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Heaven On Earth
Category Archives: Judeophobia
Hamas in their own words
One of the more appalling aspects of the news coverage of this conflict is the pervasive cover-up of Hamas’ true nature. In their interviews with Arab/Muslim specialists (like Reza Aslan) who misrepresent Hamas without challenge, in their questions to Israelis, in their own characterizations of the matter, Hamas comes off as perhaps an extremist and difficult group, but nonetheless a legitimate player, someone that Israel needs to negotiate with.
The climax of this attitude is Annie Lennox’s startling and impassioned response when asked about Hamas’ desire to destroy Israel: “people need to sit down and have a dialogue…” And Jimmy Carter’s “they were defensive tunnels…”
The difference in coverage that might ensue from a serious understanding of the nature of the apocalyptic enemy would, I think, be massive. Towards that end, MEMRI has put out a collection of some of the stuff Hamas says in Arabic (not in English to Yimmy).
When Cain is the “Other”: On the “Other” in the Arab-Israeli Conflict
I just participated in a panel at American Jewish Studies Conference in Washington entitled Rethinking the “Other”: Problems in Post-Modern Jewish Thought, Politics and the Media. The first two talks by Susan Handelman and Jacob Meskin addressed the problem of the “other” in the philosophico-theological works of Emmanuel Levinas, a Lithuanian-born Jew who became one of France’s most notable philosophers of the 20th century, and a notable influence on Jacques Derrida, the founder of deconstruction and the works of Leon Ashkenazi, known by his scouts name, Manitou, a North-African Jew who first went to France and then after 1967 to Israel.
Their points, boiled down to a crude minimum were that Levinas and/or his followers have taken the manner in which he privileged the “other” to such a point that they have ended up failing to actually interact with the other and particularly in the Arab-Israeli conflict have given a hostile “other” an undeserved, even dangerous, priority. Handelman brought in a less-well-known thinker, Leon Ashkenazi, who, among other things, warned against a particular kind of “other”, namely Cain, the murderous and envious “other” against whom one can and must defend oneself. I was asked to give an example of how the “Cain” type views the other. Not surprisingly, my “text” was the Muhammad al Durah affair, which I post below.
The Media and the Construction of the “Other” in the Arab-Israeli Conflict”
[Note the bland title, done so as not to set off flags among the programming committee and get rejected. For those who already are familiar with the Al Durah affair, you may want to skip below to Analysis.]
My topic today concerns how Palestinians “narrate” the Israeli/Jewish “other.” Let me begin with a discussion of a particular case — that of Muhammad al Durah — and then analyze what it tells us about dysfunctional attitudes towards the “other” in post-modern Jewish and Western intellectual circles.
Let’s begin with our “text,” first broadcast on September 30, 2000 by Charles Enderlin at France2.
Since we are very short of time [I had 20 minutes], let me cut to the chase. I think this is a staged scene, a deliberate lie and libel. In order to understand such a phenomenon, first you need to understand how, as a fake, it is one of many carried out that day. Indeed, I coined the term Pallywood in order to designate the existence of a whole school of film-making in the Palestinian territories designed to present the television news audience both at home and abroad with a constant stream of issues depicting the vicious Israeli Goliath crushing the plucky Palestinian David. Let’s begin with a scene from Netzarim Junction that day.
The picture seems to be a scene of Palestinians under fire, taking cover, running, and presumably looking at the position from which they are being fired at. Except that the Israeli position is behind the building in the upper right, and the Israelis never left their position that day. This whole scene is staged; they are looking at cameramen.
For anyone who wants to examine the nature of Pallywood further, I recommend viewing my movie of that name:
As for the analysis of the Al Durah staging, see my movie, Al Durah: Making of an Icon.
But this is not just a libel, it’s a blood libel, it’s about Israelis intentionally killing an innocent defenseless child, according to the cameraman Talal abu Rahmeh, “in cold blood.” In order to make the case, the Palestinian broadcast authority inserted into the footage taken by abu Rahmeh a scene of an Israeli soldier firing a rifle (rubber bullets) which was taken during the riots caused by the Al Durah footage. This billboard put up by Hizbullah in Southern Lebanon makes the point graphically.
When asked to explain how they could do something that violated every principle of modern journalist, a PA official explained:
These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth… We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth.
One could not ask for a better illustration of a pre-modern mentality: the (higher) truth is what counts, and any kind of dissembling is permissible to convey that truth, even if — especially if — it’s a blood libel against your enemies.
What’s even more tragic in this tale is not just that it appeared and spread (like wild-fire) in the pre-modern, scapegoating culture of global Islam, but that it jumped from there to spread (again like wild-fire) in the post-modern culture of the West. Sharon, who was not even prime-minister at the time of the incident was a particular target of venom.
Here in the Hartford Courant, the barrel is gone, the Israeli soldier has been replaced by a pistol-toting Sharon who smiles sadistically at his murderous deed.
Blood libels proliferated in the Arab world, and, via Palestinian and Muslim student groups, made it onto American campuses.
San Francisco State University flyer, Spring 2002
Dave Brown cartoon for the Independent, January 2003. The cartoon won the annual award as the best cartoon from the UK Political Cartoonist Association.
Europe was the Western cultural sphere especially in Europe, where it was hailed as a liberating narrative that freed from Holocaust guilt. In particular, the image opened the floodgates to comparing the Israelis to the Nazis.
Rahm Emanuel Gets the Obama Treatment from Arab-Americans
The appointment of Rahm Emanuel as Obama’s Chief of Staff has raised concern among Arab-Americans. Emanuel is an Orthodox Jew, his father is Israeli, and he volunteered as a civilian on an IDF base during Gulf War I. Rumors have been circulating about him being a secret Israeli citizen, and his father’s recent remarks about Arabs only exacerbated the situation.
James Zogby wrote an article for the Arab American Institute cautioning his fellow Arab-Americans from reverting to paranoia and anti-Semitism. While the two sets of rumors do not parallel each other perfectly, this is a rebuke to those who dumbed down the anti-Obama efforts by rumors about him being a closet Muslim with an anti-Israel agenda.
On November 5th, my office sent an email to tens of thousands of our members and contacts congratulating President-elect Barack Obama. In our message, we noted the historic transformation his victory represented and commended the thousands of Arab Americans who participated in this winning campaign.
The initial and near universal response was heartwarming, with many sharing moving anecdotes of their campaign experiences, their reactions to the victory, and their hopes for change.
One day and one announcement later, the tide turned.
Anecdote from US War College
I spoke today with a professor who holds senior positions in government institutions and security think-tanks. Unfortunately, I am not at liberty to disclose who the gentleman is, but he is someone who is full of inside knowledge regarding the American military and the war on terror.
He had several interesting anecdotes to relate. Not long ago, a Pakistani brigadier general studying at one of the American war colleges remarked in a trip to Ground Zero, after being at the war college for a year, that Jews were warned to stay home on 9/11. This is not a new rumor, but it is striking that a Pakistani general studying for an extended period of time in America takes that conspiracy theory as fact.
The professor took the general to a memorial containing all the names of the victims. “Maybe you don’t know how to read names ethnically”, he said, “but your story simply isn’t true.” He then showed the general the many Jewish names on the memorial.
The professor also told me that Rupert Murdoch caught wind of the brigadier’s statement (though he did not tell me how) and called President Bush to ask him what kind of war college the country was running, if such statements are made by students who have been studying there for a year.
Osama Bin Laden understands the importance of the information war, the professor said. He told me of intelligence that indicates that Bin Laden intended to strike on Yom Kippur in order to lend credence to the idea that Jews were behind the attacks. It is not known why the timing was changed, but it does speak to Bin Laden’s appreciation of propaganda.
