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Miura

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  • Tom Friedman suggests Arabs are 60 years behind the rest of us, or maybe 100
    • Miura September 11, 2011 at 8:18 am

      A review Edward Said did for the Village Voice in 1989:

      ---

      The Orientalist Express: Thomas Friedman Wraps Up the Middle East

      On the face of it, From Beirut to Jerusalem is a reporter's journal of a decade in the Middle East spent first as UPI correspondent for a couple of years, then as New York Times bureau chief in two major centers. Between 1979 and 1984 Friedman was stationed in Beirut where he covered the civil war, the Israeli invasion of 1982, and the country's tragic dissolution thereafter. He then moved to Jerusalem (traveling rather ostentatiously across the Lebanese-Israeli border with his golf clubs), where he wrote about the Israeli political scene, with particular attention to the intifadah. He remained in Israel until mid-1988. He then returned home to become the Times man in Washington. For his Middle Eastern coverage Friedman won two Pulitzer prizes, both of them, interestingly enough, about major Palestinian events: the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres, and the uprising or intifadah that began in late 1987 and continues to the present.

      Friedman is no ordinary reporter, however. He is, as he tells us right from the start, a young American Jew who grew up in Minneapolis, was galvanized into Zionist enthusiasm by the 1967 War, studied Arabic and Jewish history first at Brandeis and then at Oxford, and went on to become a major figure in discussions and policy analysis of the Middle East. The complexity and richness of his personal background thus make Friedman's book a compendium of autobiography, journalistic reportage, philosophical reflection laced with a political theory whose main idea is that by virtue of their power and enlightened attitudes Israel and the United States set the standards to which in the end the less gifted and culturally backward Arabs must conform. Yet Friedman is also something of a craftsman. From Beirut to Jerusalem, for all its gargantuan length, doesn't often flag or bog down except, it must be said, when Friedman either gets mushy with testimonials about his feelings, or when he offers advice to everyone about how much better they could be doing if they paid attention to him. The result is therefore an interesting book, as much a collection of anecdotes as it is clever writing studded with eye-catching but symptomatic bits of analysis.

      What keeps it together as a book is Friedman's own "insider" voice — smart, frequently vulgar and tough, sententious, effortlessly knowledgeable. When Arabs or Jews do things, it is not what they do but how their actions register on Tom's sensibility that matters. Not surprisingly, therefore, it is a strangely ignorant book: Friedman's two main sources of illumination are trusted gurus (e.g., the "philosopher" David Hartman, who — we are not told this — runs a strange religious school in Israel largely on U.S. funds; he doesn't seem to have any "philosophical" works to his credit) or bits of expert and/or folk wisdom, unconnected to specific works or research, asserted rather than argued or proved. I do not disagree with Friedman, for example, in his account of how Hafez al-Assad ruthlessly destroyed Muslim opposition in Hama by massacring thousands of his own citizens; Friedman takes the incident as a case of "Hama Rules" and attributes them to "different political traditions" in the Arab world whose true origin, he pronounces, are such things as a "tribalism" learned in the desert. So astonishing a jump, from modern, predominantly urban Syria to the prehistoric desert, is of course the purest Orientalism, and is of a piece with the moronic and hopelessly false dictum offered later in the book that the Arab political tradition has produced only two types: the merchant and the messiah.

      These ludicrous reductions do have sources: In the case of tribalism it is the Israeli "Bedouin expert" Clinton Bailey; in the case of the Arab political tradition "Lebanese Shiite scholar" Fouad Ajami. Friedman deploys these ideas disingenuously, as if there wasn't a fairly active controversy seething in all departments of knowledge about the Middle East. In fact Friedman belongs very clearly on one side, the side associated with classical anti-Arab and anti-Islamic Orientalism, the world according to Bernard Lewis, Ajami, Bailey, and their ilk. Of course Friedman is perfectly entitled to his views, which are not always unsympathetic, but what is particularly shady is that Friedman palms off his opinions (and those of his sources) as reasonable, uncontested, secure. In fact they are minority views and have been under severe attack for several decades now. They represent a narrow consensus associated not with desirable political change but with the equally political, basically conservative perspective of the status quo. People in this camp characterize themselves as pragmatic and realistic, labels that are intended to dismiss the theories of Marxists, non-Western and non-white nationalists, feminists, political economists. The point, of course, is that what Friedman and the Orientalists espouse is a threadbare repertoire of often racist clichés, all of them bearing the marks of colonial knowledge now allied with Naipaulesque disenchantment. People can't change, Friedman says in effect; they are what they are forever. Give Ahmed, or Sambo, a place in the bus and he'll simmer down.

