"Always be ready to speak your mind and a base man will avoid you." "Opposition is True Friendship." -William Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1796
The Augean Stables and The Second Draft
This blog takes its name from the Fifth Labor of Herakles, to clean the stables of Augeas, where thousands of cattle had left so much un-cleaned dung that the whole Peloponnesus smelled of it. At Second Draft, our discovery of both Pallywood and the Al-Durah Affair have led us to realize that — at least where the Arab-Israeli conflict is concerned — our MSM represent a veritable Augean Stables of accumulated misreporting. We dedicate this weblog to exploring the many aspects of our MSM’s problem, not only those concerned with the Middle East problem, but more broadly with the many ways in which our media’s errors and our media’s extraordinary resistance to admitting their errors, have contributed and continue to contribute to the serious problems that plague our globe in this young 21st century.
I have a friend who thinks the JPost keeps Derfner on as a columnist is because they satifsy two needs at once: they get a “left-wing” columnist and comic relief. I admit that Derfner’s writing provides a fair amount of amusement, and I’ve long ceased to take him seriously. (He did do a good piece on a Druze honor-killing in 2005.) Now he surpasses himself in combining the lamest kind of cognitive egocentrism which he then presents as a courageous challenge to the meanest taboos of Israeli society. (HT:ALG)
There’s a question we Israelis won’t ask ourselves about the Palestinians, especially not about Gaza. The question is taboo. Not only won’t anyone ask it out loud, but very, very few people will dare ask it in the privacy of their own minds.
However, I think it’s time we start asking it, privately and in public. If we don’t, I think there’s going to be Operation Cast Lead II, then Operation Cast Lead III, and each one is going to be worse than the last, and the consequences for Palestinians and Israelis are going to be unimaginable.
The question we have to ask ourselves is this: If anybody treated us like we’re treating the people in Gaza, what would we do?
We don’t want to go there, do we? And because we don’t, we make it our business not to see, hear or think about how, indeed, we are treating the people in Gaza.
I’ll let either masochists or humorists continue to read his article at the JPost site. I just have two major comments to make on his premise.
1) If we behaved towards other people the way that the Palestinians under the benighted leadership of Hamas and Fatah have behaved towards us, there would be no end to the Israelis — Derfner included — who would say we were getting what we deserved. (They say it anyway.)
(The idea that Israeli treatment is the cause of the Palestinians’ behavior, that somehow we need to understand their hatred and violence as a direct function of our deeds [rather than mere existence], is a nice illustration of masochistic omnipotence syndrome. We can change it all by changing our behavior.)
2) We know how Jews have behaved with those who treat them badly. Without sovereignty they were largely meek and mild; and when they did fight back (e.g., the Warsaw Ghetto) against things far more vicious than anything Israel has ever done to the Palestinians, they never targeted German civilians no matter how weak and desperate they were. Even Sharon, from a position of overwhelming superiority of force, when he took over at the onset of the second intifada and its staggering wave of suicide attacks on civilians, waited two years before striking back.
To make this comparison is already to misunderstand profoundly. To think it’s a brave and penetrating mental exercise suggests that my friend’s theory may well be right: the man is a (bad) joke… and one that doesn’t begin to fathom his own people, even himself. (As commenter 417 put it: “You can be compassionate without being stupid.”) Where’s the still-living Palestinian Derfner? Too smart to open his or her mouth?
In response to one of my posts a medievalist colleague of mine posted a comment here and a thread on his own site in which he compared the situation in Ireland with that in Israel.
I confess that I’m not sure how he got from my post, on the cognitive dissonance that results from trying to pressure the Palestinians to behave rationally and, for example, during Operation Cast Lead, stop bombing Israel in order to stop the damage to their own people’s lives and infrastructure, to “Who is to blame in the Israel-Palestine [sic] Debate?,” but it certainly gave him the occasion to make a series of comparisons between the conflict in the Middle East and that in Ireland. I confess to feeling that his analogies were defective throughout, but didn’t quite know how to respond substantively.
One of my regular and valued commenters here at the site responded with an excellent essay on the historical differences which, I think, illustrates just how ill-informed the comparison. With his permission, I republish it here with some short comments of my own [in italics].
Historian Fails History Test
Ray from Seattle:
When I read comments like Paul Halsall’s, I am incredulous. How can any objective person possibly compare the Arab/Israeli situation to Ireland’s?
Protestants ruled the Catholic majority in Ireland for hundreds of years before the “troubles” - which were really a recent flareup in the ongoing struggle by the natives of Ireland over several centuries to divorce themselves of British rule and gain independence. The modern troubles are just another chapter in that long saga of Britain’s colonialism and its ultimate decline.
The state of Israel was created by deliberation of the UN, including all of the new Arab states whose membership required their legal commitment to honor all agreements reached by that body. It concerned the fair assignment of sovereignty over the stateless territory of Palestine - according to majority populations in those areas of the two main ethnic / religious groups living there. It was a generous attempt by the democracies that won WWII to avoid further war and genocide by fair and legally enforceable deliberation and negotiation of opposing interests as judged by that world body of nations. (more…)
A provocative, well-written and thoughtful essay by Benjamin Kertsein on Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech with some very sharp perceptions on the human condition and the necessary limits of messianism. Comments welcome. HT/oao (who’s not commenting much these days here)
There is a fairly well-known phenomenon among alcoholics referred to as the “moment of clarity.” It is the momentary lifting of the haze of intoxication and denial, giving the drinker a sudden and often shattering insight into the stark reality of their situation. There is a strong possibility that President Obama’s December 9 Nobel Prize acceptance speech has given us a glimpse into a remarkable and somewhat unprecedented variation on this phenomenon: a political moment of clarity — one taking place, or at least publicly announced, on a global stage.
It must be said at the outset that the speech was also unprecedented in the context of Obama and the Obama phenomenon. It was both the first time Obama has said anything of substance, and certainly the first time he has displayed anything resembling political courage. It should also be noted that much of the speech was all but guaranteed to alienate both the president’s far-left base (already incensed by his decision to expand the war in Afghanistan) and his bien-pensant Scandinavian hosts.
Indeed, a great many of Obama’s greatest admirers consider the war on terror to be a malicious imperial project whose purpose is to enforce American hegemony on the world. Obama, however, referred to Afghanistan, now once again the major front in that war, with refreshing accuracy as “a conflict that America did not seek,” and “an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.” He also emphasized that “I — like any head of state — reserve the right to act unilaterally if necessary to defend my nation.” For a president who has often seemed disturbingly addicted to irrational adulation, this willingness to invite derision deserves, at the very least, some measured praise.
