Steven Sackur of HardTalk thinks he’s tough on everyone. But when it comes to the Middle East he’s out of his depth dealing with the Palestinians and Israelis. He’s a wimp with one and a bully with the other. Guess which?
Alice Walker, David Icke and the New York Times: Studies in the Mainstreaming of Paranoia.
Michael Barkun
The following essay was written by Michael Barkun, a colleague in millennial studies who’s written a book with extensive treatment of David Icke. He wrote a letter to the NYT about their Alice Walker interview which the NYT did not see fit to print. Here’s a more substantial treatment, he’s offered to the Augean Stables.
The New York Times Book Review each
week includes a one-page interview with a well-known author called “By the
Book.” These interviews follow a formulaic routine and always include the
question, “Which books are on your nightstand?” The subject of the December
16, 2018, interview, Alice Walker, the author of The Color
Purpleand many other works, included among her responses to the question
the following:
And the Truth Shall Set you Free, by David
Icke. In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and
several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.
Like many others, I was shocked by
Walker’s reading preference. I had written extensively about David Icke
in my book, A
Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America, and
knew that not only the book she mentioned but Icke’s many others were laced
with vicious anti-Semitism, along with bizarre ideas drawn from occultism and
science-fiction.
The published reaction to her interview
came in two forms, one from the Times, the other from Walker
herself.
The Times’ initial reaction suggested that
it was taken aback and befuddled by “The many readers [who] have expressed
concern…” Rather than let the controversy play out in the Book
Review’s letter column, on December 20th it devoted an
“Inside The Times” article – traditionally placed on page 2 – to an attempt to
explain what had happened. “Readers were upset,” the Times wrote,
“that we didn’t add context to Ms. Walker’s endorsement of Mr. Icke…” In
a lengthy Q-and-A format – ironically similar to that of the original Walker
interview – “Inside the Times” explained at somewhat tedious length that “By the
Book” interviews were in fact conducted by email and that they were only
minimally edited.
A careful reading of the paper’s explanation suggests that no one handling the Walker interview had actually read Icke or knew anything about his ideas. That surmise was reinforced by the next stage in the Times’ reaction, a long news story, two days later, on December 22nd, headlined, “Answering Backlash, Acclaimed Novelist Calls Anti-Semitic Author ‘Brave’.” The article was a combined summary of criticisms of Walker from Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL and Walker’s defense from her own blog, to which I will turn shortly.
The Times finally managed
to publish letters related to the controversy in the Book Review issue
of January 6, 2019. Considering the magnitude of readers’ response to the
original interview, it was odd that only two letters were published, the longer
of which came from Jonathan Greenblatt, whose views had already been reported
in the earlier article. There was also a brief “editors [sic] reply” that
stated that “we do not investigate or assess the quality of the books that the
subjects choose to write about,” another oblique indication, perhaps, that
whoever vetted Walker’s interview did not have a clue who David Icke was or
what he wrote about.
Alice Walker herself responded at
length in her blog. If those upset by her interview were
expecting an apology, they were to be sorely disappointed. She asserted
that she did not find him either “anti-Semitic or anti-Jewish,” and that “the
attempt to smear David Icke and by association me” was because of her support
of the Palestinians, which includes her support of BDS.
Icke has always claimed that he is not
only not anti-Semitic but is a friend and defender of the Jews. He can
adopt this posture because, like many anti-Semites, he uses the device of
dividing Jews into “good Jews” and “bad Jews.” He places in the latter
category B’nai B’rith, the Rothschilds, Zionists, and virtually all Ashkenazic
Jews, allegedly the offspring of Asiatic Khazars. That division does not
leave many “good ones,” except,
of course, the anti-Zionists. Walker seems to effortlessly buy into
that dubious division, posting a poem that asserts “Zionist Nazis are not the
Jews.” Thus, Icke can have it both ways, denying anti-Semitism while
filling his books with Holocaust denial, tributes to the Protocols of
the Elders of Zion, and a host of other well-worn if delirious anti-Semitic
motifs.
Icke is, of course, even better known for
an idea that has nothing to do directly with anti-Semitism – his claim that a
conspiracy seeking to take over the world is being master-minded by a race of
reptilians. The short description of this strange idea is that reptilians
from a distant constellation arrived on Earth, live in underground caves and
tunnels, and have cross-bred with humans to create a sinister hybrid race of
reptilians who look like real human beings, the better to work their evil
designs. Walker calls this “wonderful stuff.”
My guess is that the Times simply
got caught by a case of sloppy editing. It is unlikely that the staff of
the Book Review is au courant with David Icke’s work, the more
so since most of his books are self-published. He is very well known in
the occult community and in certain outer reaches of the UFO community, but
obscure elsewhere. Whether Walker’s reference to his work ought to have been
excised before publication is a censorship issue. My own view is that it
should not have, if only to provide an indication of Walker’s real views.
However, a statement about Icke by the editors appended to the interview would
have provided essential context to the great majority of readers unfamiliar
with Icke, and would also have removed the impression that the Times was
somehow endorsing Icke’s work by allowing Walker to praise it.
Michael Barkun is Professor
Emeritus of Political Science in the Maxwell School at Syracuse
University. His books include A Culture of Conspiracy:
Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America and Religion and
the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement.
Omertà in Action: The Cannibal Strategy and Shati
Refugee Shelling
The following is an excerpt from my book ms, They’re So Smart cause We’re so Stupid: A Medievalist’s Guide to the 21st Century, Part II, chapter 5: “Lethal Journalism.”
To add to the dossier on Palestinian intimidation and the system of Omertà that it has successfully turned into a smooth compliance of journalists with the Palestinian lethal narrative, an incident occurred in the summer of 2014, during the IDF’s “Operation Protective Edge.” It competes with the Ricardo Cristiano incident for the bright illumination is sheds on the phenomenon of intimidation of the media.
This was the third operation in Gaza in six years, and Hamas “Dead-Baby” strategy had developed clearly in response to the MSNM reliably playing by their rules.[ Firing from behind their own civilians, at Israeli civilians, Hamas’ strategy sought 1) to create a maximum of civilian casualties, 2) have them blamed on Israel, 3) so that world indignation and anger at this massive spectacle of Palestinian suffering, would wax so great that Israel would be forced to stop its operation, and Hamas and other Jihadi would survive to fight again. Meantime, the more the Palestinians suffered, the more damage to Israel’s public image in the world. It was a brilliant cognitive war strategy, waged against Israel, by a combination of Palestinian propagandists and the Durban BDS School.
So, valuable were civilian casualties in this strategy, that Hamas and fellow Jihadis, resorting to a particularly merciless strategy already deployed by the PLO and fellow civil warriors in Lebanon in the 1970s, fired from their own civilian areas, in the hopes of drawing return fire and getting their own people killed. NB: this represents an even more heinous strategy than the one used in Lebanon. There, the PLO would fire from enemy territory and run away before the return fire hit their enemy. Here it was a sacrifice of their own people.
So careless did the rocketeers get, that some 20% of their rockets fell on their own people, in some cases killing children. And yet, so valuable were dead babies killed by rockets, that they did not hesitate to use children members of Hamas had themselves killed, to blame Israel and carry out their charade of victimhood.
This terrible “dead baby strategy,” however, can only work if the Western MSNM do their part and blame Israel. Imagine the impact of the above picture were it to appear with my accurate caption. Imagine if journalists who weren’t afraid, were to ask Haniya and Kandil if they are aware that one of Hamas’ many stray rockets had killed this child too? Imagine if the photographers had worked hard, and against Palestinian Media Protocols, to catch pictures of Jihadis firing rockets from the midst of their own people, and sending in clean-up crews to get rid of Hamas ordinance shrapnel before bringing reporters to the sight of another Palestinian child killed by the Israelis. Imagine how long Hamas could continue to sacrifice its own people for its Jihadi cogwar aims?
The failure of the WMSNM to probe these cases of Palestinian
Jihadis killing their own children came to a head in the 2014 case of the
shelling of al-Shati refugee camp, right outside Shifa hospital, on the day of
a Eid-al-Fitr truce… the first time the children thought it safe to play
outside. Two rockets landed that day, “shattering the truce,” one doing minimal
damage to the hospital, the other falling amidst playing refugee children,
killing ten kids under ten years old.
