Hat tip: DP and JK
Another piece of news from that TCS, Palestine. One of the things that struck me about my last post on the double “execution”/honor-killing was that as the brother emptied his clip into his sister, the rest of the gang fired off their own guns in the air. I thought about that afterwards, like cowboys, celebrating, high-spirited… over the murder of a mother of four children under 12? I guess so.
So I wasn’t surprised when I read this item:
Disappointed investors shoot up Palestinian exchange
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
RAMALLAH — Gunmen hired by leading Palestinian investors have attacked the Palestinian Stock Exchange.
Palestinian sources said the gunmen opened fire on the PA Stock Exchange in the northern West Bank city of Nablus. The sources said nobody was injured in the May 28 attack, but the building was damaged.
“Sources from the stock exchange indicated that the attack was motivated by losses incurred by some individuals, due to the decline in stocks of some companies,” the Palestinian Center for Human Rights said.
Nablus has been regarded as the economic capital of the PA. The stock exchange had risen sharply in April, followed by an equally steep decline.
The sources said foreign investors have decreased activities in the PA over the last year. They cited attacks on foreigners in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In April, the PA canceled two conferences in the West Bank meant to attract foreign investors. In both cases, organizers said, the investors feared the prospect of abduction by Fatah gunmen.
The stock exchange was also believed to have been affected by the emerging militia war. On May 28, arsonists aligned with Fatah torched the car of the PA Prisoner Affairs Minister Wasfi Qabha in northern Jenin. Nobody was injured.
Reminds me of one of my favorite scenes in A Fish Called Wanda, where Otto and Wanda open the safe after betraying their partner, and there’s nothing there. Otto begins to hyperventilate:
Otto: Ok… Ok… DISAPPOINTED!! Son of a bitch. What do you have to do in this world to make people trust you?
Wanda: Shut up.
Otto: People are always taking advantage of me.
Wanda: Shut up and think.
[Otto pulls out a silenced pistol and fires two shots at the safe]
Wanda: What are you doing?
Otto: I’m thinking.
Comments:
Palestinians shoot their guns off often. I remember reading about a movie theatre owner in Lebanon who had to stop showing Rambo movies because the local Palestinian clientele would shoot off their guns during the action sequences. They regularly shoot off their guns at weddings and other celebrations. When they had to leave Beirut, they pretended it was a victory and shot their guns off wildly.
Last February, a 10-year old Palestinian girl named Nuran Dib fell down dead while standing on line in school. At first the media ran the Palestinian accusations that Israelis had killed her; the Arab media played every heart string, and Indymedia got predictably indignant. It turned out, she was killed by gunfire coming back down from a gun shot of by a “pilgrim” returning from Mecca.
Apparently there are dozens of deaths yearly in the PA from bullets coming back down from random gunfire. And the Palestinians include them (along with the suicide bombers) among the casualties of their war with Israel.
Civil society demands a great deal of discipline and restraint from its citizens, especially its alpha males. As a result, in an civic sphere where everyone can walk upright, there’s a different atmospheric pressure. The air of freedom is exhilarating. One medieval chronicler spoke of the hilaritas libertatis, the hilarity of freedom.
Prime divider societies in which the alpha males carry guns and shoot them off at will, when they’re angry, frustrated, disappointed, happy, rejoicing… where women and others who do not bear weapons live in a constant state of intimidation… where when they’ve got your sister and they hand you a gun, you “know what you have to do”… these are very different places. They are hierarchical, and the deference, the subjugation of the many give luster to the honor of the few. They have a different atmospheric pressure, much heavier, that bends most people down under its crushing weight.
These kinds of cultures also can’t do well economically. They’re not so much cultures of poverty as impoverishing cultures. The reasons for the decline of the Palestinian stock market are classic signs of the incompatibility of alpha male violence and the emergence of a healthy economy. But lest we think that it’s the crazy militia nuts who endanger the stable civil society who are the violent ones, and those entrepreneurs ready to invest the money, eager to see stability, are our alter-egos, the representatives of a thriving civil society just waiting to happen, let’s not forget… it was the investors who went to shoot off their guns. They’re the Ottos.
No wonder there’s a wall going up. It’s not an aparthied wall. It’s a wall between civil society and prime divider society. Otherwise the pressure from an unbearably oppressive culture would come and crush the remarkable and genuinely thriving civil society that Israel has managed to create in the midst of a desert of human oppression. Too bad their neighbors are too proud to learn anything. Of course, if they did, they’d be accused of betraying the cause, and subject to summary execution accompanied by celebratory gunfire.
Let me be clear here. Not all Palestinians are murderers and maniacs. But the murderers and maniacs rule; and they’ve made anti-Zionist poison their drug of choice. That Palestinians civilians, who live at their mercy, who are force-fed their poisons from an early age, become addicted to it… this I can understand. But we who care, who treasure freedom and human rights, who would never tolerate such brutality in our own lives… how on earth do so many of us, progressives, become so addicted?
In a double-killing of two alleged collaborators, Palestinians reveal their notions of justice and mercy. (Hat tip: LGF)
May. 30, 2006 18:12 | Updated May. 31, 2006 1:19
Al Aksa kills suspected collaborators
By JPOST STAFF AND AP
Masked Al Aksa Martyrs’ Brigades gunmen on Tuesday publicly executed a Palestinian man and woman they suspected of having spied for Israel.
The man was shot dead in the main street of a refugee camp, with a large crowd looking on. The woman was later shot to death by her relatives in the courtyard of the West Bank’s largest hospital.
The Aksa Martyrs’ Brigades, an offshoot of Palestinian Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah movement, accused Jafal Abu Tzrur, 24, of having informed the IDF where to find three of its members. The three were killed by IDF troops during a raid on the Balata refugee camp near Nablus earlier this year.