More tellingly, Obama’s speech also included several statements that cannot be described as anything other than thinly disguised restatements of the Bush Doctrine. Assertions like “as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation…. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world,” represent precisely the kind of unnuanced moral absolutism that the Bush Doctrine’s critics – including Obama himself – explicitly denounced and rejected.
Robert Wright is an interesting case study the mixture of LCE (liberal cognitive egocentrism) combined with MOS (masochistic omnipotence syndrome). After the collapse of Camp David, when the progressive left should have been begging the pardon of the Israelis for having urged them to take enormous risks with Arafat for the sake of a peace they were sure would come, Wright came out with a ringing defense of Arafat (elaborating on the work of Malley and Falk[!]), that embodies for me the moral failure of the left in the period after 2000.
Now this is perhaps related to his error-ridden work on the important issues of game theory and morality — The Logic of Non-Zero — in which he reads the record backwards and comes up with a model of inevitablility for the victory of positive-sum relations. It’s as if LCE were a part of our genetic make-up, and therefore, we begin assuming everyone’s on that page.
Let’s look at how he handles the case of Major Hasan and the Fort Hood massacre.
IN the case of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and the Fort Hood massacre, the verdict has come in. The liberal news media have been found guilty — by the conservative news media — of coddling Major Hasan’s religion, Islam.
Liberals, according to the columnist Charles Krauthammer, wanted to medicalize Major Hasan’s crime — call it an act of insanity rather than of terrorism. They worked overtime, Mr. Krauthammer said on Fox News, to “avoid any implication that there was any connection between his Islamist beliefs … and his actions.” The columnist Jonah Goldberg agrees. Admit it, he wrote in The Los Angeles Times, Major Hasan is “a Muslim fanatic, motivated by other Muslim fanatics.”
The good news for Mr. Krauthammer and Mr. Goldberg is that there is truth in their indictment. The bad news is that their case against the left-wing news media is the case against right-wing foreign policy. Seeing the Fort Hood shooting as an act of Islamist terrorism is the first step toward seeing how misguided a hawkish approach to fighting terrorism has been.
The American right and left reacted to 9/11 differently. Their respective responses were, to oversimplify a bit: “kill the terrorists” and “kill the terrorism meme.”
I would have put it very differently. Some people (I won’t call them the “right”) said, “What’s wrong with these people that they hate us so?” The others (I won’t call them “left”) said, “What’s wrong with us that they hate us so?”
Conservatives backed war in Iraq, and they’re now backing an escalation of the war in Afghanistan. Liberals (at least, dovish liberals) have warned in both cases that killing terrorists is counterproductive if in the process you create even more terrorists; the object of the game isn’t to wipe out every last Islamist radical but rather to contain the virus of Islamist radicalism.
Interesting. Would be nice to have some references to how this is an active campaign to strike at the terrorist meme (the closest I could find was this from 2004), rather than mere appeasement, which is what the argument that you can’t fight back lest you anger them produces most often. (more…)
I have yet to fisk Frank Rich, partly because he rarely deals with an issue in which I have some expertise, partly because, like Daniel Pipes, he so thoroughly links his comments to other literature, that I have not had the time or the energy to look them all up. But Rich is a former classmate (Harvard ‘71), and I’m on a class listserv where I posted David Brooks’ criticism of the psychological school’s approach to Major Hasan’s killing spree, and several classmates answered. So when Rich weighed in on the subject, I decided to call up all his links, read the material, and respond.
The result is long and sometimes circuitous. At times, following his logic is like trying to deal with a bucking bronco: easier to watch than to ride. But in the end, I think what a close look at how Rich dealt with problem reveals, is how bereft of serious thinking even the most intelligent and apparently well-read among the self-styled “liberal left” are on the subject of Islam and its extremist manifestations, and to what lengths they will go to belittle people who try to think clearly on the matter.
Nietzsche once likened serious thinking to diving into an icy river and grasping a stone lying at the bottom. Rich won’t get his feet wet, but he mocks those of us who are soaking from head to toe.
THE dead at Fort Hood had not even been laid to rest when their massacre became yet another political battle cry for the self-proclaimed patriots of the American right.
It also became a non-battle cry for the self-proclaimed progressives of the left, who far preferred the psychologization of the event — “pre-proxy-post-traumatic stress syndrome” — to any discussion of the problem with Islam. Will Rich have the courage to address the problem? Or will he just bash the “right”?
Their verdict was unambiguous: Maj. Nidal Malikan, an American-born psychiatrist of Palestinian parentage who sent e-mail to a radical imam, was a terrorist. And he did not act alone.
“Terrorist,” I think it’s hard to argue against. Did not act alone? That’s another matter. As for “unambiguous,” does Rich mean “unanimous”? I don’t know too many people who thought he acted in concert with anyone.
Indeed, the near-unanimous verdict was that he was a loner. If there’s any support group here, it’s some of the more radical members of his mosque, like Duane. So what does Rich mean here, other than suggesting that the “self-proclaimed patriots of the right” are conspiracy theorists? (Unlike the truthers who have come up with the scenario whereby Hasan’s been framed.)
His co-conspirators included our military brass, the Defense Department, the F.B.I., the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Joint Terrorism Task Force and, of course, the liberal media and the Obama administration. All these institutions had failed to heed the warning signs raised by Hasan’s behavior and activities because they are blinded by political correctness toward Muslims, too eager to portray criminals as sympathetic victims of social injustice, and too cowardly to call out evil when it strikes 42 innocents in cold blood.
Oh, now I get it. Rich means that the vast range of responsible figures, hands tied by a political correctness that he, among others, plays a major role in enforcing, are, in the minds of the “right,” collaborators. Is this what, “didn’t act alone,” means? I thought it meant, “had co-conspirators.” Rich takes it to mean “enablers.” Intellectual integrity is not the first word that comes to mind here.
