Yesterday I did a post about the humiliation of Jews and Palestinians that quoted Geoffrey Wawro's new book, and a passage in which Wawro wrote that Hitler's party won a majority in the 1932 elections in Germany.
Within an hour or two I got two notes, from Mark Wauck and Harry Clark, telling me that Wawro was wrong, that Hitler did not win a majority in the '32 elections. I promptly posted Wauck's correction.
I think this is important. Wawro is a big deal academic with a fancy endowed chair. Clark is a civilian, a writer and amateur historian. So is Wauck, a blogger and wideranging reader.
Yet on the playing field of the internet, the two amateurs put the ball in the back of the net, and Wawro didn't.
This is an important moment. The internet is demonstrating that knowledge, and the assembly of facts to make an argument, are not what I grew up thinking them to be, the sovereign province of academics and journalists who went to fancy schools and networked and yes, worked hard, but created professional/social barriers to entry into their guild.
No, all human beings can acquire knowledge, and many of them are really good at expressing that knowledge.
In time this radical democratization of the means of expression will undermine traditional status in universities and the mainstream media, and income as well. As I say here often, the internet is doing to those priesthoods what the printing press did to the clerical establishment. It's amazing to watch.
In regard to the above, I highly recommend Did 9/11 Justify the War in Afghanistan?. Put simply, the emperor wears no clothes.
Phil, don’t get carried away. Apparently, you were at least somewhat familiar with Clark and Wauck and knew they had credibility. The harsh reality is that the internet could well be the single greatest source of misinformation ever devised, spreading bullshit at the speed of light. Think Drudge Report, etc. (Jeez, can I be sued for that?). Trust me, Mondoweiss is the exception, not the rule.
he’s not getting carried away keith as phil points out Wawro is a big deal academic. i knew immediately when i read the post it was wrong, the reason how i learned i mentioned in the comment section (because i am certainly no pro on the holocaust or nazi’s). this is nazi 101: hilter was appointed.
i meant i mentioned how i heard about it here,in the original comment thread.
Keith, I think you’re underestimating human beings.
1. While the argument against disinformation can be made with great validity, the internet is certainly no different than any other medium throughout history in that regard. I mean, the disinfo was always there, whether it was peddled by governments or businesses or religious institutions.
2. The beauty of the internet is that it provides anyone with access to get different points of view, from different sources. Presented with the truth — or at the very least — with compelling arguments, most people are smart enough to recognize what’s real and what’s propaganda. As readers, we humans, tend to relate to what we’re reading, if not on a professional level then certainly on a human level. That’s why disinfo can only go that far. It’s greatest enemy is curiosity.
3. Phil wrote:
This is what democracy should encourage and what human beings should aspire for. The biggest hurdle in today’s America, for example, is getting the masses educated. The dumber they are, the easier it is for the government to control. Education shouldn’t cost so much, but it does cost an arm and a leg in the US. More democratic states offer their citizens free or subsidized college education. That’s at least the case in several European nations. And so, the internet changes the playing field. No longer does Timmy who grew up on a farm in Kansas have to settle for watching crappy network TV or listening to AM talk radio. Instead he can go online and see for himself what the world has to offer.
Personally, I think the reason many Americans still cling to propaganda, even on the internet – despite having the opportunity to read whatever they wish – is due to indoctrination at an early age. Immigrants, who were not indoctrinated by the same American education system growing up, for example, tend to view things from an entirely different perspective.
I hope that in 20 or 40 years, the internet would have made us all better global citizens, more informed and more involved.
AVI- Your long and thoughtful post has encouraged me to make a few additional qualifying comments to my original comment concerning Phil getting carried away with his estimate of the impact of the internet on the structure of intellectual discourse and the political economy that it under girds.
Let me begin by saying that I love the internet and its ability for rapid acquisition of information. I feel that I am better informed than ever. Also, making online reservations is nice too. Be that as it may, I simply don’t buy in to the hyped-up notion that the internet is going to radically alter the power seeking dynamics of the political economy. Money is power. Economic power in fluid form. The primary instrument of social control.
The internet, like the press in an earlier day, before massive commercialization and consolidation, provides a modicum of room for informed dissent. However, I seriously doubt that the corporate internet (Microsoft, Google, etc) is going to undermine the corporate oligarchy anymore than the rest of the corporate media. Progressive sites such as Mondoweiss are always under some funding pressure, whereas, right wing websites are well funded.