Al Aksa gunmen interrogated Abu Tzrur, claimed he confessed and then dragged him into Balata’s main street. As a large crowd looked on, the gunmen threw Abu Tzrur to the ground, witnesses said. When he tried to get up, the gunmen killed him with several shots, the witnesses said.
Note that the very people who claim loud and long that they want justice, execute without trial. There’s no way of knowing whether Abu Tzrur was guilty or not. Clearly his affar with the wife of one of the AMB could explain some of the hostility, regardless of whether he did or did not inform. This is a world of private “self-help” justice, where the affair was reason enough to execute.
The movement said it also killed Odad Abu Mustafa, 27, a Nablus woman. Abu Mustafa was married to one of the Aksa men slain by Israel, and was reportedly having an affair with Abu Tzrur.
Abu Mustafa, a mother of four, was shot by gunmen and male relatives on grounds that she shamed her clan. More than 15 people took part in the execution, witnesses said. It took place in the courtyard of Raffidiyeh Hospital, the West Bank’s largest.
The mob originally planned to kill her in the street but were swayed by a man who pleaded with them not to carry out the killing in the view of little children could. She was then taken into the courtyard of the hospital, said Yousef Mahmoud, 18, who witnessed the killing.
This, of course, corresponds closely to the world of “thriving civil society” that those who profess solidarity with the Palestinians continue to assure us they find when they go to the territories:
Yet scratch the surface just a little deeper and something quite phenomenal is taking place in Palestinian society, despite the photographs and statistics. There is a vibrant, talented, peaceful and very resolute society that is determined, in spite of suffering, to forge a peaceful, democratic and pluralistic state with institutions that are fully prepared for Palestinians to take their rightful place among the society of nations.
That was penned in 2003. Three years later, hospitals are sites of execution, and the best one can do in pleading for mercy is that the woman not be executed in front of children, and no sign of the “forces of order” in sight. This is the cultural underbelly of the civil war that’s breaking out slow-motion in the PA. It’s not “merely” a problem of politics, to be solved by “democratic” elections: democracy is a cultural achievement, and this culture is not ready for it.
“One of the gunmen said ‘where is her brother?’ and when he stepped forward they said to him ‘you know what you need to do,”‘ he said. “The brother took out a gun and shot her in the head with one bullet.”
Mahmoud said the brother then emptied the entire clip into the body of his sister, while the surrounding gunmen fired into the air. He said that the woman remained silent throughout and did not resist her captors.
Neighbors of the woman said she had four children; two boys and two girls, ranging in age from 11 to three and a half.
And who will these children grow up to hate?
And if they do this to their own people for “shaming” them, imagine what they’d do to the Israelis if they had a chance.
But I’m sure Noam Chomsky can find a way to flip the ever-popular moral equivalence and point out how we’re really much worse.
Hat tip: Antidhimmi.
More trouble starting up in the Parisian banlieu. A long hot summer in store? Note the elements of territoriality involved.
Times Online May 30, 2006
Paris youths clash with police in worst violence since autumn
From Charles Bremner in Paris for Times Online
Police sent reinforcements to the troubled northern Paris suburbs today after a night of rioting revived fear of a return of the violence that raged through France’s immigrant housing estates last autumn.
In another sign of France’s continuing racial tension the Government also ordered a high-level police inquiry into an anti-Semitic black extremist group which staged an aggressive march through the historic Jewish quarter of the capital at the weekend.
Seven policemen were injured in the four hours of fighting last night in the town of Montfermeil which involved some 400 local officers and national riot police. In the fiercest clashes since last autumn, police fired rubber bullets and stun grenades against youths, many masked and wielding baseball bats.
American culture! It’s everywhere.
About 100 youths hurled projectiles and petrol bombs at police and public buildings and attempted to storm the home of Xavier Lemoine, the conservative mayor of the town. The violence was sparked by the arrest of a suspect in the beating of a bus driver earlier this month.
In other words, these “youths” are protecting their territory from police actions. Just like Robin Hood — a refuge from the law.
The Montfermeil violence spread into the edge of neighbouring Clichy-sous-Bois, the flashpoint for last year’s riots. Two youths were electrocuted there in October while hiding from police in an electricity substation.
Dominique Perben, the Transport Minister, called the overnight incident a reminder of last year’s riots, in which 10,000 vehicles and 200 public buildings were torched.
“The question of the suburbs is a question for the entire political class,” said M Perben. We must have the courage to look things in the face.”
Yes, you do. Would that some of your intellectuals had as much courage looking the these things as they do looking at the debased soul of the French intelligentsia.
More than 400 teenagers and young men were sent to jail after the riots, but community leaders have complained that little has been done to answer the grievances of the alienated young in the high-unemployment estates.
Montfermeil has been a focus of tension since Mayor Lemoine decreed a bylaw last month that banned teenagers from circulating in groups of more than three, and required those under 16 to be accompanied by an adult in the centre of the town. A court quashed the bylaws after protests from civil liberties groups.
The Socialist opposition blamed Mayor Lemoine for fostering the violence in his town with his attempt to restrict the movements of youths. “No act of violence can be excused… but the Mayor of Montfermeil has created a local situation which is a factor in the violence,” said Francois Hollande, the Socialist leader.
“If you stigmatise the young to the point of not allowing them to gather in groups of more than three… you have a context which can unfortunately become favourable for this type of rioting.”
Now there’s courage. Define the response as responsible for the riotous behavior, accept as a norm conditions that enable the organization of gangs, and pretend you know the solution. I don’t know if these by-laws are legal, or even effective. But I am willing to say that the response of the Socialist opposition shows little understanding of the nature of the problem.
Politicians and Jewish organisations united today in condemning the acts of the so-called Tribu KA black supremacy group which has come to light this week.
About 30 muscular men in black garb staged a show of force, intimidating passers-by last Sunday in the rue des Rosiers, the Jewish quarter in the Marais district.