      But since this is not a scholarly book, one might say, why shouldn't Friedman traffic in these discredited myths? Because Friedman presents himself as more than a reporter, his book as more than a personal chronicle. No one watching television these days has not seen Friedman, "the expert," on all the right programs — the detached, impartial, authoritative observer who is a sizable cut above the smaller-scale partisans who are so transparently militant and therefore less credible. From Beirut to Jerusalem is the marketing strategy by means of which a young reporter consciously elevates himself to the rank of foreign policy sage, there to reap rewards and, alas, to recycle the illusions of American power and visionless realism. In the Middle East, he tells us, America should alternate between being "obstetrician, friend, grocer, and a son-of-a-bitch." Among the prototypes for these largely unattractive roles are Jimmy Carter and Henry Kissinger.

      It is not just the comic philistinism of Friedman's ideas that I find so remarkably jejune, or his sassy and unbeguiling manner, or his grating indifference to values and principles by which, perhaps misguidedly, Arabs and Jews have believed themselves to be informed. It is rather the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism that gives him his cockily alarming plausibility — qualities that may explain the book's quite startling commercial success. It's as if — and I think this is true of his views on both Arabs and Jews — what scholars, poets, historians, fighters, and statesmen have done is not as important or as central as what Friedman himself thinks. Not only is there scarcely a reference in From Beirut to Jerusalem to the latest work on Arab history and society, but Friedman is also quite innocent about the latest in Israeli scholarship that has analyzed the origins of the Palestinian refugee problem, or the birth of Israel, or the internal dislocations within Israeli society.

      I do not want to suggest that Friedman is nowhere capable of uncompromising analysis — his remarks on the creepy similarity between Labour and Likud parties are especially trenchant — or that he flinches when it comes to reporting the dreadful, virtually insensate ugliness of recent Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. He is clear about these matters, but he feels somehow that his prized sensibility, saying one thing in one breath and then contradicting it in the next, can carry the whole burden of interpretation and evaluation. And underlying his overestimated sensibility is a patronizing attitude toward all the little people who do not have quite his olympian perspective. Israeli Jews, he tells us in one passage, are closer to the West because their symbol, the star, is close to the cross, "both of which are full of sharp, angled turns. The symbol of the Muslim East is the crescent moon — a wide, soft, ambiguous arc." From such entirely dubious materials he draws
      conclusions roughly equivalent in explanatory power to theories about a natural sense of rhythm among inferior races that have been discredited at least since World War II. A little later in the book Friedman informs Palestinians that they do not belong to the "biblical super story through which the West looks at the world" — when you come to think of it, not many people have that privilege — and they are "lucky" to have had the Jews as their enemy.

      Inside this serenely untroubled cocoon of the purest race prejudice the Friedmanian sensibility ambles from subject to subject. When he arrives finally at the vexed problem of press coverage, he warns us that the media are unfair in their relentless fixation on Israel (this from the journalist-author of a 600-page book on the subject), then he compliments the Israelis on manipulating the media brilliantly, then he blathers on about Israeli troops beating up three-year-olds, and how that vigorous form of outdoor exercise provides them with self-knowledge! Friedman seems to have no inkling that people were and have been killed or beaten when he and his media colleagues were not there to report the story, or that such things as imperialism, or demography, or conflicting ideas played a role while he wasn't around to comment on the case. He does not seem quite to have apprehended that other peoples besides Westerners with sharp-angled symbols and superstories might have had a sense of nationhood, or that when a whole society is shattered and its people dispersed and stripped of their lands, it might on its own, without a Biblical superstory or a sharp Western symbol, try to reforge itself and create a new independent society.

      One would not fault as seriously From Beirut to Jerusalem for its numerous shortcomings were it not that as a collection of anecdotes or as a report on his own apparently omnicompetent sensibility Friedman's writing aspires to an almost regal authority and inclusiveness. There is little self-irony, no twinge of doubt in what he ladles out; mockery and sarcasm are reserved entirely for local Arabs and Jews, not for earnest Times reporters. Read his prescriptions at the end of the book and you will quickly realize that Friedman has internalized the norms, if not the powers, of the secretary of state not just of the United States, but of all humanity. Do this, he tells the Israelis; do this, he tells the Palestinians; do this, he tells the Americans — and anyone else who happens to be listening in. His formulas suggest that everyone should try for limits and realism, except, of course, Friedman himself.