“Keith, I think you are underestimating human beings.” Avi, you may have me on that one. When I look at the state of the world and the ability of the elites to manufacture consent, I become darkly pessimistic.
“corporate oligarchy”
;D
yes, notice those two election results
Hindenburg 49.6 percent
Hitler 30.1 percent
Thaelmann 13.2 percent
Duesterberg 6.8 percent
Hindenburg 53.0 percent
Hitler 36.8 percent
Thaelmann 10.2 percent
duesterberg must have thrown his support to hilter and i read in wiki that some people threw enough weight to hindenburg to push him over 50% which was what was required to win which is likely why the left vote shrunk. it’s also likely a percentage of thaelmann’s supporters voted for hindenburg in the first election for the same reason.
another thing not mentioned in your freedom daily link was dutch communist Marinus van der Lubbe, who allegedly set the reichstag fire, confessed under torture, was posthumously pardoned in 2008 and historians disagree as to whether he acted alone or if commmunists or nazis were involved. the responsibility for the reichstag fire remains “an ongoing topic of debate and research”. (wiki)
the implications in the freedom daily link remind me of the shock doctrine, it was similar to our 9/11.
Duesterberg’s DNVP (German Nationalist) supporters no doubt felt more comfortable voting for Hitler than for either of his remaining opponents, even Hindenburg. The DNVP ended up as Hitler’s coalition partners when Hitler’s coalition government came to power in January 1933. The leader of the DNVP, Hugenberg, got a major ministry in that coalition government. (Only Hugenberg and a lot of other non-Nazis soon lost all power, and the DNVP itself was dissolved within months of the coalition coming to power.)
I doubt if Duesterberg himself, the co-head of the Stahlhelm conservative veterans association, approved of the Nazis coming to power. As someone with Jewish ancestry, he was not only denied any role in the coalition government, but he was quickly forced to resign his leadership position in the Stahlhelm. Although arrested during the Night of the Long Knives (aka R&oeml;hm Purge), Duesterberg did manage to survive the Third Reich, dying in 1950.
Another major figure in the DNVP, Ernst Oberfohren, the leader of the DNVP fraction in the Reichstag, was not so lucky. He was known to be uneasy about his party’s alliance with the Nazis, and eventually became critical of party leader Hugenberg’s support of this alliance. A couple of days after the Reichstag voted to approve Hitler’s Enabling Act in late March 1933, Oberfohren was forced to resign his leadership position and his Reichstag seat altogether, because Göring’s eavesdropping agency, the Forschungsamt, was already eavesdropping on prominent people, and so became aware that Oberfohren was criticizing Hugenberg to other members of the DNVP, which resulted in police raids on Oberfohren’s offices that led to his resignation. By the beginning of June, for whatever reason, Oberfohren was found dead, in a rather suspicious case of alleged suicide.
The DNVP is important for any allegations that Hitler ever got a majority, because in the last semi-free elections in Germany, in March 1933, the coalition only got a majority if one includes the DNVP junior partners in the coalition. The Nazis got 43.9% of the vote, the DNVP got 8.0%.
Once the Nazi dictatorship was fully installed, further elections and referenda did not even have the semblance of being free. In the Reichstag election of Nov. 1933, the sole slate allowed, the Nazi one, got 92.2% of the vote. In the simultaneous referendum on Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations, 93.4% voted Yes. Further referenda had even more lopsided results. Odd in a way, because by that point a clear majority of the German people undoubtedly had come to support the Nazi government.
There is an excellent history of the last years of the DNVP, Hermann Beck’s The Fateful Alliance: German Conservatives and Nazis in 1933: the Machtergreifung in a New Light. Unfortunately, the book is quite expensive.
The Transfer Agreement explains how the worldwide boycott would have succeeded against Hitler and denied him the money for war — because he was not popular — had the Zionists who wanted to populate Palestine not broken the boycott. They gave Hitler the money to create his army in return for 60,000 Jews to work the orange groves. I thought the amount was $6 million. I checked it recently, it was $60 million.
I can’t quite wrap my head around the Jewish involvement in this boycott. Last week Cowboy bill was saying that the Jews started WWII because of their boycott of German/Nazi goods. Now MRW is saying the Zionists in fact broke this same boycott which was created by the Jews previous?
What on earth guys, talk about a swath of disinformation. Is there anything we are not blaming the Jews/Zionists for? It’s like the eternal scapegoat, its quite appalling actually.