Is this clearly sarcastic summary of the “self-proclaimed patriots of the American right” suggesting that there’s no problem here with political correctness? Does it not matter that our intelligence services can’t talk about “honor-shame” culture because some people — Rich? — think it’s racist as Edward Said so urgently insisted? Does it matter that Hasan’s multiple flags never quite tripped a switch somewhere? Does it matter that all those doctors who heard his alarming presentation were too embarrassed to say, “something’s wrong?” (more…)
Helena Cobban, who to her pacifist credit, expressed deep disapproval of Marc Garlasco’s unsavory hobby, despite the fact that she is on the board of HRW, and shares their attitude towards Israel, here gives us a fine example of how the “human rights” community think. It’s a stunning ride through the wild side of liberal cognitive egocentrism, the epistemological priority of the other, and masochistic omnipotence syndrome weaponized against those who dare defend themselves against sub-altern aggression. An excellent guide to what ails our chattering classes, including their chattering tone of self-confidence.
Michael Goldfarb, who was the deputy communications director for John McCain’s campaign, worked for a while in that temple of neoconservative organizing, the Project for a New American Century, and is a kind of scuzzy attack-dog for the pro-settler hard right, has now decided to come after–poor little moi.
(Yay! I made the big leagues of this guy’s ‘enemies’ list’! Oops, suppress that childish thought, Helena.)
HT to Richard Silverstein, co-rabbi of our “off-broadway” bloggers’ panel at J Street, next Monday noon-time, for having read Michael Goldfarb’s blog so the rest of us don’t have to…
For those who don’t know, “the rest of us” means, it’s, in Amira Hass’ proud phrasing, the global hamoulah [clan]” of leftists/progressives who know they’re at the cutting edge of global morality, leaders of the fight for a truly just and peaceful world, by identifying with the oppressed. And they’ve gathered, somewhat comically, at the JStreet conference in force. (more…)
Richard Goldstone has an op-ed in the NYT today. It is most striking because it is so transparently misleading. Indeed, it’s just the kind of misinformation that fisking was invented to counter. So I couldn’t help doing so.
Goldstone clearly counts on addressing a sympathetic audience ignorant of the facts — a choir. I address those readers of the news who still want to be part of a “reality-based” community, for whom evidence must be addressed, analyzed, and assessed. You make up your mind if Judge Goldstone is an honest, fair-minded man, or someone who, for whatever mysterious reason, is in thrall to a narrative he must serve, regardless of the evidence.
By RICHARD GOLDSTONE
I ACCEPTED with hesitation my United Nations mandate to investigate alleged violations of the laws of war and international human rights during Israel’s three-week war in Gaza last winter. The issue is deeply charged and politically loaded. I accepted because the mandate of the mission was to look at all parties: Israel; Hamas, which controls Gaza; and other armed Palestinian groups.
This is astonishing. Mary Robinson — the presiding genius of Durban I — rejected it because the mandate was only to investigate Israel, tainted from the beginning. Goldstone requested, in vain, that the mandate be widened. For him to pretend that the mandate was to investigate all groups when it never was, whether he threw in some comments on Hamas or not, assumes a pervasive illiteracy among his audience — the readers of the NYT.
I accepted because my fellow commissioners are professionals committed to an objective, fact-based investigation.
The case against the composition of his committee — not one person sympathetic to Israel, at least one, Christine Chinkin, openly hostile — has led two groups of lawyers, in England and in Canada, to demand Chinkin’s disqualification since she had already pronounced herself — long before she saw any real evidence — on Israel’s guilt. Goldstone, even as he tossed out the petition on a subtle technicality, admitted that Chinkin’s case was borderline and the report reconfirms her prejudice. So whence comes this bland denial?
But above all, I accepted because I believe deeply in the rule of law and the laws of war, and the principle that in armed conflict civilians should to the greatest extent possible be protected from harm.
I’ve posted severalpieces on the latest dust-up between HRW and NGO Monitor recently, that raise fundamental questions about both the credibility of the “human rights” NGOs, but also their disturbing relationship to the MSNM, especially in their way of viewing the world (what the Germans call Weltanschauung). Now Nelson (Europundit) has offered an essay that gets at the core of the problem in a way I’ve only hinted at. Below, his essay. My notes — and others who comment here — to follow.
Nobody trusts the government. The politicians are corrupt. The government is always lying to the people. It works against the people’s true interests and only promotes the selfish interests of its own members and their friends. Those in power invent scary threats to distract the public’s attention from their own wrongdoings.
No, I’m not talking about the US. Well, not exclusively at least. Everything I’ve just said has been repeated day in day out, for years and decades, by the papers and the electronic media wherever there’s anything resembling a free press. That’s the MSM’s real message in all democratic nations. Whatever else they talk about is secondary.
Is it true? Often it is. Is it the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Each one of us can judge by him or herself. And, as we have been doing so collectively for some time, the MSM has been losing most reliability it might once have had, to the point that, in countries like the US, it is not only as little trusted as the government and the politicians themselves, but it’s clearly seen as just another partisan political player.
That’s, however, quite a small consolation, because the damage they, the MSM, could do has already been done and, even without being trusted, they can go on doing it. What’s exactly this damage? The corrosion and eventual destruction of public trust. No open society can work without it and, though the government and all state institutions must always be closely watched, it works at its very best when the people’s default attitude towards these is one of conditional trust, not one of perpetual mistrust.
I’ve dealt with pomo before here, and will again. Meantime, one of the saner observers of the madness that pomo can induce in journalists (and diplomats), Barry Rubin, has an interesting column on the subject.
A reporter just wrote me a letter that contains a single sentence which I think reflects on why the Western world is in such trouble today. After understandably discussing such real problems of reporting as short deadlines, complex issues, and the duty of the reporter to report what people say, the letter concludes with this sentence:
“And when it comes to the Middle East, one man’s [obscenity deleted] is another man’s truth.”
Woe to us that a journalist thinks this way. Of course, this is very similar to the older version that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.
Recently, I heard that latter one from the Danish ambassador to the Council of Europe who said that Hamas and Hizballah were like the Danish resistance in World War Two. I replied, among other things, that I don’t remember the Danish or other World War Two European resistance movements bombing German kindergartens and glorying in getting Danish civilians killed as human shields.
I also don’t think that the Danes and other European resistance movements were attempting to commit genocide on the Germans. I do believe it was the other way around.
(PS: More Danes fought in the German army than in the Resistance, and that was true of other countries as well. Forgive me for remembering who was the main victim of terrorism and “freedom fighter” terrorists then and today. But I digress)
That a European country—and one of the more astute ones, to make matters worse–is represented by someone like that says something pretty sad about the state of the world today.
and finishes with a hilarious (to me at least) thought experiment: (more…)
In my own research I have run across a feminist claim that we should see honor-killings as part of continuum of domestic violence, little different from the assaults on women that take place in western countries (and most especially in the USA). Phyllis Chesler has done yeoman work in this area, making it clear how vast a gulf separates the culture of the US, and those in which parents feel driven by community pressures to kill their daughters for the sake of family honor.
