MARRIAGE

History has always had a soft spot for the political couple: Anthony and Cleopatra, Bill and Hillary, and, of course, that odd-couple of American political consulting James Carville and Mary Matalin. Yet what is one to make of the oddest couple of all: Joachim Martillo (a.k.a. Juan Carlo Santos Martillo Ajami) and Karin Friedemann (a.k.a. Karin Maria Friedemann-Hussain, a.k.a. Maria Hussain).

The name Karin Friedemann (without the aliases) may ring a bell to readers of the Somerville Journal. On May 5, she wrote a standout letter to the editor supporting divestment that included the following gem:

"Soon after the governor of New Jersey invested all of his state employees' 401K plans in Israel, it was revealed that the governor was being poked from behind by an Israeli agent."

For anyone unfamiliar with the reference, Friedemann was talking about the former governor of New Jersey, James McGreevey, who recently resigned due to a scandal involving his closeted homosexuality. The 401K accusation is total nonsense, and simply used as a hook for a homophobic slur directed at McGreevey's male lover (who was Israeli).

Lest anyone think Friedemann's anti-gay crack was an inadvertent slip of the tongue, here is what this outspoken woman and convert to Islam (under one of her many pseudonyms Maria Hussain) had to say about Islam, feminism and homosexuality in an article entitled "Observations on the Palestinian Solidarity Conference":

"Muslims ... are not seeking peace. We get peace from Allah. In Palestine, we will stop only at victory, which will be, inshaAllah, in the end, a just implementation of Islamic religion. We have to guard against the Palestine movement being represented primarily by homosexuals and feminists."

Karin/Maria's involvement in the Somerville Divestment Project has been both clear and long term. In an October, 2004 communication with her comrades, Freiedmann/Hussain was in a near panic when the city's aldermen decided to make the SDP's activities known to the public:

"the remaining Alderman threw us for a loop by insisting that 'the other side' be allowed to speak ... before letting the vote go through"

Needless to say, her fear was justified given how their movement shriveled to dust once it's activities was exposed to the light of truth

If Friedemann/Hussain, whose writing appears on various Islamist and anti-Jewish Web sites (including former KKK head David Duke's white supremacist publication WhiteCivilRights.org) is a strange one, she has nothing on al Jezeera's favorite "scholar" of Jewish history and anthropology, Joachim Martillo.

In addition to his many activities on various hate publications such as JewishTribalReview.org, Martillo has also been featured prominently on the Somerville Divestment Project's Web site which features a telling little essay in it's Counterpoints Section titled "How to Talk About Zionism: The New Improved Guide" which includes the following over-the-top talking point:

"...Zionist propaganda reinterprets the Ashkenazi ethnic group as the pan-Judaic ethnonational group in order to make a ridiculous primordialist claim to Palestine just as German Nazi propaganda equated modern Germans to ancient Teutonic and Gothic tribes in order to claim that only pure Germans had a right to reside in German territories."

If the bizarre ethno-history and discussion of "promordialism" causes a few blank stares, Martillo (and, one presumes, the SDP which has posted his "analysis") is struggling with the same problem faced by right-wing Jew haters who also fancy themselves religious Christians: how to continue to revere the Jews of the Old Testament (which they embrace) while leaving room to despise the Jews living amongst us today. Their solution is a witches brew of religion and ideology called "Identify Christianity" that claims the Jews of today have nothing to do with the Jews of the Old Testament, but are in fact descendents of Eastern European tribes called the Khazars who embraced Judaism centuries ago (much as the Slavs converted to Orthodox Christianity).

Middle Eastern nations and political movements that define themselves in opposition to the Jewish state face a similar problem: how to negate Israel's claim to being the historic homeland to the Jewish people, despite the chronicles of Old Testament prophets whom many Muslims also claim to revere. Their solution has been to import themes of Identity Christianity, mixed with claims that the Palestinians are not, in fact, Arabs (and thus recent conquerors of the region), but are actually descendents of the Philistines whose claim to the region pre-dates both modern and ancient Jewish history.

Into this maelstrom comes Joachim Martillo with his own wacked-out analysis of Ashkenazi and "primordialism," pseudo-scholarship embraced only by the Jew-hating fringes of the far Right and Left (which clearly includes the Somerville Divestment Project).

In compiling research on these two activists in the local divestment movement, a friend discovered this happy (if odd) wedding announcement:

"On July 1, 2004, Joachim Martillo and the former Maria Hussain joined forces a match made in heaven..."

While one could make jokes about which set of pseudonyms the happy couple used to give their vows, or explore the bizarre conversations that must take place at their dinner table, I am more struck at how this marriage of an Islamic hater of Jews and gays and a pseudo-scholarly negator of Jewish history reflects trends in anti-Israel political history generally, and the Somerville Divestment Project in particular.

This site has already noted the degeneration of tactics and discourse of the divestment movement as it moved from lobbying Somerville's alderman last year to pushing for a ballot initiative in 2005. Friedemann's screed in the Somerville Journal combined with Martillo's race-baiting "Guide" on the SDP Web site only confirms what I've suspected about the movement's move to ideology so extreme that even the most smothering blanket of human-rights vocabulary cannot obscure it's true nature.

Another ingredient in this mix is an organization called One Palestine whose members (not including one who was recently deported to Jordan) moved into high positions within the SDP after last year's defeat. As the name implies, members of One Palestine are not particularly interested in a two-state solution, or any other elements of a peace process that does not give Arabs exclusive possession of the entire region, from the River to the Sea. Like the SDP (whose favorite scholar Joachim Martillo once wrote to a friend of mine that "The only downside to Palestinian terrorism is the death of the Palestinian attacker."), One Palestine does not have any moral dilemmas about blowing up children in a Jerusalem Pizzeria as a legitimate political tactic. And, like the SDP, their attempt to cloud the air with the progressive language of human rights cannot camouflage their true face.

Having spent time in the hothouses of Internet debate in the years before I hung up my keyboard and started raising children, this cast of characters (the religious spewer of anti-Jewish and anti-gay hate; the pretentious, aging Ivy League grad who has learned the format of scholarship, but none of its substance or integrity; the hypocritical "human rights" supporter of terror) are all familiar to me.

The trouble is, when divestment was allowed through the door last year, this freak show moved from virtual reality to the pages of my weekly newspaper and into my neighborhood. While I never felt resentment towards Somerville's political leaders who allowed themselves to be manipulated and thus let this circus commence, I would hope that all those who thought they were battling simply for human rights in last year's debate would now would turn left and right, look at just whom they are being asked to embrace, and get the toxin of divestment out of Somerville's bloodstream for good.