Why don’t you read “The Transfer Agreement,” which details the various factions of Zionists all fighting each other for their agendas. It is not a black & white story. The group in Palestine were different from the ones in London and Germany. Subterfuge galore.
Edwin Black wrote the book because his parents wouldn’t talk about the Holocaust. He was one of the first reporters ever to use the FOIA to get original docs on three different continents over five years and hired a slew of translators to translate them into English.
There is no swath of disinformation in it. Read the damn book. You’ll discover that there was a swatch of American Zionist Jews who convinced Roosevelt and the Canadian PM not to let Jewish refugees into this country. They wanted them to go to Palestine. What is appalling is being blamed for recounting historical facts. When do you take responsibility for your actions? When? [Netanyahu is still milking that proclivity proclaiming that the Mavi Marmara activists were terrorists whose use of wooden and metal ship railings provoked a crack Naval commando team to kill them.]
I’m very excited about the access the intenet has given me to events and opinions. In that I agree with Phil completely. Mondoweiss is a great example of disseminating knowledge.
Perhaps a new, empowered generation will come out of this. It is dismaying to see people in their 50s+ insist on how “one cannot understand the reality in the Middle East” and they therefore defer to the reigning common wisdom.
The extent of this change is only as big as these websites’ readership and their ability to reach others. So, the Internet has broken us out of isolation, and brought in some more people. The revolution is still a long ways off.
Elliot
I enthusiastically agree. The web has been a wonderful source to find material. Yes, there is a lot of bogus stuff, but you know, in print, one will find a similar percentage of rubbish. You just need to check the facts. The web makes this a lot easier. And it takes much less time now.
Elliot, I agree too. And libraries are as full of just as much nonsense as the internet is. It’s just that much harder to locate it.
I prefer the wildcat nature of it. When systems like IBM’s Watson can presumably use ‘artificial intelligence’ to make associations for a reader/searcher, then we run the risk of what is happening behind the scenes now: we will only be as informed as the info we have access to.
So much has been wiped from the web. The ADL actively gets that done. (eg: the Fox News series in December 2001).
I save as much as I can and protect it. I have monster databases of articles that are lost forever covering events since 1995. I copied entire websites (thank you Adobe) that have disappeared. At $89 for a terabyte, it’s not an expense. I DO need a research assistant who can spend six months accurately cataloguing all this stuff, and I’m going to have to remember to copy this stuff to other media as soon as I’m able as a further backup. And I’m going to leave copies of it to various organizations around the world.
Elliot, those are my sentiments, as well.
I think the fallback response for many has been and remains, “We’ll, it’s too complicated”. But, the fact is, the information is out there, one simply has to make an effort to find it.
Personally, for me, the internet has been a great asset on several levels, intellectually, educationally, and perhaps even financially. Heck, I have learned how to change the sparkplugs on my car from the internet. So, at least that is good. ;)
There were several different elections in Germany in 1932. In the Reichstag elections on 31 July, the Nazi party won 37.3% of the vote; while this was not a majority, it gave them 230 seats and made them the largest parliamentary group. The web page you cited doesn’t make this clear, and also fails to cite any sources.
Academics are human beings; they make mistakes, and on occasion can even be dishonest, like anyone else. This is not news. But they are expected to support their arguments with logic and verifiable evidence, and in the long run, they are held accountable to their peers. The same cannot be said of just anyone who publishes something on a web page. This in itself is a compelling reason to have much more confidence in academic texts than in random web pages, and to resist all attempts to undermine the authority of academic research in general.
While I agree, I also point out that in both books and websites authors can and should document their sources. One advantage of the internet is that it can link directly to sources if they also are online.
“Academics are human beings; they make mistakes, and on occasion can even be dishonest, like anyone else. This is not news. But they are expected to support their arguments with logic and verifiable evidence, and in the long run, they are held accountable to their peers.”
Actually, a lot of peer scrutiny is people of like minds rubber stamping the opinions of their fellow traveling associates. Not all, maybe not even a majority of it is, but a substantial chunk of peer review is, enough that would cause a major academic scandal were the actual percentage investigated and exposed. These people generally operate in small circles and learn their trades in the same environments. If one gets bogus material taught to them, chances are the majority learned the same rubbish, as well.
Ben, (may I call you Ben?)