“They were all tough guys, wearing black bandannas - it was really organised, they had a camera and were filming everybody,” one witness said.
We have similar behavior among demonstraters here in the US. When the Israeli consul spoke at Boston University some months ago, not only were there raucous protests outside, but among the protesters were people with cameras filming everyone who went in or came out.
For the best post on the Rosiers incident, see Atlas Shrugged.
Members of the group were also reported to have visited sports centres in search of activists in two hardline Jewish youth groups, Betar and the Jewish Defence League.
On its website, which was taken offline today, Tribu K accused the Jewish groups of staging racist attacks against blacks during marches held in tribute to a young Jewish man who was tortured to death on a mainly black housing estate last winter.
Nice demopathic behavior. Play hardball. Adopt a radically racist ideologyy. Then accuse the Jews of being racist and attacking you. This is a group for whom racism is not a bad word… just your racism.
Nicolas Sarkozy, the Interior Minister, today promised tough legal action against the group when he met Roger Cukierman, the head of the Representative Council of French Jewish Institutions (CRCIF).
This is a serious dilemma for the French. On the one hand, their intellectual and political elite have pontificated in terms that radically misread the situation, so that whatever they do in line with such analyses will only backfire. On the other, they cannot ignore it, because each clash, though not decisive, strikes the rioters as a victory and encourages more. There is nowhere to go but somewhere they have never been. Rather than fascism, they need to think out of the box. Kobayashi Maru.
I recently got a book by Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion Terror and the Future of Reason. (Hat tip: Lawrence Barnes)
It’s hard to judge the entire argument and I’ll probably blog on it later (my initial sense is that he reduces religion to its theocratic and dogmatic variants). But his treatment of the liberal response to Islamism is excellent, and in it he quotes Jean Baudrillard, one of France’s most “brilliant” sociologists. The passage is worth quoting here since it embodies so much of what is wrong with French — and by extensiion, European, and by further extension, progressive, anti-Americanism — a staggering and spectacular insight into American Derangement Syndrome.
Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism
Le Monde, November 2, 2001
(I have adjusted the translation according to my reading of the French original.)
That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, — this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it.
In the end, they did it, but we wanted it.
Got to give him credit for honesty. For those innocent Americans who are not familiar with French discourse, allow me to unpack this remarkable piece of prose. Part of what Baudrillard is trying to say is that when any nation or culture becomes as powerful as the USA, they provoke a resentment so deep that others wish to see it destroyed. On one level, this is true. Even as some people around the world shed tears, somewhere deep inside was a thrill at seeing the mighty brought low. And this is a deep-seated instinct in humans, as Helmut Schoek has argued so persuasively in his book, Envy: A Theory of Social Behavior. But it is, as he explains, a zero-sum emotion with a terrible cost.
He is aware that such sentiments are “unacceptable for the Western moral conscience” (Schoek argues that Western economic development is based on a partial renunciation of envy), but he defends himself. This is not a base reaction. Baudrillard deals not with emotions we can control, but with “facts” — and the key “fact” is that “everyone without exception… must dream of the destruction…” Not one to take responsibility for his base emotions, Baudrillard wants to claim that his feelings are a) universally shared, and b) an entirely predictable response to American hegemony.
If one does not take that into account, the event loses all symbolic dimension to become a pure accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But we know very well that this is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic exorcisms: because evil is there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity, the event would not have had such repercussions, and without doubt, terrorists know that in their symbolic strategy they can count on this unavowable complicity.
Now that we’ve established the objectivity of these emotions, we begin to understand how they give meaning to this deed, how it transforms it from a mere marginal, extremist act, into one of symbolic power. The complicity of which he speaks is the intense emotional sympathy that people like Baudrillard and others who share his profound resentment of American hegemony feel. The terrorists know they can count on this “unavowable complicity.”
Of course, Baudrillard, being brave and honest, a Nietzschean superman, can avow the unavowable. (Later in the essay, he calls on us to go “beyond Good and Evil.”) It doesn’t matter so much that the sentiments here expressed are precisely what Nietzsche viewed with greatest contempt — ressentiment. Apparently Nietzsche was entirely correct in using the French term to designate this particular sickness of the soul.
It is worth noting here that the reference to the terrorists knowing they can count on this complicity recoups a remarkable chronological relationship between 9-11 and the delirious hate-fest directed against both the USA and Israel at Durban which had just finished four days earlier on September 7, 2001. This UN sponsored event, intended to inaugurate the 21st century with a world-wide conference dedicated to eliminating racism around the world, turned into its opposite, a non-stop, grotesquely unhinged assault on the USA and Israel, a platform for every kind of hatred as long as it was directed against white “racism,” at once passing over in silence the live racism of Arab slave trade of black Africans, and offering these same active racists a feast of hatred aimed at their enemies. As the Israeli representative noted in his speech to the conference:
But here today, something greater even than peace in the Middle East is being sacrificed - the highest values of humanity. Racism, in all its forms, is one of the most widespread and pernicious evils, depriving millions of hope and fundamental rights. It might have been hoped that this first Conference of the 21st century would have taken up the challenge of, if not eradicating racism, at least disarming it: But instead humanity is being sacrificed to a political agenda. Barely a decade after the UN repealed the infamous ‘Zionism is Racism’ resolution, which Secretary-General Kofi Annan described, with characteristic understatement, as a “low point” in the history of the United Nations, a group of states for whom the terms ‘racism’, ‘discrimination’, and even ‘human rights’ simply do not appear in their domestic lexicon, have hijacked this Conference and plunged us to even greater depths.
Bin Laden clearly had planned 9-11 well before Durban, but as he recently commented, he could have called it off. Instead, not only did Durban not discourage him (which it might have had it raised the hue and cry about Muslim racism), it almost surely led him to believe that the world would cheer him. And, as Baudrillard reveals her less than a month later, Bin Laden was not wrong.