For a brief period, the news media covered the story in lurid detail. Pictures of the unfortunate children and their grieving parents filled the pages of newspapers and websites, along with expressions of shock and horror from major figures the world over.
“It’s worse than shooting fish in a barrel, it’s like shooting sardines in a barrel,” noted one CNN reporter (I think he meant sardines in a can). NBC reporter Ayman Moyheldin tweeted immediately:
Israeli airstrike has hit the outpatient clinic at Shifa Hospital. Local Palestinian media is reporting several children among dead #gaza
“Israeli drone struck refugee camp killing 10, including eight children.” Reporters quoted locals who blamed Israel: “There were no militants, no resistance members, just children… It was just after Ramadan, just when life was returning to normal… The Israelis broke the cease-fire. These children were just trying to play.”
It all fit so perfectly into the frame so common in the news media, and at the core of the UNHRC’s attitude towards the conflict, the cruel Israeli Goliath pummeling the Palestinian David, the systematic trampling of the rights and dignity of the Palestinian People. Such a wanton act of cruelty shocks the world’s conscience. Even if the Israeli perpetrators did not do it on purpose, the criminal negligence of firing shells so close to a refugee camp, filled with innocent civilians and so many children, certainly qualifies as a war crime if not a crime against humanity. Headlines from around the world resembled those from the Arab world: ISRAEL’S CAMPAIGN TO SEND GAZA BACK TO THE STONE AGE Daily Beast; ‘EID OF BLOOD’ AS ISRAELI MILITARY WARNS WORSE IS TO COME, Australian Broadcasting Co.; 8 PALESTINIAN CHILDREN AMONG 10 DEAD AS ISRAEL HITS GAZA REFUGEE CAMP. Al Ahram.[
Except it wasn’t quite that. Witnesses, both local and
journalists quickly understood that the strike had come from Hamas, which
quickly sent in people to clean up the evidence:
“I saw the body of the rocket [and] I knew it was a local one,” the family member told The Times. “Some people came and hid it on the spot — however, it was really hot.”
Wall Street Journal reporter Tamer El-Ghobashy quickly tweeted the following about the other shell, the one that hit Shifa hospital:
By evening, an unofficial consensus had
emerged among the foreign press on the scene that it was Hamas. Gabriel Barbati
tweeted at 20:15 that night:
International journos say: feeling today's massacre in shaati beach playground #gaza was misfired rocket by Hamas or factions
Israel responded with unusual alacrity to the accusations, producing within an hour, diagrams from Iron Dome radar tracking to show that the two rockets that hit Israel were fired from Gaza at Israel that fell short; two others, fired from the same spot, hit Israel but caused no damage. They were rockets from the Palestinian ‘resistance.’
IDF map of Hamas rocket trajectories, produced an hour after strike.
And yet, despite the evidence, CNN’s Carl Penhaul was determined to tell the tale of innocent Gazans, just like you and me, devastated by what everyone on the outside assumed was an Israeli strike.
For two days, the coverage continued to emphasize Palestinian suffering and at least imply Israeli guilt. When it became clear that the incident was not Israel’s fault, the various media silently changed their reports (most notably, Ayman Mohyeldin-impaired, NBC),[ dropped the topic, and went on to the next lethal narrative about the shelling of a UN School that killed 10. Although Israel claimed that Hamas was firing from the vicinity (a regular tactic), the international community exploded with condemnations that blanketed their silence over the 10 killed by Hamas two days earlier.
This particular incident illustrates the pattern of lethal journalism (i.e. high PMP Compliance Score) littered with traces of intimidation. El-Ghobashy’s post blaming Hamas was quickly taken down, replaced the tweet with the same picture captioned “Unclear what the origin of the projectile is.” El-Ghobashy later claimed he deleted the tweet because it was “speculative” and that there was “no conspiracy,” meaning that he did not do it under pressure.[
And yet, the next day, Gabriel Barbati, who had already tweeted the consensus among journos that it was Hamas, tweeted again:
Out of #Gaza far from #Hamas retaliation: misfired rocket killed children yday in Shati. Witness: militants rushed and cleared debris
It’s all here: awareness of the fault, failure to report
while within Gaza because of “Hamas retaliation,” clean-up crews to hide the
evidence, so familiar to the journalists that it’s proof of yet another case of
Hamas inflicted, Hamas covered-up, Palestinian deaths.
To what lengths will Hamas go to protect its position? The very night of a terrible incident of Shati Refugee camp, there was a protest in Gaza city, nearby. Hamas mowed down over twenty Palestinian protesters on the street. Reports from Palestinian witnesses reached Israeli reporters,
Four years ago, in response to an article I published in the Tablet, Mondoweiss posted a rather glib and superficial criticism of my analysis of the role of honor-shame dynamics in the Arab-Israeli conflict. It only came to my attention recently from a friend (HT:DQ) who thought I should answer. So here it is, late in terms of the news cycle, alas still relevant in terms of the issues involved.
Richard A. Landes is an associate professor of history at Boston University. He is an expert on millennial movements and honor-shame culture. He is also a conspiracy theorist who believes that the killing of Mohammad Al-Durrah was staged by Palestinians and sold to a gullible mainstream media all too ready to promote an ongoing blood libel against Israel.
Sigh. Here’s my response to the “conspiracy theory” accusation.
He is a key contributor to the documentary “The J-Street Challenge,” which is currently making the pro-Israel propaganda rounds. His BU webpage says that, among other things, he is chronicling “the astonishingly foolish behavior of intellectual and policy elites in the response to global jihad.”
Tablet Magazine has been featuring Landes’ article “Why the Arab World Is Lost in an Emotional Nakba, and How We Keep It There.” The article focuses on how this “foolishness” relates to Israel. “By ignoring the honor-shame dynamic in Arab political culture,” asks a sub-heading, “is the West keeping itself from making headway toward peace?” The question is rhetorical.
I should note, I had nothing to do with the title or subtitle (other than writing the piece that inspired it).
With his credentials, Landes should not be taken lightly despite his partisan positioning. All the same there is something unsettlingly glib and extreme in his analysis at Tablet. It all starts innocently enough. The article asserts that warrior-nomadic cultures (read Arab Islam)
and pre-modern Western cultures (Celts, Greeks, Romans, Germans, Scandinavians)
have specific honor codes, the violation of which brings debilitating shame. He relates how in such cultures the failure to avenge a killing is so shameful that it cannot be lived down. He contrasts this with a 1000-year transition in Western Greek culture from a “shame culture” (honoring fame and reputation above all) to a “guilt culture” (marked by an internal conscience and a fear of divine retribution) underpinning our liberal democracies.
Just a point of clarification. The 1000 year process I spoke of in the article was not Dodds’ analysis of Greek culture (which was a) a faster process and b) not very complete). The 1000 year process I’m interested is from the 11th to the 21st century in which, during the last third of that period we’ve managed to establish democracies built (imnsho) on getting domesticating the honor-shame dynamic.
In October, the University of Michigan went through a number of controversies concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict, one brought on by a faculty member, adherent of BDS, who refused to write a letter of recommendation for a student who wanted to study in Israel, and the other about a lecture series that included a graphic artist who used his art to accuse Bibi of being the new Hitler, committer of genocide. The following are reflections on what we can learn from these incidents. Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, where I am chair of the Council of Scholars, issued a statement at the time of events.
That ‘hearing’ – the right of Israel and her defenders to tell ‘their side of the story’ and the duty of serious moral beings to listen – is particularly important in the case of BDS, which uses both misinformation and intellectually dishonest exaggeration to turn Israel into a pariah state.
Ken Marcus, for example, does not, as claimed, “oppose and censor any criticism of Israel” (the dishonest Livingstone Formulation) but only those deemed by formally adopted definitions, too be anti-Semitic hate speech.
By those definitions, for example, the slide presented by Emory Douglas at a required lecture at University of Michigan fulfills the two most extreme criteria of the internationally-accepted definition of ‘anti-Semitism,’ defined by the IHRA, adopted by a number of countries, and parallel to the state department definition: Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis; and Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.
Douglas’ graphic art purposefully blurs the boundary between ‘Jewish’ and ‘Zionist’ by equating Hitler, the quintessence of evil in Western discourse, to Netanyahu. The end result is a particularly distorted replacement narrative whereby the Israelis are the new Nazis, and the Palestinians, who openly admire the Nazis, are the new Jews.