A Millennial critique of Rene Girard’s thesis on scapegoating
N.B.: The following is an essay I wrote several years ago while working on early Christian millennialism. It’s a critique of René Girard’s work on the subject, in particular, the ideas he delineated in a book with the modest title of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. I’m posting it here partly because Yaakov of Breath of the Beast is working through some of Girard’s ideas and we have come to similar critiques of this seminal thinker’s provocative work. I also welcome any suggestions or criticisms from readers, even though this is not in the main stream of this blog’s focus. The essay is neither polished, nor fully footnoted; consider it a draft.
According to Girard, the New Testament (NT) stands apart from all previous thinking on sacrifice, with the partial exception of Judaism, because, rather than declare the sacrificial victim guilty, the victim is the very image of purity and innocence. Thus a mythical implosion occurs. This unjust sacrifice of the innocent extinguishes the self-regenerating mentality of sacrificing the guilty, thus putting an end to scapegoating. The notion has problems with handling Jewish materials, something especially evident in the work of Hamerton-Kelly, whose anti-Judaic tendencies flourish under his apologetic pen.
What strikes the millennial scholar here, however, is the depiction of Jesus as innocent. Granted Girard is working with the “myth” of Jesus, – indeed, Girard regularly and, I think, revealingly, refers to not to Jesus but to Christ.1 But the myth is self-consciously embedded in a historical discourse about millennial hopes and apocalyptic expectations which – surely much to amazement of all sides at the time were they to know it but not retrospectively to Girard – continues to flourish to this very day.
From the millennial, that is from the historical rather than mythical point of view, Jesus is not “innocent.” On the contrary, he was wrong about the imminence of the apocalypse and, whatever his intentions, dangerous to those who brought their demotic millennial hopes to the surface in a prime divider society profoundly hostile to such sentiments, in the case of Jesus, during the pax romana, whose peace the Romans nailed down, literally, with crucifixion. The kingdom was not at hand, and he got crucified for simple and predictable reasons by Romans who had no doubt of his guilt. There may well have been Jewish aristocrats who shared this perspective, and even invoked the “safety of the people” (given Roman rule), for their conservative, prime-divider politics. The disciples, those who developed the myth as well as those who wrote it down, needed above all to save their faith in their own salvation. And they chose to do so by denying Jesus’ error and in so doing, denying their own continuing and continuously fruitful error of anticipating the end at any moment.
The sacrificial victim in this process of denial was Judaism, especially Pharisaic (later rabbinic) Judaism. This sacrificial Judaism was judged guilty by Christians for the mere fact that they did not accept the divine, blameless and faultless messiah of the Christians. Thus, far from putting an end to scapegoating, NT narratives actually imbedded a new kind of scapegoating into its very history and salvific myth. For Christians, Christ, Jesus sacralized, was innocent, the Jews guilty of the double crime of killing the man and denying the God.
Thus it cannot be “merely” the Saducees who are guilty of killing Jesus, it must be the Pharisees who are responsible for killing Christ. For the sake of saving themselves from the rocky shores of cognitive dissonance, Christians consigned their religious parent to perpetual guilt, and, as we shall see, when Christians gained power, to oppression, prison and death. Girard, despite his usual acuity in such matters, does not perceive any of this disguised sacrificial activity in the text, partly because it is crucial to his own reading of the Crucifixion, partly because his entire effort aims at showing that this text presents the end of sacrificial constructions. Thus he repeatedly refers to and analyzes the “Gospel” and the “text” as if it only needed direct interpretation, not deconstruction for its silent and disguised sacrificial activity.
How Did It Happen? Kagan on Realists as Dupes of Demopaths
Robert Kagan, a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an informal adviser to the McCain campaign, whose most recent book is The Return of History and the End of Dreams, has an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal on the bizarre turn that our “realist” thinkers have taken in recent years. It’s as if the “realists,” who should in principle line up with the Honor-Shame Jihad Paradigm (HSJP), have somehow adopted the Politically Correct Paradigm (PCP) — whose principles are as un-”realistic” as one could imagine, and then turned that paradigm against the only culture that makes PCP a viable option, the civil polities of the democratic West. Although Kagan focuses on the anomaly, my comments attempt to explain how this bizarre turn of events could happen. It’s got to do with the Moebius Strip of cognitive egocentrism, something no “realist” has any business falling prey to.
Power Play
The nature of nations, like people, never changes. Today’s political realists say economics rather than military might has become the guiding principle of countries, but the conflict in Georgia shows otherwise, argues Robert Kagan.
By ROBERT KAGAN
August 30, 2008; Page W1
Associated Press
A convoy of Russian troops drives toward the Abkhazian border in western Georgia.Where are the realists? When Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, it ought to have been their moment. Here was Vladimir Putin, a cold-eyed realist if ever there was one, taking advantage of a favorable opportunity to shift the European balance of power in his favor — a 21st century Frederick the Great or Bismarck, launching a small but decisive war on a weaker neighbor while a surprised and dumbfounded world looked on helplessly. Here was a man and a nation pursuing “interest defined as power,” to use the famous phrase of Hans Morgenthau, acting in obedience to what Mr. Morgenthau called the “objective law” of international power politics. Yet where are Mr. Morgenthau’s disciples to remind us that Russia’s latest military action is neither extraordinary nor unexpected nor aberrant but entirely normal and natural, that it is but a harbinger of what is yet to come because the behavior of nations, like human nature, is unchanging?
This “objective law” is what Eli Sagan calls the “paranoid imperative.” Rule or be ruled… Do onto others before they do onto you. According to Sagan, this principle has prevailed in virtually all international relations between polities, and domestic relations between incumbent elites and commoners from the early centuries of the agricultural revolution. The dominance of this principle produces what I’ve called “prime divider societies.” I refer to this principle as the “dominating imperative” partly because when I spoke to colleagues in political science about it, they responded, “that’s not paranoid, it’s realistic”; and partly because I prefer saving the paranoid imperative for “exterminate or be exterminated.”
The significance of Sagan’s perspective, however, comes out when we understand the role of overcoming the paranoid imperative in creating civil polities. Only when a critical mass of autonomous moral agents can commit to renouncing the dominating imperative and trusting that others will as well, can a society create a democratic polity. I recently reread Mill’s words in an article by Alain de Botton on “The Nanny State”
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“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it … The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.”
When I first read those principles in high school, it all seemed fairly straightforward. I didn’t realize how much they appeal to what I now understand is “liberal cognitive egocentrism” (LCE) that the zero-sum games that people play for emotional reasons make Mill’s eminently reasonable-sounding conditions extremely rare to achieve at a social level.
Our problem, as a democratic culture committed to the principles of civil polities, is that we fail to appreciate how exceptionally difficult it is to achieve these levels of tolerance and good will towards others, and as a result we get profoundly confused about both the ability of other cultures to achieve the same levels (PCP 1) and about our achievements (hyper-self-criticism and PCP 2). This goes back at least to the late 60s (when I first encountered the phenomenon): if we can have civil polities based on mutual trust and mutual freedoms, why can’t we do that with the whole world? (This is, by the way, an unspoken axiom of Chomsky’s thinking.) In some senses, the UN was created precisely with this model in mind, and the legislation of universal human rights was its quintessential expression.
Today’s “realists,” who we’re told are locked in some titanic struggle with “neoconservatives” on issues ranging from Iraq, Iran and the Middle East to China and North Korea, would be almost unrecognizable to their forebears. Rather than talk about power, they talk about the United Nations, world opinion and international law. They propose vast new international conferences, a la Woodrow Wilson, to solve intractable, decades-old problems. They argue that the United States should negotiate with adversaries not because America is strong but because it is weak. Power is no answer to the vast majority of the challenges we face, they insist, and, indeed, is counterproductive because it undermines the possibility of international consensus.