This goes much further than hatred for the dominant global power from the disinherited and the exploited, those who fell on the wrong side of global order. That malignant desire is in the very heart of those who share (this order’s) benefits. An allergy to all definitive order, to all definitive power is happily universal, and the two towers of the World Trade Center embodied perfectly, in their very double-ness (literally twin-ness), this definitive order.
In case you haven’t caught on, Baudrillard loves this “malignant” resentment. For him it is the spirit of anarchy that is “happily universal.”
No need for a death wish or desire for self-destruction, not even for perverse effects. It is very logically, and inexorably, that the rise to power of power exacerbates a will to destroy it. And power is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes [sic] by their own suicide. It has been said: “God cannot declare war on Itself”. Well, It can. The West, in its God-like position (of divine power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war on itself.
The epigrammatic French of “No need for…” seems to mean “[We have] no need [to posit] a death wish or desire for self-destruction” in order to understand this reaction. The reaction is logical, inexorable.
Again, we return to Baudrillard’s attempt to disguise his base emotions in logic, objectivity, inexorability. No need? But what if, whatever its source, however powerful its pull, this reaction is self-destructive, it does reflects a death wish, it is, however “understandable,” profoundly perverse? From the perspective of people who find liberation of both themselves and their fellow citizens in their pruning back of envy and resentment, however limited our success, Baudrillard’s indulgence in this emotion seems like an act of profound self-destruction. Especially given the circumstances. It is precisely this resentment which will destroy the Europeans, which makes them vulnerable to demopaths and the Eurabian future in store for them. It is, in part, what brought down Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
There is another interesting element in this paragraph of suicidal denial. “The West,” he tells us in his characteristic tone of certainty, “in its God-like position (of divine power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war on itself.” Actually, the whole point of the West’s success, intellectual as well as moral, comes from its willingness to be more modest about its claims and hence tolerant about dissent, and more self-critical about its behavior. If there are God-like claims to divine agency and absolute moral legitimacy, it comes from the Muslim terrorists, whose ideology apparently holds little interest for Baudrillard. His statement, shorn of its willful ignorance and projection should read: “It has been said, ‘Europe cannot declare war on itself.’ Well, it can. The Europeans, in their radical bad faith and envy (of American hegemony, and relative but clear moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war on itself.”
I skip some of the text to focus on his analysis of American hegemony.
When the situation is thus monopolized by global power, when one deals with this formidable condensation of all functions through technocratic machinery and absolute ideological hegemony (pensée unique), what other way is there, than a terrorist reversal (literally, transfer) of the situation? It is the system itself that has created the objective conditions for this brutal distortion. By taking all the cards to itself, it forces the Other to change the rules of the game. And the new rules are ferocious, because the stakes are ferocious. To a system whose excess of power creates an unsolvable challenge, terrorists respond by a definitive act that is also unanswerable. Terrorism is an act that reintroduces an irreducible singularity in a generalized exchange system. Any singularity (whether species, individual or culture), which has paid with its death for the setting up of a global circuit dominated by a single power, is avenged today by this terrorist situational transfer.
Now it gets interesting, because here we see most clearly Baudrillard’s sleight of hand. America unquestionably dominates the global scene in an absolute fashion: it monopolizes power, takes all the cards for themselves. This is important, since were it not so, the resentment would not be objective, but subjective, and therefore, those who feel it might be held responsible for it.
Now granted, since the “thiry years’ war” of 1914-45 and the rise of America to a position of global dominance, France has suffered from a loss of prestige that it once had. But America’s dominion bears little resemblance to the kind of truly suffocating and contemptuous hegemony that France (and England, and the rest of the European imperial powers of the 19th, a fortiori earlier imperial powers including Islam) had exercised when they dominated the globe. And yet, in order for his ressentiment to operate symbolically, it must be unquestionable, “objective”ly true that American hegemony leaves no room for anything else. It must be absolute in order to deserve the hatred it inspires.
But American hegemony is the least monopolistic, the least forceful of all the cultural hegemonies known world-wide… hegemony lite. And the French in particular, have been the recipient of the most generous (and historically unprecedented expressions of America’s lack of imperialist instincts, having twice been saved by American forces and twice given back its independence, the second time with a great deal of foreign aid and a seat on the UN Security Council with veto-power. As Walter R. Meade notes:
This phenomenon [of anti-americanism] persists despite the fact that few countries benefited more from the American security umbrella in the twentieth century.
France has done very well in the world where America exercises hegemony. They have pursued, often at the expense of the USA, their own way diplomatically, economically, culturally. They have prospered as never before, and had a stable and durable republic as never before. In other words, if there is a people who should not be resentful of American, but rather grateful, it is the French. And yet, among the vast array of anti-American forces taking shape so ominously around the world, they are among the leaders of the pack, with this passage from Baudrillard as a flag flying on the prow of that ship.
So what are the “objective conditions” of her resentment at this hegemony? As far as I can make out, the hegemonic force that suffocates French society, especially among the elites, allowing — at least where the USA is concerned — a “pensée unique”, is resentment that the Americans occupy a place that should be France’s, a sentiment they share (unwittingly?) with the Arabs. When stripped of its intellectual gloss, what we here witness is the deep frustration of the French — and the Europeans — that, by rules that allow them to win, they cannot. No matter how hard they try, by the rules of meritocracy and voluntarism that dominate so much of modern societies choices — what movies you go to, what products you buy, who generates successful innovations — they come in a painful second to the US. Could this be why Europeans find it so easy to explain Palestinian hatred of the Israelis as “intolerable despair” and “hopelessness.” They experience the same “identification” with the “intolerable” helplessness of losing competition to the Americans that the Palestinians feel in their efforts to win their zero-sum competition with the Israelis.