      His book would have been more interesting had his account of himself included some narrative of how he achieved such awesome powers, or of how being a reporter for the Times in the Middle East elevates one to institutional status, or of how the selection of what's fit to print (for example, Friedman's use of the word indiscriminate to describe Israel's 1982 bombing of Beirut was removed by then Times editor A. M. Rosenthal; Friedman makes no mention of the episode in his book) has a lot to do with what is considered "important" by various powers and interests. I would have also liked to read his opinion of the wall-to-wall coverage of terrorist Shaikh Obeid's kidnapping in which the fact that Israel has been in military occupation of a handsome swathe of South Lebanon is almost totally suppressed by the Times and all the other independent U.S. media, along with the fact that although Obeid is an unattractive clerical zealot, he hasn't been concretely accused of any greater or more specific "terrorism" than fighting the Israeli military who have taken over his homeland. Or then again I'd like to have read Friedman's account of how the Times's editorial pages are dominated by the opinions of William Safire and A. M. Rosenthal (whom Friedman credits with having helped his career), opinions about the Muslims and Arabs that could not be printed about any other people on earth.

      A treatment of these facts would have been fairer and perhaps less grand than asking Arabs and Jews to bear the brunt of Friedman's ponderous judgments on their infractions and departures from the essences and fates decreed for them by Friedman and his dubious authorities. Yet despite the distorting prism of his official self, Friedman does indeed have an understanding of how people hang on — e.g., the young Palestinian defenders of Beirut in 1982 — or of how a self-serving myth of victimization still controls the Israeli self-image. Compassion and affection thus occasionally get through Friedman's remorseless machine, but the really curious thing is how little he seems to be interested in these genuine accomplishments, and how much more determined he is to be an all-knowing White Father composing the ultimate how-to-do-it book for the Middle East.

  • 'Liberal Orientalism' is also misleading
    • Miura September 9, 2011 at 12:44 pm

      The trouble with Orientalists is that they heart Islam too much:

      [Bernard] Lewis remains an ardent student of Islam, which despite his criticism of its present-day manifestations, he admires as one of the world's great religions. It could be this love, says Ian Buruma, writing in the *New Yorker*, that has led Lewis to overreach in his belief that the west may be able to save his beloved Muslim civilization. Wrote Buruma, "Perhaps he loves it too much."

  • 'Hands at your side like a soldier,' first-graders belt out 'Hatikvah' --at NY school with public funding
    • Miura September 7, 2011 at 2:36 pm

      Interesting thoughts on where this civil religion originated:

      An old Prussian saying goes "Der Soldate ist der beste Mann im Staate"--the soldier is the best man in the state. Adulation of the army became a cult, almost a religion....The lack of homogeneity of the Prussian lands, composed as they were of diverse and unconnected areas, gave birth to the main Prussian creation: the "state." This was the factor that was to unite all the different populations, each of which stuck to its local patriotism and traditions. The "state"--Der Staat--became a sacred being, transcending all other loyalties. Prussian philosophers saw the "state" as the incarnation of all the social virtues, the final triumph of human reason.

  • Just who is General 'All-out total war' Eisenberg speaking for?
  • Israelis uproot trees in occupied Walaja to make room for more Jewish settlers
    • Miura September 6, 2011 at 1:07 am with 3 replies

      An excerpt from José Saramago's Nobel acceptance lecture:

      ...People who were sorry to leave life just because the world was beautiful; and this Jerónimo, my grandfather, swineherd and story-teller, feeling death about to arrive and take him, went and said goodbye to the trees in the yard, one by one, embracing them and crying because he knew he wouldn't see them again.

  • Zygmunt Bauman: Palestinian persecution echoes the Shoah, which began with discrimination, ghettoes and pogroms
    • Miura September 6, 2011 at 3:44 pm

      It's a subtle argument that Traverso and Bauman following in the footsteps of Adorno and Horkheimer develop--and perhaps in Traverso's case it carries the baggage of "dialectics" so favored by those of a Marxist persuasion--but the basic idea is that while obviously there was nothing inevitable about these strands of modernity coming together in a "perfect storm", but neither can one simply brush one's hands off the set of problems that underlie the modern world and which can and have led in one case to Auschwitz. To consider it non-reflexively--and self-righteously--as a "picture hanging on a wall" which offers few lessons for the civilized 21st century modern world, especially when tropes of the 19th century relationship between the West and the benighted rest have made a strong comeback, is asking for trouble on a barely comprehensible scale:

      The relationship of Nazism to western modernity is thus essential to an understanding of its origins and the history of Nazi violence. Liberal 19th-century Europe--the heartland of racism, imperialism and colonial war--was the cultural and ideological laboratory in which Nazism developed. That development was not inevitable, since it required several intermediate stages, from the first world war to the crisis of the Weimar republic. But there is a clear line of descent.