Maybe the key here lies in the phrase “some titanic struggle with neoconservatives.” Among the many elements of zero-sum thinking is a bizarre (and highly emotional) force-field that distorts judgment. Like Bush Derangement Syndrome (or its many relatives, like Israel Derangement Syndrome), people so dislike someone or thing that they adopt positions that are self-destructive just so that the object of their hatred, resentment, or irritation, can suffer. From zero-sum to negative sum.
This is where we enter the Moebius Strip of Cognitive Egocentrism. We project our good intentions on demopaths (“realism” rephrased as “idealism”), demopaths project their bad intentions on us, and with the help of some hyper-self-criticism, we accept their profoundly dishonest and hypocritical accusations of not living up to standards they themselves hold in contempt (attacking the realists as racists for pointing out profound cultural differences).
They are fond of citing Dean Acheson, Reinhold Niebuhr and George Kennan as their intellectual forebears, but those gentlemen would have found most of their prescriptions naive. Mr. Acheson, as Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, had nothing but disdain for the United Nations and for most international efforts to solve world problems. As his biographer, Robert L. Beisner, has shown, he considered such efforts evidence of the naive hopefulness of “people who could not face the truth about human nature” and “preferred to preserve their illusions intact.” He strongly supported the NATO alliance but ultimately put his faith not in international institutions but in “the continued moral, military and economic power of the United States.” He aimed to build a “preponderance of power” and to create “situations of strength” around the world. Until the United States acquired this predominant power, he believed, negotiations and international conferences with adversaries such as the Soviet Union were worthless. He opposed talks with Moscow throughout his entire time in office.
Maghen Challenges Leading Conventional Ideas on Agreement Between Iran and the West
Ze’ev Maghen, Senior Lecturer in Islamic Religion and Persian Language at Bar-Ilan University, and Chair of the Department of Middle East History, recently published “From Omnipotence to Impotence: A Shift in the Iranian Portrayal of the “Zionist Regime“. The article examines and challenges some of the prevailing notions about the prospects for and the price of an agreement with Iran, and what the implications would be for Israel.
One of the interesting points about his study concerns the wild swings of Iranian thinking on Israel. One minute it’s omnipotent, the next, impotent. Not only does this reflect the Iranian mullahs’ lack of touch with reality, but also their terrible lack of confidence which they must compensate for by using totalistic language. Profound imbalance, profound instability.
Maghen opens with a description of the banal, ubiquitious nature of calls for the destruction of the U.S. and Israel in Iran. After classical music performances, soccer goals, and even a speech by Ayatollah Khamenei meant to counter President Ahmadinejad’s extreme rhetoric about Israel, Iranians robotically call for Israel and America’s demise:
In January 2006, the Iranian daily Jomhuriya Eslami carried the text of a speech delivered in Tehran’s main mosque by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamene’i. Attempting to defuse the diplomatic tension occasioned by newly elected President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel’s destruction at the previous month’s “World without Zionism” conference, Khamene’i concluded his uncharacteristically moderate sermon with the following ringing remarks: “We Iranians intend no harm to any nation, nor will we be the first to attack any nation. We do not deny the right of any polity in any place on God’s earth to exist and prosper. We are a peace-loving country whose only wish is to live, and to let live, in peace.” Without missing a beat or evincing even a hint of irony, the reporter who had covered the event continued: “The congregation of worshippers, some seven thousand in number, expressed their unanimous support for the Supreme Leader’s words by repeatedly chanting: marg bar Omrika, marg bar Esra’il – ‘Death to America, Death to Israel!’”1
The ISM’s Disrespect for Jews and Disdain for Israel
The International Solidarity Movement’s ‘protest’ boats shipped off today from Lanarca, Cyprus, toward the Gaza Strip. Their stated goal is :
Our mission is to expose the illegality of Israel’s actions, and to break through the siege in order to express our solidarity with the suffering people of Gaza (and of the occupied Palestinian territory as a whole) and to create a free and regular channel between Gaza and the outside world.
It does not take in-depth analysis to understand that the ‘free and regular’ channel that the ISM advocates is an open door for Hamas to increase their already unacceptable arms shipments into Gaza for use against Israeli soldiers and civilians (not to mention Palestinians who belong to other factions).
UN, Demopathic Instrument of Retrogression: Pascal Bruckner on Durban II (Boycott!)
Pascal Bruckner is one of my favorite French intellectuals, someone who cuts through the maze of post-modern morality like a lazer through butter. So I was pleased to find that he’s taken on Durban II.
Boycott Durban II
Sign and Sight, 16/06/2008
Pascal BrucknerAt the 2001 UN Conference against Racism in Durban, anti-colonialism bared its anti-Semitic face. Democracies should stay away from a repeat performance next year in Geneva. By Pascal Bruckner
In September 2001 the South African city of Durban played host to the third United Nations World Conference against Racism, which was aimed at achieving recognition for crimes related to slavery and colonialism. The event’s organisers hoped that the whole of mankind would use this ceremonious occasion to face up to its history and chronicle events with equanimity.
It was billed as a conference against racism, and had a “soft” millennial quality of hoping that the world would enter a new era where it left racism behind.
These good intentions rapidly degenerated into one-upmanship among victims and bloodlust directed at Israeli organisations and anyone else suspected of being Jewish. The original intent, which was to heal the wounds of the past through a sort of collective therapy and arrive at new standards for human rights, twisted into an outburst of hatred which, in the wake of the September 11 attacks that followed only days later, disappeared from the public eye.
It was an orgy of hatred aimed at Israel and the USA, and offers perhaps the single most concentrated example of demopathy available. Led by Arab nations, it excoriated the USA for her slavery (almost a century and a half ago) and Israel for her racism and genocide (with al Durah as poster boy and patron saint), when Arab states are currently the only ones actually engaged in both genocide and slavery (specifically of sub-Saharan Africans). The hypocrisy was suffocating, and the participation of “human rights NGOS’s” one of the most astounding expressions of the moral corruption of the “progressive” left on record.
It’s time we had another look. Against the wishes of the organisers, Durban became an arena where people screamed and hurled insults at each other in a re-enactment of the comedy of damned, in the face of the white exploiter. “The pain and anger are still felt. The dead, through their descendants, cry out for justice”, Kofi Annan said on August 31 of the same year – an astounding choice of words for a UN secretary general and more a call for revenge than reconciliation. The delegates at the conference, particularly those from the Arab-Muslim states, also understood it as such and, together with the African group, they transformed the conference into a stage for anti-colonialist revenge. The West, which is genocidal by nature, should recognise its crimes, beg for forgiveness and pay symbolic and financial reparations to the victims of its oppression. Emotions ran high and anger was brought to the boil by coverage of the second Intifada which was being violently quashed by the Israeli army.
Muslims who Admire Israel: What Significance?
There are a tiny number of Arab and Muslim intellectuals who have expressed admiration for Israel. What does this admiration mean? Do we take its numerical percentage as a sign of its significance? Say a hundred pro-Israel Muslims out of 1.4 billion Muslims, so less than .00001% of the total, i.e., less than a fraction of a statistical error?
Or do we take it as the tip of an iceberg of an opinion that cannot express itself in an honor-shame culture where honor has been defined in terms of hating Israel, and therefore every expression of pro-Israel sentiment represents something far more significant, something that, just in order to exist, must fight heavy cross-winds. In other words, it’s the easiest thing to be pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel in the Muslim world; it takes great courage and intellectual integrity to fight that consensus. Just as we should weight Israeli self-criticism differently from Palestinian demonization in our efforts to assess the information we get from the Middle East, so should we weigh pro- and anti-Israel sentiments in the Muslim world.
The case of Salah Choudhury, the Bengladeshi journalist who is now fighting for his life against charges of sedition, treason, blasphemy and espionage, raises yet another dimension. In addition to the peer-pressure of an honor-shame culture — so strong it can drive mothers to kill their daughters — there is also the matter of violent intimidation, whether state-sponsored (as in Choudhury’s case) or supported by a fatwa that operates at the grass-roots level. Just as Islam considers that apostates deserve death, so does this religion exercise enormous threats of and execution of violence against those it considers guilty of betraying the cause.