What those BDS advocates signing the letter mean by the “advocacy” opposed by Marcus, is, like the Douglas slide, the kind of hate-mongering against Israel that accuses it of genocide, when, just to take a local example, in the last seven years, Syria has killed five times as many and driven ten times as many Muslims from their homes as Israel has in seventy years of ongoing war. The use of accusations of Israel committing genocide against the Palestinians, when their numbers have grown manifold under Israeli rule, debases the language in order to preach hate… hardly progressive values.
Hitler—Netanyahu comparisons and #BlackLivesMatter
I wrote the following in response to a piece by Mariam Barghouti. The Forward, however, told me they “can’t run it I’m afraid.” Given the recent controversy raised by Hen Mazzig, I post it here.
Dear Mariam Barghouti and your audience:
You recently published a piece in the Forward about Trump’s move against UNRWA. In it you argued that Palestinian identity was intimately wrapped up in refugee status, and its resolution through the right of return as the only just way to resolve the pain and suffering inflicted by the Nakba, an event that lies at the heart of Palestinian consciousness. In articulating your position, you criticized the Trump Administration for “failing to recognize” the nature of what’s at stake here. At the same time, you suggest that an attack on Palestinian refugee rights foreshadows other assaults on victims’ rights the world over.
Allow me if I may, to address a similar appeal to you: maybe there are some aspects of the problem you too fail to recognize. You have a coherent narrative, which you have ably folded into an (in your piece unspoken) intersectional analysis about institutional racism and oppression. I wish to raise here several anomalies in the historical experience, that suggest that you achieved this coherence by ignoring details that both vitiate that coherence and call into question your conclusions.
Anomaly One: The Term Nakbah was a reproach to the Arabs. The first use of the term Nakba blamed the Arab leaders who started the war they lost, creating the refugee catastrophe. At the same time, they recognized that this was also their shame, for running away. As Constantin Zureiq wrote bitterly in 1948:
Seven Arab states declare war on Zionism in Palestine, stop, impotent before it, and turn on their heels. The representatives of the Arabs deliver fiery speeches in the highest government forums, warning what the Arab states and peoples will do if this or that decision be enacted. Declarations fall like bombs from the mouths of officials at the meetings of the Arab League, but when action becomes necessary, the fire is still and quiet, and steel and iron are rusted and twisted, quick to bend and disintegrate. (Zureiq, The Meaning of the Disaster)
Yet today, this has become ‘Look at what Israel did to us!’ 24/7.
Yikes! A fuller exposition by you here would be welcome and persuasive. While twitter is a fave with our current President, it is not really useful for discussion, IMO (in my opinion).
The article to which I referred was by Aaron Maté, and took Paul Berman to task for describing some of the current left as “characterized by an irrational hatred of Israel, a reflexive blame-America posture, and a blind eye to Islamist fanaticism.” Instead, Maté insisted, the real problem was Israel and her occupation.
No one has been able to disprove the conclusion of Labour’s internal review, which found that cases of anti-Semitism within the party’s ranks represent “less than 0.1 percent” of Labour’s members.
comes this whopper:
And it is true that a one-state outcome would mean that Israel could no longer define itself as the state of the Jewish people, but instead as a state of its citizens, of any religion—in others words, a democratic one. On a moral level, I favor that outcome. How can I oppose democracy with equal rights for all?
The obvious response to that (tó which Maté hints) is that not only has no Arab country been able to sustain a democracy under the best of circumstances, but given the culture of genocide and child death cult that the Palestinians have developed and marketed about killing Israelis, insisting that Israel share the democratic system with a majority population of Palestinian Arabs is literally a recipe for the suicide of both a Jewish and a democratic state. Hence my reference of #Yidiocy, a recent coinage by Lynne Lechter denoting American Jews who are useful idiots.
To long list of her descriptors of yidiots, I add, a yidiot is a Jewish member of the “Cult of the Occupation,” who thinks anything that puts an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land is so important, if it means joining with genocidal Palestinians who define “from the river to the sea” as “occupied,” then so much the better. People who go for this alliance (some of J-Street, all of Jewish Voice for Peace and #IfNotNow, are dupes of demopaths like Marwan Barghouti and the BDS crowd, who use the language of human rights to destroy (other people’s) human rights.
In that sense, Corbyn, with his warm support for Hamas and Hizbullah is a useful infidel idiot, and Maté, who is a Jewish supporter of Corbyn and considers fellow Jews who appreciate the threat to Israel as the real threat to the Jewish left, is a #Yidiot, and most probably into Proxy shame murder.
For a sense of just how widespread a mild form of this useful infidel idiocy, watch this:
I was in Paris on December 1, 2018, when some of the most violent of the gilets jaunes demonstrations happened, especially at the Arc de Triomphe. I should have posted this a week ago when I composed most of it. Apologies. It belongs in the line of essays I wrote about France a decade ago.
Prologue: Normandy, AD 996: When Commoners Complained
In order to ratify these new decrees, each of the rebellious peasants’ groups chose two envoys who brought the decisions for confirmation to an assembly held in the middle of the land. As soon as the duke [Richard] heard this, he sent Count Raoul [d’Ivry] together with a group of soldiers to suppress the rustics’ insolence and to dissolve the peasants’ assembly. Promptly following these orders, he rapidly seized all the envoys and some others, and cut off their hands and feet and sent them, no longer of any use, back to their fellows to restrain them from like conduct and warn them by their own fate against suffering worse. Having seen this, the peasants hurriedly dissolved their assemblies [conspirationes] and returned to their ploughs.
How far we have come in the last millennium! Today, French commoners – citizens – can gather under an egalitarian law that grants them that right; they can petition in peace; they can make public claims, and have a press (and historians) potentially sympathetic to their plight.
On December 1, 2018, we saw an near inversion of the situation in Y1K, when upstart commoners were the victims of violence: some ‘protesting civilians’ – gilets jaunes – engaged in violently aggressive behavior, while the forces of order (the Duke’s men) stood down.
Soiling the National Monument to France’s Military Virility
Unobstructed, the most violent among the protesters took over the arc de la Triomphe, scrawled silly graffiti on its august appearance.
They then broke into the inside and smashed the face of the very martial spirit that the gilets jaunes claim to represent: angry liberty leading the way to freedom.
Never since the beginning of its construction in 1806, the arc of triumph had been vandalized, ravaged. Yesterday, it was decided to evacuate the cordon of CRS that protected it and thus to abandon it to the hands of thugs, vandals, criminals. Yesterday, the fight to be carried out, the one that would have been in honor of our representatives and our forces of law, was to defend this high symbol of France’s history and glory. Yesterday, we had to protect this monument and the tomb of the unknown soldier. It was an honor and a duty. Concentrate our forces, fight foot, don’t let go. But an opposite order was given. The Prime Minister and the minister of the interior were on the spot on the operations They gave the orders, they must be removed from their duties.
Recently a friend and colleague, Jeff Weintraub, who has written on the Al Durah case in the past, posted on his facebook page my article in the Tablet on Israel as the first victim of a massive attack of #FakeNews in the MSNM in the 21st Century. Larry Derfner joined in, heaping scorn on my “conspiracy theory.” Towards the end of what was a long and repetitive exchange, Derfner posted two comments that I think are quite revealing. I invite him to respond here if he wishes.
Derfner begins by listing all the anomalies/contradictions to the narrative that I and others have raised. In response to each I add the treatment of the topic in Esther Schapira’s third documentary on the subject. He then proceeds to accuse me of being impermeable to the evidence. His words in bold.
Like the blood on al-Dura that you say was a red rag?
Like the bullets fired into the wall that you say were put there by a Palestinian sharpshooter aiming to miss?
(note the hole by father’s sleeve wd have turned the corner if it came from Israeli side.)
Like the burial of the boy that you say wasn’t the boy?
Like the medical reports on Jamal al-Dura that you say were all a lie?
You ask, where was the blood on the ground where they were “shot”?
The site, photographed the next day. No blood in the black circle which marks the spot where Al Durah allegedly bled out for 20 minutes and where the ambulance man scooped up his guts from the ground. On the other hand what looks like fresh (bright red) Note the red rag. Is it the one some think Muhammad was holding?
