attend the conference, objecting to its "psychological" approach. "I don't like the heavily psychologistic turn of the conference. If you were in occupied France, you were never asked why you don't love the Nazis. And what about South Africa?" she says. Is Rose comfortable making such a comparison? "I would see the right of people to fight against an illegal oppression as a fundamental right and I say that as a pacifist," she says. Such comments are likely to rile opponents to the boycott. "I think the 'Israel is an apartheid state' argument is a stupid and politically illiterate one," says Pike. "There's a case to answer that that equation is an anti-semitic equation." Rose retorts that anti-semitism is the "card which is endlessly laid on the table in the debate". There has been a similar row over anti-semitism at the National Union of Students. Two Jewish members of the union's executive and one of its steering group resigned during its annual conference last spring, accusing the leadership of failing to condemn the circulation of anti-semitic leaflets. Kat Fletcher, the president of NUS, commissioned Marco Henry, a human resource consultant, to carry out an inquiry, due to report today. The Union of Jewish Students says it is expecting the report to find in its favour. "I know that a lot of the issues surrounding conference will be in our favour - from speaking with Marco, our impression is that there will be some bits we agree with, some bits we don't," says Mitch Simmons, UJS head of campaigns. "As long as the recommendations show they have listened to our concerns we will be satisfied. We've got to make sure there's a line under the issue." The AUT is hoping for a similar conclusion to the boycott debate. But when the union met in May and overturned the boycott, it resolved to undertake a full review of its international policy. At the end of this month it will convene a committee to address what is euphemistically being called the "international question", really a new debate on boycotts. The commission, the union spokesman says, will be a "grown-up, serious way of taking a step back from the heat" to set a policy on boycotts. It will decide guidelines for when a boycott is justified, so that it is applied fairly to all countries in the world with aggressive regimes.
From
Fipp's point of view, while the boycott row was divisive, Segal says
that its defeat also paved the way for a serious debate about the
relationships between Israelis and Palestinians. "There's a sense
that now is the time to have a serious debate about the ways in
which we think about people in conflict. It's about tackling the
fear that there's no real possibility of dialogue between Israelis
and Palestinians."Academic
boycott of Israel (4) http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/000770.html
July 21, 2003
Proto-ubermensch?
I have alluded to a "transnational" post-ethnic elite before on this blog. This is a microcosm of what I mean (from The Washington Post). Some relevant excerpts:
There is also a class element to the new mobility. The young Europeans who are relocating are most likely to be the university-educated elite, not factory workers or farmers. .... Stubb said the total number of people moving is small, perhaps 2 percent of the EU's workforce. "It's nice for a journalist, an academic or a Eurocrat," he said, using the slang term for the EU's international civil servants. "But it's not that nice for a construction worker. . . . It's not very easy if you are a farmer in Poland just to leave your farm." .... It was an Italian who said, somewhat derisively, that the new Europe would be created sexually. What he meant was that open borders would lead to more cross-border relationships, and over time national boundaries would have less meaning.
Caroline Soole, an energetic 25-year-old with short blond hair, is a living example of that.
Soole's mother is French and her father English. But her father is himself ethnically half-Danish. She grew up in France, and considers herself French. But she said, "I have this strong French culture, but I have this northern culture, which is English."
Soole was born in the French Alps, where her maternal grandparents -- of Portuguese-Jewish background -- imbued her with a strong sense of French culture. But she went to London as an adolescent and ended up in an international school. "I really liked being in an international culture," she said. "I think that was a turning point. Before, I was really French."
Of course, intra-European mingling is an order of magnitude below what I speak of, but just project the scale upward as transportation costs decline and globalization progresses. I worry about the possibility of co-existance between this new class of post-national mult-ethnic individuals and the old nationalist elites that emerged out of the French Revolution and its aftermath, not to mention the tension with the mass of lumpen that form the bedrock of a social organism.
Update from Godless:
Steve Sailer (and several others) have also voiced such concerns, albeit with a more US centric view. See here.
It's interesting to speculate on the future of intermarriage in America. Marriages are increasingly likely to be between people of different ethnic groups but of similar IQ's, and there's no reason to assume this trend will stop. America's obsession with sending everybody to college means that young people get sorted by SAT score (i.e., IQ) when they're at their most romantic. Therefore, it's quite possible that the top dogs in America will in future generations look different than they do now, but they probably won't look much like the future underdogs, either. If we were to halt immigration now, continuing intermarriage along IQ lines might in many generations lead to the country being run by an IQ overclass of mostly "Jeurasians" (i.e., a genetic blend of the smarter European gentiles, Jews, East Asians, South Asians, Armenians, and possibly other Middle Easterners). In contrast, the lower ranks might consist largely of "Redblex": a rather lumpy partial blend of redneck whites, blacks, and Mexicans. Of course, continued immigration slows genetic and cultural assimilation. For example, right now Japanese-Americans are fading into Eurasians because of the decline in immigration from Japan (since there are no terribly poor people left in Japan) and their very high rate of intermarriage with whites (especially for Japanese-American women). Chinese-Americans, in contrast, can be expected to remain a distinct ethnic group for several generations more (despite a high rate of intermarriage), since there is no imminent shortage of poor Chinese desperate to come to America.
The Jews are another interesting case to speculate about. The next generation of the "IQ elite" (e.g., Ivy Leaguers or lawyers or media figures or frequent flyers or whatever category you think representative) may well have a lower percentage of pure Jews ... but a higher percentage of part-Jews, as intermarriage between Jews and smart gentiles continues.
