Marc Cooper, Darfur and the Jews

Marc Cooper

As should be painfully obvious by now, Marc Cooper has made a bid for the Harry’s Place franchise in the USA. He incorporates all of the talking points found on this pro-war “decent left” blog, from bashing Hugo Chavez to hyping the Euston Manifesto.

Harry’s Place specializes in baiting anybody who is critical of Israel as “anti-Semitic”, a charge that they lodge against the British SWP especially. Cooper incorporated the same sleazy tactics that they use in a post today attacking Yoshie Furuhashi’s articles on Darfur that appeared on MRZine.

He got a head’s up on Yoshie’s articles from a character named Michael Pugliese who doesn’t have the guts to join the FBI outright but prefers to snoop on people as an unpaid volunteer.

Yoshie answers Cooper effectively in the comments section, but I doubt that Cooper will have a reply. He is notorious for refusing to acknowledge his own lies and distortions when they are brought to his attention on his blog. After he accused Galloway of supporting suicide bombers, somebody posted a quote from Galloway attacking such acts on his blog. Cooper had nothing to say in reply, just as George W. Bush prefers to ignore his own critics. That is why Cooper’s reputation as a journalist is in tatters.

I actually was the first one to bring up the connection between Jews and this Darfur campaign. My mother is very involved with her local reform Judaism synagogue and she informed me a couple of weeks ago that her rabbi has organized a letter-writing campaign to Congress and that reform Jewry is deeply involved with the issue. What is so controversial about that? Go to the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism at http://rac.org/ and you’ll see Darfur splashed across the home page.

The 4/29 Baltimore Sun reported:

“The National Association of Evangelicals and the American Humanist Association might not agree on much. When it comes to abortion or homosexuality, the Union for Reform Judaism and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops find themselves on opposite ends of the debate.

“But when the subject is genocide in Darfur, all are on the same page.

“In what may be the broadest coalition of faith-based groups ever assembled for a political cause, Jews, Christians and Muslims, liberals and conservatives, evangelicals and atheists are joining with humanitarian and human rights organizations to demand that the U.S. government end the killing in Sudan.

“In a movement more diverse than those that backed the abolition of slavery or the struggle for civil rights, tens of thousands of demonstrators – including several busloads from the synagogues and churches of Baltimore – are expected to converge on Washington tomorrow for what organizers are calling the Rally to Stop Genocide.”

The real scandal is not Yoshie calling attention to establishment Jewry (and the evangelical Christians) going on a campaign around Darfur (that dovetails with broader Zionist ambitions), but Marc Cooper accusing people of anti-Semitism who have never had a single instance of such beliefs or activity in their entire lives. It is the kind of guttersnipe neo-McCarthyism that people like Alan Dershowitz specialize in. Of course, we have grown used to that from the likes of Dershowitz. I suppose we’ll eventually get used to Cooper as well.