FOR FULL EQUALITY OF NATIVE AND ADOPTIVE PALESTINIANS

FOR One Man, One Vote

Rights & Roots

About Universal Human Rights, conciliated with duties bound to roots

(after reading Israel Shamir, Joh Domingo, Jonathan Cook and Norman Finkelstein)

By Maria Poumier[1], 9-10 January 2007

The very idea of "human rights" is a hostile assault on "collective rights" entertained by the neo-liberals against the underprivileged. It is time to give up an attempt of fitting into liberal paradigm (Israel Shamir)

Israel Shamir is uncomfortable for the left, because he looks for the points of agreement between leftist and right-wing thought. But the great thinkers are always those who break ideological barriers, breach and bridge, and therefore are able to lift up huge popular movements. For our times, his thought is necessary in order to put an end to the state of USurpaZion, and enter a new age. Surprisingly, in the search of unity and reconciliation, it seems Shamir does not care at all for any of the new rights that Western countries invent and promote all over the world. We are so used to the modern claim of rights and the right to invent new rights, that we miss this dimension in his writings. The left is proud of its ability to recognize the collective rights of any group that can argue about its oppression, so we need some articulation between Shamir's brave antizionism and our claim for universal generosity.

 At present, the French representative of the Zionist Masters of Discourse, Alain Finkelkraut, is being sued and also heavily opposed on the internet by some important Black figures and writers [1] because he adopts the right-wing claim for "national identity" against "barbarian immigrants", as Bush builds walls against Mexicans, and Tel Aviv against Palestine. In the 1930s, Jews were still uncomfortable immigrants from the East. So the arrogance of our judaized elites against Blacks (supposed to be the most uncivilized people in the world) is unbearable for anyone who remembers that the disturbing low class strangers in our countries are just the followers of native "dangerous classes" of the XIXth century, the ones who gave birth to the huge Marxist revolutions we are proud about, and Shamir, as a Soviet Russian, is also proud about. Doudou Diène, special rapporteur on Human Rights at UN, reminds us that racism against Blacks is becoming the connection between the extreme right and the mainstream representatives, not only in the West, but also in the Arabic world [2].

I New Rights

Whoever declares a new right supposes that this new right will apply to him. In order to obtain agreement for it, he must say his struggle is about "universal" rights, or "human" rights. He never expects that other people may use his logics against him. Democracy – meaning the summit of a society where rights rule and flourish, works only within a small community, against the wild wide world outside, and against some enslaved ones inside. But democracy, as it claims it is universal, must expand itself, must create more rights for more people. It is a trap, and this trap is the same for monarchy, as monarchy claims to represent universal will of God, and fatherhood for all the country's children.

In white societies, the black struggle always started from recognizing the established rights, and then asked the ruling class to apply that rule to Blacks the same as for Whites; this is what happened in the times of slavery, and produced abolition all over America, and the same logic, strategy and tactics are still working, now at a world wide level. In the times of legal slavery great bloody clashes occurred, because Blacks were not supposed to be concerned by rights, only by duties.

At the Durban UN international conference about racism, in 2001, Blacks recognized the new legal concept of « crime against humanity », created by Jews for Jews; immediately, the white delegations from USA, Israel, England, France (the French delegation was led by Patrick Gaubert, the boss of LICRA), left and shouted it was anti-Semitism to declare "crime against humanity" a universal concept, able to describe other mass murders than H. A few months before, in France, Blacks indeed had succeeded to impose to the government a law that recognizes transatlantic deportation and colonial slavery is « crime against humanity »; obviously, it lasted more than Jewish-Nazi H (as James Petras calls it [2]) , and made a lot of millions more victims.

Durban's resolution at UN in August 2001 has four meanings :

a) a victory over J exceptionalism,

b) a victory for ethics, for good old Kantian categorical imperative

c) a victory for Blacks.

d) a victory for collective sense of rights, not individual ones.

 In 1945, with the universalization of the legal concept of "crime against humanity", the sense of collective rights won, against the sense of individual rights.

In 2001, the entire ruling world wide caste –not only Jews, reacted with a racial automatism: invocating individual rights against collective rights; they screamed: "a single grandson of a slave has no right for any compensation about what a big enslaved population suffered, so no compensation at all for anyone of you, outsiders who are trying to invade our private democracy!"

In this case, they used individual right for them, and were unable to accept that Descendants of Slaves were asking for some collective reparation, not for individual compensations. But, as a matter of fact, Jews know they cannot get back some compensations from WWII if they use only the sense of individual right, so the whole ruling white caste that support Reparations for Jews is trapped in its own lack of logic.

The danger is so big for the elite, with the question of Reparations for Africans and Descendants of Africans, that now, even some mainstream historians in France are asking for the abolition of any law based on the concept of "crime against humanity", including the one that protects the H narrative ( the Fabius-Gayssot law).

If these historians succeed in their abolitionist project, not only the laws that censor some narratives about the past may fall, but also the International Criminal Court of The Hague, for recent and forthcoming mass murders, would be questioned; the USA never recognized it, nor the Jewish State.

But no people who want to judge some of their local mass criminals will ever agree to dismiss the legal concept of "crime against humanity". Who can imagine the Palestinian would leave their dream of suing Sharon, Olmert and the next ones, for nothing?

It is impossible to go back to some narrow national legislation in such political matters. Shamir may be the first Israeli citizen sued in France just for what he writes in Israel, but if he is condemned, there will be plenty of so called evil thinkers sued far from their countries afterwards. No doubt Africans are able to catch and imprison Finkelkraut in some southern country to get him sued at any time… as David Irving was kidnapped in Austria, far from his country of England.