When one considers the joint threat of social and economic ostracism on the one hand and threat of violence on the other, even the slightest expression of support or admiration for Israel in the Muslim world needs to be factored at, say, 100,000,000 times the significance of an anti-Israel sentiment that is so easy and so (seemingly) cost-free for Muslims to express.
In honor of Choudhury’s struggle — I urge everyone to sign the petition on his behalf — I post here the reflections of another courageous Muslim, exiled Iraqi writer Najem Wali, who followed her intellectual instincts and went to visit Israel.
A journey into the heart of the enemy
Sign and Sight
21/05/2008Exiled Iraqi writer Najem Wali travelled to Israel to uncover some uncomfortable truths about the Arab leaders
When a child is born in Israel or to us in the Arab world, the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict is flowing in its umbilical cord. Since the declaration of the state of Israel on May 14 1948, Israel has been the official enemy number one for the Arab states.
But even as a child I found the rhetoric didn’t add up. How could this somehow “all-powerful” country so successfully “let the Arab nations sink into lethargy”, as the official speeches would have us believe? And why, at the same time, were they so confident that the “small state of Zionist gangs” would inevitably “disappear from the map”? I never found a convincing answer. Nor did I ever make the connection between the “Jew question” and the “Palestine question”, between the victims of the Holocaust and the victims of Israel’s foundation.
To Find the Principles: James Wald’s Blog is Back
An old friend from graduate school, who is a professor of German History at Hampshire College and has sent me many an excellent tip and/or comments over the years has put his blog back in action. Among the new entries, all of which are worth reading, he has several on the odious comparison of Israel to the Nazis.
Nasty Nazi Analogies: Amherst Activists Call Gaza Israel’s Concentration CampFriday, June 13 was certainly an unlucky day for our local “Women in Black.”
Like many activist groups, the Women in Black attract the predictable mixture of benevolent civic-minded souls, misguided idealists, and myopic, mean-spirited dogmatists. These days, the latter two categories seem to predominate. Their recent demonstration revealed their complicity in the bigoted behavior that is becoming dismayingly common, in Amherst and elsewhere, among the supposed “left” in general and the pseudo-“peace” movements in particular.
Fridays at midday, the Women station themselves in front of the hideous Bank of America building opposite the Amherst Town Hall and Common and hold up signs calling attention to their causes of the moment.
This was the sight that greeted me as I left the bank, where I had stopped in preparation for a trip to Europe on academic business:
Taken aback, I explained that I was a professional historian and asked whether I could help them with their problem: The sign was deeply offensive and inappropriate. Were they incredibly insensitive, I inquired—or just really, really stupid?
Read the rest.
And another:
Nasty Nazi Analogies in Amherst: Gaza is Like the Warsaw Ghetto?From a flyer distributed to drivers in the center of town, dated 10 May 2008:
“The Amherst Vigil for Peace and Justice in a Nuclear Free World . . . continues to advocate for an end to the arms trade, for an end to nuclear weapons at home and abroad and for social justice around the world.”
Evidently, “social justice” does not in this case include doing justice to the historical truth or to the agonizing complexities of contemporary politics.
The perverse and perversely consistent desire of enemies of Israel to identify with the Jewish fighters of the Warsaw Ghetto (whose leaders, incidentally, were left-wing Zionists) is a peculiar phenomenon worthy of further study, though the fundamental tendency is clearly to mobilize support by claiming the ultimate underdog status.
Read the rest.
1948-2008 Part I: The Sad Story of the Nakba
Efraim Karsh has an excellent article in the latest Commentary on the story of 1948 which, among other things, sheds significant light on the nature of the catastrophe (Nakba) that befell the Palestinian people at that time. I recommend reading the entire piece, but what I have excerpted below (with comments) represents the thread that has to do with the fate of the Arab population of the British Mandate of Palestine. The tale he tells offers an object lesson in how the approach one takes influences the history one writes. Karsh’s approach is founded in the principles of civil society — self-determination, government of, by, and for the people, productive economies, life-enhancing positive-sum choices — and traces the tragic tale of how and why the Palestinian people failed to accomplish any of these progressive goals. (By contrast, note the effects of a different approach and set of values.)
Karsh claims the article is based on new research into the recently declassified archives of “millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate (1920-1948) and Israel’s early days” although the piece itself is without any references. The author promises a footnoted version soon.
1948, Israel, and the Palestinians—The True Story
EFRAIM KARSH
May 2008…Far from being the hapless objects of a predatory Zionist assault, it was Palestinian Arab leaders who from the early 1920’s onward, and very much against the wishes of their own constituents, launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival. This campaign culminated in the violent attempt to abort the UN resolution of November 29, 1947, which called for the establishment of two states in Palestine. Had these leaders, and their counterparts in the neighboring Arab states, accepted the UN resolution, there would have been no war and no dislocation in the first place.
Note that this reflects classic “prime-divider” dynamics — an empowered ruling elite makes decisions that benefit themselves rather than their own people. And the decisions are classic zero-sum: no shared land, no twin-nationalities… the whole loaf or no loaf.
Failed Jihad 1948: The Real Naqba
Benny Morris has a new book out on 1948. In the course of researching it he discovered how intense the religious dimension of the conflict that year. Such an observation is on the one hand, quite ordinary and empirical, on the other, a violation of the principles of cognitive egocentrism whereby the Arab objection to Jewish independence must be formulated and presented to the public as a “rational” objection, as a “nationalist” argument. Negotitations according to the PC Paradigm will only work if the dispute is about territories and rational national narratives that can come to a mutual understanding (2-state solution). But if it is profoundly zero-sum and religious in nature, then all the pacific bromides about war not being the answer fall by the wayside.
Here Morris discusses the religious dimension of 1948 and chides the modern historian for not taking it seriously.
Historians Should Take the Jihadi Rhetoric of 1948 Seriously
By Benny Morris
Mr. Morris is a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University and the author of 1948 (Yale University Press), from which this article is excerpted.
Historians have tended to ignore or dismiss, as so much hot air, the jihadi rhetoric and flourishes that accompanied the two-stage assault on the Yishuv [the Jewish residents of Palestine before the founding of Israel] and the constant references in the prevailing Arab discourse to that earlier bout of Islamic battle for the Holy Land, against the Crusaders. This is a mistake. The 1948 War, from the Arabs’ perspective, was a war of religion as much as, if not more than, a nationalist war over territory. Put another way, the territory was sacred: its violation by infidels was sufficient grounds for launching a holy war and its conquest or reconquest, a divinely ordained necessity. In the months before the invasion of 15 May 1948, King Abdullah, the most moderate of the coalition leaders, repeatedly spoke of “saving” the holy places. As the day of invasion approached, his focus on Jerusalem, according to Alec Kirkbride, grew increasingly obsessive. “In our souls,” wrote the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, “Palestine occupies a spiritual holy place which is above abstract feelings. In it we have the blessed breeze of Jerusalem and the blessings of the Prophets and their disciples.”
The evidence is abundant and clear that many, if not most, in the Arab world viewed the war essentially as a holy war. To fight for Palestine was the “inescapable obligation on every Muslim,” declared the Muslim Brotherhood in 1938.
The Muslim Brotherhood gained great strength from their anti-Zionist activities particularly during this period of the “Arab Revolt” of 1936-39, launching, according to Matthias Küntzel, their first “fanatical solidarity campaign in which the idea of Jihad was linked to the policies in Palestine,” and going from 800 to 200,000 years from 1936-38 (p. 21).