The “absolute” hegemony of the US actually resembles more the feeling of despair that overcomes an athlete when he realizes that some other athlete will consistently beat him. [The Euro and the EU — and Eurabia — were supposed to allow Europeans to compete successfully with the US. But no, things are not working out as they wished.] Does that mean you blow up the stadium, or cheer when someone else does it? This is not “objective grounds” for hatred. This is the height of subjectivity, and height of base motives. But Baudrillard can’t stop himself, and it must be someone else’s fault. Into the spell of words he plunges.
Terror against terror — there is no more ideology behind all that. We are now far from ideology and politics. No ideology, no cause, not even an Islamic cause, can account for the energy which feeds terror. This energy does not aim anymore to change the world, it aims (as any heresy in its time) to radicalize it through sacrifice, while the system aims to realize (the world) through force.
Say what? There is plenty of ideology at work here. But never mind. The energy is, indeed, emotional. It is not, however, a force of nature, a juggernaut that will wipe everything out in its path. And, having studied many heresies, I do not recognize his sweeping generalization — or even his invocation of this base resentment as characteristic of “any heresy in its time.” Garbing his emotions in grandiose disguises — a radical, self-sacrificing heresy, an energy that drives world history, Baudrillard has managed an ideological coup. Now the “system” by which America has achieved its unique hegemony becomes the symbolic expression of “force”, and the violent reaction it inspires, the epitome of liberating resistance. But it’s just the contrary: American (Western liberal) hegemony comes above all from “voluntarism“, and the resistance comes from the very forces that produce the most suffocating, force-driven, self-impoverishing hegemonic societies — envy, theocracy, patriarchy, honor.
Baudrillard insists there is no need for discussions of “self-destructiveness” and “suicidal impulses.” I beg to differ. Only by confronting and renouncing this debasing envy and the distorting lens it focuses on everything — a phenomenon to which Baudrillard’s own essay bears eloquent testimony — is there any hope that Europe can save itself. Baudrillard seems to think himself a successor to Nietzsche — bold enough to look the painful truths right in the eye and speak them aloud. But when I read this convoluted and self-deceiving indulgence in the very resentment Nietzsche despised, I’m filled above all with the sickening sense of witnessing someone who should — were he sufficiently aware — be experiencing Sartre’s “nausea”. Indeed, if anything, Baudrillard has taken Sartre’s place as both a brilliant useful idiot and a patron saint of “bad faith.”
As long as he avoids the freedom to chose to which, as Sartre claims, he is doomed, and indulges in the bad faith to deny that he (and “everyone else”) has that freedom, he (and everyone else he so inspires) is doomed. As the scripture he probably has no time for would advise him: “choose life.”
Read the whole piece by Baudrillard, or even the book. If Europe becomes a Muslim continent in the course of the 21st century, Baudrillard has written its epitaph.
Hillel Halkin has an excellent brief piece on the problems of both Israelis dealing with suicide bombers, Palestinians dealing with Israelis, and the Western media dealing with Palestinians expert in yanking their liberal heart strings.
May 30, 2006 Edition, New York Sun
The Purpose Of Checkpoints
BY HILLEL HALKIN
May 30, 2006
“….The Zaatara checkpoint, where I was waiting, is one of dozens inside the occupied Palestinian territories, restricting the movement of people and goods….I looked at the two young soldiers arrogantly manning the checkpoint, with dozens of people awaiting a sign from them….
“[A soldier] shouted at a woman holding a crying baby. He ordered her to dump her bag’s contents on the ground…..While we waited in a long queue under searing heat, Israeli settlers in air-conditioned vehicles bypassed the checkpoint in their special lane.
“Israel says these measures are vital to stop suicide bombers from flooding into Israeli cities to terrorize the civilian population. But I can’t imagine a suicide bomber standing in a long line deep inside the West Bank, waiting for soldiers to check his ID and car. Determined people can always travel through the hills, avoiding the checkposts.”
- Fareed Tamallah, identified as a Palestinian “peace activist,” writing in a May 25, 2006, New York Times Op-ed.
“This morning, IDF forces arrested a suicide bomber and an aide who were apparently on their way to a terrorist strike within Israel. The two were caught at a surprise checkpoint put up near Nablus….
“Yesterday, as a result of intelligence passed [to the army] by the General Security Service, many checkpoints were put up in the Nablus area. This morning a battalion of the Haruv Brigade spotted the bomber and his aide north of Nablus. The two threw a bag with the bomb in it out the window of their car and tried unsuccessfully to escape. The bag, in which there was a powerful explosive charge, was exploded by sappers of the security forces.”
- MSN Internet news, May 29, 2006
I can assure you that the above news item did not appear in today’s May 30 Times. Why should The Times have published it? It was an incident, after all, in which no one was killed or even wounded. Dozens of Israeli lives may have been saved because of it, but surely one can’t expect The Times to run a story every time a life isn’t lost.
But one can expect even The Times to refrain from publishing blatant anti-Israel idiocy, not only in its own news and feature articles, but in its op-eds that are written by others, too.
Presumably, The Times has one or more op-ed editors. What exactly went through such an editor’s mind when he read Fareed Taamallah’s statement that, “I can’t imagine a suicide bomber standing in a long line deep inside the West Bank, waiting for soldiers to check his ID and car.” Was the editor fast asleep? Why didn’t he or she get on the phone to Mr. Taamallah at once and say:
“Listen, this sentence of yours is absurd. Of course a suicide bomber would be unlikely to stand in a long line deep inside the West Bank waiting to be checked by Israeli soldiers. That’s one reason the checkpoints are there. If they weren’t, what would keep suicide bombers from driving merrily along main highways instead of having to seek out arduous (and, because of Israel’s security fence, increasingly impossible) alternatives? Do me a favor and rewrite those words, please.”