      To put it in a nutshell, as a reviewer of Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust noted:

      Its argument is deeply troubling for those who still have the comforting illusion that modernity and sophisticated civilization will lead to humane outcomes.

    • Miura September 5, 2011 at 11:30 pm with 2 replies

      ...Just as personal hygiene, subtle philosophical concepts, superb works of art or sublime music are expressions of civilization, so too is imprisonment, war, exploitation and the concentration camp. Shoah--he said in conclusion--"was not an expression of a collapse in civilization but of its progress."

      Enzo Traverso has also made similar points in his book on the "genealogy of Nazi violence":

      ...As has been stressed by a vast sociological literature in recent years, the modernity of Nazism lies above all in its exterminatory practice. The Nazi genocide was predicated on the state monopoly of violence, which Norbert Elias, following Thomas Hobbes, had interpreted one-sidedly as a vector of social pacification and thus of civilization. Indeed, the monopoly of force at the origin of the modern state was the sine qua non for the totalitarian genocides and violence of the 20th century--their Hobbesian paradigm.

      A functional analysis of the Nazi death camps also shows their close relationship with western modernity. Auschwitz was modeled throughout on the Taylorist principle of productive rationality, with death as the end product of a "rational" processing of raw material--deported Jews. It was a mass-production corpse factory in which the assembly line was the arrival of convoys, selection, confiscation of possessions, undressing, gas chamber and crematory oven.

      Inevitably, the extermination camps also embraced the administrative rationality described by Max Weber in Economy and Society: division of labor, hierarchical decision-making, separation of ideation (the process of forming ideas) and of their execution, bureaucratization and deresponsibilisation.

      Like Maurice Papon at his trial in Bordeaux, none of the accused at Nuremberg considered themselves guilty: all had simply followed orders. In the majority of cases, their tasks became criminal only at the end of a complex chain of activity that was invisible to most of them, or easily ignored. Hannah Arendt noted that Nazism had given birth to a new type of executioner, the bureaucrat at his desk, who killed by filling in forms. Finally, the genocidal assembly line required, on the part of the many operatives involved, some of the self-control of impulses that Freud defined and Elias subsequently incorporated in his analysis of the civilizatory process.

  • 'Commentary' blames Turkey for starting the insurgency in Iraq
    • Miura September 4, 2011 at 12:52 pm with 3 replies

      Here's Chomsky:

      You may recall in Turkey, to everyone’s surprise, the government went along with the will of 95% of the population and did not let U.S. troops use the country as a base for the war against Iraq. There was bitter condemnation of Turkey in the United States, from Colin Powell and others. But the most extreme was Wolfowitz. He berated the Turkish military for permitting this to happen. He said, “Look, you have power, you can force the civilian government to do what we want them to do. The idea that they should listen to 95% of the population is outrageous.” Then he demanded that Turkey apologize to the United States and in fact say that it understands its job to help the United States. A couple of months later he was being hailed as the “idealist-in-chief” leading the crusade for democracy.

      Can't they make the doctrine simpler? Here's a first stab at it:


      Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
      Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
      No animal shall wear clothes.
      No animal shall sleep in a bed.
      No animal shall drink alcohol.
      No animal shall kill any other animal.
      All animals are equal.

  • 'The Debt' tries to redeem a lost, lying Israel
    • Miura September 4, 2011 at 12:43 pm

      The swell guy who chastised her for "getting political" was Paddy Chayefsky:

      There's a little matter I'd like to tidy up...at least if I expect to live with myself tomorrow morning. I would like to say that I'm sick and tired of people exploiting the Academy Awards for the propagation of their own personal propaganda. I would like to suggest to Miss Redgrave that her winning an Academy Award is not a pivotal moment in history, does not require a proclamation, and a simple "thank you" would have sufficed.

