We always say there's no vindication like getting it from both sides, but this is about as vindicating as it gets. Your trusty blogger has long taken pride that my name appears on the Jewish Self-Hating and/or Israel-Threatening (SHIT) List, compiled by some proverbial Zionist hoodlums who wish to intimidate critics of the settler state. I assume I won this honor through my bloggery, my anti-Zionist website New Jewish Resistance, and my interviews with Palestinian activists on WBAI over the years. It has certainly been very handy for me—I can trot out this impeccable credential every time some anti-Semite accuses me of being "pro-Zionist" for calling out Jew-hatred. So now I was just pleased to find that I have my own hateful little entry in Metapedia, a sort of Wikipedia for neo-Nazis. (See their flattering entry for Adolf Hitler.) So the next time some Zionist hoodlum accuses me of being "self-hating," I'll know just what to do...

Ron Paul's connections to the neo-fascist right are already well established, for those who are paying attention. Now it seems his longtime connection to the John Birch Society has led him deeper into the radical right nexus. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center's Hatewatch blog, Paul is scheduled to speak at a confab sponsored by a wing of the "Traditionalist" schism that literally claims to be more Catholic than the Pope and has long been a magnet for sinister reactionaries. In this case, one of the fellow luminaries on the bill is the Italian neo-fascist leader Roberto Fiore. 

This is too funny. Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles last week demanded that President Nicolás Maduro, political heir to Hugo Chávez, clarify his citizenship status: "Where were you born, Nicolás? Venezuelans want to know. Will you lie? Show your birth certificate." It began with the claim that Caracas-born Maduro—son of a Colombian mother and Venezuelan father—holds a dual Venezuelan-Colombian citizenship, which would disqualify him from the presidency. But it quickly escalated as the opposition began distributing a supposed facsimile of his birth certificate, showing that Maduro was born in Cúcuta, Colombia. The Colombian authorities (no friends of the chavistas, needless to say) immediately issued a statement dismissing the facsimile as a crude forgery. (Bloomberg, Aug. 2) This is made doubly amusing by the fact that during the presidential race last year, chavistas utilized ugly propaganda implying that Capriles' nativist creds were in question because of his Jewish ancestry.

The usual frustrating mess. The ascendance of Samantha Power, longtime advocate of "humanitarian intervention," as Obama's new UN ambassador (replacing Susan Rice, named for National Security Advisor), is applauded by Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch (NBC)—and, we may be certain, opposed by both the anti-war left and the paleocon right. Google results reveal that the paleocons have beat the lefties to the punch. A Fox News report picked up by World Net Daily taunts: "'Nazi' Problem for Obama's UN pick?"...

Man, it just gets worse every damn day. All the lefties are cheering on Alice Walker for urging Alicia Keys to cancel her upcoming concert in Israel, calling on the singer to honor the boycott and visit Gaza instead. (Ha'aretz, May 29) But just a few days earlier, asked by a BBC reporter what book she would take with her to a desert island, she named David Icke's Human Race Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More. Yes, David Icke—the same crypto-fascist conspiranoid freak who I was sacked from WBAI for opposing. As The Independent notes in its report on Walker's endorsement of the evil little twit, Icke's book purports that the world is secretly ruled by "shape-shifting reptilians" from outer space, that the Moon is actually a "gigantic spacecraft" which sends us a "fake reality broadcast," and that we live in a manipulated reality "in much the same way as portrayed in the Matrix movie trilogy." On her own website, Walker gushes:

With Boston under "lockdown" and a manhunt underway, leaders of the Chechen insurgency issued a statement April 19 casting doubt on police claims that the two suspects in the Marathon bombing—young brothers of Chechen origin—carried out the attacks. The official media arm of the Chechen mujahedeen, the Kavkaz Center, published a blog post that suggested a frame-up as part of a "PR campaign" to discredit the insurgency. The statement mocked the "lightning speed" at which the two suspects were identified, and called the investigation "completely muddled." From a translation by NBC News: "The news that the brothers attacked police officers, carjacked a man and did an array of other things, instead of going into hiding, looks strange at the very least." The statement argued that the younger brother, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was "very far from your typical 'Islamic terrorist.' He named career and money as his main credo. What's more, he just logged onto his Russian social networking site a few hours ago." Indeed, an overview of the young man's Twitter and other social media posts on AtlanticWire notes that he listed his "personal priority" as "career and money"—but his "worldview" as "Islam." He also made some ominously foreshadowing tweets, including "I will die young."

You knew this one was inevitable. It is profoundly odious to have to favorably cite the monstrous Alan Dershowitz, but he's raised the alarm on something really alarming—not without distorting it in the service of his propaganda crusade. In a comment appearing Feb. 25 on Canada's National Post (among other places) Dershowitz portrays Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras, apparently shortlisted to succeed Pope Benedict, as floating conspiracy theories about how the Vatican sex scandal (now reaching surreal proportions, as the Daily Mail gloats) was instrumented by (you guessed it) the Jews. 

In what has now become an annual ritual, a group of hundreds of neo-Nazis attempted to march on Dresden's city center to crash commemorations of the 1945 Allied bombardment of the eastern German city, and were blocked by a human chain of thousands of anti-fascist activists. Some 13,000 anti-fascists linked arms in a chain stretching form the Elbe River to the city's historical city center, preventing an estimated 800 Hitler nostalgists from proceeding with what they billed as a "funeral" march, with propaganda about a "bomb holocaust." An estimated 25,000 people perished in 37 hours of Allied aerial boming that started Feb. 13, 1945. The official commemoration was presided over by the Dresden mayor and Saxony governor, both of the center-right CDU, and attended by US, Jewish and church representatives. It ended in a march to the city's Heide cemetery, where white roses were laid on the snow-covered ground for all victims of the war.