The root meaning, which we find in extermist German nationalist tracts and in German Zionist social critics like Max Nordau, who wrote Entartung/Degeneracy, is “removal from one’s kind” with an implication of inauthenticity.

The other meaning relates to the development moral corruption and turpitude. Several social historians have described tendencies of Germans to develop negative beliefs about Jews in order to justify ex post facto the mistreatment that Jews received from the Nazi German government.

Not only do David Project productions evince a desperate quest to find more and more justification after the fact for Israeli brutality towards Palestinians, but the intrinsic evil of Arabs and Muslims as identified and elaborated by the David Project has increased steadily with each passing year.

It is a very good example of the 2nd form of degeneracy, but I have rarely attributed degeneracy to the DP because for the most part “degeneracy” has been drained of meaning in common political discourse.

this petition reveals an anti-Israel bias.

I am opposed to the U.S. providing Israel cluster bombs used in their hundreds of thousands against Lebanese civilian & probably in contravention of U.S. agreements with Israel. I am opposed to the U.S. providing Israel its most dangerous weapons such as DIME & others which have never been tested in battlefield conditions before & whose lethality is beyond many conventional munitions. I am opposed to the U.S. providing Israel weapons which Israel uses in ways that contravene international laws of war. I am opposed to the U.S. providing weapons to Israel which incinerate Palestinian organs from within the body in horrifying and excruciating ways. I have written about ea. of these subjects here. If you need links you can search the blog or ask & I’ll provide them.

Does that make me anti-Israel? If it does in yr book then we simply will never agree on what constitutes being anti-Israel.

And btw, I’m not in favor of most U.S. arms sales including those to Arab countries & I’ve written that here in this blog.

About the issue of U.S. arms sales, there are even ardent right wing Israelis who’d like to see Israel completely self-sufficient for nationalist reasons. So while it’s true that her signature reflects a critical stance toward the Israeli military complex, I wouldn’t say it reflect an anti-Zionist position at all. I’d probably be willing to sign such a petition myself. Some of the new U.S. weapons systems which Israel is using & which I’ve written about here including DIME) are incredibly & scarily destructive of human life.

“degenerate Arab-hater” is not an inaccurate description of anyone that would work for Jacobs and the David Project.

Norman Levitt used the term “degenerate left” in one of his diatrbes against Abu El Haj here & I responded by telling him how uncomfortable I was with bringing such red flag terms into a political debate. I agree with you completely that Jacobs and everything he touches is treif & slimy. But to call him or David Project degenerate? I don’t know where that gets you that you couldn’t get by arguing facts & issues. In fact, the Kahanists who revile me at a number of their websites love to call me terms like “fag” and “kapo” which seems to me only a slightly more extreme form of calling someone degenerate. I just don’t much go for it.

I have my own rejoinder to something Amir said in the very first comment:

“She might want to mention that her name appears on a petition calling for an end of military and arms sales by the US government to Israel so that readers of her work will understand that her conclusions are clouded by a preformed political outlook hostile to the state of Israel.”

More than a few people, including some Israelis, hold that it would do Israel a world of good to cut the umbilical cord and learn how to not be dependent on American aid - to put it another way, only in the world of Orwell’s ‘1984′ does dependency equal strength. One could straightforwardly argue that signing such a petition reflects a PRO-Israel outlook.

One last minor point:

“The fact that he was working for Campus Watch WHEN it was first published doesn’t phase him in the least.”

The correct spelling is “faze”, not “phase”.

I have taken David Project Israel advocacy sessions, and I did a lot of research on Charles Jacobs, the David Project, and the AASG during the conflict over the Roxbury Mosque. It is not the type of language that I normally use, but “degenerate Arab-hater” is not an inaccurate description of anyone that would work for Jacobs and the David Project.

Take a look at my web site and search for “Roxbury Mosque,” “Charles Jacobs,” and “David Project.”