Haters of America’s 1619 Project & Lovers of Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Laws

Jerome Irwin

INTRODUCTION

How the United States of America, in 1619, and the Jewish Nation State, in 1948, first were born, and the controversial gestation periods that led to their birth, is at the heart of all the battle lines that have now been drawn, especially between the bigots in academia and editorial board rooms who hate America’s 1619 Project, those forever incensed by all the criticisms ever leveled at Israel’s biased-racist Jewish Nation-State Laws, and all those others who instead endeavor to better inform students of American and Jewish-Israeli history and culture of what they contend is the real true story of their birth and development as nations. That true story, say their critics, rather than based upon some lofty, democratic philosophy or spiritual principle of universal human equality, instead were based upon the racial-religious-ideological superiority and exclusivity of their White, European colonizer forbears. Especially regarding the spin both nations ever strive to project to the world of their biblical-scriptural origins and how their peculiar versions of Christian-Jewish-Zionism and racial-religious hegemony, are falsely said to be originally founded.

Both nations continue to go out of their way to joyfully laud themselves and one another for their mutual understanding of what they claim to be their true soul and selfhood as a people and what they believe to be the lofty, divinely-inspired democratic principles upon which they both contend their nations were originally founded and still so proudly adhere.

On the other side of the battle lines that have been drawn in both America and Israel are those who seek to tell what they think is the real story and truth, beyond all the propaganda, narrative spin, and hyperbole of how and why each nation first was formed.

Given the analogous origins of both nation-states, it’s not surprising that they’renow bosom buddy-allies, as if forever tied to the hip. Theanalogy between them could be likened to the birth of a human baby; regardless of whether the gestation period in America’s case was 158 years, prior to its 1776 American Revolution, or Israel’s gestation was 2,000 or more years longer, prior to its modern political era that began with its Nakba War and invasion of Palestine in 1948.

However, both White European America and Jewish Zionist Israel have left out of their birthing story’s the critical elements of the Black and Brown peoples in their midst who, like all-important chromosomes in the formative birthing process of every nation and their peoples, make up the essence of both beings. The birth of both the American Nation-State and Jewish Nation-State preceded by horrendous tales of the slavery, murder, removal and dispossession of the native indigenous peoples in their midst.

Thus, as many contend, there should not only be a 1619 Project but a 1948 Project, as well, that, like a social, political and religious lightning rod, more fully and truthfully explores Israel’s true origins and its future prospects, compared to the harsh realities of the racist, genocidal practices that both America and Israel have perpetrated and continue to perpetrate against their own Black and Brown indigenous citizenry. Both realities fly in the face of the way they’ve falsely come to view themselves and continue to project forward their much-ballyhooed democratic values and principles of how human beings should live and govern themselves.

In America’s case one need only closely look at the ramifications and fall out that have since been caused by the clashing visions and perspectives on both drawn sides of the battle lines of the Black Lives Matter Movement. In Israel’s case, one need only likewise imagine what the eventual fate of the Palestinian and Arabic peoples in their midst is destined to become if they remain under the rule of Israel’s Zionist Nation-State that, like the Nazi’s one-time dream-vision of a Third Reich, had it lived for a thousand years, once dominated and ruled by its Aryan Race, would have looked like had it survived.

In point of fact, actually every modern Western political nation-state, that has similarly evolved in the New World at the expense of their own indigenous peoples, should also undertake its own ‘Project’ to tell the full and truthful story that continues to underlie its raison d’etre.

WHAT LIES AT THE HEART OF THE 1619 PROJECT

The 1619 Project was originally inaugurated by the New York Times Magazine & Pulitzer Center that challenged America and Americans in general, and historians in particular, to reframe U.S history by posing to them the question “Why should Americans know about the year 1619?” The year – 1619 – being when the first twenty enslaved Africans were transported by the British to the British colony of Virginia in the New World and sold to the new colonists, who, some 158 years later, then went on to become one of the United States earliest foundational dates. America wasn’t yet then America, but this subsequently was the moment when the colonization of the New World began with a particular purpose and intention.