I don’t know, but what I do know is that if there were film of copious blood on the ground, you would say it was fake, it was spilled there by the evil Arabs, it didn’t belong to the al-Duras. And if a Gazan hospital said it matched the al-Duras’ blood, you’d say they were lying. If they ever do exhume the boy’s body and do DNA tests and everything else, even with Israelis involved, and say, yeah, it’s Mohammed al-Dura, it won’t budge you. There will always be Arabs involved somewhere who you can point to and say, They’re lying, that explains everything.
Of course these are all hypotheticals, because there are no films of copious blood, no hospital “match” of blood, no DNA tests. So here’s Derfner accusing me of being impermeable to evidence, even as, at least as far as the evidence we do have, he’s the one impermeable to evidence, ridiculing rather than addressing it. At the core of Derfner’s ‘reading’ of me is what strikes me as a PC dogma: you cannot suggest the Palestinians deliberately lie. That is demonizing, that’s making them ‘evil Arabs.’
It seems to me this is a big part of the problem (more to follow). We are somehow honor-bound to accept Palestinian claims (especially about Israel) as accurate. And anyone who suggests that even sometimes they lie, ends up getting accused of being a conspiracist and a racist (not to mention, heartless.) As one of the members of the Goldstone Report commented, “It would be cruel not to believe their testimonies.”
This played out in two instances I treat in my book. First with Barak on Arafat lying constantly at Camp David, and then with Andrea Koppel who cited the massacre at Jenin as evidence that “this was the end of Israel.” When challenged on her sources (no journalists had yet entered), she responded to the suggestion that the Palestinians had lied, replied:
“Oh, so now they’re all liars.”
And indeed they did lie, systematically. (My full passage on Koppel and Jenin is posted here.)
So by insisting that there’s something wrong (morally?) about suspecting the Palestinians of lying, even lying systematically, Derfner has essentially rendered us helpless. See no evil; hear no evil, speak no evil (of Palestinians… about Israelis, it’s fine). A recipe for suicide.
Larry Derfner: You’ve done a great deal of damage. Now it’s become instinctive on the part of Arab-haters to look at film of unarmed Palestinians being shot and say, “Pallywood.”
This is interesting: a hermeneutics not of suspicion but of credulity. The ‘fact’: unarmed Palestinians are being shot. The ‘conclusion’: anyone, who doubts the veracity of the footage (the facts) is an Arab-hater. What if sometimes it’s true, that the film is a fake, a Pallywood scene? Why not check.
Michael Oren did it on CNN with the killings of two Palestinian protesters on Nakba Day a few years ago.
Oren may have been wrong there – although there were plenty of suspicious claims involved. But that doesn’t mean it’s always like that. Remember the wheel-chaired activist who was going to be the next Al Durah? Evidence contradicts narrative.
A friend of mine, who isn’t even an Arab-hater, showed me one of the photos and he actually believed it had been doctored by Palestinians because one of the shadows seemed too long or too short or something. You’ve popularized this game.
Not, alas, among journalists. Larry, there’s extensive evidence that Palestinians fake stuff, doctor stuff, blame Israel for the death of Palestinians Israel didn’t kill, or worse, that Palestinians did kill, relabel stuff so children killed elsewhere get labeled “Killed by Israel,” and evidence that it dupes credulous journalists. I am very much in favor of journalists approaching any war zone with a “hermeneutic of suspicion.” Every and any information, evidence, video, claim, made by any side deserves to be tested for veracity, reliability. As they say in CSI, “follow the evidence, not the narrative.”
If Charles Enderlin, or any other journalist at the time, had approached the the al Durah footage from the angle of evidence rather than narrative, it wouldn’t have survived the most superficial examination.
You and your serial conspiracy theorist colleague Shahaf, among others, have served the cause of deranged Arab-hatred and Jewish moral deadness.
Now we get to the heart of the matter. For you, Palestinian suffering is a voice that Jews must hear and heed. If not we have lost our moral lives. Anyone who questions this Palestinian voice participates in, or encourages, Arab-hatred, and kills the Jewish soul that pursues justice. You need Palestinian suffering to be as awful as possible, so you can whip the Jewish soul with regret for the criminal occupation. You are, if I am not mistaken, a priest of what Matti Friedman calls, the “Cult of the Occupation.”
For me, Palestinian leaders have used the Palestinian suffering they often provoke, in order to make war on Israel. While we must, as Jews and Israelis, be attentive to the suffering we cause, we are not required to accept morally sadistic accusations as true, and certainly not, just in order to signal what morally concerned folks we are. Anyone who does not question Palestinian war propaganda – or worse, launders it as news – encourages Arabs and others to hate Israel.
Just because we’re wrong sometimes, hardly means they’re right all the time.
They’re So Smart cause We’re So Stupid, part I, chap. 3, “The Jenin ‘Massacre’.”
Cognitive Egocentric Journalists Helpless before Palestinian Disinformation
That Palestinians might have not been telling their eager audiences the truth, worse, that they were engaged in war propaganda designed to alienate support from the enemy and arouse rage among their own, never seems to have occurred to these information professionals.[1] And if any Israeli had the nerve to point out that the Palestinians might not be telling the truth, a journalist like Andrea Koppel, operating entirely from third hand accounts from colleagues about Israelis slaughtering Palestinians, and believing that signaled the “end of the state of Israel,” would scornfully respond, “Oh, so now they’re all liars.”[2]
In the abundant thesaurus of astonishingly stupid statements made in the early 21st century, Andrea Koppel’s holds a special place, partly because it reflects a wide post-colonial consensus that has corrupted fields like anthropology and journalism to the core,[3] partly because it was supremely inappropriate from a journalist in this particular case. First, the actual evidence indicates a long history of widespread lying by Palestinians to Western journalists. Second, it was precisely the astonishing and uncorrected credulity of the journalists – Koppel had just arrived in Israel, no journalist had yet been in the Jenin Camp at the time of her conversation – that produced the continuous series of episodes of lethal journalism in which they mainstreamed Palestinian propaganda accusations as news.[4] Third, by phrasing it as a rhetorical question in which the only way not to look like a racist was to say, “no, they’re not all liars,” she literally boxed herself and her interlocutors out of reality.
For, repeatedly, the real story turned out to be the opposite of what Palestinians told anyone who would listen. Abo Gali, the head of the Hospital in Jenin, told any and every one that the Israelis had targeted the hospital with 11 tank shells that destroyed one wing, and subsequently did their best to keep the wounded from being treated in the Hospital, including blocking food supplies.[5] On the contrary, the IDF had gone out of its way to protect the hospital and guarantee its continuing supply, including the treatment of wounded Palestinian combatants, while the Palestinians used ambulances to ferry suicide belts. When Pierre Rehov asked to see the destroyed wing, he was shown a wall with some bullet marks. Similarly, an old man, Ali Youssef, testified how the Israelis shot him in the foot and the hand, when in fact the Israeli medical team not only treated him for injuries (not bullets), they sent him to an Israeli hospital to treat his undiagnosed congestive heart failure.[6] One must see these interviews to realize how easily and convincingly these men lied.[7]
For a serious journalist like Koppel, trained to be suspicious of, and double-check, eye-witness accounts, her principled credulity bespoke a dramatic collapse of professional standards, precisely where and when they were most needed.[8] Instead, she opted for the Saïdian Zeitgeist.[9] Nor was she the only one. CBS’s correspondent Mark Phillips, indignant at Israel’s “destruction of the peace process,” explained that how to evaluate what happened at Jenin depends on whom you believe (i.e. he preferred the Palestinian narrative). Joshua Muravchik noted how he “sounded like a modern-day literary critic approaching a ‘text’ of which all constructions were equally subjective, thus equally valid.”[10] A Human Rights Watch activist gave the poor journalist’s version of this narrative equivalence. Ceding somewhat to the evidence, he explained to The Washington Post’s John Lancaster, “the final tally will probably be somewhere in the middle.” It wasn’t anywhere near: the final tally fell not between Palestinian hundreds and thousands vs Israeli estimates around 100. They were half the IDF estimates.[11]
The Jenin affair represents one of the most extraordinary episodes in the battle for the soul of 21st century journalism: narrative vs accuracy. Here, accuracy undermined the apparently enormously exciting narrative that Israel was massacring Palestinians. For many, that narrative was too good to let go.
___________________________________________
[1] For documentation of the systematic lying involved both by Palestinian spokespeople, medical officials, and people on the street, see below.
[2] Diana Lynne, “Pro-Palestinian Bias among CNN Ranks?” WorldNetDaily, April 23, 2002. The conversation took place on April 14, at which point no journalists had access to the battlefield.