While your point is certainly valid, there are also “well published academics” who are nothing but propagandists and hacks. Yet, their books and their alleged research get peddled by many academic institutions and NGOs. Michael Oren and Daniel Pipes come to mind.
On the flip side, take a budding journalist like Jeremy Scahill, who wrote Blackwater and publishes most of his work online. He has certainly proved to be not only credible, but a source of integrity and professionalism. Many of the hacks on prime time and cable news don’t even come close to his level of analysis or knowledge.
In other words, the proverbial knife cuts both ways.
For details, see:
link to bit.ly
link to bit.ly
Thats what Clinton (H) told AIPAC crowd this year .She basically expressed her ( and AIPAC’s) inability to spin the news or stop the news from reaching the ears and eyes of the world at the speed of the light. Truth has a way of emerging unscathed.
Actually academia is full of errors and professional historians frequently let their bias or laziness determine what they write. I’ve been a history buff since childhood and have found that no matter what field of interest, it’s unusual to read 2 books on the same subject that did not differ in their “facts” in some important aspect. Outside of maybe pure experimental scientific subjects, a lot of what gets written up is conjecture and opinion. Historical studies have always been motivated by opinions in which “facts” are used to support. It is very rare I read a book on a historical subject that is impartial. In fact with regard to aspects about military history, I’ve found american authors to be so unreliable as sources that I discount their “facts” as biased opinion until I see the same material confirmed from an independent, non-american source.
I agree that the Internet has vastly increased the chances of people to research events that are not their “specialty”, it’s opened up the flood gates for huge amounts of information. Especially history. There are problems, though, like the fact that there is TOO much information, and it takes time to sort out who are reliable sources of information and who aren’t. This can be tricky, because, while there are more opportunities for honest, good scholars and journalists and laypersons to give their insight, there are also more opportunities for the dishonest and delusional to do the same. It’s a mixed bag. Those who are simply looking for sources to confirm what they already believe in order to feel good about themselves, will be amply rewarded.
For example :
link to palwatch.org
It seems that this guy (Itamar Marcus) preys on the gullibility of the English-language audience, and most of it has that “propaganda” ring to it without even going into the facts, but I’m sure many people buy into it, and it is probably very effective for its intended audience.
Not to say that propaganda didn’t exist before the Internet, but it can “propagate” faster now… if that makes sense.
I think on the whole that it has done more good than harm, though, and I only get my news from Internet sources now, never on the radio or television.
When will the Internet be co-opted by powerful interests, and could this ever happen? (there is talk of a “kill-switch” : link to antiwar.com
lareineblanche,
The kill switch is more than talk. It passed in the senate committee, and is going for a full senate vote. I was onto my senator in a heartbeat when I heard that.
Lieberman doesn’t have the network smarts to know what he’s talking about. He’s getting his marching orders from the lobby.
But if you read what’s in it, your hair will stand on end. This is an attempt to put every private citizen and business under the control of — they use the term ‘under the command of’ — an unelected group of people who have the power to shut you down based on their rules. It has nothing to do with extraordinary circumstances. They want to create a department to monitor everything you do on the web because they can’t control the flow of info any other way.
Every person needs to call their senator and SNARL.
P.S. Thanks for the link. Going to listen to it now.
link to huffingtonpost.com
MRV
Welcome to the 4th reichian zionist states of america.
There’s a difference between being a writer and an editor. An editor looks for what’s wrong be they typo’s or facts. The print media is unforgiving because it can’t talk back. The test book for New York State’s Regents’ Exam in American history confused Eugene McCarthy with Roy McCarthy. It happens. And finally, let us not forget that we sometimes remember things incorrectly, and often do so for years, when something causes us to recall a memory from our memory closet and reconstruct it, correctly with new understanding.
There are some academics and experts who know their stuff. There are many who sorta/kinda know something. And there are some who don’t know anything. Most people do not have the time, knowledge of languages and access to libraries and archives which are necessary to do so, but if you really want to see how good a scholar somebody is, what you need to do is take their book and not read the book, but read the footnotes, and not read the footnotes, but actually check the footnotes. If you check a person’s footnotes, you quickly realize how serious a scholar actually is. And you will often find very surprising (and disappointing and alarming) things. At least in my experience. If a scholar gets big enough and rich enough s/he will actually hire grad students to do a lot of their research/dirty work. They will even hire people who know languages they do not know to read through things for them and find items that would be of interest to them. Scholars who are less-than-forthcoming will not tell you that they actually do not read language X as their work might seem to suggest, but you can find these things out by talking to people at their institutions.