In fact, Mr. Taamallah’s entire op-ed is absurd. Take the poor woman with the baby, the contents of whose bag were dumped on the ground. One sympathizes with her. There should have been a table to dump them on, and one hopes the Israeli army will acquire some for its checkpoints.
But just suppose for a moment that a nice soldier - a most non-arrogant soldier - had felt sorry for the woman and waved her on without emptying her bag. And suppose it soon became known that at Checkpoint X there are nice Israeli soldiers who do such things. How long does Mr. Taamallah - how long does The New York Times - think it would take before a suicide bomber approached such a woman and persuaded her to stick his bomb in her bag? Would our bomber mind “standing in a long line deep inside the West Bank” then?
Indeed, Palestinian women have been caught at checkpoints with bombs in their bags and clothing, just as have Palestinian schoolchildren. The next time Mr. Taamallah sees a schoolchild with tears in its eyes because a checkpoint has made it late for school, he might think of that.
And because the woman with the baby and the child on its way to school are checked thoroughly at checkpoints, and because this takes a long time, and long lines of cars back up on major roads that have good visibility, a suicide bomber who spots such a line ahead of him has plenty of time to turn around and try a back way. And it is precisely when he does that he can be caught at a surprise checkpoint like the one near Nablus yesterday, when coming around a bend in a narrow road he suddenly runs into a barrier that is seen by him when it is already too late.
The checkpoints are a major source of frustration and indignity to the West Bank’s Palestinians and it is understandable that they are resented and hated. It is even understandable that Fareed Taamallah - who, “peace activist” that he may or may not be, clearly doesn’t lose any sleep at night over dead Israelis - should seek to denounce them in a less than honest manner. But The Times owes its readers more. The purpose of the checkpoints is to save Israeli lives, not to embitter Palestinian ones, even if they end up doing both. Surely that’s part of all the news that’s fit to print.
Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.
Here’s a good example of the ways in which the Palestinians’ insistence on complaining to the West (and the West’s readiness to validate their complaints) actually prolongs Palestinian suffering. Either the Palestinians acknowledge that suicide terrorism is the reason why checkpoints are so pervasive and unbearable and work against the terrorism as a way to get rid of the checkpoints, or they work on demonizing Israel to the West so that they can eventually eliminate her. The latter is a Rube Goldberg machine of the most destructive kind, but, hey, it sells really well.
On Sunday, December 28, a bunch of French blacks (Afro-French?) belonging to what they call Tribe KA “visited” the oldest Jewish neighborhood in Paris, the famous “Rue des Rosiers”, looking for a rumble. “Are there any from Betar? [A Jewish self-defense group] Is there a Jew or a Cohen among you?” For twenty minutes, while the police tarried, they intimidated the neighborhood. The details are yet to come (Nidra Poller is preparing an article). But one thing seems certain: Anti-semitism is a growing phenomenon today in France. This group is clearly fringe (and although associated with Islam via the Nation of Islam in the USA, anti-Arab), and the police behavior still unclear. But however hostile they may be to the Arabs and other non-Blacks (whom they view as usurpers on the planet which belongs to them), they have learned from the riots and the torture of Ilan Halimi. These are gangs claiming territory. Yet another challenge to “la République.” Hopefully the French will rise to the occasion.
29 mai 2006
La Tribu Ka, ou le symbole de la haine antisémite qui commence à se distiller au sein d’une frange radicalisée de la population noire
Par Jean-Yves Camus
Rue des Rosiers, ce dimanche 28 mai, un groupe de racistes noirs fait la chasse aux militants juifs. À 18H.30, ce lundi 29 mai, Nicolas Sarkozy exprimait le souhait que soit diligentée une procédure contre ce groupe.
La scène a lieu vers 17 heures, ce dimanche 28 mai. Un groupe d’une trentaine de noirs au physique imposant se campe dans la rue des Rosiers et commence à intimider les passants juifs qui déambulent nombreux, comme chaque dimanche aux beaux jours. Celui qui apparaît comme leur chef déclare qu’ils sont à la recherche des membres du Betar et de la Ligue de Défense Juive ; il assure également, selon des témoins, qu’ils « n’en ont rien à faire des Arabes et des Palestiniens » mais qu’ils veulent « karchériser » les militants juifs. Certains témoins encore affirment les avoir vus faire le salut nazi. La tension est forte, mais il n’y a eu pas d’échange de coups. Au bout d’un moment, les « armoires à glace » repartent comme elles sont venues, tandis qu’arrivent sur les lieux, très vite, six voitures de police.
« Y a-t-il un juif, un Cohen parmi vous ?”
Qui sont ces activistes noirs qui chassent les jeunes juifs en plein Paris ? Les membres d’un groupe séparatiste appelé Tribu Ka, qui se réunissent chaque dimanche en début d’après-midi dans un local de Belleville, dans le Xème arrondissement. C’est la seconde fois en quinze jours qu’ils organisent une expédition de ce genre puisque, vendredi 19 mai vers 19h30, il sont allés provoquer une vingtaine de pratiquants d’un sport de combat élaboré en Israël, le krav maga, dans la salle où ils s’entraînaient, dans le 9ème arrondissement. Le scénario avait été quasi-identique : débarquant avec un air menaçant, ils étaient dirigés par un homme qui demandait à la cantonade « est-ce ici que s’entraînent les militants du Betar et de la LDJ ?” puis, « y a-t-il un juif, un Cohen parmi vous ?”. En fait, il n’y avait pas d’activistes juifs dans la salle, mais un groupe dont le professeur et deux élèves étaient d’origine asiatique, un troisième étant métis. Pas malins, de surcroît, les intrus n’avaient pas réalisé qu’on était à une heure du shabbat, moment peu propice à l’entraînement d’un groupe juif…
“La Tribu KA après avoir adressé son message, s’en alla comme elle était venue, à savoir fière et disciplinée.”