The 1619 Project, subsequently created by the Pulitzer Center, produced school curriculum materials covering the many years of slavery that followed, upon whose premise no aspect of the nation’s evolution that eventually would be formed has been left untouched. At its core, the Project seeks to explore the Idea of America and legacy that slavery then, and ever since, has had on the evolution of American culture and its systemic legacy of racial injustice, pervasive racism, a skewed criminal justice system; systems that remain alive and well to this day, and the ideological propaganda that has since been created to cover it over and obfuscate the truth.

A seminal essay of the 1619 Project’s collection of relevant materials was created by Nikole Hannah-Jones, a New York Times journalist, who oversaw the Project and later won a Pulitzer Prize for her work on it. Hannah-Jones efforts in this regard was meant to honor the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment in history and tell the whole story as truthfully as possible. Her basic premise was, as she writes, “Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. Black Americans have fought ever since to make them true”.

But there came a moment when the University of North Carolina (UNC) denied Hannah-Jones her full professorship tenure on its faculty, over the recommendation of its journalism department. That reversal was originally based upon the single dissenting voice of Walter Hussman Jr., a conservative, right-wing newspaper baron, publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, whose family, historically, has owned a chain of newspapers from Tennessee to Missouri, and Hussman himself once donated $25 Million to UNC’s journalism school that UNC later named after him and even inscribed on the front of its school of journalism a Walter Hussman Jr. principle that speaks of “credibility being the greatest asset of any news medium and impartiality its greatest source of credibility”. But the only problem in this scandalous case being that it, perhaps, called more into question Hussman and his own impartiality and credibility as a journalist than it did that of Ms. Hannah-Jones. The upshot of Hussman’s biased, heavy-handed actions is that it set off a maelstrom that continues to this day between the ire of many radical right-wing conservatives and prestigious academic institutions against all those who might be described as critical race theory scholars.

North Carolina’s schools, following suite, already have even crafted radical reactionary rules designed to ‘muzzle’ teachers about what to teach and what not to teach about racism in American culture and society. The mind-control continues to grow in its intensity as bodies like the North Carolina General Assembly, for one, considers radical reactionary legislation for its schools and teachers that prohibits diversity training and any discussions of racism that might cause students, especially its white students, in the General Assembly’s usage of a nice bit of Orwellian doublespeak: to feel any discomfort.

LAWMAKERS AND RIGHT WING JOURNALISTS DRAWN INTO THE MAELSTROM

Lawmaker’s, following the lead of Walter Hussman Jr., in a number of other Republican-led states, already are also in the process of endeavoring to pass laws to limit critical race theory (CRT), and so further muzzle what and how teachers, following the guidelines of the 1619 Project, can teach and discuss with their students the question of race, race relations, and the history of slavery with direct reference to the Project.

The vicious outrage and bigotry that continues to manifest against the 1619 Project in American culture continues to escalate the closer the country comes to its next critically-important 2022 National Election. The mounting tensions haven’t been lost on John Duffy, English professor and faculty fellow of the Klaus Center for Civil and Human Rights at Notre Dame University. Professor Duffy says of the tsunami of negative criticism of the 1619 Project, “Many of the critiques of the Project seem cynically opportunistic – gasoline-powered into the trash can fires of the culture wars.”

Criticisms by various other historians who have faulted the 1619 Project have been many and varied for misrepresenting such things as: the historical. cultural and societal realities, from 1619 to 1776, that led up to the American Revolution; distortions of the legacy of Abraham Lincoln; discounting the contributions of White allies in the struggle against racial injustice, and; for dismissing American’s aspirations of freedom and equality as hypocrisy.

Historian Sean Wilentz, a student of U.S. Political and Social history, who received his PhD, in history from Yale University, and edited books on “Major Problems in the Early Republic”; “The Age of Raegan” and “Bob Dylan in America”, has termed the Project cynical. While Allan Guelzo, a former professor of history at Gettysburg College, who serves as Sr. Research Scholar in the Council of Humanities in the James Madison Program at Princeton University, has argued that, “The 1619 Project is not history; it’s conspiracy theory”. While still other right-wing critics have variously labeled the Project “agitprop”, “Un-America”, “socialism” and “garbage history”.

David Kirkland, executive director of New York University’s Metro Center, asserts that Americans need to have courageous conversations about race and culture because too many Americans still don’t know who they are or where they come from. Kirkland says, “It’s not that we are not a human race. It’s that America was constructed on the idea that there are people of different races, with whites on the top and blacks on the bottom.”