The most interesting part of any book is quite often not what the book says. It is the footnotes and the bibliography, which tell you the level of scholarship the person is operating at and the acknowledgements which tell you who that person has been talking to while writing the book, where the book was written, and who was helping out. For big-name people (e.g., Alan Dershowitz or even someone like Al Gore) who are celebrities, it is usually safe to assume that there is an it-takes-a-village thing going on. Norman Finkelstein nailed Dershowitz on the whole plagiarism issue; I strongly suspect that Dershowitz didn’t do any of the research for that book. He probably had some Harvard undergrad or starving grad student or law student go find him what he already knew he wanted to prove, and just wrote it up. When you start reading footnotes, which Norman Finkelstein does, and you actually know the field in which the book is written, you can tell a lot. It’s like reading a person’s DNA. It should tell you everything.
Interesting you mentioned Dershowitz, Boulos, because he’s a model of dishonesty and bias in “academic” research. The way he operates is revealed in this article citing many examples.
the thing is, i doubt that dershowitz even found that quote. i think somebody else found it for him and told him he could chop it that way. actually doing research, serious research, requires sitting down for long amounts of time in libraries, having sitzfleisch, and frankly, a person like Dershowitz has a media career and is a propagandist and a showman. you cannot have the level of public visibility he does and actually do serious research. and moreover, a friend who took a class with him in law school once told me he’s got young kids (and a young wife–though she was in his class some time ago now). once you have a family, you can’t do the research that you used to be able to do. i have heard a quote attributed to a very eminent scholar, now passed away, who was at yale. he said for every kid you have, you write one less book. real academics, serious ones, are like monks, though often they lack the personal holiness.
he’s got grad students doing work for him, i’m nearly certain. and to be honest, i wouldn’t be surprised if he even had students who drafted things for him. he will tell them what he wants or will ask them to write up a report for him on palestinian attitudes towards the israeli justice system. he’ll take what the the student wrote, maybe change it around a bit, and then call it his own.
it’s not just dershowitz who operates this way, either. any time you see any big name academic or scholar who writes a lot of books or who is always on t.v., you should be suspicious of their actual research and what they are doing. the same goes when you see a person publishing a lot of books in a short period of time. as an experiment, go to the websites of the best history departments in the US–princeton, yale, berkeley, ucla, columbia, whatever–and look at the scholars there and look at their publications. see how long the dates are between the books they publish. people will take years between books they publish. later in their careers, they may publish more frequently, but that’s only after they have been working in a field for most of their adult lives. dershowitz does not know a word of arabic. he probably knows hebrew because he was raised orthodox. this would perhaps qualify him to comment in a serious way about israeli politics, but if he can’t read arabic, he really has no business ever trying to say anything about palestinian history or culture or politics and do so while claiming some kind of expertise or authority. i mean, just to prove the point, look at who publishes his books. they are not published by university presses. they are put out by trade publishers and he will make lots of money off of them. academic publishers will have anonymous reviewers–i.e., scholars who come from the field the book situates itself in and who will be able to tell if it is a serious piece of work and worthy of publication. books by dershowitz fail on both accounts.
dershowitz is just a sophist who uses his institutional affiliation to make arguments from authority. it’s all smoke and mirrors and its an act that got old a long, long time ago.
Another valuable contribution, Boulos. The language fluency question especially interests me. Some years ago, a long-time Mideast correspondent told me that Thomas Friedman exaggerated his ability in Arabic. Friedman never came right out and claimed fluency, but he regularly wrote that he “didn’t pay attention to what Yasser Arafat said in English but waited to see what he said in Arabic” and similar insinuations.
I tipped off Phil Weiss, who was still at The New York Observer. To Friedman’s credit, he responed to Phil’s phonecall, and acknowledged he was not fluent. His insinuations stopped for a few years.
I would like more inside information. Is Bernard Lewis truly the linguist he is supposed to be? What about, say, Daniel Pipes?
I do know that language mastery may not mean much; one of the core beliefs of Orientalism is that close scrutiny of ancient texts reveals the essence of timeless cultures, instead of actually listening to people today. But if, as you suggest, some people are going around misrepresenting themselves, we want to know — and the internet is a good place to tell us.