David Thompson, whose critique of post-modernism I have highlighted and commented on here has a new post on the strange world of feminist discourse that sheds light on this effort at moral equivalence. It chronicles the astonishing misrepresentations that come from a radical political agenda disguised as human rights talk.
I’ve previouslynoted the tendency of some academic activists to indulge in wild overstatement, not least those entranced by the Holy Trinity of race, class and gender. As, for instance, when Barbara Barnett, a product of Duke’s infamous English department, claimed that, “20%–25% of college students report that they have experienced a rape or attempted rape.” Barnett’s assertions were subsequently debunked by KC Johnson:
Barnett… thereby [suggests] that college campuses have a rate of sexual assault around 2.5 times higher than the rate of sexual assault, murder, armed robbery and assault combined in Detroit, the U.S. city with the highest murder rate. For those in the reality-based community, FBI figures provide a counterweight to Barnett’s theories: not 20%-25% but instead around .03% of students are victims of rape while in college. Duke’s 2000-2006 figures, which use a much broader reporting standard than the FBI database, indicate that 0.2% of Duke students “report that they have experienced a rape or attempted rape.”
A friend of mine who lives on the West coast remembers a trip I made out there in early 2002. “All you could say was ‘Where’s the outrage?’” And, of course, I was talking about the suicide terror campaign against Israel and the eery silence, not only from the “left” — which, it turns out, was celebrating the terrorists — but the liberals, the people who should have been most indignant at the appalling sight of a culture that does blood sacrifices of its own youth in order to act on its hatreds. What I eventually learned was that the they had been taken in by the “yes it’s indefensible… but…” position.
All told, I became rapidly convinced over the course of the early years of the aughts (’00s) that the year 2000 — from Camp David’s failure in August to the outbreak of the Intifada in October, marks a major failure of the modern, liberal world. At that point, having urged Israel to make massive substantive concessions on the promise of peace — letting Arafat back in, giving him a free hand to arm his “police” force, to control his own media and educational systems — in exchange for promises of recognition and commitment to making peace. When Arafat turned down the offers of Camp David, and later when he revelled in the violence of the Intifada, that was a moment where the liberal left, if it believed in its values of positive-sum negotiation, mutuality and peace, should have turned to Israel and apologized for having urged such a dangerous, even suicidal “peace process” on them.
Instead, it turned against Israel and made Arafat and his suicide-bombing Palestinian Jihadis the heroes of resistance against the Israelis. If the Palestinians hated Israel so, it must be because the Israelis have deprived them of hope. How could it be their fault? How could we hold them responsible for their hatreds? Wouldn’t that be “blaming the victim?”
Now, from the Times of London, an essay by Oliver Kamm examines the role of a certain kind of identity politics associated with authoritarian (if not fascist) communities who are given more than a free ride.
Liberal over-sensitivity to the beliefs of others is undermining freedom of speech, so giving reactionaries an easy ride
I attended an academic conference in late 1989 on the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Martin Jacques, editor of the now-defunct journal Marxism Today, put a brave face on the rejection of the ideals he espoused. He argued that these revolutions would expand the variety of left-wing views in Western Europe.
I recall arguing with him from the floor that the opposite was true. Of the two principal left-wing traditions in Europe, insurrectionary socialism and pro-Western social democracy, only the second retained credibility.
It is obvious now that we were both wrong. The revolutionary Left has made fitfully fruitful tactical alliances, such as the bleakly comic amalgam of Leninists and Islamists who formed and then rent apart George Galloway’s Respect party. But in its own name it remains a minuscule if variegated sect.
Actually, in retrospect, the radical left, groups like International A.N.S.W.E.R., was saved by anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism. (more…)
The issue of post-modernism has arisen a number of times at the blog (most recently here), and since I’ve been meaning to put up David Thompson’s conversation with PoMo critic Stephen Hicks for some time, I decided now might be propitious. For the sake of introduction (and since I find some valuable items in the post-modern paradigm), let me lay out the major claims — and strengths — of post-modernism. My criticism will accompany the rather ample discussion of Thompson and Hicks.
Post-modernism, as I understand it, represents at once a disillusionment with the failure of the “modern” project — science, technology, the superiority of the modern West — especially in the wake of World War II. No more optimism that the scientific method will produce the solutions to all our problems. At the same time, pomo was a declaration of independence from the demands of the modern, scientific epistemologies, from the demands normally made on exegetical specialists whose job, in every culture, is to interpret the world all about. This meant, above all, probing and, if necessary, stabbing texts in order to “deconstruct” them, to identify their silences and bring out what discourses the text deliberately concealed.
Derrida’s notion of différance, which is a double-pun (differ and defer) and a play on the discontinuity of oral and written media (you can’t hear the difference with “difference”) has much to offer here, especially the notion that a text’s meaning is constantly deferred into an unending future, that the passage of time inevitably reveals new facets of the text’s import. Given that Western culture is profoundly marked by apocalyptic hopes, prophecies, and “readings”, and that time consistently strikes them down and raises them up, the discovery of such a notion in Western culture may not be so surprising. But it is valuable in injecting a little modesty in the otherwise all-too frequent tendency of exegetes to insist they have the meaning.
The rejection of the “objective” is a reasonable linguistic move: language cannot possibly be transparent on reality, especially the reality of human experiences. Even if something “really did happen,” there’s no way to reduce it to verbal formulae, no way for verbal formulae to somehow lock on to the objective reality at which it points. Epistemologically, it’s possible to push it all the way to radical doubt — we can’t know what we can’t know.
One of the more interesting directions pomo thought takes this axiomatic relativism, is the rejection of the “Grand” or “Meta-Narrative,” the all-encompassing, totalistic narrative that includes, gives order and priority in meaning to the multiplicity of “little narratives” that emerge from any event. Pomos have declared the “death” of the Meta-narrative, apparently feeling that having slain the reigning Meta-Narrative (modern, scientific objectivity), they would not allow a new one to gain hegemony.
All of these ideas are interesting and potentially enormously fruitful. The danger I find most pervasive though, is in the lack of understanding and appreciation that post-modernists have for their exegetical freedom. Not realizing that in most societies in most parts of the world for most of history no one, not even the most privileged figures had anything remotely resembling their freedom to interpret and criticize and even reinvent the meaning of the culture’s major texts. As a result, they tend to abuse their freedom, decoupling the key pair of freedom and discipline for an extraordinarily self-indulgent display of solepsistic “creations.”