  • The end of civilization: no 'dignity' in remaining silent at BBC Proms
    • Miura September 3, 2011 at 8:30 pm

      Zubin Mehta is also an interesting person with an interesting background. "It is hard to imagine a greater ambassador for the Jewish homeland than this 'citizen of the world', as one of his players calls him". Although the same account blandly mentions how on his first visit to Tel Aviv, the coastline reminded him of "his homeland India", what it airbrushes is that Mehta is not your run of the mill Indian from a country that makes up one sixth of humankind. He's a member of a tiny religious community commonly known as Parsis (corruption of Farsi or Iranian), based primarily in cosmopolitan coastal commercial cities like Mumbai where Mehta was born. The role of members of the community is an intricate one in the infinitely complex society of the "sub-continent" and ranges from the highest civic-minded leadership--and voices of sanity in communally charged locales--to ownership of gigantic conglomerates (one of which acquired Jaguar Motors recently). In other words, when Mehta says that "he adores Israel, the people, the dreams, the ambition--and the music-making", one has to keep this background in mind and not confuse him for one of the 800 million low-caste Indians making do on $2 or less per day.

      Perhaps the most psychologically revealing portrait of the "comprador bourgeois" class position that Mehta was born into in British-ruled India--and which he shares with quite a few other commercially successful minorities around the world--comes from Albert Memmi who was born in French-ruled Tunisia:

      I was sort of a half-breed of colonization, understanding everyone because I belonged completely to no one...Unlike the Muslims, [Jews] passionately endeavored to identify themselves with the French. To them the West was the paragon of all civilization, all culture. The Jew turned his back happily on the East. They chose the French language, dressed in the Italian style, and joyfully adopted every idiosyncrasy of the Europeans.

      Freddie Mercury--born in another Parsi community in sub-Saharan Africa--rarely acknowledged his Indian childhood and was perceived as white by most of his fans. The very notion that he was "Asian" only became known toward the end of his career--and sadly life in the late 80s. He also performed in Apartheid South Africa in 1984 at the peak of the international cultural and sporting boycott of the racist regime.

      An analogous position was held by the Greek and Armenian trading communities in coastal cities of French North Africa and Alexandria. These communities fell victim to an ugly reverse racism once the "wretched of the Earth" gained power, although the marvelous fusion of cultures that was lost in the chauvinist nationalism of the 50s is acknowledged more openly now despite painful memories.

      To conclude, Mehta's gushing adoration of all things Israeli is not the norm in India--or most of the "Global South" for that matter--except among fringe supremacist groups which were struck by the "discipline" of the Nazis once and later carried out the assassination of Gandhi. Speaking of the latter as someone who is mentioned much in the conflict (as shown by the IDF policy director's comment on difficulty in dealing with those who are inspired by Gandhi's philosophy), his opinion from before WWII still holds some lessons:

      Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French.

  • Taking himself to woodshed, Derfner says his 'awful truth' column isn't what he believes and stood in opposition to 'my allegiance to Israel'
    • Miura September 2, 2011 at 5:21 pm

      This bald lie on political uses of terror is common in Zionist apologetics. Chomsky called it out in the supposedly great philosophical work on Just War by the "moral giant" and upholder of "decent left" values, Michael Walzer:

      Walzer does discuss terrorism, but his account is deeply flawed. He makes the important point that the tendency to restrict the term "terrorism" to "revolutionary violence" is "a small victory for the champions of order, among whom the uses of terror are by no means unknown." It is indeed remarkable to see how the term has been restricted in recent years so as to exclude state-organized terrorism. Walzer asserts that "contemporary terrorist campaigns are most often focused on people whose national existence has been radically devalued: the Protestants of Northern Ireland, the Jews of Israel, and so on." He then develops the following "precise historical point: that terrorism in the strict sense, the random murder of innocent people emerged as a strategy only in the period after World War II."

      His "precise historical point," however, is precisely false, as a look at his favored example suffices to show. In just three weeks in July 1938, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, dedicated to the ideals of Menahem Begin's mentor Ze'ev Jabotinsky and later headed by Begin himself, killed 76 Arabs in terrorist attacks on Arab markets and other public places. There were many similar pre-World War II examples: bombs placed in Arab movie theaters, sniping at Arab quarters and trains carrying Arabs, and so on. The propagandists of the Jewish terrorist groups gloried in these triumphs. One of the heroes of the Herut, the party of the current prime minister of Israel, is a man hanged by the British for firing on an Arab bus.

      (And while the main paramilitary force of the Jewish community in Palestine did not systematically resort to random terror, it did not disdain it entirely. To cite one case, the same page of the official history that describes the Haganah assassination of the orthodox Jewish poet Dr. Israel Jacob de Haan in 1924 goes on to describe how the Haganah destroyed the house of an Arab near the wailing wall in Jerusalem in retaliation for harassment of Jewish worshippers by Arab youths; the bomb caused no injuries "because by chance the inhabitants of the house were away" [Toldot Hahaganah, the official history of the Haganah].)