Thank you for you long, obviously informed, knowledgeable comment, Boulos. I’m glad we have you posting and commenting here. You’re a pleasure to read.
BTW, take a few minutes to read the article I linked to above. The author Richard Forer is an ex AIPAC member and knows the internal workings of this Mafia group. He’s now fully committed to exposing their sleazy methods..
“Cutting through the confusion about Israel/Palestine”
link to redress.cc
James
Being fluent in a language of a country (ies)which one writes about is absolutely crucial. Without going into details I’ll give just one or two examples of the misunderstandings and confusions the lack of fluency may generate; take the word ‘jihad’. We all know what, for a non-Arabic speaking person, it implies, infers or conveys. But for an Arab it really is far more complicated (or is it simpler?) than any of that. It means struggle and it all depends on what the jihad is aimed at and not only for “holy matters”..It can be jihad for the country (la patrie), for survival/life and means of subsitance (sabeel ul Aish) etc..The same with the word “shahid”, which is commonly used in translations conveying a religious connotation when in Arabic it simply means ‘Martyred’ (died for) and not necessarily for the sake of god or faith or religion but for many other reasons such as a cause or a country etc….A square in Beirut is named Al Shuhada’(Martyrs’ square) after those who died in the struggle against the French mandate in Lebanon. Many among those who died were Christians and were fighting for the country not for a any faith in particular.
And so on.
Lewis knows Arabic and he knows Turkish and he knows Hebrew. He may very well know Persian, too. I think he probably does. His linguistic skills are legit. I think he was British intelligence in the Middle East in WWII and maybe lived there for five years. I can’t remember now. He’s old-school British-trained. Most Western scholars today will not know their languages like he will. That’s my guess.
Pipes knows Arabic, too. He wrote a book on how to learn the Egyptian colloquial dialect of Arabic. He actually wrote a serious academic book on slave soldiers in the middle east in the middle ages.
of course, actually knowing Arabic does not mean that you understand the culture or that you have political views that are good, praiseworthy, or rightly motivated or views that one should seriously consider adopting as one’s own. It is, I would submit, a necessary condition for claiming expertise, however. Knowing Chinese doesn’t make you qualified to comment on Chinese society and the last several thousand years of Chinese history, just like knowing English doesn’t make you qualified to comment on American (or British or Australian or whatever society). What it means is that you have a necessary pre-requisite for actually reading the literature, seeing the movies, listening to the music, talking to people from all walks of life, living there and actually gaining insight into a place and the way people live and think there. If you come with a certain agenda, or simply if you’re not a perceptive person in your own society, however, your ‘insights’ and comments might not be worth the paper they’re printed on. When someone like Martin Peretz or whoever tries to talk about Arabs or Muslims, or some moronic blogger or columnist tries to start speaking about Middle Eastern history, especially in a derogatory way, one should always ask what the basis of their valuations is. And almost always, their basis will be extraordinarily flimsy and non-existent. Picking up some popular history in Barnes and Noble which somebody has written to make a quick but, and reading that, does not make you qualified to do that. History is extremely political and you need to be able to situate any book you read in the historiography of the question it is dealing with. Only then can you understand what the author is up to, what sort of intervention into the debate he/she is making, and why you should care (and or beware).
I would be extremely surprised if Friedman knew Arabic or knew anything beyond basic Arabic. He did an MPhil in Middle Eastern studies at St Anthony’s probably over 30 years ago. I don’t know what the degree was like back then. Now, it is a two-year degree. You will work through the first book, maybe two, of al-Kitab, the Arabic textbook. Personally, I think it is a book which is good at getting you some conversational skills, but bad at teaching you grammar and getting you to the point where you can really read the language. If you do do the al-Kitab series for two years, you, you can probably get to where you can read newspaper articles. Does being able to read AP reports make you qualified to comment on American affairs in-depth?