Indeed, the battle was of such an order of holiness that in 1948 one Islamic jurist ruled that believers should forego the hajj and spend the money thus saved on the jihad in Palestine. In April 1948, the mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Muhammad Mahawif, issued a fatwa positing jihad in Palestine as the duty of all Muslims. The Jews, he said, intended “to take over … all the lands of Islam.” Martyrdom for Palestine conjured up, for Muslim Brothers, “the memories of the Battle of Badr … as well as the early Islamic jihad for spreading Islam and Salah al-Din’s [Saladin's] liberation of Palestine” from the Crusaders. Jihad for Palestine was seen in prophetic-apocalyptic terms, as embodied in the following hadith periodically quoted at the time: “The day of resurrection does not come until Muslims fight against Jews, until the Jews hide behind trees and stones and until the trees and stones shout out: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ “
Of quote not only marks the Jihad as apocalyptic, but also, alas, genocidal.
The jihadi impulse underscored both popular and governmental responses in the Arab world to the UN partition resolution and was central to the mobilization of the “street” and the governments for the successive onslaughts of November-December 1947 and May-June 1948. The mosques, mullahs, and ulema all played a pivotal role in the process. Even Christian Arabs appear to have adopted the jihadi discourse. Matiel Mughannam, the Lebanese-born Christian who headed the AHC-affiliated Arab Women’s Organization in Palestine, told an interviewer early in the civil war: “The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders …. [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the ‘holy war’ has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred.” The Islamic fervor stoked by the hostilities seems to have encompassed all or almost all Arabs: “No Moslem can contemplate the holy places falling into Jewish hands,” reported Kirkbride from Amman. “Even the Prime Minister [Tawfiq Abul Huda] … who is by far the steadiest and most sensible Arab here, gets excited on the subject. “
Note that even the Christian Arab is swept up in the mood of collective empowerment. One cannot understand either the decisions of the Arab leadership in 1947-49, or the catastrophic scale of the defeat, if one does not understand the omnipotent inebriation they felt about their cause.
Nor did this impulse evaporate with the Arab defeat. On the contrary. On 12 December 1948 the ulema of Al-Azhar reissued their call for jihad, specifically addressing “the Arab Kings, Presidents of Arab Republics, . . . and leaders of public opinion.” It was, ruled the council, “necessary to liberate Palestine from the Zionist bands … and to return the inhabitants driven from their homes.” The Arab armies had “fought victoriously” (sic) “in the conviction that they were fulfilling a sacred religious duty.” The ulema condemned King Abdullah for sowing discord in Arab ranks: “Damnation would be the lot of those who, after warning, did not follow the way of the believers,” concluded the ulema.
The Naqba was not the terrible tragedy that befell the Palestinian refugees. They were collateral damage, soon to be turned into sacrificial victims by imprisonment in the camps. The real Naqba was the catastrophe of Jewish sovereignty in Dar al Islam — a humiliation to the Arabs, a blasphemy to Muslims.
Reconciliation-Hearted to Bostom: It’s really not a zero-sum
Andy Bostom has a response to my post on the Bostom-Künatzel debate. He has asked me to stick to substantive issues, which I agree is where we need to go in this discussion. I will, however, make a couple of asides about rhetoric [in brackets] since Andy’s tone has, on occasion, created unnecessary friction. Here are my responses.
Richard the Reconciliation-Hearted
April 6th, 2008 by Andrew Bostom
Actually, I’m mostly known as Richard Artichokeheart.
Has Medievalist Richard Landes chosen his arguments all that wisely?
[Let me guess, that's a rhetorical question the answer to which is... no. :-) ]
Richard Landes, invoking understandably, his background as a Medievalist, with a special interest in millenarian movements — attempts a thoughtful “reconciliation” of what he attributes to be the positions of Matthias Kuntzel, and myself, vis a vis Islamic Antisemitism. But Landes’ discussion has two fundamental flaws.
[Normally, one first goes over the strengths of the argument before going for the weaknesses, but okay. Andy's a no-nonsense guy.]
First, Landes ignores (and likely does not appreciate) Kuntzel’s complete failure to understand the jihad,
[Although this is not purely a matter of substance, it is significant. I neither ignore, nor fail to appreciate the issue, nor do I think it appropriate to use terms like "complete failure to understand" (even if it's true, which I don't think it is).]
which lead Kuntzel to opine, remarkably (on p. 13 of his book “Jihad and Jew Hatred”),
The [Muslim] Brotherhood’s most significant innovation was their concept of jihad as holy war, which significantly differed from other contemporary doctrines and, associated with that, the passionately pursued goal of dying a martyr’s death in the war with the unbeliever. Before the founding of the Brotherhood, Islamic currents of modern times had understood jihad (derived from a root signifying “effort”) as the individual striving for belief or the missionary task of disseminating Islam. Only when this missionary work was hindered were they allowed to use force to defend themselves against the unbelievers resistance. The starting point of Islamism is the new interpretation of jihad espoused with uncompromising militancy by Hassan al-Bana, the first to preach this kind of jihad in modern times.
There is simply no way to reconcile this statement with either classical Islamic doctrine — entirely consistent with Al-Banna’s views — or the tragic, but copious historical evidence of how jihad campaigns, in accord with this doctrine, were (and continue to be) conducted across, Asia, Africa, and Europe. I amass incontrovertible evidence of this living doctrine and history in the The Legacy of Jihad.
There are, in fact, several ways to reconcile these statements with the ample documentation of Bostom’s work. First, note that Küntzel refers to “Islamic currents in modern times.” Küntzel may, indeed, underestimate the importance of Jihad as holy war in Islamic tradition, and overstate the “innovation” of the Muslim Brotherhood when it comes specifically to Jihad, but that hardly means that the Muslim Brotherhood’s reformulation of Jihad doesn’t contain important new elements that included an anti-modern anti-Semitism typical of fascism and Nazism. It’s one thing to say Küntzel underestimates the vigor of an earlier Jihadi and anti-Semitic tradition in Islam, quite another to dismiss his argument that Hassan al Banna’s and the Mufti’s version had new elements that, even if they existed before (see below), took on new and ominous forms.
Anti-Semitism, Nazis, and Muslims: Is it Islamism or Islam?
Keith Pavlischek has an interesting meditation which begins with a discussion of a debate between Andy Bostom and Matthias Küntzel about the nature of Islamic anti-semitism. This debate has recently turned even more vituperative, alas, as a result of a book review by John Rosenthal of Klaus Gensicke’s Klaus Gensicke. Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten: Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten in Policy Review. Pavlischek’s opening discussion focuses on the debate’s substantive issues and highlights their significance.
Jihad, Jew-Hatred, and Evangelicals and Jews Together
By Keith Pavlischek
Thursday, March 27, 2008, 6:14 AMAn instructive and fascinating debate has erupted over what at first glance may seem an academic point. The debate is between Matthias Küntzel, the author of Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11, and Andrew Bostom, the editor of The Legacy of Jihad and author of the forthcoming book The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn History.
The debate is not over whether contemporary Islamism is vehemently anti-Jewish but over the historical roots of that Jew-hatred. Küntzel locates the current rabid Jew-hatred specifically in the influence of Nazi ideology. Bostom, alternatively, insists that the legacy of Islamic Jew-hatred is far more ancient and deeply rooted in classical Islam. Bostom assembles a wealth of historical material and concludes, “According to the full range of hadith concerning the Jews, stubborn malevolence is the Jews’ defining worldly characteristic: rejecting Muhammad and refusing to convert to Islam out of jealousy, envy and even selfish personal interest, lead them to acts of treachery, in keeping with their inveterate nature.”