[7] See Phyllis Chesler’s discussion of this problem in the context of journalistic credulity about Jenin: The New Anti-Semitism, pp. 65-69. See the repeated cases of Palestinians treated by Israeli doctors, accusing the Israelis of trying to kill them: Pierre Rehov, La route de Jenin, discussed below.
[8] Koppel denied making these remarks, despite the independent testimony of three witnesses. This is typical of astounding stupidities: in one context they’re self-evident, and everyone nods (e.g. among journalists), in another, they become deeply embarrassing silliness to be categorically denied.
Below I fisk a letter signed by a dozen prominent BDSers in support of Prof. Cheney-Lippold at University of Michigan, who refused to write a letter of recommendation for a student because she wanted to go to an Israeli university and he was pledged to boycott Israel.
One preliminary note: BDS claims to be morally motivated by outrage at human rights violations of the Palestinians. What they can’t explain is why the accusations they level at Israel exist in far greater degree in many other countries around the world, and in particular in the region in which the Israelis exist, namely the Arab Middle East. Indeed, just in neutral terms, the Israelis give Muslim Arabs, both in Israel and in the disputed territories, for more human rights than do Palestinians leaders provide to their own people.
In other words, the BDSers seem far more exercised about Israeli violations than about Palestinian suffering. One might even see in their obsession with Israeli ‘evil’, an unconscious attachment to Palestinian suffering: ‘Palestinians must suffer so I can hate Israel.’
In what follows, I try and restrict my remarks to relevant comparisons, highlighting the inverted sensitivities (hyper to Israeli, insensate to Palestinian violations).
Of course Palestinian campuses are far more exclusive and discriminatory. They even kick out Israeli participants who sympathize enthusiastically with their cause on the basis of nationality. Israeli campuses are more accepting and tolerant of ethnic and intellectual diversity than anything in the Arab world. Indeed given the heavy prejudice of Western institutions to the wide range of Israeli perspectives, possibly one of the most tolerant on the planet. Do they have imperfections? Yes. Are BDSers picking zits while ignoring gaping wounds elsewhere? Could just be.
Conversely, the very existence of institutions of higher education in the West Bank and Gaza arose under Israeli ‘occupation’ (no college or university before 1967), and Palestinians have among the highest education levels in the Arab world (but below Israeli Arabs).
Cheney-Lippold is a supporter of Palestinian human rights and refuses to participate in normalizing Israel’s political oppression.
Opposing normalization means opposing compromise. It means adopting the totalistic Palestinian narrative whereby Israelis are irredeemably bad and Palestinians unquestionably justified. It feeds war: justice is victory, from the river to the sea.
Such action affirms an ethical position increasingly shared by artists, musicians, actors, scholars, and students around the world who have endorsed the Palestinian call for an academic and cultural boycott of Israel. In doing so, Cheney-Lippold and like-minded scholars seek to pressure Israel to end the occupation, to grant Palestinian refugees the right of return, and to give equal rights to Palestinians in Israel.
To conduct “normal” educational and cultural activities with Israeli universities is to be complicit with acts of discrimination and injustice.
To refuse educational and cultural activities with Israel is to uncritically adopt the “Palestinian narrative of suffering” and therefore, to be complicit with the acts of discrimination and injustice that Palestinian rulers commit against their own people (it is the scapegoating narrative that these leaders use to exploit their people, a weapon of mass distraction), as well as to be complicit in the terrible acts carrried out by people they encourage and honor, like Jihadi suicide attacks on civilians.
As educators, we have the ethical responsibility to stand by our political convictions, to advance social justice, and to expose falsehoods and partial truths.
As educators, we have an ethical responsibility to advance social justice and expose falsehoods and partial truths, especially when they come neatly packaged as war-propaganda – “my side good, their side evil.”
Given the United States’ extraordinary financial and military aid to Israel, Americans have a particular responsibility to put pressure on Israel. People of conscience, like Cheney-Lippold, have the responsibility to defend the equal treatment of all members of society and to take peaceful steps to oppose oppression.
People of conscience, like Cheney-Lippold and the signers of this petition, have a particular responsibility to inform themselves better about the larger issues, so their moral outrage has a certain perspective that would discourage them, in their obsessions, from violating the rules of their profession in support of a cause that undermines the very (progressive) principles they invoke.
Trump appointees Betsy DeVos, head of the Department of Education, and former Brandeis Center President Kenneth Marcus, head of the Civil Rights Division of that department, have advanced a policy that aims to limit advocacy of Palestinian human rights on US university campuses.
By advocacy, Marcus means hate-mongering against Israel, accusations of genocide, when in the last seven years, Syria has killed and made homeless almost ten times as many Muslims as Israel in 70 years.
DeVos and Marcus have made it clear that the current US administration will ignore principles of academic freedom and freedom of speech in order to repress all criticism of Israeli state policies.
This is classic Livingstone Formulation: the point here is, it’s not any criticism of Israel that’s being barred (that is an endless river), it’s dishonest, false accusations designed to inflate hatred… textbook cases of racist hate-speech, or, as Marcus carefully documents, anti-Semitism.
If, under some circumstances, civil disobedience and breaking rules is called for, it’s a right to use only in serious situations, not abused by taking wildly inflated rhetoric as a descriptor of reality. To do so, as do BDSers harms the academy and polarizes us precisely at a time when we need to be listening.
In this context, Cheney-Lippold’s decision is an exemplary expression of his professional and political rights. Rather than malign Professor Cheney-Lippold, scholars should applaud his courage, which will inspire others to take a stand and oppose Israel study abroad programs. We join him in affirming that we, also, do not write letters of recommendations in support of student participation in Israel study abroad programs. We also call on our colleagues to refuse to participate in Study Abroad in Israel programs by endorsing our pledge at http://usacbi.org/boycott-study-abroad-in-israel/#pledge
‘Join us lemmings in our mimetic drive off the edge of the cliff. Win the booby prize of righteous indignation, as we take down before us, anyone who would oppose so noble a cause.’
In preparing my chapter on Al Durah for my book ms (They’re So Smart cause We’re So Stupid: A Medievalist’s Guide to the 21st Century), I came across an important article by Stephane Juffa that is no longer available online at its original site, MENA Press. Since I copied it when I began work on Al Durah (lo, these fifteen years), I publish it here.
Stéphane Juffa, “France 2’s report on Al-Dura at the Origin of the Riots of October”
MENA Press, September 23, 2001.
Translated from the French by Llewellyn Brown
On 26 August, a court martial condemned a Palestinian policeman, Raed Sheikh, for the first degree murder of two reserve soldiers of the Israeli army. The two men, the late Vadim Norzhich and Yossef Avrahami, had been arrested by the Palestinian police on 12 October 2000, when they entered Ramallah by mistake.
The lynching, that started in the very premises of the police station and at the hand of Sheikh — fortified, in the circumstances, by a forty centimeter metal bar — is common knowledge. It is not my intention today to emphasize the dramatic effect produced by the narrative these events, the filmed bestiality which abundantly shocked people’s minds.
Sheikh appeared before three judges. Two of them, in their verdict, opted for the application of the death penalty, the third settling for life imprisonment. As the execution of the death penalty in Israel requires the unanimous decision of the magistrates, Raed Sheikh’s life was spared. Otherwise, he would have been the first person to be executed in the Hebrew State since the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1962.
What specifically drew my attention, regarding this tragedy, is the number of times the Mohamed Al-Dura case was evoked or invoked. From the raging rabble, who tore apart the limbs of the two unfortunates in the street, crying “revenge for the blood of Mohamed !”, to the observers who concur in recognizing that the pictures of the assassination of the child of Netzarim were in the memories of all the lynchers.
The images had enraged the crowd and it is almost certain that, without the (free) distribution of France 2’s report, the victims would have had a chance of getting away, that the delirious and popular hatred would not have received such a complete acceptance by the crowd.
On July 28, 2014, during Operation Protective Edge, a just implemented Eid al Fitr truce was broken when two shells slammed into Shifa Hospital and Shati Refugee Camp. The former did limited damage to an outlying structure, the latter hit a group of children playing outside for the first time in weeks, killing almost a dozen. Hamas and some reporters (notably NBC’s notoriously pro-Palestinian journalist, Ayman Mohyeldin), blamed Israel. Israel rapidly denied any involvement and produced graphics of the trajectory of the Palestinian rockets.
