Adam Holland has a series of excellent posts (here, here and here) about the anti-Zionist “progressive Jewish” blog Mondoweiss.
Until last month Mondoweiss was a project of the Nation Institute, affiliated with the leftwing The Nation magazine. Now, for whatever reason, the blog has ended its relationship with the Nation Institute and become a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. According to a Mondoweiss post:
CERSC is a great fit for us because the Center is fearlessly dedicated to ideas that are outside the mainstream. With the help of Anthony Arnove, it is best known for its pathbreaking publishing arm, Haymarket Books, which has published Omar Barghouti, Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Wallace Shawn, Amy Goodman, Dennis Brutus, Amira Hass, and Ilan Pappe, among others.
It seems that as part of a fundraising appeal, Mondoweiss claimed it was “under Israeli attack.” Later one of the bloggers, Adam Horowitz, admitted that Mondoweiss is not in fact under Israeli attack, “but we certainly need the support of our readers to keep the site going.”
Both the original post and the later admission have been scrubbed from the site.
But the most remarkable revelation is that one of Mondoweiss’s bloggers, Alec Kinnear— an obsessive Israel-basher– paid a handsome tribute on his own blog to the far-Right, anti-immigrant Austrian politician Jörg Haider after he died in 2008 (Farewell Jörg).
Haider’s voice was resonant and clear, the structure of his sentences as well tailored as his suit. Little acquainted with the German language at that time, I was only able to follow the phonetic balance of Haider’s rhetoric.
The audience was as rapt as I’d ever seen at the speech of a politician. From Haider’s end there appeared to be little grandstanding – none of the whipping up of the crowd that so cheapens many politician’s public speaking. Just an engaging speech.
Not a word about Haider’s hateful views.
From The Washington Post obituary of Haider:
At times, Mr. Haider’s followers would start singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me,” an anthem from the musical “Cabaret” that symbolized the Nazi takeover of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s.
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As a young man, he practiced fencing with a straw dummy labeled with the name of Simon Wiesenthal, the Vienna-based hunter of Nazi war criminals.
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To great applause, Mr. Haider lauded a group of Waffen SS veterans at a 1995 reunion as “decent men of character who remained faithful to their ideals.”
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Mr. Haider lived on a 38,000-acre estate that provided a generous income from inherited forestlands. An uncle had bought the property at a bargain price after its Jewish owners were forced to flee in 1938.
The BBC reported from Haider’s funeral:
International guests included Sayf Gaddafi, the son of the Libyan leader, who was a close friend of Mr Haider, and a delegation from Italy’s right-wing Northern League.