Saturday, April 02, 2005

ATTENTION SURFERS, BLOGGERS AND WEB MASTERS

April 2, 2005

http://www.bloglines.com/blog/mideastweb

Attention surfers, bloggers and Web masters:

Help promote a fair break for Israel and Zionism on the Web

By Ami Isseroff

Every people is entitled to a fair hearing. Every people. That must even include people you do not like!! It must even include Jews and our Jewish national movement - Zionism. Unfortunately Zionism has become a kind of cuss-word, not just in the dens of Al-Qaeda and remote Sheikhdoms where women can't vote, but in Europe and in the USA and in the UN, in the media and on the Web.

It is one thing to disagree with policies of the Israeli government, which are undoubtedly disagreeable at times. It is quite another thing when that criticism stems from an ideology that denies the Jewish people the right to national self-determination. That is a form of racism. Unfortunately, it is a "permitted" and politically correct form of racism. No other country has been singled out for this treatment, no matter what their policies. The Chinese have plundered Tibet and oppressed the Tibetan people, but nobody says that the Chinese do not have a right to a country. The Turks repressed the Kurds. Nobody said that Turkey is an apartheid racist colonialist warmonger state. The examples are endless. Only Israel, of all countries, is singled out for this sort of treatment.

Systematic delegitimization of Zionism has been "Politically Correct" since the infamous UN "Zionism is Racism" resolution of 1975, and it has not abated. This situation is mirrored on the World Wide Web. Depending ont he day, Five or Six of the ten first links retrieved by a Google search for "Zionism" are anti-Zionist polemics, inlcuding some obnoxious racist diatribes. "True Torah Jews Against Zionism," the top-ranked Web site, represents a tiny minority of medieval Jewish religious fanatics who insist that only their view is correct and brands every other view as heresy. Another site offers us the following enticing introduction: "What Zionism is -- and its pernicious influence upon the USA." Sounds to me like that could have been plagiarized from Mein Kampf, with "Zionism" replacing a certain other word. Here is another "A Crude Attempt To Equate Anti-Zionism With Anti-Semitism ... Jewish Persecution - A Primary Tool Of International Zionism" "International Zionism used to be the International Jew-Bolshevik conspiracy in the good old Third Reich of course. Many of the Web sites that insist they are not racists and that criticism of Zionism is not racist have links to Mein Kampf, Protocols of the Elders of Zion and similar materials.

Anti-Zionism sometimes masquerades as "peace" or "peace and justice" advocacy. Destroying the national home of another people, whether it is the Jewish national home, or the Palestinian national home, cannot have anything to do with either peace or justice.

Suppressing such Web sites would not help much, but there is no reason why decent people have to read them, or keep silent in the face of this abuse. The unsuspecting high school student somewhere in Midwestern USA who has to do a homeowork assignment about Zionism should not be immediately confronted with the rantings of religious fanatics, Stalinist ideologues and racists, placed so that they seem like the authoritative "last word" on Zionism.

You can help. Rankings in Google and other search engines are determined in part by how many other sites link to a particular Web site. This means that if you have a Web site or a blog, you can help promote decent and fair Web sites about Zionism. Even if you are just a surfer, you can leave comments at blogs that allow them and in forums that include links to these sites.

I have compiled a list of such Web sites. These are not primarily pages that promote a particular Israeli policy or answer particular claims about the Arab Israeli conflict. They are all focused on the definition and history of Zionism.

Here it is:

Sites that are fair to Zionism

Zionism - Definition, Early History and Role in the Creation of Israel

http://www.mideastweb.org/zionism.htm

- A comprehensive and balanced treatment.

Labor Zionism - Early history and analysis

http://www.mideastweb.org/labor_zionism.htm

Wikipedia article about Zionism - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism

A comprehensive and fairly balanced article including the history of Zionism as well as links to specific topics and articles about anti-Zionism.

Zionism - Table of contents at the Jewish Virtual Library

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/zion.html

Zionism article at Infoplease http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0853449.html

The US Library of congress has a comprehensive and balanced set of articles about Zionism:

Zionist Precursors - US Library of Congress http://countrystudies.us/israel/8.htm

Political Zionism - US Library of Congress http://countrystudies.us/israel/9.htm

Cultural Zionism - US Library of Congress http://countrystudies.us/israel/10.htm

Labor Zionism - US Library of Congress http://countrystudies.us/israel/11.htm

Revisionist Zionism - US Library of Congress http://countrystudies.us/israel/12.htm

Essential Texts of Zionism http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/6640/zion/essential.html

Jewish Agency Zionism pages - Links to basic information about Zionism from the Jewish Agency

http://www.jafi.org.il/education/100/concepts/index.html

Ambassador Herzog explains Zionism in the UN

http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/UN/herzogsp.html

The above links were chosen for one or more reasons:

All of them are fairly solid materials that have historical information and are comprehensive and/or balanced.

None of them tries to pass off a particular view of Zionism as "holy writ."

None of them contains apologies for particular policies of the Israeli government. They just explain Zionism and give its history.

Nany of them are already fairly popular and in the first 20 links retrieved by google.
We want to get all of them on the first page of information retrieved by Google.

You can add your own favorites to the above list, but please post at least the above sites, so that we can focus efforts to raise the popularity of representative Web sites.

Please post this list (remember to keep the word "Zionism" in the hyperlink text of each link) wherever you can, and please pass this article on to others.

IMPORTANT

If you have posted permanent links to these Web sites in your blog or Web site, I will be happy to link to your Web site. Contact me at mew (at) mideastweb.org. [Replace the " (at) " with a @ to get the actual e-mail address]

Thank you.
Ami Isseroff

Reminder - The above do not represent the views of any organization. They are my own views.

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