The media, however, continued to play he-said, she-said, while allowing the unspoken assumption to prevail that it was Israel. Below is a listing of the various clusters of media coverage. This post is a footnote for the discussion of this matter in my book ms: They’re So Smart cause We’re So Stupid: A Medievalist’s Guide to the 21st Century.
Hamas Statement on Blaming Israel:
“The story being put forth by the ‘Occupation’ that resistance rockets fell in Shifa Hospital and at the Children’s Park in the Al-Shati Refugee camp is a failed attempt to escape from this crime and its fears that this crime will be exposed and held judicially accountable,” said Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri.
This happened in the Phillipines by a Muslim separatist group but was an actual massacre, +20 people killed, however majority of media coverage is about Shati
“The IDF, however, has said that this was the result of a “failed rocket attacks” launched by Hamas, even though the drone was scene by nearly all witnesses at the scene of the bombing.”
However, Gaza’s Interior Ministry spokesman Eyad al-Bozum told news reporters that he believes shrapnel found in the victims’ bodies is evidence of Israel’s involvement. He asserted, “The occupation claims that Palestinian rockets hit the hospital and park. This is an attempt to cover their ugly crime against children and civilians, and because of their fear of scandal and international legal prosecution.”
Another man stood beside a pool of blood and cried: “We don’t want an agreement. We don’t want a cease-fire. All of us, children, women, will give our souls for God!”
The Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) tweeted that Hamas were to blame for the deaths in Gaza, and accused the group of “hit[ting] their own people” with misfired rockets. But officials from Gaza’s police operations room, Civil Defence and Sahabani, said the deaths and injuries were caused by Israeli airstrikes.
Hamas blamed Israel for both strikes but the Israeli military insisted it had not carried out any attacks in those areas and said the blasts were caused by misfired Hamas rockets meant to hit Israel.
Italian correspondent Gabriele Barbati, who represents the Radio Popolare Milano station in Jerusalem, tweeted the following immediately after he left the Gaza Strip:
“Out of Gaza far from Hamas retaliation: misfired rocket killed children yday in Shati. Witness: militants rushed and cleared debris. 10:46 a.m. Tue, Jul 29. IDF Spokesperson said truth in communique released yesterday about Shati camp massacre. It was not Israel behind it”
An Italian journalist who until Tuesday was embedded in Gaza has backed the IDF’s account of a rocket strike on a school playground in central Gaza’s Shati refugee camp on Monday.
Clean Up Crews (most refer to Shifa and not Shati)
“The strike on the park occurred a few minutes after the hospital’s outpatient clinic was hit, leaving several people wounded. Camera crews were prevented from filming the area of impact at Shifa.”
Basically blames Israel with title: “the eid of blood”
The strike (on Shati) occurred a few minutes after an outpatient clinic at Gaza’s main hospital, Shifa, was hit, leaving several people wounded. Camera crews were prevented from filming the area of impact at Shifa.
The NYT published a piece by their own reporters on Oslo at 25. It is a treasure trove of Y2KMind. On one level it’s yeoman-level journalism: a background, he-said, she-said, survey. It’s in the PCP1 packaging that the real problem lies.
It is not so much frozen in amber as subtly updated, with the only signs of intelligence to be found in the smooth introduction of perspective as fact, and conclusion as self-evident, and literally not a glimmer of new understanding. My fisking will focus on the alternative narrative/paradigm (HSJP) to which the NYT, and so many other high-level information professionals, have studiously avoided exposing their 21st century readership.
The governing assumption, the sine-qua-non of the analysis is a simple axiom, an axiom launched by Oslo in 1993, and turned into dogma in 2000: the Palestinians want a state, their own independent state. Any analysis that questions that dogma is, by definition, not fit to print. When you see the “Oslo Dream” referring to Palestinian hopes for a “democratic state living side by side in peace” with Israel, you’re reading the workings of Westsplaining Y2KMind.
In Jericho, once seen as the foothold of a new Palestinian state, the Oslo accords held out a glittering future. Uriel Sinai for The New York Times
JERICHO, West Bank — When the Oslo peace accords were signed a quarter-century ago, residents of Jericho celebrated. Their dusty, 11,000-year-old desert city was given autonomy before anywhere else on the West Bank. Palestinians saw it as a foothold for what they trusted would become their own new state.
But nothing has turned out as they expected.
A shiny new casino, opened with great fanfare in 1998 to entice Israeli gamblers, has been empty since 2000, when they were barred from entering the city.
When the Palestinian leadership started a war of extermination (all civilians targeted), which they could not win, and drove every interacting Israeli out of reach.
The two-decade-old public hospital finally just got an elevator thanks to a donation from Japan. Perhaps the best-known institution of self-government in town is the jail, widely feared as a dungeon for political prisoners.
Nice touch, a little honesty… but will the implications of this observation make it into the analysis?
The brilliant Palestinian future conjured by Oslo has instead become a bitter trap.
Wow. Disappointment, failure, maybe, but trap, bitter trap? That’s so deliberate and malevolent. And who, prey, set the trap? 3 guesses. And who, aside from some Palestinians are bitter about it? The true believers who blame Israel for their failure?
The Oslo accords, first unveiled on the White House lawn with a handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat on Sept. 13, 1993, culminated in mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which Israel had long banned as a terrorist organization, and the first formal agreements in a phased effort to resolve the century-old conflict.
They called for a comprehensive peace agreement by 1999, which was widely expected to lead to statehood for the Palestinians, and for Israel, realization of the long-held goal of land for peace.
Watch out for the passives: “was widely expected to lead to…” Widely believed by whom? The Israeli and European architects of Oslo and anyone, especially Bill Clinton, to whom they could sell that hope, Westsplainers.
Arafat, most of his negotiators, the Palestinian and Muslim world? They were told it was a “Treaty of Hudaybiyya,” humiliating now, but a ruse to bring on a more successful war against Israel. Unbeknownst to all but the more alert Westerners, in the minds of the people who thought they were still at war with the very existence of Israel (how many of the 1+ billion Muslims?), the Oslo ‘Peace Process’ was an ‘Oslo War Process,’ not ‘Land for Peace’ but ‘Land for War.’
So determined were Westsplaining Peace activists, including large swaths of the community of journalists, to this version, that when the suicide terrorists tumbled out of the Trojan Horse in 2000, Westerners remained in ignorance of the ‘alternative’ narrative. So much for PoMo rejection of grand narratives, and openness to multiple ones. But for Y2KMind, it was just what the doctor ordered: when Caliphaters attack a Western democracy, blame the democracy.
The famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat after signing the Oslo accords at the White House in 1993 was seen as a first step toward peace and Palestinian statehood.Paul Hosefros/The New York Times
Again the “was seen,” and again by the same people, who are not about to tell you what happened if it violates their chosen narrative.
Today, however, the Oslo process is moribund, having produced neither a peace agreement nor a Palestinian state.
It was brutally slain in October 2000. It has been kept alive, somewhat like Lenin’s corpse, frozen in the hearts of Y2KMinders who refuse to admit that positive-sum Oslo Logic (Land for Peace) could not work when one of the two sides had no intention of letting the other side ‘win’ anything.
Recently a scandal arose in the Episcopalian Church about a resolution to boycott Israel. Suffragan Bishop Gayle Harris spoke in favor of the measure, depicting Israel as a brutal regime abusing its superior fire-power to oppress the Palestinians terribly. In one particular incident she told a detailed story of Israeli soldiers, annoyed with a youth’s questions, shooting him in the back repeatedly, and gave the distinct impression to everyone who heard her, that she was an eye-witness.
story of shooting in the back 1o times, at 1:10.
When word got out, beyond the BDS bubble in which the lethal narrative had been welcomed, and in which it contributed to the passing of the resolution, people who knew how preposterous a story it was, demanded that Bishop Harris specify where and when these ‘impossible’ stories happened. Forced to a precision she could not give, the good bishop apologized for “unintentionally” giving the impression she was an eye-witness when she was not, and Bishop Gates, of the Boston diocese, further lamented the events. Even the Boston Globe wrote about it, although they waited till they had a happy ending of fulsome apology and acceptance by Jewish community leaders.