      Contrary to Walzer's claim, random murder of innocent people, is no postwar invention of the Provisional IRA and the PLO. His point about "people whose national existence has been radically devalued" is very well-taken--but it applies to Palestinian Arabs no less than to "the Jews of Israel."

  • Important study shows that a small network is fostering widespread hatred of Islam inside US politics and public opinion
    • Miura August 29, 2011 at 6:56 pm

      The High Priest of 'Clash of Civilizations'--the famed Orientalist who coined the phrase in fact which was picked up by others flailing around for a post-Cold War "Grand Idea"--crowd considers Israel to be the very rampart of Western Civilization. He has issued warnings from Jerusalem on topics such as how Muslims are about to "take over Europe" and the consequent "Fall of Europe to Islam".

    • Miura August 29, 2011 at 11:49 am

      ...jews getting their share of slanderous treatment as well.

      An interesting take on the politics of some Middle East experts:

      In an earlier era, before the Zionists developed a proprietary interest in Palestine, the least bigoted voices in the field of Oriental studies were often those of European Jews. Ironically, Lewis himself has written that these pro-Islamic Jews "were among the first who attempted to present Islam to European readers as Muslims themselves see it and to stress, to recognize, and indeed sometimes to romanticize the merits and achievements of Muslim civilization in its great days." At a time when most Orientalists took Muhammad for a scheming imposter, equated Islam with fanaticism, thought that the Qur'an was a crude and incoherent text, and believed that the Arabs were incapable of abstract thought, a growing number of Jewish scholars often took opposite positions. They accepted the sincerity of Muhammad's mission, described Arabs as "Jews on horseback" and Islam as an evolving faith that was more democratic than other religions, and debunked Orientalist claims about a static Islam and a dynamic West. It would appear that these Jews were anti-Orientalists long before Edward Said.

      These contrarian positions had a variety of motives behind them. Even as the Jews began to enter the European mainstream, starting in the nineteenth century, they were still outsiders, having only recently emerged from the confinement of ghettos, and it would be scarcely surprising if they were seeking to maintain their distinctiveness by emphasizing and identifying with the achievements of another Semitic people, the Arabs. In celebrating Arab civilization, these Jewish scholars were perhaps sending a none-too-subtle message to the Europeans that their civilization was not unique, that Arab achievements often excelled theirs, and that Europeans were building upon Islamic achievements in science and philosophy. In addition, Jewish scholars' discussions of religious and racial tolerance in Islamic societies, toward Jews in particular, may have offered hope that such tolerance was attainable in Europe too. The discussions may also have been an invitation to Europeans to incorporate religious and racial tolerance in their standards of civilization.

      Yet the vigor of this early anti-Orientalism of Jewish scholars would not last; it would not survive the logic of the Zionist movement as it sought to create a Jewish state in Palestine. Such a state could only emerge as a child of Western imperialist powers, and it could only come into existence by displacing the greater part of the Palestinian population, by incorporating them into an apartheid state, or through some combination of the two. In addition, once created, Israel could only survive as a military, expansionist, and hegemonic state, constantly at war with its neighbors. In other words, as the Zionist project gathered momentum it was inevitable that the European Jews' attraction for Islam was not going to endure. In fact, it would be replaced by a bitter contest, one in which the Jews, as junior partners of the imperialist powers, would seek to deepen the Orientalist project in the service of Western power. Bernard Lewis played a leading part in this Jewish reorientation. In the words of Martin Kramer, Bernard Lewis "came to personify the post-war shift from a sympathetic to a critical posture."

  • No way to honor Dr. King
  • Even Sternhell, leftwing Zionist, concedes that 'radical, ruthless, racist nationalism' requires a... revolution
    • Miura August 27, 2011 at 11:57 am

      A few excerpts from Sternhell's book Founding Myths of Israel, including the one below:

      To avoid any misunderstanding or confusion, I have used the term
      nationalist socialism…But national socialism, which was commonly used at the beginning of the twentieth century, has been contaminated by its association with the Nazis. However, the adjective nationalist, although not traditionally used, in its strict sense describes one of the variants of socialism accurately. There is a nationalist socialism just as there is a democratic or revisionist socialism, often known as social democracy…Nationalist socialism, properly understood, appeared in Europe in the last years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth as an alternative to both Marxism and liberalism…The uniqueness of European nationalist socialism…lay in one essential point: its acceptance of the principle of the nation’s primacy and its subjection of the values of socialism to the service of the nation. In this way socialism lost its universal significance and became an essential tool in the process of building the nation-state. Thus, the universal values of socialism were subordinated to the particularistic values of nationalism. In practice, this was expressed by a total rejection of the concept of class warfare and by the claim of transcending social contradictions for the benefit of the collectivity as a whole. This form of socialism preached the organic unity of the nation and the mobilization of all classes of society for the achievement of national objectives. According to the theory, this process was to be led by natural elites, whose membership was determined not by class, origin, or educational qualifications but by sentiment, dedication, and a readiness to make sacrifices for all. Nationalist socialism quite naturally disliked people with large fortunes, the spoiled aristocracy, and all those to whom money came easily and who could allow themselves to be idle. It lashed out mercilessly at the bourgeoisie whose money moved from one financial center to another and whose checkbook, close to its heart, served as its identity card. In contrast with all these, nationalist socialism presented the working man with both feet firmly planted on the soil of his native country–the farmer, whose horizons are restricted to the piece of land he tills, the bourgeois, who runs his own enterprise, and the industrial worker: the rich and poor who contribute the sweat of their brow, their talents and their money to increasing the collective wealth…Indeeed, nationalist socialism was based on the idea of the nation as a cultural, historical, and biological unit, or figuratively, an extended family. The industrial worker was regarded as an organic part of the whole, and the whole took precedence over the individual. The blood ties and the cultural ties linking members of the nation, their partnership in the total national effort, took precedence over the position of the individual in the production system.

  • Wikileaks: In '06, Lieberman told US ambassador of need to transfer Palestinians from Israel-- and US says nothing
  • Why the Palestinians can’t recognize the Jewish State
  • Blumenthal: Absence of the occupation in the tent protests reflects total separation between Jews and Palestinians
    • Miura August 24, 2011 at 12:19 pm with 1 replies

      "I don't know what you mean by 'glory,' " Alice said.
      Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't--till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!' "
      "But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected.
      "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less."
      "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
      "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master that's all."
      Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. "They've a temper, some of them--particularly verbs, they're the proudest--adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs--however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That's what I say!"

    • Miura August 24, 2011 at 12:10 pm with 1 replies

      Israel is like Austria Hungary at the turn of the last century.

      Karl Kraus described it as a "research laboratory for world destruction”.

  • The empty pieties of David Grossman
    • Miura August 23, 2011 at 5:31 pm

      An excerpt from a review of Grossman's latest work of fiction:

      SOME NOVELS are met by such a hurricane of hostile criticism that they sink out of sight. Only word of mouth, the contrary opinion running from reader to reader, can occasionally bring them to the surface again. To the End of the Land has the opposite problem. It arrived on a foaming wave of praise which, when they actually get down to its pages, will leave many readers puzzled. Normally an author can deflect blurb hyperbole with a wince. But this fanfare has been on a Hollywood Bowl scale that does Grossman, who has proved himself in the past to be a wise and talented writer, no favors at all.

      'To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.' So wrote Nicole Krauss. Paul Auster ranked the book with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina: 'wrenching, beautiful, unforgettable'. Grossman's American publisher called it 'one of the very greatest novels I shall have the privilege of publishing ... When critics look back at the 21st century and list its 20 best novels, it will be on it.' Several reviewers and interviewers have grabbed at the Tolstoy comparison: the vast scale, the humanity, the panorama of families in a land incessantly at war. Perhaps, they venture, this is the War and Peace of our own times.

      A Letter to the Editor cut to the chase:

      Reviewing David Grossman's To the End of the Land, Neal Ascherson is right to be reminded of 'those American war films, proclaimed to be 'against Vietnam', in which only the American victims are in focus' (LRB, 3 February). Grossman's novel--like most Israeli fictions about the conflict--is almost entirely preoccupied with Jewish suffering, its Arab characters never more than shadows that flit across the stage. What Ascherson misses is the thread that connects Grossman's aesthetics and his politics. Grossman is, to be sure, concerned about what Israel has done to the Palestinians, but he's far more concerned with what oppressing the Palestinians has done to Israel. The indifference to the inner lives of Palestinians and the emphasis on Jewish victimization in To the End of the Land reflect the pinched sympathies--and imaginative failures--of the Zionist consensus to which he belongs. This is a major reason why Grossman is so enormously popular in Israel, even on the right. Despite his opposition to the occupation, he remains a loyal soldier. As George Packer touchingly noted in his New Yorker profile, 'even though he is alienated from Israel's leadership, he still sends his children into the army.' The fact that he continues to support a two-state solution 'even though Arab militants killed his son' (Packer again) has been turned into another reason to admire him: an example of his supreme generosity (never mind that these 'Arab militants' were defending their land against an Israeli invasion). Purportedly an anti-war novel, To the End of the Land breathes new literary life into the old cliché of Israel's anguished soul.