Contemporary Islamic Jew-hatred, according to Bostom, cannot simply be linked to the influence of Nazi propaganda but rather with an entirely explicable reaction to the very existence of Israel. Explicable, that is, given Islam’s traditional hostility to Jews. According to Bostom, “The rise of Jewish nationalism—Zionism—posed a predictable, if completely unacceptable challenge to the Islamic order—jihad-imposed chronic dhimmitude for Jews—of apocalyptic magnitude.” He then quotes his mentor, Bat Ye’or, who explained: “Because divine will dooms Jews to wandering and misery, the Jewish state appears to Muslims as an unbearable affront and a sin against Allah. Therefore it must be destroyed by Jihad.”
One crucial implication of all this is that the Israeli-Palestinian “problem” has less to do with any particular policy pursued by Israel than with the Jew-hating ideology intrinsic to Islamist organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood (not to mention the Islamic Republic of Iran). Also, the deep-seated Jew-hatred of the Islamists should disabuse us of the notion that the threat of Islamism will wither away with the establishment of a Palestinian state.
I don’t intend to weigh in on the particulars of the Küntzel-Bostom debate, except to note that it has profound implications for how we name the enemy. Do we call them Islamofascists, which tends to suggest their current form of Jew-hatred is originally modern? Or do we call them Jihadists, suggesting a more ancient and intrinsic connection to Islamic theology and political understanding (with consequently diminished prospects for reform)? In any case, the debate is instructive, with both sides presenting plausible (and not mutually exclusive) explanations.
I agree here with Pavlischek. Not only are these issues crucial, the positions are not mutually exclusive (hence my dismay at the stridency of the debate). All of the books here discussed support the Honor-Shame Jihad Paradigm (Israel is a theological blasphemy to an honor-shame form of religiosity that can only feel good about itself when it debases its parent religion); and challenge the Western cognitive egocentrism of the Politically Correct Paradigm that insists on seeing the conflict as one of rival nationalisms that, hopefully, can be resolved by compromise. Indeed, those tempted by the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis would do well to ponder Pavlischek’s comment: “the deep-seated Jew-hatred of the Islamists should disabuse us of the notion that the threat of Islamism will wither away with the establishment of a Palestinian state.”
The rest of the article treats the matter of Jewish discomfort with Christian support for Israel. That is an entirely different issue, about which he has some interesting things to say, despite completely ignoring the major source of the discomfort — i.e., the underlying apocalyptic beliefs that fuel some of the most passionate support for Israel, beliefs that make the Zionist fervor a time-bound phenomenon, an instrument in the hastening of Jesus’ return, at which point Jews will vanish from the earth either in the battle of Armageddon or by converting to Christianity.
The debate between Küntzel and Bostom, despite the excess of heat it has generated, also sheds important light. Küntzel’s point is that although there is a long history of Jew-hatred in Islam, since Hassan al Banna, and even more, since the establishment of Israel, that hatred has shifted from what I call anti-Judaism (“we” are right and proud because you are wrong an humbled) to anti-Semitism (your very existence threatens us, we must exterminate you before you destroy us). This is the shift that the Nazis made in their turn to what Goldhagen calls “exteminationist anti-Semitism” and Friendlander calls “redemptive anti-Semitism” — i.e., salvation comes from wiping out the Jews. I think, it is correct to see the rebirth of Jihad in the 20th century as a) a virulent form of anti-Semitism that incorporated much of the European tradition — blood libels, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc. — even as its earlier traditions of Jew hatred provided the fertile soil for this transfer.
Bostom may well be correct in showing that even this kind of genocidal thinking existed, if not in precisely the form it now takes, throughout Islamic history. My own suggestion here is to view this exterminationist anti-Semitism as the product of apocalyptic time: that’s how it operated in Christianity (e.g., the slaughters of the First Crusade), and how it operates now in Islam. Fundamentally, as far as I can make out, Bostom and Küntzel agree on a key point: the existence of Israel has driven Muslims, long accustomed to throttling and humiiating Jews, into paroxysms of hatred. Today, for Muslims drenched in the frustration and humiliation of a tiny Israel resisting their efforts to restore the true nature of the world order and return the Jews to dhimmi status, it has morphed into a desire to kill all Jews everywhere.
So if we want to understand the dynamics, we are best advised — I think — not to look for a permanent state of genocidal Jew hatred, nor for a once-only appearance in the modern world, but for its episodic emergence in paranoid apocalyptic moments when Muslims (or Christians) think they are fighting a Jewish enemy that refuses to accept its place at the bottom of the hierarchy (as in the case of modern Zionism), and that the genocidal element takes on a particular power when Muslims and Christians believe that they are engaged in the apocalyptic battle of the Endtimes.
Hopefully this suggestion may permit us to move on to the important discussion of what is going on in Islam today, and how we can deal with it.
The Martyrs who dare criticize Israel: Nidra Poller explicates the Guigue affair
I wrote a brief comment on the Guigue affair in an earlier post. Now Nidra Poller gives the deep background.
The Martyrdom of an Anti-Zionist French Official
By Nidra Poller
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, April 03, 2008A high ranking French official publishes an anti-Zionist diatribe on a French Muslim website and gets sacked. He wasn’t violating a taboo, just disgracing his uniform.
French citizens do not enjoy the same broad freedom of speech granted to Americans, but when it comes to criticizing Zionists and the State of Israel the difference is hardly visible to the naked eye. The abrupt dismissal of sous-préfet [vice-magistrate] Bruno Guigue, author of a text that compares Israel to the Third Reich, is not strictly speaking a free speech issue. As a high-ranking civil servant, i.e. in the service of the State, Guigue is expected to refrain from the public expression of extreme statements, opinions, or affiliations.
Nothing Guigue wrote in the controversial article posted on the French Muslim website www.oumma.com violates current “standards” of discourse on the subject. He might have been sued 6 or 7 years ago for claiming that Israel is the only country whose snipers take shots at Palestinian girls coming out of school, but authors of such statements are rarely taken to court these days. The high-profile hate speech conviction of Edgar Morin, Sami Naïr, and Danièle Sallenave, authors of a comparable diatribe published in the snooty newspaper Le Monde in 2002, was overturned on appeal.
Bruno Guigue is an « énarque, » a graduate of the prestigious national school of administration, breeding ground of almost all French politicians Left and Right—with the notable exception of Nicolas Sarkozy–which accounts for the monotonous similarity of their mindset and operating methods. Guigue, who considers himself a specialist on the Middle East conflict, is the author of several books and countless articles in the same vein as the incriminated specimen.
The Mystery of Hate: Can Pallywood have anything to do with it?
Yair Lapid, an Israeli columnist asked a long, painful, and highly relevant question. Why the hate? Not Palestinian hate, but Arab, Muslim? My attempt at the beginning of a answer aftewards.
The Mystery of Hate
by Yair LapidHundreds of years of fighting, six and a half wars, billions of dollars gone with the wind, tens of thousands of victims, not including the boy who laid down next to me on the rocky beach of lake Karon in 1982 and we both watched his guts spilling out. The helicopter took him and until this day I do not know whether he is dead or survived. All this, and one
cannot figure it out.And its not only what happened but all that did not happen – hospitals that were never built, universities that were never opened, roads that were never paved, the three years that were taken from millions of teenagers for the sake of the army. And despite all the above, we still do not have the beginning of a clue to the mystery of where it all started:
Why do they hate us so much?
Bad News Bears: Gerstenfeld and Colleagues Show How Bad Spin Works against Anyone
I just heard a talk from an American historian working on the history of “spin.” His conceptualization of the problem has me thinking about the phenomenon in new ways. I actually think that a history of spin might shed interesting light on the media coverage of the Middle East. It’s not that spin is bad, or even dishonest. One describes one’s house differently to the tax assessor from how one presents it to a prospective buyer, and there’s nothing necessarily dishonest about it — especially since both the assessor and the buyer know what you’re up to. But like all those checks we get at restaurants that have mistakes, if the errors are consistently in favor of the house, you know you’re up against something less than honest.