Also, all this depends on how hard you work. Two years of studying Arabic is a start, but you should not confuse two years of studying Arabic with two years of studying French or German at the college level. Arabic is a different beast entirely. Much much more difficult. Friedman maybe could slowly read through basic news articles in Arabic newspapers when he left Oxford, but I would be very surprised if he has kept it up. If he could actually read Arabic, he hasn’t used it and it has done him very little: he shows no profound knowledge of Arab culture or Arab thought and his views are distinguishable from any other typical US pundit bloviating on the Middle East only by virtue of their sanctimony and annoyingly simplistic sententiousness.
in general, the exchange between the angry arab and ethan bronner is worth reading and thinking about when it comes to the knowledge of all these ‘experts’ of arabs, arabic and the middle east
link to angryarab.blogspot.com
off the top of my head and at this late hour, i can think of no mainstream american commentator on the middle east whom i take seriously or who i think is actually informed about arabs and arab culture. though i may be missing somebody right now. i remember back when william safire was alive, how he would call up ariel sharon once a month or so and basically transcribe sharon’s views into his nyt column for that week. there is nothing even approaching that in the US media with respect to arabs. the closest thing to a mainstream publication in the US which is sympathetic or even open to an arab view is the LA Times, though I don’t read it enough to be sure about that. Haim Saban hates it, so maybe that’s proof enough.
also, i just realized that people here might think that dershowitz is a scholar. he is many things, but he is definitely NOT a scholar. he may be a scholar of certain kinds of law, but anything middle east related and arab-israeli related, he is not a scholar. he doesn’t have training as an historian (or as a political scientist or as an anthropologist or sociologist or whatever). he doesn’t know the languages. he’s a polemicist and an advocate for one side in an extremely contentious debate. he tries to silence people through campaigns of intimidation and public shaming and outrage. he uses the apparatus of scholarship, its window dressings, to try to advance an agenda which is transparent and evident to anyone who has a pulse. there are zionists who are scholars of the modern middle east. and there are scholarly zionist takes on different historical debates and questions. tel aviv university and hebrew university will have serious scholars of the modern middle east (and also the medieval middle east) who are zionists. you will find this in the US as well. dershowitz is a zionist, but he’s not a scholar.
Boulos, TGIA: Thanks to both of you for some fascinating comments.
Well, from a medieval tome preserved in the Historical Museum in Krakow, the name dershowitz is an obvious derivative of an old Polish term of the effect of having too much sewage cast upon the streets during the Diurnal.*
*This isn’t exactly true. But it does sound scholarly, yes?
In these days of expanded access to info brought about from a [still] mostly unfettered internet, one of the things most beneficial is the confrontation to power that the web brings. Not by arms, but through information that previously was so hard to come by, that most people had no idea it existed. In fact, the one loser in this is established power.The web circumvents their power, their control of what people can know. When I see cautionary anti-internet tales, such as these:
Keith June 26, 2010 at 12:48 pm
lareineblanche June 26, 2010 at 2:46 pm
I’m very much reminded of the fact that a free internet has hurt power immensely, especially the ZPC, and there is a huge movement afoot to demonise and control the web for [guess whose] corporate fascist interests by whatever means possible. They’d love to see the internet reduced to another way of broadcasting vetted noise to the the wad. And have said wad stay provincially limited in that carefully administered кома (coma):
link to irc.lv
( a google translate of the page will get you there close enough – for now,anyways…;D)
The internet (and cheap travel) is also undermining the obscenely racist way which in which Hollywood has represented arabs and muslims: in the background as I’m typing “Harum Scarum” is on TV.
Elvis, 1965, playing an American singer kidnapped in the Middle East. Boobs are everywhere and it looks like an orgy is in the offing. The Arab women are portrayed as absolute nymphomaniacs and the men are naturally brutal. A character has just described himself as “Lord of the Assassins”.
No wonder US policy on the ME is so screwed up. All hail the internet!
No wonder US policy on the ME is so screwed up
I would blame 9/11 for some of that too.
“I would blame 9/11 for some of that too.”
It started decades before that Schwartzman. 9/11 merely served to confirm many people’s pre-conceived notions of what arab/muslim is. I am referring to a 1965 movie goddamnit, which is racist/sexist in the most extreme fashion!
Despite the recent brouhaha Helen Thomas has been one of the few journalists actually asking what is the actual motivation of those fighting against the US:
‘You Never Explain Why They Want To Do Us Harm! What’s Their Motivation? Helen Thomas’
link to youtube.com
Sumud,
would you blame it entirely on Israel and the US’ support for them? Is that why we(the US) are hated so much? Is Israel to blame for 9/11?
Once Helen Thomas’ dream is realized and all Jews are out of Palestine, then what? Who will be the scapegoat then?
Once Helen Thomas’ dream is realized and all Jews are out of Palestine, then what?
Helen Thomas didn’t say anything what the Zionists haven’t been doing daily to the Palestinians, even before Israel was created, continuing to this day.