Puis, après s’en être pris particulièrement au propriétaire de la salle d’arts martiaux, accusé d’assurer l’entraînement de militants “sionistes”, le « chef » avait donné à ses troupes l’ ordre de quitter les lieux, en éructant un cri de ralliement (ou de guerre) : «leka». Inconscients, ou provocateurs, ou les deux à la fois, les militants avaient d’ailleurs pris soin de filmer l’ensemble de l’action, qu’on retrouvait bientôt sur le site du mouvement.
La Tribu Ka veut la séparation totale des noirs et des « leucodernes » : les blancs
Qu’est-ce que la Tribu Ka, quelques dizaines de membres tout au plus ? C’est un mouvement qui a pris la suite du Parti Kémite, qui s’est longtemps réuni au Théâtre de la Main d’Or, propriété de Dieudonné (qui semble avoir pris ses distances) et qui se fixe pour objectif de « remettre le véritable peuple élu, kémite de son vrai nom, à sa vraie place : celui de guide de l’humanité ». Qui sont les « kémites » ? Ce sont les noirs, Africains ou Antillais. La Tribu Ka veut la séparation totale des noirs et des « leucodermes », c’est à dire les blancs. Dans une rhétorique délirante, elle clame que « chaque morceau de cette planète lui appartient car, à l’époque où le leucoderme marchait encore à quatre pattes dans les cavernes, nous étions déjà les rois et les propriétaires de ce globe ».
Le leader du mouvement est un déçu du groupe antisémite noir Nation of Islam, qui se fait appeler Kémi Seba et dont le nom d’état civil est Stellio Gilles Robert, né à Strasbourg de parents ivoiriens et haitiens. Le « fara » de la Tribu Ka, puisque tel est son titre, est d’ailleurs connu aussi pour avoir tenu des propos particulièrement favorables aux « patriotes » ivoiriens, adversaires acharnés et violents de la France.
L’intégration comme une « haute trahison » et le métissage comme « la fornication avec l’ennemi »
Ce groupe, qui comporte de son propre aveu d’anciens délinquants, a élaboré une sorte de religion sectaire avec son dieu, Aton, sa langue et sa symbolique. Il se vante d’être « la seule organisation noire à n’autoriser l’accès à ses meetings qu’aux seuls kémites, excluant de ce fait les blancs, arabes ou juifs de nos réunions » . Il considère l’intégration comme une « haute trahison » et le métissage comme « la fornication avec l’ennemi ». Les juifs sont au sommet de leurs détestations et « Kémi Seba » est déjà mis en examen pour avoir, après l’affaire Ilan Halimi, diffusé un communiqué de presse dans lequel il menaçait d’aller « couper les papillottes des rabbins ». L’escalade physique actuelle semble d’ailleurs due au fait qu’en marge de la manifestation à la mémoire de Ilan Halimi, un « kémite » se soit légèrement fait corriger par un groupe de militants juifs.
Mais, au-delà du prétexte, la Tribu Ka est bien le symbole de la haine antisémite qui commence à se distiller au sein d’une frange radicalisée de la population noire. Une haine qui, désormais, se traduit par la recherche de l’affrontement physique, le face à face d’aujourd’hui n’étant probablement pas le dernier.
The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has a congratulatory piece on NATFHE’s decision to boycott Israeli academics. It illustrates nicely the way the demopaths (PACBI) appeal to the most disoriented moral sensibilities of their dupes.
NATFHE Leads the Way in Moral Responsibility
British Academics Vote for Boycotting Israeli Apartheid
29 May 2006
Today, British academics proved once again that they are up to the challenge of meeting injustice with the powerful message of civil resistance that boycott represents. The National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE) voted for an academic boycott of Israel in response to its “apartheid policies.”
This is a significant accomplishment considering the campaign of intimidation and bullying waged against proponents of the NATFHE academic boycott initiative by Israeli networks and powerful Zionist lobbies in the United Kingdom and the United States.
Note how they designate opposition as intimidation. I’d be interested to hear from them what they think the Muslim reaction to the Danish Cartoons represented. The photo below is from a London demonstration, so something that the members of NATFHE would know about.
At this stage of the international boycott movement, Palestinian boycott advocates, including PACBI, aim first and foremost to keep alive an open and principled debate on the need for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it fully complies with international law and universal human rights. The other side primarily works on achieving the exact opposite result by suppressing all opportunities for debate and education on this issue in order to maintain the distorted and deceptive image of the conflict constructed through systematic misinformation and biased reporting in a largely compliant western media.
Being among those opposed to the boycott, precisely because it is a political invasion of an arena (academia) where politics should not drive the agenda, I don’t find this description recognizable. As an inversion of who wants debate and who wants to rant and demonize, it makes sense. As for their characterization of a “largely compliant western press,” it seems that the slightest resistance to Pallywood is unacceptable and nothing short of complete acquiescence will satisfy their need for support. The very fact that they feel the press is pro-Zionist illustrates the ways in which they cannot tolerate any dissent, and why banning Israeli scholars — most of whom have nothing to do with political issues — makes sense to them. These are issues about which they see no debate. They are right, innocent, justified; Israel is wrong, guilty, to be banished.
The NATFHE vote proves once again that despite all the obstacles, boycotting Israeli academic institutions due to their complicity in maintaining Israel’s special form of apartheid against the Palestinians remains prominent on the agenda of western progressives and human rights activists.
It’s excellent evidence that Western progressives and human rights activists are still deeply mired in what Charles Jacobs has called the Human Rights Complex, in which the issue is neither the victim nor how badly that victim suffers, but who the perpetrator is: if white (a fortiori if Jewish) then the indignation is boundless; if “of color”, as in the case of Sudanese perpetrators of genocide, they look the other way or, in the case of Palestinian terrorists, then cheer. To get a sense of how skewed the scales, here is another NATFHE proposal, this time about Hamas:
Conference notes the victory of HAMAS in the recent Palestine Authority elections.