And spin is identifiable, possibly even quantifiable. Wikipedia defines it as follows:
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In public relations, spin is a sometimes pejorative term signifying a heavily biased portrayal in one’s own favor of an event or situation. While traditional public relations may also rely on creative presentation of the facts, “spin” often, though not always, implies disingenuous, deceptive and/or highly manipulative tactics. Politicians are often accused of spin by commentators and political opponents, when they produce a counter argument or position.
- Selectively presenting facts and quotes that support one’s position (cherry picking)
- Non-denial denial
- Phrasing in a way that assumes unproven truths
- Euphemisms to disguise or promote one’s agenda
- Ambiguity
- Skirting
- Rejecting the validity of hypotheticals
- Appealing to internal policies
The techniques of “spin” include:
None of these are outright dishonest. Everyone selects evidence; they have to. Most people assume unproven truths, often thinking them proven. Most people use euphemisms and ambiguity, and skirt difficult material, etc. By this definition it would be hard not to be accused of spin.
On the other hand, there are ways to determine just how heavy the spin, and how consistently it favors one side, as in Steve Erlanger’s journalism. Interestingly enough, the definition assumes that spin is “in favor of one’s side,” which raises the question: Why would journalists spin, and particularly why would they spin hard? Whose side are they on?
Again, I don’t have too much of a problem with journalists from civil societies who benefit from a culture that prizes and guarantees freedom of the press, spinning in favor of civic players, and against tyrants of various kinds. The real puzzle, as with Erlanger and so much of the Western press is why they so favor the most regressive elements in the Palestinian world.
In any case, I imagine that it would be possible to define, even quantify spin (e.g., leaving out significant details that any impartial reader/viewer might want to know in order to make an intelligent and informed judgment, like the data on Sderot without which one cannot undestand Israeli actions against Gaza). And if one tried to develop an impartial means of quantifying the data — never certain, but capable of giving a general sense of the tendencies — I think one would find that the media systematically spin against Israel, presenting negative news as often as possible. Indeed, if we were to give a scale to the degree of spin, one might find that their treatment approaches the level of “character assassination.”
Manfred Gerstenfeld, the indefatigable prober of anti-Israel sentiment, especially in Europe, but also in academia and the media, has launched an interesting project that gets at the core of this problem. By presenting negative news about other countries, he shows a number of important phenomena:
1) How easy it is to make a country look bad.
2) How little people like it when their country is portrayed in the media in so negative a light.
3) How rarely the media engage in the kind of character assassination when it comes to other democracies.
As Gerstenfeld noted in an earlier piece on his project:
The Dutch haven’t quite developed the thick skin that we have as Israelis to outside acrimonious criticism. Maybe that’s why the seminar is generating such interest there,” Gerstenfeld suggested. “And by successfully blackening Holland’s name despite its positive image abroad, we are demonstrating how easy it is to portray any country as a brutal police state.
When one realizes that a “moderate” Arab county will imprison its own academics for “tarnishing the image” of his own country, one can begin to understand how thin a skin some countries have. Again, the exceptional self-criticism of Israelis who are often proud to be ashamed of their country, skews the field and creates an epistemological confusion among outside observers who don’t understand how much the information they get is skewed by the profoundly different cultures from which it emanates.
Cnaan Liphshiz, who already wrote a piece on this project has a follow-up in today’s Ha-Aretz.
Ha-Aretz
Bad News Bloggers bid to beat press bias
By Cnaan LiphshizWhat began six months ago as a brazen attempt to counter a perceived anti-Israel slant in the Dutch media, has evolved into a network monitoring the media in eight countries across the world. The idea is simple: Beat press bias at its own game by advertising only bad news about one place.
Over the past months, seven activists from Israel and elsewhere have been exposing online readers to scandalous yet accurate reports from media in Britain (violent drunk teens), France (high homeless mortality), Norway (serial child molesters), Finland (sexual harassment in parliament), Sweden (soaring suicide rates), The Netherlands (menacing Muslim unrest), Mexico (rampaging flood victims) and Los Angeles (drive-by killings).
The seven bad-news activists visit one another’s online blogs and have incorporated links referring the dozens of surfers who visit their pages every day to sister-sites. Though they all act out of a desire to counter what they see as media bias against Israel, they operate independently and have little communication with one another. Some of them rely on friends to send them interesting bits of bad news.
“This project demonstrates how media coverage can degrade any country’s image by using selective news without context,” explains media analyst Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld from Jerusalem. His seminar last summer, entitled “Bad News about the Netherlands,” became the kernel of his blog.
“Present” Will not Do: Obama’s Minister Honors Farrakhan
Richard Cohen, who is not one of my favorite news analysts, had an important article at the Washington Post last week on Obama’s minister and spiritual advisor.
Obama’s Farrakhan Test
washingtonpost.com readers have posted 823 comments about this item.
WHO’S BLOGGING
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, January 15, 2008; Page A13Barack Obama is a member of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Its minister, and Obama’s spiritual adviser, is the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In 1982, the church launched Trumpet Newsmagazine; Wright’s daughters serve as publisher and executive editor. Every year, the magazine makes awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to a man it said “truly epitomized greatness.” That man is Louis Farrakhan.
Maybe for Wright and some others, Farrakhan “epitomized greatness.” For most Americans, though, Farrakhan epitomizes racism, particularly in the form of anti-Semitism. Over the years, he has compiled an awesome record of offensive statements, even denigrating the Holocaust by falsely attributing it to Jewish cooperation with Hitler — “They helped him get the Third Reich on the road.” His history is a rancid stew of lies.
It’s important to state right off that nothing in Obama’s record suggests he harbors anti-Semitic views or agrees with Wright when it comes to Farrakhan. Instead, as Obama’s top campaign aide, David Axelrod, points out, Obama often has said that he and his minister sometimes disagree. Farrakhan, Axelrod told me, is one of those instances.
Fine. But where I differ with Axelrod and, I assume, Obama is that praise for an anti-Semitic demagogue is not a minor difference or an intrachurch issue. The Obama camp takes the view that its candidate, now that he has been told about the award, is under no obligation to speak out on the Farrakhan matter. It was not Obama’s church that made the award but a magazine. This is a distinction without much of a difference. And given who the parishioner is, the obligation to speak out is all the greater. He could be the next American president. Where is his sense of outrage?
Any praise of Farrakhan heightens the prestige of the leader of the Nation of Islam. For good reasons and bad, he is already admired in portions of the black community, sometimes for his efforts to rehabilitate criminals. His anti-Semitism is either not considered relevant or is shared, particularly his false insistence that Jews have played an inordinate role in victimizing African Americans.
In this, Farrakhan stands history on its head. It was Jews who disproportionately marched for civil rights and, in Mississippi, died for that cause. Farrakhan and, in effect, Wright, despoil the graves of Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and, of course, their black colleague James Chaney.
I can even see how someone, maybe even Obama, could dismiss Farrakhan as a pest, a silly man pushing a silly cause that poses no real threat to the Jewish community. Still, history tells us that anti-Semitism is not to be trifled with. It is a botulism of the mind.
The Obama and Clinton campaigns are involved in a tasteless tussle over the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. What is clear from rereading King’s celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech of Aug. 28, 1963, is how inclusive that dream was — “all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ”
This, though, is not Farrakhan’s dream. He has vilified whites and singled out Jews to blame for crimes large and small, either committed by others as well or not at all. (A dominant role in the slave trade, for instance.) He has talked of Jewish conspiracies to set a media line for the whole nation. He has reviled Jews in a manner that brings Hitler to mind.
And yet Wright heaped praise on Farrakhan. According to Trumpet, he applauded his “depth of analysis when it comes to the racial ills of this nation.” He praised “his integrity and honesty.” He called him “an unforgettable force, a catalyst for change and a religious leader who is sincere about his faith and his purpose.” These are the words of a man who prayed with Obama just before the Illinois senator announced his run for the presidency. Will he pray with him just before his inaugural?