Critical Race theory has been around since the 1970’s when scholars first saw the shortcomings of the Civil Rights Movement and its focus on racial equality through color blindness, controversial affirmative action measures and the reality of racism, not as a biological fact but as a reality that had long been enshrined in U.S. law and other institutions, specifically to maintain America’s foundational domination by white people who still hold sway over the power in society.

In a report (“Capitalism in the 1619 Project”), by the Heritage Foundation, an American right-wing conservative think tank, the 1619 Project is further criticized as “insufficiently celebratory of American Capitalism”. Its report primarily asserts the Project overstates slavery’s importance in U.S. economic history. Critics of the Foundation otherwise say its report instead shows a remarkable lack of self-awareness regarding its own embeddedness in a political project to mobilize the past in the service of a particular vision of the future.

Whereas Professor Rockman, of the Great Lakes Center for Educational Research, that represents over 600,00 members in seven states, concludes the Heritage Foundation’s report commits the exact same sin with which it besmirches the 1619 Project: substituting ideology and political motives for an accurate engagement with the past. Still other right-wing politicians, like Newt Gingrich simply flat-out brands the Project a lie, while Donald Trump conflates the Project with critical race theory, declaring the Project as “toxic propaganda, and ideological poison that, if not removed, will dissolve our country”. Finally, at the federal and state levels, conservative lawmakers everywhere currently seek, in every which way, to ban the teaching of the Project.

At its core, the pushback against the 1619 Project isn’t really about ensuring that all students are treated with dignity in schools or are provided with the real truth of at all, as much as it is about ensuring white students in particular don’t learn that their country has a long history of systemic oppression towards people of color and a whole host of other traditionally marginalized groups.

A FINAL MESSAGE OF TRUTH TO ALL THE CRITICAL RACE THEORY HATERS

The hotly-debated questions surrounding the 1619 Project, is the extent to which slavery and race played a critical role in the 158-year lead-up, from 1619 to 1776, in the American Revolution and still plays in the politics, economy and culture of the American State.

But a recent Time Magazine bombshell essay by historian Robert G. Parkinson, an associate professor of history at Binghamton University, and the author of “Thirteen Clocks: How Race United the Colonies and Made the Declaration of Independence”, emphatically turns on its head all the arguments made by the race haters who remain so critical of any attempt to teach or pose critical race theory argument about America’s origins.

Professor Parkinson’s essay, “You Can’t Tell the Story of 1776 Without Talking About Race and Slavery”, argues that it is indeed impossible to actually understand what happened in 1619, 1776 and ever since without recognizing the critical, over-riding importance of race and slavery in America.

Parkinson’s essay boldly contends, “SLAVERY and arguments about race were not only at the heart of America’s founding; it was what united the states in the first place.” “We have been reluctant”, Parkinson says, “to admit just how thoroughly the Founding Fathers thought about, talked about, and wrote about race at the moment of American independence……..Colonists really didn’t know or particularly like one another. They fought with each other all the time. But you can’t tell the story without it”.

Despite Parkinson’s insights into how deeply race was embedded in the patriot cause, the controversy this has since enflamed within radical right-wing circles in America over critical race theory philosophy has fueled the public debate about the centrality of Race in American history. As part of that debate, which has been ongoing since the publication of the 1619 Project, the nation’s founding origins continues to come under severe scrutiny.

Long-standing prejudices about Black people, what modern society today would call ‘blatant racism’, was a primary force that caused the colonies to come together as one union, but that effort also simultaneously buried race deep within the cornerstone of the American republic the race issue from the moment it was born.

HATERS OF AMERICA’S 1619 PROJECT & LOVERS OF ISRAEL’S JEWISH NATION-STATE LAWS:

TWO PEAS FROM THE SAME POD

For years, this writer has written countless articles that have sought to raise the level of conscious awareness of the historical similarities of the plight of Black and Brown peoples everywhere in the America’s of the New World, and especially in what has since come to be known as the ‘United States’, at the hands of the constant diaspora of White, Christian, European colonizers at the constant expense of many indigenous peoples and their dramatically-different world views.