New Duties

Roger Garaudy has a good idea to stop the inflation of human rights, mentioned in his last book called Western Terrorism (Le Terrorisme occidental, Paris, Ed.. Al Qalam, 2005); he says we should write a Universal Declaration of Duties.

What should be those duties? It would be a super secularized and transnational version of Kantian imperatives, or pan-religious imperatives.

First: you will not kill, steal, swindle, as individual duties changed into collective duties; as all the UN international and collective implementations of these duties; this means the end of mass murders and collective exploitation, the necessity of Reparation for collective harms. Reparation must appear as the opposite of Revenge, and the only ethical proceeding for collective crimes.

Second: the secularization of the biblical commandment : "honor your father and mother". It means honor the single, incarnated sexual duality of male and female;

the idea of fatherhood, "Patria" from "patres" (the vertical standing towards an ideal goal, making mankind be more than human)

the idea of motherhood, "Matria" from "matres", our duty with our local birth place, earth and nature (in shamirian terms, the Holy Virgin, the concrete ground where our feet look for roots, the horizontal line)

the need to unite Patria and Matria, because it is the only way to reproduce mankind, as any living being, and to create anything (in African, Christian and other traditional religions, the ultimate sense of the Cross).

Here we have the logic of tradition and local common sense reconciled with the logic of secular, open societies; modern thought must be able to recognize and make real our duty about our land, our local, individual and collective "property" , that should rather be called: the native context we must serve, feeling we belong to it.

So, collective, national, local, ground duties can balance universal rights, and undo the evil hybris at work about them. All the same, religious traditional sense of charity as a duty in the traditional thought balanced the old, primary right of autochthonous people to "own" and rule in their country, and enslave other dwellers.

Alas, returning to small local units is not possible anymore, nor is it possible to go backwards about collective rights. "Defense of national identity" is a wrong name: the scale changes, the ethnic identity too, the claims of national will change also; but the duty with our local context remains.

For example, not one woman who once gets free from the danger of being raped, murdered, repudiated and beaten in a traditional society would resign her human rights, and go back to the old slavery of marriage, as the law established by males in order to control the production of new human beings. But any woman is able to learn and accept that her duty with her national home, or homeland, is to keep it clean and flourished as her family house, and full of sane children able to respect their fathers. Feminism was considered as a big danger once upon a time, but civil rights for women didn't make western societies collapse, because feminism has its natural limit in the great majority of women because they will never use their modern rights just to make a world full of useless inflatable dolls, terrorists, lonesome lesbians, or whores open to all men; they still look for one single ideal husband, they still strive to make sane minded children, and vote for strong long-lasting institutions.

For Blacks and all kind of immigrants, it is the same : their right to a full human condition must be respected, even when it means some sacrifices for the natives, and at the same time they must pay allegiance to the place and the tradition where they live in : they must get deeply rooted in the local landscape. Double nationality, that allows so many people to be unfair with the place where they live, should be abolished. At present, it is mostly a world privilege for Jews and wealthy people.

We can understand the H narrative as an excess of implementation of the sense of Human rights recently given to Jews in European history, because Jews still appear to feel and react as if they were the untouchables, outcast of European societies, as it was once upon a time; so, as nouveaux riches, they made an abuse of the new toy they were good at playing with, namely citizenship.

Jews found access to full human rights by two means; their own struggle and will on the one side, and the French Revolution and Napoleon's interest on the other, because both the Revolution and Bonaparte needed the French Jews not to betray them, as any ambitious power need his bankers help loyally.

Anyone is allowed to dream about turning back to village scale societies, but it doesn't help much on real ground, where nobody will agree to resign any universal human right. Probably in some way, there is not much to be invented, we can just enforce duties, because duty makes sense only as local concrete action, starting from the place where we live and vote.

Ernest Partridge [3] wrote in 1990 about the rights of the future generations, following Feinberg's defense of The rights of animals and unborn generations, and in David Thoreau's line. Obviously, it is inhuman not to sacrifice our individual present comfort for the collective future. When Africans ask for a whole rehabilitation of the global African first civilization, revision of their colonial history and reparation about the past, they are taking us back to another very religious point : duties with our ancestors, all of them, for all of us.

Shamir, as the brightest writer of our times, knows how to take back into the solid traditional experience our taste for inventing new concepts. He is disturbing because he points out the Jewishness in any sophistic and cynical modern discourse. He has the right to do so because he belongs to a very strong Jewish culture; recently he paid tribute to our genuine and generous philosemitism, accepting that "Jews don't have the copyright on nastiness". We have the duty to listen to him because we Western people all belong to Judeo-Christianity. But for any former colonized, there is no substantial difference between Judaism and Christianity, they are just an ideological double-face mask of western non-right of conquest and oppression. With this outlook, we should use Shamir's method, rediscover the need of pan-religious traditional duties, and make them effective against the sophistics of unlimited new rights in modern secularized world without fear of the "dark others".

[1] Claude Ribbe (www.clauderibbe.com ), COFFAD, MNH, ARMADA; after Doudou Diène, now the Caribbean writer Raphael Confiant (from Martinique) is being attacked in the main stream press as "anti-Semite"; not surprisingly, he is absolutely antizionist, as all honest Blacks are.

[2] http://www.continentpremier.info/

[3] Upstream / Downstream : Issues in Environmental Ethics, ed. D. Scherer, Temple University Press, 1990

Maria Poumier is a retired University professor and translator and a member of Tlaxcala, the network fro translators for linguistic diversity. She is active with the Association Entre la Plume et l'Enclume (Between the Feather and the Anvil) against censorship (the name of the Association is a joke basing on he expression Entre l'enclume et le marteau, Between the anvil and the hammer = between the devil and the deep blue sea). Please see http://www.plmenclume.net

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