Would this mean the non-violent extinction of Jews (except for the Orthodox)?Possibly, but it might also imply that America's overclass would become even more dominated by Jewish attitudes, e.g., Hitler-obsession (which has played such a major role in influencing the views on the Balkans of our Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, National Security Adviser, and their colleagues). In the future most highly articulate white Americans will be related to Jews by genes or marriage, which no doubt will impact what views are popular in society (even more than today, when a Marlon Brando is automatically excoriated for saying that Jews have lots of power in Hollywood!)
For an extreme example of how pro-Semitism can come about within an individual merely through genes alone, consider me. Although I'm Catholic, I became very pro-Semitic at the age of 13 when my powers of logic kicked in(and my hair turned curly). I quickly noticed that a high percentage of the thinkers I either agreed with (e.g., Milton Friedman) or whom I considered it a worthy challenge to argue against were Jewish. Since I was adopted, a few years later I concluded that it was likely that I was half-Jewish biologically, (which indeed appears to be the case based on evidence my wife dug up when I was 30). It's important to understand the chain of causation: having a very Jewish-style brain (e.g., enjoying logical argument), I sought out the best logical arguers to read, very many of whom were Jewish. (You may object that my political views today don't sound much like those of the majority of American Jews, but I was enormously influenced by Jewish neoconservatives in the 1970s and 1980s. Having gone to some lengths to expose myself to Jewish thinkers (not because they were Jewish per se, but because those who most stimulated my kind of mind more than writers from other ethnic groups), I absorbed from them a lot of typically Jewish political stances: e.g., pro-Israel and pro-immigration.
Now, my pro-Semitism came about even though I was being raised in my (adoptive) family, which has no Jewish relatives, and, in fact, has a slight anti-Semitic mindset. (I realize my case is only a single data point, so I recommend somebody conduct a formal adoption study of Jews and part-Jews adopted by gentile families.) In the future, however, most children of the IQ elite will have Jews in their extended relatives, which will make my kind of pro-Semitism even more widespread in the future.
(5)
http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jid/jid050512_1_n.shtml
A partnership between Israel and NATO?
In a rapidly changing strategic environment, Israeli policy makers are recognising definite advantages, especially in security affairs, in developing closer ties with NATO. The present Israeli government's enthusiasm for this project can be seen in an ambitious set of proposals submitted to the Alliance. Highlighting the desirability of upgrading relations with NATO, the document proposes closer co-operation on counter-terrorism; combating the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; joint military training; in the field of logistics; and in the future joint development of weapons systems.
The latest push by Israel to build strategic links comes at a very crucial time for NATO since the Middle East represents a major issue of concern for the trans-Atlantic military alliance. Concerned by the growing threats posed by terrorism and the continued proliferation of chemical, biological and even nuclear weapons in the region, NATO appears to be adopting a new strategy: address the crisis before it reaches Europe.
Widespread suspicion among Arab rulers over NATO's more active involvement means that Israel alone is being considered as a dependable regional ally for NATO. Joint military exercises have taken place in the past and there is a genuine desire on both sides for further agreements aimed at strengthening co-operation in the critical area of security. It cannot be ignored that two major objectives of NATO - combating international terrorism and blocking further proliferation of weapons of mass destruction - are also the two main strategic concerns shared by Israel. Whereas Israel's geopolitical location could offer an 'external base' for the defence of the West, NATO's military and economic status could provide added security and economic benefits for the host state.
The issue of Israel's possible future membership of NATO is likely to prove less controversial than the prospect of the alliance becoming involved directly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This issue has become more significant in recent months. Although both sides have ruled out any direct NATO role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, JID sources suggest that NATO leaders are assessing the possibility of a peacekeeping mission in the event that a peace deal is negotiated between the Israeli authorities and the new Palestinian leadership.
(6)
Intel to Build $3.5Bn Chip Plant In Israel
(Reuters) -- Intel will build a $3.5 billion chip plant in Israel, the largest investment ever by an industrial company in the country.
Thursday's news of Intel's second plant in Israel--which will produce 300-millimeter wafers using a 45-nanometer process starting in the second half of 2008--confirms an announcement made in July by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Sharon had said the company would invest around $4 billion. Until now, Intel had declined to comment.
"Intel is committed to widening its lead in advanced semiconductor manufacturing," Intel Chief Executive Paul Otellini said in a statement.
The government has already approved a grant of $525 million for the new facility, as well as Intel's $600 million plan to upgrade its existing plant.
Construction on the project, which will be Intel's second 45-nanometer factory in the world, will begin immediately, the company said.
The 45-nanometer technology will allow chip circuitry to be built at about half the size of today's standard 90-nanometer technology.
Intel said the project will create more than 2,000 new jobs at the new plant in the southern town of Kiryat Gat, the site of the existing plant that employs about 3,500 people.
The world's top chipmaker, whose processors power an estimated 80 percent of personal computers, reported exports from Israel of $1.17 billion in 2004. Its exports peaked at $2.02 billion in 2002.
The company, which has two plants and five development centers in Israel, accounted for 9 percent of Israel's total electronics and information technology exports in 2004. Centrino mobile technology was developed in Israel.
In 1999, Intel--active in Israel for 30 years--built its first plant in Kiryat Gat with a total investment of $1.6 billion, including government subsidies.
Manufacturing with 300-millimeter wafers--about 12 inches in diameter--significantly increases the ability to produce semiconductors at a lower cost compared with more commonly used 200mm wafers. They also use 40 percent less energy and water per chip, Intel said. |