This same journalistic intent and zeal has often been applied as well to the similar plight suffered by Black and Brown indigenous peoples of the Old World, and especially in the Occupied Territories of Palestine in what has since become known as ‘Israel’, at the hands of yet another diaspora, this time of White, Jewish, Zionist colonizers. The constant expansionistic dreams and aspirations of both aggressive, ruthless colonizers in the New and Old Worlds one and the same – two peas from the same pod.

In this sense, it’s totally understandable why America and Israel consider themselves to be such close, bosom buddies – logically, philosophically, politically and religiously – and why they constantly tout, when the truth is just the opposite, each other’s governments and ways of life as representing the same political, biblical and scriptural lies of democratic principles and values upon which they contend both were originally founded.

But America’s 1619 Project and Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Laws, that can be traced back to their ‘Zionist’ origins clearly say otherwise. What this writer never has been able to fully comprehend, though, is the extent to which White Christian America and White Jewish Israel, as supposed lofty models and paragons of religious and political democratic virtue, have otherwise demonstrated so much similar amoral, insensitive, unempathetic behaviour and blindness to the roles they’ve played as genocidal colonizers and abject racists towards all those indigenous peoples they’ve violently displaced or totally eradicated for their own continued evolution and advancement.

Nothing this one has ever sought to document about this heinous process has seemingly ever made any kind of meaningful impact in the general conscious awareness of both colonizers. The mutual juggernauts of each succeeding U.S. President, their Administration’s, and the sum total of all their elected Senators and members of Congress, as well as each succeeding Prime Minister of Israel and its elected bodies of the Knesset within the Jewish Nation-State, simply continue to steamroll over every living race, culture and species of life that ever gets in their way.

Then, when the same hostility and hatred shown by American radical, right-wing ideologues towards the educational efforts of those brave and bold ones who likewise seek to undertake the 1619 Project, or those others who bravely try to create a BDS Movement to stop Israel’s apartheid crimes against humanity against the Palestinian people, or dare to even propose their own ‘1948 Project’, are ridiculed as anti-semites and met with the greatest derision by the citizenry of their own nation’s.

But, at one point, this writer finally got it. He got it as more and more critics of the Project continue to come out of the woodwork to disparage and assault the good intentions of all those involved in the Project. He got it again when Israel’s High Court upheld Israel’s clearly racist-genocidal Jewish Nation-State Law blatantly continues to reduces every Palestinian into a second-class citizen. He got it, too, when all ten of Israel’s so-called ‘liberal’ Jewish judges once voted to keep the blatantly-discriminatory Jewish Nation-State Law, overwhelmingly passed by Israel’s Knesset in 2018, that constitutionally-codified the status of Palestinians as second-class citizens, while at the same time afforded special privileges to Jews both within Israel and abroad.

He gets it, again, every time U.S. President Biden and the vast majority of elected Democratic and Republican politicians, duly elected by the American people themselves, choose to look the other way whenever another 20-50-100 Million or more dollars of America’s hard-earned taxpayer’s dollars are sent to help Israel continue to expand upon its de-facto segregation, apartheid policies and persecution of Palestinian people.

He gets it, still yet again, every time so much hatred continues to be shown by America’s politicians and lawmakers who seek to muzzle the 1619 Project, just like Israel’s Knesset politicians who herald its Nation-State Law that makes no mention of equality for dispossessed Palestinians in the Jewish Nation-State’s vast array of de-facto discrimination against them for everything from: land acquisition and ownership to housing and immigration policies that are manifestly racist and genocidal, such as its Admission Committee Law, which enables the segregation of Palestinians within the Jewish State. Or its Nakba Law that seeks to undermine the right of Palestinians to even dare to commemorate, from their own perspective, the outrageous, hateful 1948 invasion of Palestine by Jewish terrorists and guerrilla units. Or the Jewish Nation-State’s Citizenship Law which bans Palestinian family’s efforts at family unification.