Indeed, in their eagerness to flaunt their freedom, the unconsciously replicate the ancestors they thought they had slain, those Meta-Narrative driven figures like Hegel and Vico, who saw in history the inexorable march of freedom. And yet, unlike earlier heroes in the heroic narrative — Washington’s refusal to become king comes to mind — they fail to appreciate either the gift they’ve inherited, or the audience to which they, as the culture’s interpreters, are responsible. Alas for us.
“In politicized forms, then, postmodernists will behave like the stereotypical unscrupulous lawyer trying to win the case: truth and justice aren’t the point; instead using any rhetorical tool or trick that works is the point. Sometimes contradictory lines of argument work. Sometimes your audience’s desire to belong to the in-group can be played upon. Sometimes appearing absolutely authoritative works to camouflage a weak case. Sometimes condescension works.”
Dr Stephen Hicks is Professor of Philosophy and Executive Director of the Centre for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford College, Illinois. He is co-editor with David Kelley of Readings for Logical Analysis (W. W. Norton, 1998), and has published in academic journals as well as The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun, and Reader’s Digest. His book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault was published in 2004 by Scholargy Publishing and is now in its eighth printing. He is the author and narrator of a DVD documentary entitled Nietzsche and the Nazis, which was published in 2006 by Ockham’s Razor Publishing.
DT: In an exchange with Ophelia Benson, I mentioned Explaining Postmodernism and suggested one of the book’s main themes is that postmodernism marks a crisis of faith and a retreat from reality among the academic left. Is that a fair, if crude, summary?
SH: It is striking that the major postmodernists - Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Richard Rorty - are of the far left politically. And it is striking that all four are Philosophy Ph.D.s who reached deeply skeptical conclusions about our ability to come to know reality. So one of my four theses about postmodernism is that it develops from a double crisis - a crisis within philosophy about knowledge and a crisis within left politics about socialism.
In millennial studies jargon that’s cogntive dissonance at recognizing (and denying) the failure of one’s outrageously hopeful expectations, at the horror of witnessing the God that failed.
Here, rather than acknowledge that the failure of expectations was due to a misreading of human nature, we have people throwing out the very effort to accurately read the world of humans.
Regular and valued commenter at this blog, Joanne, asks an agonizing question:
The simple story that the Jews were largely (though not completely) European newcomers to a land that was undeveloped but still with a people there, a land that had belonged to the Jews only in the distant past, and remained Jewish only in the imagination of the Jews…. Well, it’s not a syllogism I want to believe. But it’s one that’s hard to argue against when I’m talking to non-Jews, especially when one doesn’t have hard numbers at hand about population statistics.
To one friend who said that the Palestinians got a raw deal, I tried to explain that it was made gratuitously “raw” when the British lopped off 85% of Palestine, an area that, together with their part of the remainder, would have given the “Palestinians” the lion’s share. The argument simply did not register.
It’s frustrating: I sense that there were so many aspects of the reality back then that have since been lost. But I don’t know how decisive those aspects really are. In other words, I want the Jews to have been in the right, but I’m not totally sure we were.
There are many ways to respond to this, and I welcome further comments. But here’s my immediate response.
There are 10 million people now living rather well in a territory that once held less than a million who had no sovereignty and the vast majority of whom lived at the very margin of subsistence. There was, therefore, room for all, and sovereignty for those who wanted it.
The Jews came, not as the European colonialists in other parts of the world, after conquest, but without warfare, by offering their neighbors advantages that many appreciated. This included the large number of Arab immigrants to Palestine during the first half of the 20th century, and those who took the side of the Jews in the war of Independence.
Only in a remorselessly zero-sum universe are the Jews interlopers. As one Arab rioter in 1936 responded, when asked by the Peel Commission why the Arabs rioted against the Jews, when the Jews had so obviously improved the economic situation for everyone:
“You say we are better off: you say my house has been enriched by the strangers who have entered it. But it is my house, and I did not invite the strangers in, or ask them to enrich it, and I do not care how poor it is if I am only master of it” (Weathered by Miracles, p. 207).
Zionism stands as exceptional in the history of “colonization,” one that begins in peaceful, positive-sum relations. Of course supporters of the Palestinian Arabs insist this was all done as a planned invasion to subvert Palestinian rights. Aside from the fact that there were no “Palestinian rights” — no sovereignty, no constitutional right to organize, much oppression — this argument is a classic case of projection.
If you want an example of the kind of “demographic warfare” that the Arabs accuse the Zionists of conducting, try what’s going in in Eurabia today. And when Muslims establish sovereignty, don’t look for a document about equality before the law for all citizens, like the Israeli Declaration of Independence.
As for Jewish association with the land, it was far more than merely their imagination — which is a strange word to use for a religion whose very liturgy makes Jerusalem and the land of Israel a major focal point of identity and future hope (something that cannot be said about Islam, whose sacred Qur’an never mentions Jerusalem once). There was a continuous jewish presence in the land from ancient times, despite ethnic cleansing by both the Romans and the Arabs.
There once was a king who had everything (say 300 million Arabs with 5 million square miles/14 million square kilometers, 22 Arab Muslim nations, and vast oil wealth) who had a poor neighbor (say 5 million Israeli Jews, with 8 square miles/20 square kilometers, one nation, and no precious few natural resources) who had a precious lamb that he loved above all else (Jerusalem).
Note also, if you wish, that the king (Islam) owed his very origins to the beliefs of his tiny neighbor, whose stories the king had liberally adopted to his own glory. Indeed the neighbor’s land and precious lamb (Israel and Jerusalem) were only important to that king because of his neighbor’s beliefs.
And yet that king, rather than (at the very least), leaving his neighbor alone, or at best, showing him honor and appreciation, insists on having his neighbor’s lamb for himself and driving the small man from his home. And when that small neighbor resists, the rest of the world screams at him for daring to resist the just demands of the king.
And this is justice?
Let me know how they argue that this is a bad analogy.
More from Stuart Green’s thesis, The Problem of Cognitive Warfare, this time from chapter 3.