Two of the more vocal critics of Bishop Harris’ testimony, Dexter Van Zile of CAMERA, and Rabbi Elchanan Poupko, have expressed a sense of unease about the quality of the apologies. I post my letter in support of their reservations below:
Dear Bishop Gates:
Let me add mine to Rabbi Poupko’s voice of concern. I find this whole incident deeply disturbing, even in Bishop Harris’ and your efforts to apologize.
In an article on censored art (which any progressive knows, that’s bad), an article in Fox News (!) included the following item (HT – Adam Levick:
Brandeis University
Following the Penn State incident, a student at Brandeis University had an art display titled “Voices of Palestine” that included a girl lying in a pool of blood. The display was removed after four days, however, because it was “one-sided.” School officials later apologized, saying they “committed a serious error.”
A student at Brandeis University had her art display titled “Voices of Palestine” removed from the library before school officials apologized. (Samah al-Azza via Boston Globe)
What an eloquent entry on so many things that went wrong in the aughts (first decade of the new millennium). Let us enumerate the ways.
Studies in the Collapse of the Cultural Maginot Line, Brandeis 2006.
Start with the picture of Muhammad al Durah and his father: it is a perfect incarnation of demopathic war propaganda designed to arouse hatred of the Jews. The Star of David is a serpent, symbolizing their deadly evil, the boy and the father – the icon of hatred precisely because they were ‘innocents’ maliciously targeted by Israeli soldiers. Below, the jarring “Peace of Palestine,” as if, were they not being killed, Palestine would be peaceful. Wrapping up this image designed to arouse profound hatred of the “other,” in an appeal to peace… who could not side with the poor Palestinians? From a 13-year-old girl in a Palestinian refugee camp (ie the victim of her own people’s malice), this is as remarkably powerful and complex a message, as it is lethal and malicious. My guess… she was a good student of the kind of teaching that permeated her teachers and parents.
Consider the reality: this story of Muhammad al Durah is a candidate for the most powerful and damaging piece of #FakeNews in the 21st century. The boy and father are actors in the creation of a powerful lethal narrative, designed to arouse pity for them and hatred of their alleged persecutors. The bullets hitting the wall that make the boy and father shrink in terror, come from the Palestinian side, who set the scene for the cheap fake, so full of inconsistencies – boy lies down between scenes, boy moves after declared dead, no pool of blood where he was under fire of hundreds of bullets, and “bled out for 17 minutes.”
Here at Brandeis six years later, it was being used by a Jewish student to give Palestinian teenagers a chance to express their understanding of the Palestinian point of view, a classic 21st century configuration of a Jewish ‘progressive’ giving Palestinian demopaths a chance to spew their hatred against her own people. And just as her demopathic acolytes exploit her humane sensibilities to carry on their cognitive war against her people, she uses the principles of post-modern sensibilities – listen to the voice of the other – to inject poisonous war propaganda into her community. The Jewish student calls her exhibit, “The Arts of Peace,” even as she performs valiantly in the arts of [cognitive] war of her enemies and the enemies of freedom the world over.
Brandeis at first shows good sense – why on earth should they encourage such hate-speech against their own community? – then folds in response to indignant faculty who find the administration’s concerns unacceptable. If the faculty and administration had heard and paid attention to the story behind the artwork, they might have laid down some key elements of both the fight against #fakenews and against hatred. Instead, they lay down supine, and got walked over by the same folks who, some years later, shrieked in horror at the very thought of the ‘hateful Islamophobe’ Ayaan Hirsi Ali getting an honorary degree.
The inability of the West to counter this hate-based cogwar, and the role of allegedly progressive Jews in promoting it, is directly related to the West’s inability to identify the same themes in other claims made on progressive loyalties in the teens.
I am preparing to treat this incident on the Maher-Harris-Affleck-Kristof dust-up on Maher’s show from October 2014, in my book: They’re so Smart/Deadly because We’re so Stupid.
I discuss this in terms of Affleck’s performance. Now, given that Affleck was way out of his league both intellectually and informationally on this panel, we can’t judge his argument purely on his emotive ejaculations. On the other hand, given how little he knew, his attempt to dominate (close down) the discussion is all the more striking.
The exchange and its aftermath offer a good example of the dynamics of LCE (liberal cognitive egocentrism) dupes and dishonest demopaths, and the virtue-signaling involved in Affleck’s moral indignation at Harris and Maher. For a more poised and informed presentation of the “liberal” position, see bibliography below. Reza Aslan comes closest to demopathic dishonesty in his defense of Islam, the others on Affleck’s side seem like true believers in the discourse.
Overall, however, I take Affleck as a good example of that form of Islamophobia that is afraid to criticize Islam. Indeed, he’s an enforcer. Unwittingly, he acts like a traditional dhimmi leader, making sure his people don’t anger Muslims.
I think the issues raised here and in subsequent discussions, deserve close scrutiny, because, better understanding and weighing the evidence and arguments – precisely what Affleck’s intervention was designed to stop and Aslan’s misinformation designed to justify – could represent the point at which the conversation changes, and people start talking about real problems, realistically.
We cannot afford to operate in this denial based community that continues to lose a cognitive war with global Jihad that we should be winning handily, a war whose loss would be catastrophic for civil society and progressive principles the world over.
Below is a preliminary bibliography of subsequent discussions about the exchange, crudely divided into pro and con.
In favor of Affleck:
Did anyone enjoy watching an impassioned @BenAffleck on Bill Maher as much as I did?
I just recently came across a excellent piece by a English literature professor, Eric Bennett in the Chronicle of Higher Education. It resonated with an article I recently dug up for the book I’m writing on the first years of the new century/millennium, by John Leo about the responses to 9-11 on American campus. I think they are perfect bookends to the sad tale I try and tell in the book: They’re so Deadly cause We’re so Foolish. (Was formerly They’re so Smart…)
First the article from 2018, that tells the devastating tale about how, in politicizing everything in pursuit of the goal of a society free of coercion, the literary theorists destroyed the very ramparts against the abuse of power they sought, in their messianic fervor, to deconstruct.
Dismayed about American politics? Look in the mirror.
By Eric Bennett
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 13, 2018
Can the average humanities professor be blamed if she rises in the morning, checks the headlines, shivers, looks in the mirror, and beholds a countenance of righteous and powerless innocence? Whatever has happened politically to the United States, it’s happened in stark opposition to the values so many philosophers and English professors, historians and art historians, creative writers and interdisciplinary scholars of race, class, and gender hold dear.
We are, after all, the ones to include diverse voices on the syllabus, use inclusive language in the classroom, teach stories of minority triumph, and, in our conference papers, articles, and monographs, lay bare the ideological mechanisms that move the cranks and offices of a neoliberal economy. Since the Reagan era our classrooms have mustered their might against thoughtless bigotry, taught critical thinking, framed the plight and extolled the humanity of the disadvantaged, and denounced all patriotism that curdles into chauvinism.
We’ve published books like Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s The Signifying Monkey, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, and Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Ethics of Identity— treatises that marshal humane nuance against prejudice, essentialism, propaganda, and demagogic charisma.
We’ve cast out Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, and Steve Bannon, but also Allan Bloom, Jordan Peterson, Richard J. Herrnstein, and Charles Murray. Our manner has been academic, but our matter has been political, and we have fought hard. So how have we ended up in these ominous political straits?
The easy answer is frightening enough: We don’t really matter. The hard one chills the blood: We are, in fact, part of the problem.
How has this sorry reality come to pass, across the humanities, and as if despite them? I can only tell a story of my own field and await the rain of stones. Three generations ago, literature professors exchanged a rigorously defined sphere of expertise, to which they could speak with authority, for a much wider field to which they could speak with virtually no power at all. No longer refusing to allow politics to corrupt a human activity that transcends it, they reduced the literary to the political. The change was sharp. From World War I until the 1960s, their forerunners had theorized literature as a distinct practice, a fine art, a realm of its own. Whether in the scholarship of the Russian Formalists, in T.S. Eliot’s archconservative essays, or in such midcentury monuments as Erich Auerbach’sMimesis(1946), René Wellek and Austin Warren’sTheory of Literature(1948), and Northrop Frye’sAnatomy of Criticism(1957), literature was considered autonomous.
The editorial logic of right-wing media resembles closely the default position of many recent books and dissertations in literary studies.
