Adam Holland has the goods on a bizarre fundraising appeal on the anti-Zionist website that had as its hed, "Help Mondoweiss Stay Afloat Under Israeli Attack."
Nothing in the text explained why or how it was under attack — it would, natch, be big news if it was.
Mondoweiss moderator Adam Horowitz later told a commenter that was "the wrong choice of words."
Okay, but it’s a choice of words pretty clear in its meaning — how did y’all get there?
Thing is, Horowitz does not only not go on to explain — the comment, his response to the commenter, the original post all get scrubbed. (Links above are to resourceful Holland’s screen-saves.)
What gives?
Holland digs deep and comes up with bizarre postings by Alec Kinnear, the contributor who posted the original appeal, on other blogs.
Kinnear, who is based in Vienna, has an unsettling jones for Jörg Haider (yes that Jörg Haider.)
The most striking entry, though, is this from 2004, written after a meeting between President Bush and then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — so offensive on so many levels, and probably the first ever 21st century apologia for the Inquisition (yes, that Inquisition):
What can be done to avoid an outpouring of anti-Semitism?
1. American and Canadian Jews must denounce Sharon immediately and to repudiate his plan for the Palestinians.
2. The American congress should suspend all support of the Israel defense structure as long as those weapons are being used to kill America and other international observers and to raze Palestinian homes.
3. The current sitting President of the United States withdraw his ill-thought support for the apartheid and inhuman Sharon plan for the destruction of the Palestinian people.
4. Americans must press for a fair settlement of the Palestine issue
If not and the brutal persecution and fencing of the Palestinians continues, Sharon will have opened the floodgates to the greatest torrent of antisemitism the world has known since the Spanish inquisition. The Jewish people will be welcome nowhere except Israel and they will lose Israel altogether sometime in the next fifty years.
(snip)
Logically the quandary is thus posed:
-the state policies of Israel are totally unacceptable to civilised man
-it is our duty as a state to oppose these Israeli policies
-many Jews support these policies and other Jews support these policies clandestinely, indeed Jewish advisors led America into this preposterous war
-thus no Jew can be trusted in government any longer, as he may be working against his own state to support the inhuman policies in Palestine
In the Spanish Inquisition, many Jews would convert superficially to Catholicism but continue to practice their faith, until discovered. At that point, the unfortunate Jew (and others) would suffer persecution if not death, until finally the Jews were driven from that country.
Yes, my ancestors, pelted with stones on their march out of Spain, were "unfortunate." The ones they left behind, tortured to death, were "unfortunate." That’s one way of putting it.
Now, Kinnear has posting rights at Mondoweiss. One of his most recent adds this caveat (as a result of this flap?):
I’d like to be really clear, I’m not a moderator. I’m a supporter, an occasional contributor and we provide technical support. My views do not directly reflect those of Phil Weiss or Adam Horowitz, nor am I their representative.
Notably, in this self-same post, Kinnear thanks "Mondoweiss’s supporters for your recent contributions." That sounds like he’s mishpokhe, or something close to it.
What does "we provide technical support" mean? Is Kinnear a paid consultant? Mondoweiss just ended a two-year relationship with The Nation Institute and launched a new one with the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. The site draws a lot of his support from the left — do these institutions, and the folks clicking on their Paypal accounts know about this team member who mourned the passing of a preeminent Austrian fascist he found "engaging"?
None of this should be hugely surprising: Phil Weiss routinely namechecks Jews with a fervor that would have made Joe McCarthy blush, and thinks Jews who have relatives who died in the Holocaust should "confess" this stain.
But paying a Haider acolyte? That seems a little much for The Nation, of all institutions, to be undertaking.
Nu, so what is Kinnear’s Mondo-status? Paid, unpaid? And how did that hed get posted in the first place?