The Discourse and the Cognitive Offensive
Any discussion of the cognitive offensive must begin with a discussion of the discourse, for it is the accepted discourse cognitive warriors see as the strategic target. Limited to the issue or conflict at hand, the discourse may be considered a relatively small memeplex that finds its anchor in larger environmental memeplexes such as culture, religion, prevailing academic paradigms, economic traditions etc. It can, however, be manipulated by outside influences through transparent, open debate, or a protracted information campaign that makes skillful use of propaganda, violence, and knowledge of the adversary’s environmental vulnerabilities. The degree to which the accepted discourse is vulnerable to destruction from the outside depends on the nature of the contributing environmental factors.
Information and “Information”—The Accepted Discourse. It is important here to discuss the transformation of information into “information.” There must be a careful distinction between information meant to persuade and “information” meant to persuade. That is, there must be a way to differentiate between “information” cynically distributed for effect and information—less the quotation marks—distributed for effect but believed by its propagators to be true and free of exaggeration, regardless of the reality.
One could argue, for instance, that the Palestinians’ uttered beliefs are no more propaganda than those of many Jewish settlers who feel a strong emotional and historical connection to the land. Nonetheless, in the context of cognitive warfare and the pressing need for persuasion, there comes a point at which information ceases to be the heartfelt, honest articulation of one’s views. Disconnected from the desire for expression or articulation and no longer parallel to the propagator’s perception of the truth, it emulates propaganda in the traditional, pejorative sense and may be considered an engineered, infectious meme.
As time wears on and the conflict’s rhetoric intensifies, propaganda may pull away from empirical and perceived truths. Its propagators, seeking to shift the intellectual locus of legitimacy, attempt to obscure empirical truth by supplanting it with a “new” truth—in other words, manipulation and deception. Brodie offered the Trojan horse and repetition—discussed briefly in chapter three—as just two means by which minds may be deceptively changed. The more successful the campaign, the more acceptable debate peels off the empirical truth, hopefully, from the propagator’s perspective, without the constituents knowing.
The passage of time and the growing intensity of propaganda increase the gap between the acceptable discourse and the empirical truth, which gradually becomes lost or obscured. In the most extreme scenarios, the gap between the empirical truth and acceptable discourse grows so large that the former is perceived as extreme or unlikely.
Figure 1: Changing the Accepted Discourse 1
In their campaign to expose “alternative” points of view, for instance, Holocaust deniers have benefited from time’s passage and the death of most survivors. As the evidence literally dies off and memories fade, the idea that far fewer Jews died during World War II seems less extreme and therefore more acceptable, particularly when that idea is pitched as a moderate alternative to the notion that the Holocaust never happened. In fact, Holocaust denial is a common theme in the Muslim world (see chapter seven). It presents a major memetic threat to Israel’s legitimacy in international eyes, as much support for the state’s existence is predicated on the Holocaust and the perceived, tenuous survivability of the Jewish race. (more…)
I have begun doing some video fisking which we are calling “Dialogues with the Media.” For the first examples, see here. I’ll be putting up some shortly, one on Annie Lennox, another on a CNN interview with Diana Buttu, and a third on a BBC with Hamas official Mahmud al Zahar. In the meantime, one of the major cases I’m looking into is the CBS piece by Bob Simon entitled “Time Running out for a Two-State Solution?” In preparing it, I welcome comments from readers on what they suggest I say in response to this piece (as well as links to others who have already critiqued it). Remember, in video fisking, the comments have to be as succinct as possible.
(CBS) Getting a peace deal in the Middle East is such a priority to President Obama that his first foreign calls on his first day in office were to Arab and Israeli leaders. And on day two, the president made former Senator George Mitchell his special envoy for Middle East peace. Mr. Obama wants to shore up the ceasefire in Gaza, but a lasting peace really depends on the West Bank where Palestinians had hoped to create their state. The problem is, even before Israel invaded Gaza, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians had concluded that peace between them was no longer possible, that history had passed it by. For peace to have a chance, Israel would have to withdraw from the West Bank, which would then become the Palestinian state.
It’s known as the “two-state” solution. But, while negotiations have been going on for 15 years, hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers have moved in to occupy the West Bank. Palestinians say they can’t have a state with Israeli settlers all over it, which the settlers say is precisely the idea.
Excellent and thoughtful post at Breath of the Beast on the Bill Moyers affair. I cite only the conclusion as an appetizer, with its brilliant analogy to Julia Child and Hannibal Lecter. Read the whole essay.
Then, finally, trusting that his double talk has rendered us so woozy and nauseated that we will be powerless to resist its authority, he flashes us the gold plated, jewel encrusted, richly engraved, plain-as-day badge of the hypocrite. He taunts Israel, saying that the slaughter of innocents he so deplores, “is exactly what Hamas wanted to happen.”
But, Mr. Moyers, a truly honest critic would have to ask why Hamas “wanted it” to happen. A real friend of reality, let alone Israel, would have to admit that a political/religious movement that intentionally incites violence against its own women and children for its own gain is an abomination — that is guilty of what amounts to human sacrifice. An honest man whether a critic or not would be compelled to admit that such a movement no more deserves equal respect with a modern, western, liberal democracy like Israel than Hannibal Lecter deserves to be compared with Julia Child.
On the 9 pm (Jerusalem time), December 28, 2008, CNN International channel, anchor Ralitsa Vassileva challenged Tsipi Livni in an interview. Livni claimed that this attack was meant to strength the moderates on the Arab side. But Vassileva countered: “Couldn’t this backfire? Isn’t it more likely that the Arab moderates will necessarily rally around beleaguered Hamas? Isn’t that what we’re seeing around the Arab world?”
(from 3:00-
Not satisfied with Livni’s response, like a teacher who keeps calling on students to get the “right answer,” Vassileva then turns to Diana Buttu, an “independent Palestinian analyst.” Livni says this should help the moderates, but, she adds helpfully, don’t you think it will help Hamas? Buttu, who is anything but “independent,” and follows the Palestinian narrative quite crudely (it’s a “massacre, a war crime… the Israelis are telling a “complete lie… Tsipi Livni’s head is in the sand…”), needs no leading questions.
This exchange, like so many others from CNN anchors (Rosemary Church, Ralitsa Vassileva) and BBC (Peter Dobbie), reflect an interesting standard in the moral reasoning of our newsmedia, a standard that, when examined closely, reveals on the one hand, a puerile notion of morality (intention doesn’t matter) and on the other such a low set of moral expectations from the Palestinians as to almost constitute a kind of unconscious (racist?) prejudice against the Arabs. And, ironically, that serves the worst elements in the Arab world and undermines the very values each of these anchors think they uphold.