Then, starting in the 1970s, autonomy became a custom honored only in the breach. Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson were first among countless equals who argued that pure art was pure politics. In 1985, Jane Tompkins laid out what many scholars increasingly believed about the whole field — that “works that have attained the status of classic, and are therefore believed to embody universal values, are in fact embodying only the interests of whatever parties or factions are responsible for maintaining them in their preeminent position.” Porous boundaries, fluid categories, and demoted reputations redefined classic texts.
Beauty became ideology; poetry, a trick of power, no more essentially valuable than other such tricks — sitcoms, campaign slogans, magazine ads — and no less subject to critique. The focus of the discipline shifted toward the local, the little, the recent, and the demotic. “I find no contradiction in my writing about Henry James, bodybuilding, heavy metal, religion, and psychoanalytic theory,” Marcia Ian stated in PMLA in 1997. In Classics and Trash: Traditions and Taboos in High Literature and Popular Modern Genres (1990), Harriet Hawkins argued that much pop culture “has in practice … been a great deal more democratic and far less elitist, even as it has often been demonstrably less sexist than the academically closeted critical tradition.” Within the bosky purlieus of a declining humanism, everything had become fair game for study: Madonna andLost, Harry Potter and Mad Men.
The demographic exclusivity of the midcentury canon sanctified the insurrection. Who didn’t feel righteous tossing Hawthorne on the bonfire? So many dead white men became so much majestic smoke. But now, decades later, the flames have dwindled to coals that warm the fingers of fewer and fewer majors. The midcentury ideal — of literature as an aesthetically and philosophically complex activity, and of criticism as its engaged and admiring decoding — is gone. In its place stands the idea that our capacity to shape our protean selves is the capacity most worth exercising, the thing to be defended at all costs, and the good that a literary inclination best serves.
Reminds me of Thomas More’s rebuke to the zealots in A Man for all Seasons:
Not heeding the sage advice of people “thinking slow,” the deconstructionist theorists plunged down the path of destabilizing the Western Canon to make room for the voices of the “Other.”
There seem to be two readings of Israel’s place in the 21st Century.
On the one hand, there’s a view, not so popular, even among Jews, that Israel is a light unto the nations, an inspiration to peoples and nations everywhere, about how to surmount the most terrible odds and come out the other side with your humanity not only intact, but thriving. As Edward Alexander put it:
the creation of the State of Israel was one of the few redeeming events in a century of blood and shame, one of the greatest affirmations of the will to live ever made by a martyred people, and a uniquely hopeful sign for humanity itself.
For those who wish to taste of this latter Israel, she who rises from the depths, who bears no malice, for whom the best revenge is to move on with life, enjoy this song with which Israelis mark their remembrance of the Holocaust.
Is COL a common acronym?
***
On the other hand, there is an anti-Zionist school, much fashionable among “progressives” (GPL) that holds Israel is the embodiment of everything wrong with mankind. If “those who can do what they will and those who cannot suffer what they must,” then the Jews embody the behavior of those who suffered when they were powerless, but no sooner did they get power, than they made others suffer. In this “take,” the Jews embody all the worst instincts for bitter vengeance, for arrogant domineering, and merciless hatred, all in the name of their special (and self-arrogated) status as “chosen.”
Jose Saramago articulated this perspective. After visiting Yassir Arafat at the height of the terror campaign of 2001-2002, he vented his indignation:
…contaminated by the monstrous and rooted “certitude”: that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Israeli seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: “Vengeance is mine, and I will be repaid.”
This school readily sides with the most extreme articulations of the Palestinian narrative of suffering, in which the Israelis are the new Nazis, and the Palestinians the new victims of their genocidal hatreds. And somehow, when it comes to plotting vengeance against the Israelis, nothing is denied the poor Palestinian victim.
Again at the height of the terror Intifada, a Palestinian psychiatrist, Iyad Sattay and Ami Ayalon had a “dialogue of the deaf” that Ayalon, without realizing his own deafness, reported in The Gatekeepers:
“At some point, I was making myself a cup of coffee and I was approached by a Palestinian acquaintance named Iyad Satay, a Doctor of Psychiatry. He said, “Ami, we finally defeated you. “ I said to him, “Are you mad? What do you mean, defeated us? “Hundreds of you are getting killed. At this rate thousands of you will get killed. You’re about to lose whatever tiny bit of a state you have and you’ll lose your dream of statehood. What kind of victory is that?” He said to me, “Avi, I don’t understand you. You still don’t understand us. For us, victory is seeing you suffer. That’s all we want. The more we suffer, the more you’ll suffer. Finally, after 50 years, we’ve reached a balance of power, a balance, your F-16 versus our suicide bomber.” lyad Saraj’s statement gave me a very clear insight. I suddenly understood the suicide bomber phenomenon. I suddenly understood our reaction very differently. How many operations did we launch because we hurt, because when they blow up buses it really hurts us and we want revenge? How often have we done that?
Ayalon, too wrapped up in his we-too-ism, didn’t see what was before him: a completely different notion of revenge, one that willingly sacrificed its own people’s wellbeing just in order to inflict suffering on the enemy. Ayalon claims this remark brought on a very clear insight. Alas, he missed the point, which he doesn’t for a moment consider, that this “dream of statehood” that he imagines moves the Palestinians as it does the Israelis, was only a projection, a figment of his cognitive egocentrism. Unable to see the cultural chasm, he reasons: “If they’re not like us, then we must be like them.”
***
Those who feel deeply moved by the first video, may be unhappy with my invidious comparison with Israel’s neighbors. Why contaminate such a beautiful sentiment with unpleasant and demeaning comments about the Palestinians.
Please excuse me, but given the immense popularity of the anti-Zionist narrative, I think it important to spell out for people what they don’t seem to be able to do for themselves.
I received this letter today from Rena Cohen from Canada, prompted by a viewing of my new video,Everyone Agrees. Given its substance, and its historical interest, I put it up as its own post. It not only confirms for Canada what Zev Chafets documents for the USA in Double Vision, but also the idea that in the 1980s, Pallywood took a great step forward. I intersperse some comments in italics.
Today I received a link to your video ‘Everyone Agrees’ from a friend in Boston. I have just watched it and forwarded it and wanted to send you the attached letter. My letter will show you that media bias didn’t just begin recently. It’s been on the books for a very long time. Much longer than we think. And because of this, the Jewish world has accepted these distorted Arab facts and has grown away from Israel which is so hard for people to believe. But knowing how many of them think that CNN only tells the truth, they have been completely taken in.
When I returned from my visit to South Lebanon in August 1982, I tried to show my photos to the leaders of the Calgary Jewish community – of which I was one, being very actively involved in Soviet Jewry and Canadian Hadassah WIZO, as well as many other organizations. But they refused to see them, stating that they already knew what had happened there, from what they saw in the media. No idea that what they had been shown was fake news. But their minds were closed to any other ‘truths.’
This is quite remarkable. I often wonder why Jews are so determined to believe nasty stories about Israelis even when there’s good evidence those stories are not true. Some of it may come from a certain masochism. I had an aunt, a good liberal, who told me she loved Ha-aretz because it hurt doubly – because it was so bad, because it was so true. Some may be from sheer embarrassment. But i think that at some level, it’s also because who wants to take on the MSNM? You sound like a conspiracy theorist. So given a choice between believing terrible accusations against Israel and risking one’s public reputation, I think many Jewish leaders feel compelled to accept the media’s account for the sake of their own institutions’ effectiveness.
Steven Sackur of HardTalk thinks he’s tough on everyone. But when it comes to the Middle East he’s out of his depth dealing with the Palestinians Read More »
Alice Walker, David Icke and the New York Times: Studies in the Mainstreaming of Paranoia. Michael Barkun The following essay was written by Michael Barkun, a Read More »
Omertà in Action: The Cannibal Strategy and Shati Refugee Shelling The following is an excerpt from my book ms, They’re So Smart cause We’re so Stupid: A Medievalist’s Guide to the 21st Century, Part Read More »
Four years ago, in response to an article I published in the Tablet, Mondoweiss posted a rather glib and superficial criticism of my analysis of the Read More »
In October, the University of Michigan went through a number of controversies concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict, one brought on by a faculty member, adherent of BDS, Read More »
Ursula Right: people acquiesce or conform... or self-exclude &am
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anon: Excellent. Are you sending this to Sackur? Please
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Sandy: I detest that kind of interview technique. It's me
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Michael Barkun: I attempt to track the origins of the reptilian ta
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Stan Nadel: "Icke is, of course, even better known for an idea
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