I don’t for a moment think that Obama shares Wright’s views on Farrakhan. But the rap on Obama is that he is a fog of a man. We know little about him, and, for all my admiration of him, I wonder about his mettle. The New York Times recently reported on Obama’s penchant while serving in the Illinois legislature for merely voting “present” when faced with some tough issues. Farrakhan, in a strictly political sense, may be a tough issue for him. This time, though, “present” will not do.
cohenr@washpost.com
Barack Obama came out almost immediately issued a statement:
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“I decry racism and anti-Semitism in every form and strongly condemn the anti-Semitic statements made by Minister Farrakhan. I assume that Trumpet Magazine made its own decision to honor Farrakhan based on his efforts to rehabilitate ex-offenders, but it is not a decision with which I agree.”
Captain’s Quarters thinks this is guilt by association and a tempest in a teapot. Many of his readers disagree. I do too. According to a NYT’s article on Obama’s Church:
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On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later he wrote that the attacks had proved that “people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West went on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.”
The apparent “Afrocentrism of Reverend Wright would seems worrisome to say the least. As for Israel, apparently the good Reverend thinks it belongs in the same category as genocidal Sudan.
This political “catechism” is certainly not reassuring, as are his “10 Facts“. On the contrary, it suggests someone for whom “Black Liberation Theology” and third-worldism, and anti-Americanism blend so effortlessly together that honoring a Black Muslim makes “ecumenical” sense. If the thought of Theresa Heinz in the White House, inviting all her PCP2 guests, made me nervous, the thought of someone who has attended this man’s church for 20 years as president makes me even more nervous.
The relationship of Minister Wright — Obama’s minister for 20 years, his acknowledged spiritual mentor — is much to close to Trumpet Magazine both personally (his daughter is the editor, he writes for it constantly) and ideologically (anti-Western, anti-Zionist, anti-globalization) for him to disassociate himself from this without saying something about Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. whose name graces the award given to Farrakhan.
Apocalyptic Islam: Paul Landau explores the unspeakable
This is a topic I don’t often blog on, although I should. It’s the core of my own academic work, but I’ve chosen to focus on the media at the Augean Stables. Nonetheless, it’s important to keep in mind that one of the major functions of the MSM in the 21st century is to keep from the public awareness of the nature of the challenge. Islamic apocalyptic millennial expectations are at the heart of both the Shi’i (Khoumeini, 1979/1400) and Sunni (Bin Laden, 1989) jihadi awakening.
If you don’t know about this dimension of the problem, you’re much more likely to fall prey to PCP and LCE… which is why the guardians of the public sphere — academics and media talking heads — don’t like to bring it up much.
Hamas and Islamic Millenarianism: What the West Doesn’t Recognize
Paul Landau | Bio 08 Jan 2008
Some 20 years after its founding, the Palestinian organization Hamas remains little understood in the West. Although it is invoked nearly daily in the media, it has been the subject of only a very small number of serious studies. The most common error made by observers in considering contemporary Islamist movements — and notably, Hamas — is that of attempting to grasp them in terms of concepts and modes of thought that are proper to the West. Most western analyses of the phenomenon of Islamism tend to underestimate or even obscure a fundamental element that is common to all the various Islamist currents and organizations: namely, the role of specifically Muslim religious beliefs and, more precisely, of Islamic eschatology.
Thus in his book “Jihad,” a well-known French expert of Islamism like Gilles Kepel can explain Iran’s Islamic revolution of 1979 as the result of an “alliance of the pious bourgeoisie and the poor urban youth.” In similar fashion, numerous journalists continue to describe the perpetrators of suicide attacks — both Palestinians and others — as economically disadvantaged and driven by “desperation,” even though all the research conducted on the subject demonstrates that such a Marxist-tinged sociological interpretation does not reflect the reality.
It is impossible to understand the success enjoyed by Hamas, notably since the Palestinian elections nearly two years ago, and the persistence of Islamism in general — the decline or even proximate demise of which is regularly announced by Western observers — if one fails to take into account the beliefs held by the members of Islamist movements themselves or if one diminishes their importance: dismissing them, for instance, as medieval gibberish devoid of any concrete significance.
We need to listen to what the Islamists say and appreciate the importance of their discourse if we are going to be able to grasp their motivations and strategies. It is symptomatic in this regard that the Western media, which regularly touch upon the rivalry between Fatah and Hamas in covering events in the Middle East, nonetheless almost never mention the charter of the Palestinian Islamist movement.
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Eschatology and the Conflict Between Islam and the West
One of the most essential — and most little-known — aspects of contemporary Islamism is the role of eschatological or millenarian beliefs within it. This millenarian dimension of Islam has often been minimized by commentators, sometimes for polemical reasons: Christianity is presented as the only religion that is oriented toward the beyond, whereas Islam is supposed to be characterized by strictly this-worldly preoccupations.
This forgotten dimension of the Islamist phenomenon is key to understanding the current resurgence of a triumphalist Islam, since it cuts across all the divisions within the Muslim world: between Sunnism and Shiism, between traditional Islam and contemporary Islamism. As the French historian Pierre Lory explained in a recent lecture at the Sorbonne, “Eschatology represents one of the fundamental traits of the Muslim religion. The imminence of the end of time and of the final judgment is one of the oldest and most constant Quranic themes and is found throughout the sacred text of Islam.” Inasmuch as Muhammad is the last prophet (bearing the “seal of prophecy”), his advent inaugurates the last period of universal history: i.e. the eschatological period.
In his collection of Hadith titled “The Major Signs of the End of the World from the Prophet to the Return of Jesus,” Abdallah al-Hajjaj cites a saying of the prophet, who, raising his hand, is supposed to have affirmed that his mission and the final hour were as close as his middle and index fingers. This belief in the imminence of the end of time is a fundamental aspect of the contemporary Islamic reawakening, in both its peaceful and belligerent forms.
It is sometimes suggested that only the Shia version of Islam assigns importance to eschatological considerations, and it is true that the motif of the return of the hidden Imam, the central element of Shia belief, lends itself especially easily to millenarian interpretations. Since Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979, millenarian aspirations have been at the center of developments in the Shia Muslim world. The belief in the imminence of the Final Judgment helps to explain both the suicidal forms of behavior that proliferated during the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s and the current attitude of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
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A Millenarian and Redemptive Anti-Semitism
Hamas is a radical Islamic movement whose worldview is marked by an Islamic eschatology in which the Jews occupy a central place. Its apocalyptic vision of a final confrontation with Israel excludes every possibility of coexistence or “moderation.” This vision is identical with that of the most radical Jihadist movements.
Far from being merely an epiphenomenon, the anti-Semitism of Hamas constitutes the very core of its political-religious doctrine. The hatred of Jews expressed in the Hamas Charter and conveyed in the discourse of its officials is not simply a religious anti-Judaism or an imported anti-Semitism of European origins. It is, as the French scholar of anti-Semitism Pierre-André Taguieff has put it in his book “La nouvelle judéophobie,” a “millenarian and redemptive anti-Semitism.” Taguieff compares radical Islamic Judeophobia — in terms of which “the Muslim world can only be saved by the extermination of the Jews” — to the racist anti-Semitism of Hitler.
It is troubling to note, as Richard Landes has recently pointed out, that the West, far from condemning the apocalyptic discourse of Hamas, actually encourages it. Such an attitude is undoubtedly to be explained by the fact that certain European leaders and diplomats share the convictions of Hamas officials concerning the imminent disappearance of Israel.
Paul Landau is the author of the recent study of Tariq Ramadan and the Muslim Brotherhood “Le sabre et le Coran” (Editions du Rocher, 2005). The above article was translated from French by John Rosenthal.
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