Conference condemns the hysterical reporting of the result by most of the British news media and the outrageous bias shown by UK Government statements against the outcome of a democratic process
NATFHE resolves:
1. to continue to help protect and support Palestinian colleges and universities in the face of the continual attacks by Israel’s government.
2. to contact the Palestinian Authority Government to re-affirm that support.
Now we have a sense of the moral universe in which the Israeli boycott pronouncements carry weight: a genocidal, demonizing, irredentist movement which not only targets Israeli civilians, but recklessly endangers and sacrifices Palestinian children, receives support. And protection and support to an academic scene in Palestine which bears almost no resemblance to the world of free speech and impartial inquiry that supposedly animates the Western academic world. What kind of suicidal alliance with a world of hatred and propaganda can the activists in NATFHE be working towards?
The persistence of academic boycott efforts proves that many academics in the UK and beyond do not buy the disingenuous claim that boycott of Israeli academic institutions conflicts with “academic freedom” or inadvertently promotes anti-Semitism in any way. The first claim is at best hypocritical as it is based on the premise that only Israeli academic freedom counts. The fact that Israeli academic institutions themselves collude in various ways in their government’s grave violations of Palestinian human and political rights, which include the right to education, is lost on those making this claim.
This is interesting, and reminds me of when I was a graduate student in 1982 at the time of the Lebanese incursion (which led to Sabra and Shatilla). The campus where I was working had an organization called CAFIOT: Committee for Academic Freedom in the Israeli Occupied Territories. When I asked about academic freedom anywhere else in the Arab world, and pointed out that every institution of higher education on the West Bank and Gaza Strip first arose under Israeli control since the Jordanians and Egyptians would never allow such a thing to occur, they told me not to change the subject. Apparently the obsession is still at work: Israel is responsible for the lack of academic freedom in the Palestinian territories, and probably for the rest of the Arab world as well.
As for the Palestinian “right to education,” when one realizes how the PA (before Hamas took over as well as after) was used to brainwash a generation to hatred and violence, one wonders just what idea of academic or educational freedom operates in these pro-boycott circles.
As to the ubiquitous anti-Semitism charge, it is now clearer than ever that it is mendaciously being used merely to stifle opposition to Israel’s illegal occupation and horrific human rights record and to abort attempts at effectively resisting this decades-old injustice. The Palestinian Call for Boycott [1] is categorically not directed at Jews or even Israelis as Jews; rather, it targets Israel’s oppression and racism with no consideration to ethnicity or religion.
Where to begin? Let’s paraphrase. Any effort to suggest that the virulence and one-sidedness of this campaign with it’s relentless vilification of Israel and its alliance with open sympathizers with the nazis, might have links to anti-semitism, is just a dishonest effort to escape condemnation. Sounds like a Catch-22 to me.
Let it suffice to remark that no effort has been made to get Arab Muslim academics to condemn the genocide committed by their fellow Arabs and c0-religionists in Darfur and southern Sudan. Why? Because the people behind this petitition live in a world obsessed by Israeli “crimes against humanity” no matter how they pale in comparison with what other nations around the world engage in. That such an obsession has no relationship to the fact the Israel is the only Jewish state in the world seems highly unlikely.
The Palestinian boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement is supported by a growing current of social movements, unions, academics, intellectuals and human rights activists across the world. For instance, it is endorsed by the South African Council of Churches (SACC), the Coalition of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and by hundreds of South African political and academic figures, including Ronnie Kasrils, Dennis Brutus, John Pampallis and Steven Friedman.
All obfuscation notwithstanding, the truth about Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugee rights, its illegal military occupation and its system of racial discrimination remains the fundamental motive behind the expanding BDS initiatives around the world. Israel’s colonial Wall, its ever expanding settlements, its indiscriminate killing of Palestinian civilians, its house demolitions, its relentless land and water theft and its abuse of Palestinian human rights are all too real to be ignored by the international community.
What a terrifying list of abuses might one come up with for three dozen other countries under one tenth the provocation! How interesting that Israel, which grants its Arabs rights no other Arab country grants their Arabs (much less their Jews and Christians), should be called apartheid. There is no current form of apartheid more widespread and dangerous in the world today than that of the legal discrimination against non-Muslims built into Sharia. And here is a Western organization, condemning Israeli “apartheid” while congratulating the “democratically elected” Hamas who have stated their desire to inaugurate Sharia. It’s as if these words don’t really have meaning beyond their designated target, Israel. And this is invoked as “justice”?
Just as in the South African case, a comprehensive regime of sanctions and boycotts remains not only the most politically effective but also the most morally sound strategy in bringing about Israel’s compliance with international law and universal principles of human rights. Only through such effective pressures will there be hope for a just peace in our region, based on equality and dignity for all.
Now I’m curious as to who actually believes this. Who really thinks that by bringing Israel down (whether “to size” or eliminating her), we will find either peace or equality in the Middle East? The same people who here insist that getting rid of Israel (the only country with a working democracy, which even its own Arabs, resentful as they might be, nonetheless concede), will bring peace and equality, turn around and with equal confidence assure us that Arab culture is not ready for democracy when it gives them a chance to heap contempt on Bush.
All told, this document, short as it is, contains most of the elements of demopathic discourse: the constant invocation of human rights, justice, equality, and peace, combined with a relentless agenda of aggression and hatred. That a Palestinian organization should embrace such rhetoric is not really surprising: the “victim narrative” is their bread and butter. But that a Western organization of highly intelligent and educated individuals could fall for this kind of demopathy, and for so long… that remains one of the great (and suicidal) mysteries of our day.