Even so, her comments are open to interpretation. The Zionists are open with their plans and desires of ethnic cleansing the Palestinians and racial conquest of Palestinian territory.
Who will be the scapegoat then?
Did you miss the memo? Eternal victimhood can be quite comforting and most definitely is the best propaganda tool. After all, who can blame the Zionist Jews for anything if they are just noble victims simply defending themselves against the savage Arabs.
How do you ethnically cleanse a group who is caged in?
Doesn’t ethnic cleansing require people leaving? Sure this happened during the Nakba and I recognize that travesty. But to say there is ethnic cleansing in Gaza or the WB (maybe excluding EJ if you accept a very very loose interpretation of it) is lunacy.
But that is pretty standard amongst some of the commenters here.
But to say there is ethnic cleansing in Gaza or the WB (maybe excluding EJ if you accept a very very loose interpretation of it) is lunacy.
Right. So the news of Arabs in East Jerusalem being forcibly evicted from their homes is “very very loose” ethnic cleansing. Sheikh Jarrah is just lunacy. The Palestinian families being served orders to leave the Jordan Valley by Israeli authorities – that’s just a stretch.
Gaza, absolutely right. There is no ethnic cleansing there. Because that is where the ethnically cleansed end up (it’s majority popular being refugees, and those continually removed from Israel and Palestinian territories by Israeli authorities either through deportation or forced removal.) Lest the Israelis forget about the Gazans, however, that is the very people they are torturing and punishing into submission.
But that is pretty standard amongst some of the commenters here.
Ignorance and hypocrisy, that is something surprising and unexpected coming from a Zionist….
“would you blame it entirely on Israel and the US’ support for them? Is that why we(the US) are hated so much? ”
Absolutely and categorically, YES! Why would the Arabs hate the US the financial and economic aid they provide and for every other sense of the word over many decades? Please don’t tell it’s because of the mini skirts, you’d make laugh and I don’t want to, I have a cold sore.!.
OOps, a sentence is missing above: Why would the Arabs hate the US IF IT WASN’T FOR THE DIPLOMATIC/POLITICAL SUPPORT OF ISRAEL AT THE UN AND the financial and economic aid etc.
“would you blame it entirely on Israel and the US’ support for them? Is that why we(the US) are hated so much?”
I presume by “it” you mean hostility to the US in the ME. Israel and the US history of supporting Israel and blocking serious action against Israel at the UN is definitely a part of it. So is overthrowing governments, fomenting war, making actual war, backing warlords and dictators, flooding the ME with weapons and showing absolutely no concern for human rights.
Is Israel to blame for 9/11?”
I don’t know. It’s not inconceivable that 9/11 was a false flag operation. The US and Israel both have a history of sponsoring such operations. It occurred at an opportune moment, less than a year after a dumb-as President was “elected”. Netanyahu said not so long ago that it was good for Israel. I’m not interested in 9/11 enough to do the research necessary to come to a firm conclusion.
“Once Helen Thomas’ dream is realized and all Jews are out of Palestine, then what? Who will be the scapegoat then?”
HT didn’t say “all jews”. Clearly she’s talking about jews that moved to Palestine under zionism, which would exclude the jews that were already living in Palestine. You can criticise HT without misrepresenting her.
What I hope is that the US’ imperial activities in the ME will cease, and that includes the unhealthy relationship between the US and Israel. If that were to occur I believe hostility to the US in the ME would subside, bypassing any question of scapegoating altogether..
“Is Israel to blame for 9/11?”
Not at all, though Neteyahu seemed pretty happy about it.
US support for Israel was one of the main grivances expressed by Bin Laden, Mohammed Atta and KSM.
Q (Elvis): “Tell me how I can free you from you master”
A (nubile arab woman love interest): “my master is a very kind man, he might sell me to you”
They then proceed to kiss, despite the fact that she (who has never heard of America) is observing Ramadan..
Unbelievable. I have to connect this historical racism (which this movie celebrates; Elvis: “if you’re a product of keeping out western influence I’m all for it”) to the same modern racism at work in the west’s largely disingenuous concern for woman’s rights in the ME, which we discussed at length in a previous article.
Well, things have got worse in hollywood since 1965, Sumud. At least elvis was allowed to kiss the woman, with the implication she was then human. I don’t think zionist hollywood allows the american hero to interact with Muslims, other than to kill them now.