In order to understand the issues at play, I have analyzed the issue of two different cultural styles of moderation at work in this conflict. On the one hand we have a “fair-weather moderate” discourse that lasts only as long as it serves “my” side (my family, clan, people, state). When it comes time to chose between a self-critical adherence to moderate principles or a “my side right or wrong” solidarity, fair-weather moderates choose solidarity over principles of reciprocity, while committed moderates choose self-criticism and the principle of reciprocity over solidarity. These two styles align closely to what I have characterized as the difference between an “honor-shame culture” and an “integrity gult culture.” For those who wish to explore this issues further, I recommend my essay “Meditations of Moderation and Demopathy,” the final paragraphs of which are included below.
During the Oslo “Peace” Process, one could see the contrast between Israeli and Palestinian “moderates” in precisely these terms. The Israeli peace camp constantly criticized Israeli extremists, in particular, the settlers who, in their PCP conception of the conflict, were the base cause of Arab hostility. The settlers’ belligerence towards their Arab neighbors was inexcusable, culpable, worthy of public denunciation in no uncertain terms. Thus Israel abounds in groups and individuals who are once fiercely Zionist and fiercely moderate, who do not hesitate to publicize every Israeli sin that they can possibly find. As opposed to Arab moderates, they move in the remarkable direction of being even more severe on their own group rather than the hostile “other.”
The Arab peace camp and NGOs might have denounced the terror of the extremists, but they never even considered arguing that those terrorists should not dominate the political and cultural public discourse. On the contrary, the Arab moderates put far more effort into “softening” the image of their extremists in the eyes of the West than they did into fighting their extremists. Indeed, the genocidal Jihadism that drives suicide terrorists to their inhumane frenzy still dominates Palestinian TV and radio and schools on both parts of the Palestinian divide (i.e., “even” where the “moderate” Abbas “governs.” Instead, the vast majority of Palestinian “moderates,” spoke little of the self-generation of these hatreds and “explained” suicide bombing as the “understandable” rage created on the one hand by Israeli intransigence and on the other by the “hopelessness and despair” that intransigence “inevitably” instilled in the suffering hearts of the Palestinians.
Human Rights organizations are the product of integrity-guilt culture. Only when you view the “other” as equal to yourself, can you develop the notion that he or she deserves the same treatment before the law as you do, both in theory (constitutional government that guarantee such rights legally) and in practice (NGOs that try to remedy the injustices of the system). Thus Human Rights Groups in the West, from the ACLU to HRW, to B’tslem, scrupulously observe the human rights of the “other,” as the real measure of a commitment to egalitarian principles – my principles applied to all sides.
Most (all?) Israeli “human rights organizations” are genuinely moderate by my definition, dedicated to documenting Israel’s violation of the human rights of others. Indeed, they are so moderate, that they will unfairly side against their own side. The excessive predilection for this counter-intuitive direction produces what Charles Jacobs calls “the Human Rights Complex.”
Palestinian HROs, on the other hand, reflect a paper-thin moderation that has no principled adherence to any kind of reciprocity. Thus, they regularly document the violation of their own human rights by the (Israeli) “other”; but when it’s time to self-criticize, they beg off; what self-criticism one finds often appears only in the foreign language version of the website. Understandably, public self-criticism is taboo in serious honor-shame cultures: it shames those criticized. And of course, in a culture where any male who wants authority is expected, allowed, even required to shed someone else’s blood for the sake of his honor, public criticism regularly elicits violence against the critic.
Thus the classic demopathic pattern emerges – Palestinian “moderates” demand their side’s human rights, even as they defend fellow Palestinians who seek not just the systematic refusal of rights to the Israeli “other,” but even their annihilation. And of course, Israeli and Jewish dupes, eager to believe that by assuring the rights of the other, peace will come, embrace the Palestinian moderates. Mix such a near-unbeatable combination of demopathy and credulity with blood libels like Al Durah, stir with the potent cry of western radical and Islamic jihadi outrage, and voilà, the demopaths delight… Durban I, and, coming soon, Durban II.
Fortunately the picture is far more interesting than this stark and disheartening contrast. There is, for example, Bassam Eid’s Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. When throughout the Second Intifada, while other Palestinian NGOs shouted Israeli genocide to the world, he remorselessly documented the systematic abuse of Palestinian human rights by Palestinian “authorities,” noting that over 15% of Palestinian casualties during that Intifada were inflicted by Palestinians on themselves! (There is no corresponding figure on the Israeli side.) When Hamas took over the Gaza Strip, he documented their brutal application of Machiavelli’s “economy of violence” in a depressing detail that should be read by every foolish pundit who talks about Hamas as a democratically elected – and therefore democratic – government.
Nor is Bassam Eid alone. MEMRI, for all the paranoid, frenzied and genocidal incitement it documents dominating the Arab and Muslim media globally, dedicates a special section to highlighting the work of real reformers, genuine moderates, in the Arab world. There we find that Lafif Lakhdar, for example, has just denounced
Hamas as another link in the chain of Palestinian rejectionism, i.e., in their tendency to refuse all suggestions of compromise. This tendency, he said, is rooted in religious extremism and brings disaster upon the Palestinians.
Thus, not all Arabs think with their shoes. But these folks are always in danger of being accused of being sell outs (coconuts: brown on the outside, white on the inside), an honor-shame accusation people like Saïd make against serious intellectuals like Kanan Makiya and Fouad Ajami, and Western commentators too readily accept.
The Western acquiescence in this honor-shame demand for solidarity no matter how inexcusably Hamas behaves has reached such a consensus that news analysts have no hesitation representing it as a given. Here Alvaro de Soto, former UN envoy to the Middle East takes it as a given that the Israelis have no right to try and restrict their dealings to the moderates, whom he contemptuously refers to as “the ones who mark the x’s on the appropriate boxes…”
Rather than negotiating as if one portion of the Palestinian didn’t exist, the portion that supported Hamas in legitimate elections, the sooner it will be possible to get something serious. Because on the current path when you negotiate only with Palestinians you like and the ones you check the appropriate boxes, you won’t get anywhere.
Note that de Soto has already taken the position that Hamas — legitimately elected — has a right to the negotiating table, regardless of her stated goals, her principled acts of terror, her revolting discourse. Is this because he doesn’t know about it? Or because he is afraid to challenge it? Or because he really wants to see Israel forced to try and deal with a group that wants her destruction. In any case, he’s “objectively” a dhimmi, that is, someone subjected to Sharia law which demands public submission to Muslims.