THE FARCICAL PARADE OF THE JEWISH NATION-STATE CONTINUES

The Jewish Zionist Nation-State sees no problem with constantly parading out with pride its concept of Israeli democracy that enshrines the second-class status of its non-Jewish citizenry with the complete demotion of Arabic in Jewish society, while claiming that Arabic equality is something to be swept, as it were, ‘under the rugs’ and left for some future, distant generation to decide upon. Israel’s Jewish Nation-State doesn’t even consider Judaism as a diverse religion but as one identity that guarantees its inherent supremacy over all other people, including other Jews, by its official definition of Israel as the exclusive homeland of the Jewish people; a homeland in which Palestinian citizens are increasingly dispossessed and their language and culture excluded from Israeli society. Politics As Usual in Israel is what best describes the forever-escalation of Palestinian repression. Aryan’s of another time and place would be proud. That American and Israeli citizens alike cannot see this for the ugly, racist reality that it is, and instead arrogantly profess their unequivocal support for this reality is truly an appalling state of affairs.

EVEN THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST SUCCUMB TO THE JEWISH DIASPORA MIND-SET

The late Ruth Gavison, a one-time renowned Israeli scholar, winner of the Israel Prize, law professor of the prestigious Hebrew University of Jerusalem and founder of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, once was considered a pioneer of Jewish liberalism. Yet even Gavisonherself wasn’t immune to the constant Zionist brainwashing barrage that Israel’s citizenry constantly undergo that leads them to espouse the same reactionary, illiberal positions about real equality for Palestinian people.

Gavison’s position on equality for non-Jews in the Jewish Nation-State typifies the inherent contradictions that exist between demography and democracy in the modern Jewish State. Her support for Israel’s Admissions Committee Law, that grants ethnic-cultural communities the right to exclude people who don’t fit in, created and justified the basis of the Jewish Nation-State’s racist principle that underlies its “separate but equal” status of Palestinians. The Jewish Nation-State Law not only ignores the idea of equality but focuses solely upon the national rights of Jewish citizens without even mentioning how Israel’s non-Jewish minorities should be treated.

AMERICA’S OWN FORM OF DEMOCRACY ALSO REMAINS DETACHED FROM REALITY

No real empathy exists in Israel among its arrogantly-smug Jewish citizenry, towards the many terrible, heinous things that its non-Jewish minorities face every single day. It’s not much different in the United States. Those like President Biden, as well as most Democrat and Republican politicians of the U.S. Congress, unequivocally blindly support, in every which way, Israel’s racist, genocidal society and culture. They, too, remain detached from, and blind to, the disastrous impact that Israel’s Jewish Nation-State Law, and the tyranny that the Jewish majority willingly casts upon its non-Jewish minority population. If the same conditions were applied in the United States towards its own minority citizenry there would most certainly explode, over-night, yet another American Revolutionary War much more violent than the first one.

If these same conditions that still exist in both America and Israel in different ways were equally and fully grasped, President Biden, his administration, its elected politicians and lawmakers, as well as the corporate mainstream press and university academics would absolutely have no sound basis whatsoever upon which to offer any resistance, restrictions or objections to the teaching principles embodied in the 1619 Project. Likewise, there also wouldn’t be any resistance, restrictions or objections whatsoever in the future to some kind of similar 1948 Project in Israel itself that seeks to speak truth to power.

Tags:  politics and race, critical race theory philosophy, 1619 Project, 1948 Project, American-Jewish culture and politics, Jewish racial indoctrination, Black American racial justice, Palestinian racial justice, Zionist racism

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Bio Note:  Jerome Irwin is a Canadian-American writer who once upon a time in university was a Criminology student while working in one of America’s local police departments. For decades, Irwin has especially sought to call world attention to problems of environmental degradation and unsustainability caused by a host of environmental-ecological-spiritual issues that exist between the conflicting world philosophies of indigenous and non-indigenous peoples.

Irwin is the author of the book, “The Wild Gentle Ones; A Turtle Island Odyssey” (www.turtle-island-odyssey.com), a spiritual odyssey among the native peoples of North America that has led to numerous articles pertaining to: Ireland’s Fenian Movement; native peoples Dakota Access Pipeline Resistance Movement; AIPAC, Israel & the U.S. Congress anti-BDS Movement; the historic Battle for Palestine & Siege of Gaza, as well as; the many violations constantly being waged by industrial-corporate-military-propaganda interests against the World’s Collective Soul

jerome_irwin@yahoo.com