The "Save Darfur" rally today was aired on C-Span. [....] The timing of the rally was perfect, designed to coincide -- and scuttle -- the Abuja peace negotiations between the rebels and Khartoum brokered by the African Union, whose deadline is midnight today.

The negotiations with one rebel group succeeded. The Zionist conspiracy was foiled by Comrade Furuhashi apparently. However it is well to remember that there are other rebel groups, and that all previous agreements have been totally ineffective in stopping the carnage.

Furuhashi exposed the Zionist plot as actually a pro-war rally in humanitarian clothing. Comrade Furuhashi wrote:

Who is behind this astonishing pro-war rally in war-weary America (war-weary as far as the Iraq War is concerned, that is)? A rag-tag coalition of evangelicals and establishment Jews (those whom the corporate media designate as official leaders of Jewish communities) [....]

Not everyone is grateful for the enlightenment offered by Comrade Furuhashi. Jeff Weintraub comments:

I feel almost embarrassed to be paying attention to this idiotic, pernicious, and disgusting pair of articles by editor of the on-line version of Monthly Review (MRZine), one Yoshie Furuhashi...

I am neither making this up nor exaggerating. Both of these pieces approach self-parody...

...The fundamental question here is whether the genocidal mass murder, mass rape, torture, ethnic cleansing, and deliberate starvation of civilian populations should be regarded as legitimate tactics of military and political conflict.

I happen to believe that the answer should be no. Furuhashi's remarks about Darfur and Bosnia suggest that she thinks otherwise. But be that as it may....

It happens to be quite true that American Jewish groups have played a very active role in mobilizing public protest against the slow-motion genocidal mass murder of African Muslims in Darfur. Unlike Furuhashi, I see this as a cause for pride and hope. We should all be doing more to stop this atrocity--not inventing reasons to change the subject, protect the criminals, and attack those who sympathize with the victims.

Jeff also adds and agrees with a comment by Marc Cooper:

I share Jeff's dismay and disgust with this garbage from Monthly Review. There was a time in my life when I made sure not to miss an issue of MR. I never shared its always orthodox Marxist perspective, but the mag -- in its heyday-- could be counted on always to be of the highest intellectual caliber. To this day I still vividly remember pieces I read in MR 25 and 30 years ago (Economist Samir Amin's circa 1975 essay on Australia and California stands out most boldly).
What a long, long, long, long way down. From a sparkling theoretical journal of the intellectual left, to an agit-prop rag unintentionally (I hope) flirting with anti-semitism and soaked in conspiracy mongering. [....]
This ugly episode is nothing but one more crude manifestation of the knee-jerkish "my enemy's enemy is my friend" axiom. In this case, whatever the Bush administration is for (no matter how half-heartedly or ineffectually) some "anti-imperialists" are totally against -- even it means siding with a genocidal dictatorship in Sudan. Man, does this stink.

No, chaverim (the Hebrew equivalent of "comrade" by which labor-Zionists address each other - same meaning, very different connotation) Weintraub and Cooper. I wish you were right, but it is very obvious that you give Monthly Review too much credit. It is not a singly "ugly episode" but part of a quite consistent pattern of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism that has characterized much of the Marxist left for many years.

The Khartoum government is not the enemy of the Bush regime particularly, not in the sense that Osama Bin Laden is the enemy of the Bush administration or the United States. That is not the reason that the Monthly Review is attacking the Jews. What you call "anti-Semitism" is viewed by Monthly Review people as part of the long campaign against rootless cosmopolitanism and Zionist colonialsim, which must be supported by all right-thinking people.

It has always been hard for well-intentioned progressive Jews to admit to themselves that parts of the communist movement are tainted deeply with anti-Semitism. We ignored, repressed and denied. In the 1930s Jews insisted that it was just a coincidence that such a large proportion of the people purged were Jews. When Itzik Feffer and others of the Anti-Fascist committee were murdered after World War II, we made believe it didn't happen. Now, when "progressives" insist there is a Jewish plot to start a war in Iraq or Iran, we still insist it has nothing to do with anti-Semitism. It is just an "ugly incident." "They didn't really mean it." "They are only angry at Zionists" (just as German Jews wanted to believe that Hitler only disliked 'Eastern' Jews)." Forget about it. They are not "flirting" with anti-Semitism. The courtship ended in the 1930s. They have been to bed with anti-Semitism very often since then. By this time the "rootless cosmopolitan" campaign of Vissarionevich has grandchildren all over the world. They don't mean someone else either. They don't mean other Jews, or only Eastern jews, or only bourgeois capitalist Jews, or only Zionists. They mean you.

Ami Isseroff