This Western eagerness to submit to Arab honor-shame demands goes very far. It can actually have a Westerner egging on an Arab to show the kind of fraternal unity that their honorable cause demands. Here Nisha Pillai of the BBC, after having badgered Bibi Netanyahu for Israeli-caused casualties in Gaza, then challenges the Arab League spokesman (no fan of Hamas), not to moderation, but to a show of solidarity in response to Israel.
Where she has no hesitation telling Israel to play by civil rules, she has even less hesitation telling the Arabs to get their act together and fight back.
This astoundingly misplaced Western “peer-pressure” can make it difficult for Arabs to maintain “moderate” positions. Take the case of Mahmoud Abbas, who made a statement that looked a lot like that of a genuine moderate, although may well be that of a pragmatist who, like the Egyptian ruling party, happens to hate Hamas.
We want to protect Gaza, our people there, we don’t want genocide for our people. There are some who say, even if Gaza is wiped out, so be it. We reject this, this logic annot be accepted, has nothing to do with the interests of the people. We want to protect every drop of blood of our people…
Here’s a stark contrast between Abbas here and Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum who assured reporters that his organization “will continue the resistance until the last drop of blood,” and the Palestinians that Abbas refers to (presumably West Bankers) who say “even if Gaza is wiped out, so be it” (note the sweeping gesture). Now how genuine is Abbas’ moderation? When the Arab street starts screaming for Israeli blood, will he hold the line? When other Arab leaders start to abandon their silence and weigh in behind Hamas as the honor-shame imperative now demands, will he hold the line?
And note the vast contrast between how flabby Arab “moderation” and how vigorous, even extreme, Israeli moderation. In Israel there’s a whole world of intellectuals ready to say something quite close to “the other side, right or wrong,” who criticize relentlessly even when their “peers” (i.e., their own people) pressure them heavily to tone down their public criticism, especially when it’s based on dubious information. Not all the demonstrations or threats in the world could get them to rally round their own flag.
How could Arabs and Muslims help their societies if their program for progress is built upon violence?… [Hamas or Hizbullah] seek power instead of duty, money instead of benevolence, and longevity in both instead of renewal for the good of their people… Hizbullah and Hamas must be destroyed and the regimes in Damascus and Tehran must be changed for all Arabs and Farsi people to survive and prosper… Their poisonous rhetoric of violence feeding a frenzied mass of ignorant Arabs leaning on their extreme religion to honor their incapacity to compete with the West is destroying future generations of hopeful saviors of our culture and traditions… We Arabs must be the ones to stop Hamas and Hizbullah, rather than support their demonic and twisted logic of resisting development, enlightenment, and progress of the region.
Let’s return to Ralitsa Vassileva’s question to Bibi. She assumes that the vast majority of Arab moderates are fair weather. Won’t your attack backfire? Won’t it force the moderates to side with Hamas? This is a question they repeatedly ask of their Arab “analysts” (with a distinctly leading tone), which they dutifully answer: “Of course.”
What we have here is the soft racism of low expectations. Vassileva not only does not expect real moderation from the Arabs, she assumes they will rally round their people. And the people she interviews, and introduces as “independent analysts” all represent the Arab honor-shame consensus that this is Israel’s fault and all Arabs should rally together to fight her.
Here the CNN anchor questions reporter Nic Robertson about the support for Hamas as a result of this onslaught. He first summarizes the remarks of a “human rights” reporter whom he then channels without the slightest caution: Hamas gets more support every day.
After all, given Hamas’ revolting behavior, who would expect the people to rally around them other than someone who thinks they’re moral and rational idiots? To amend PT Barnum’s famous dictum, “the only way you can fool all of the people all of the time, is by knee-capping dissidents.” But rather than expose his audience to an alternative take, Robertson, along with his “Human Rights” worker, becomes the advocate of a united response: The Israeli Goliath is not going to pound this proud Palestinian David into submission.
Of course, when it comes to the Israelis, these same anchors have a radically different set of expectations. Challenging Bibi Netanyahu over when Israel will stop creating this humanitarian crisis, Nisha Pillai got the following response:
Her reponse to him was to interrupt and repeat her challenge — the international community’s great concern for innocent Palestinian civilians:
She’s missed the moral point entirely. He says, “watch out for playing the moral equivalency card” (in which case Israel loses the mathematical game because it kills more civilians than Hamas), because when you do, you basically favor people who target civilians. (In terms of this article, you basically support the anti-moderate honor-shame “unity” of Arab “resistance” to Israel, and feed Jihadi sense of entitlement the world over.) Her response resembles that of some of the less accomplished Israeli spokesmen who, when challenged, return to talking points rather than answer the question. Ironically she ends up answering Bibi by doing what he warned against: reiterating the scapegoating narrative that focuses exclusively on Israeli-caused civilian casualties.
Bibi patiently explains:
Her response? End of interview.
Even though one might be hard put to offer a different explanation, I don’t think her moral incomprehension reflects a lack of intelligence so much as an inability to even conceive of the vast gulf that separates Arab and Israeli moral culture. Politically correct insistence on moral equivalence makes such a thought not only inutterable, but unthinkable. In a sense, she cannot think this one through. Instead she takes refuge in an even-handedness that pleases no one except, perhaps, an audience that thinks this makes sense. And as a result, she makes a perfect dupe.
But given the huge global audience that these CNN and BBC anchors have, it offers a troubling prognosis for a troubled world. Here we find Western intellectuals incapable of even perceiving, much less analyzing the interests of the civil society in which they thrive, and which they endanger, precisely as Bibi described it, with their foolish moral equivalence.
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.
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. (more…)
Prof. Barry Rubin, writing for Watch on the Middle East, critiques several recent AP articles that betray the media’s devotion to the Politically-Correct Paradigm, the principle that we cannot understand “others” without empathy, and cannot empathize without restraining our tendency to impose our own mentality on others, especially in making value judgments. In the articles that Prof. Rubin has collected and analyzed, we see journalists who instinctively project the civic ideals that they believe in onto the Palestinians, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. In so doing, of course, Israel comes out as the aggressor who forces peaceful Palestinians to reluctantly turn to violence as the last resort.
In an article of September 20, Ali Daraghmeh, “Army says troops kill Palestinian with firebomb,” there is a long discussion of the current state of the peace process.
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”
“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.
