Benny Morris: History as Platform for Racism

Innovative Minds
Dissident Voice
August 20, 2011.

On Tuesday 14th June 2011 human rights activists came together to oppose the visit of Israeli historian Benny Morris to the London School of Economics.

The visit was organised by the Anglo Israel Association, whose honorary president is the Israeli Ambassador. The Anglo Israel Association boast that their most fruitful work is as propagandists for Israel bringing ‘opinion formers’ to the UK on speaking tours in partnership with British think-tanks and universities to push the Israeli perspective.

Benny Morris is well known for his racist views of Arabs and Muslims, his support and whitewashing of ethnic cleansing and his justification of genocide.

Justifying Genocide

US soldiers pose over a mass grave with some 300 bodies of innocent Native American Lakota Sioux, two-thirds women and children, massacred at Wounded Knee, Pine Ridge Reservation in 1891.

Zitkala-noni (Lost Bird)

One of the few survivors of the massacre was a baby girl, found 4 days after the massacre, lying beneath her mothers dead frozen body, her mother having protected her in death as she had in life. The baby girl having survived the massacre and blizzard with temperatures 40 below zero, was then abducted by US Brigadier General Colby as a trophy of the massacre, in his own words “a most interesting Indian relic”.

Every single state in the United States had in place a scalp bounty law that would stipulate the fee the state would pay for the murder of an Indian, any Indian — it didn’t matter, it was a clear policy of genocide. The payment scale was graduated with the murder of an adult male Indian achieving the highest reward, but even murdering a baby Indian would secure a good reward.

Between Columbus’s arrival in 1492 and the massacre at Wounded Knee in 1891, 98% of the Indigenous population had been wiped out and 97.5% of their land had been stolen.

In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Haartez in 2004, Benny Morris justifies this crime against humanity saying that “the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.”

Whitewashing Ethnic Cleansing

Unlike some Zionists, Benny Morris doesn’t deny Israel’s crimes of ethnic cleansing, rape, and murder of Palestinian people in 1948 to facilitate the founding of the Jewish state, rather he justifies the countless massacres, rape and the forced expulsion of over 750,000 Palestinians from their homes, the destruction of over 500 Palestinian towns and villages, resulting today in more than 7 million Palestinian refugees.

He justifies it as a means to an end, he says, “Under some circumstances expulsion is not a war crime. I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. You have to dirty your hands.”

Read the rest here.

Innovative Minds supports the boycott of Israeli products and companies supporting the zionist entity. It is about ordinary people around the world using their right to choose what they buy in order to help bring about an end to oppression in Palestine. Its a peaceful means of putting international pressure on the racist state of Israel and follows in the footsteps of the successful boycott against South African racist apartheid.

See Innovative Minds' website.

Comment: Boycott Israel !!!

I was curious about the baby girl who survived the Wounded Knee massacred on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1891.

I found out that her name was Zitkala-noni (Lost Bird) and she was 'adopted' by General Colby and displayed as an "Indian war curio".

General Colby holding Zitkala-noni (Credit)

She ended up being a feature in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show.  She died in Los Angeles at the age of 29.

The Lakota people brought her remains back to Wounded Knee in July 1991.  Zitkala-noni's remains were interred there a century after her passing.  I found this information at an excellent Indigenous peoples blog entitled Mitakuye Oyasin.

You can read more about the Wounded Knee Massacre here.

Onward!