  • 'Politico' features claim for Israeli sovereignty of W.B. where 'Jews have been the majority' since 1800s
    • Miura August 23, 2011 at 5:44 pm with 2 replies

      As everyone knows there are people, and then there are people:

      In his seminal book Expulsion of the Palestinians, Palestinian scholar Nur Masalha writes of Israel Zangwill’s infamous slogan "a land without a people for a people without a land" that it was not intended as a literal demographic assessment: "[Zionists] did not mean that there were no people in Palestine, but that there were no people worth considering within the framework of the notions of European supremacy that then held sway".

  • State Department beneficiary, MEMRI, is dedicated to bringing Israeli ideas about Arab world and Iran into U.S. establishment
    • Miura August 12, 2011 at 7:29 pm

      Yes, but after the 50s, the racist depiction of black Africans was no longer acceptable in polite company in the West. Apartheid South Africa's song and dance about holding the line against "barbarians" (as J.M. Coetzee memorably phrased it in his novel Waiting for the Barbarians) was not tenable, even with Cold War paranoia about Russian influence in Africa. Israel, as Ilan Pappe has shown has always tried to control the "story" coming out of that region--with success it might be claimed--and it's propaganda arm has a long history of poisoning the well when it comes to relations between, say, Americans and Egyptians--or Arabs in general. The idiotic "Clash of Civilizations" idea which Bernard Lewis has been trying to pawn off since 1958, but which really took off after the Soviet Union fell into the dustbin of history comes out that same effort to keep the air acrimonious when it comes to public perception of the Middle East and its inhabitants in the West:

      link to youtube.com

      The contempt toward Asia and basically anyone who's not European dates back to Herzl who wanted his Europeanized state to be a "wall against Asiatic barbarism". Ella Shohat has written well about the self-hatred and disavowal of culture that Mizrahi Jews suffer in Israel:

      link to bintjbeil.com

    • Miura August 12, 2011 at 12:24 pm with 59 replies

      Israel persists in dragging the West back to the nightmarish history from which it is trying to awaken:

      Israel and Australia are like sisters in Asia. We are in Asia without the characteristics of Asians. We don't have yellow skin and slanted eyes. Asia is basically the yellow race. Australia and Israel are not--we are basically the white race. We are on the western side of Asia and they are on the southeastern side.

  • Walzer: Tent protesters want to escape neoliberalism, 'security' mindset, and nonexistent peace process
    • Miura August 12, 2011 at 7:41 pm

      That was Edward Said quoting Dworkin. The latter was also highly critical of the slippery arguments--to use that term in its broader sense--that are the stock in trade of Walzer:

      --

      Our political arguments almost never begin in some shared understanding of the pertinent principles of distribution. Every important issue is a contest between competing models. Nor do we accept that everything we find valuable must be wholly subject to a single logic of distribution: if we recognize spheres of justice we also recognize the need for interaction between them. The most important way in which wealth influences politics, for example, is by buying not votes but television time. Of course those who favor restricting campaign expenses say that money should not buy office. But their opponents reply that such restrictions would violate rights to property as well as free speech, so the issue belongs to no settled sphere of justice, but is rather the subject of bargaining and compromise endlessly debated.

      Walzer’s response to these plain facts about political argument shows how feeble his positive theory of justice really is:

      A given society is just if its substantive — life is lived in a certain way — that is, in a way faithful to the shared understandings of the members. (When people disagree about the meaning of social goods, when understandings are controversial, then justice requires that the society be faithful to the disagreements, providing institutional channels for their expression, adjudicative mechanisms, and alternative distributions.)

      This passage confirms Walzer’s deep relativism about justice. He says, for example, that a caste system is just in a society whose traditions accept it, and that it would be unjust in such a society, to distribute goods and other resources equally. But his remarks about what justice requires in a society whose members disagree about justice are simply mysterious. Does “alternative distributions” mean medical care for the poor in some cities but not in others? How can a society that must make up its mind whether to permit political action committees to finance election campaigns really be “faithful” to disagreement about the social meaning of elections and political speech? What would “being faithful” mean? If justice is only a matter of following shared understandings, then how can the parties be debating about justice. When there is no shared understanding? In that situation no solution can possibly be just, on Walzer’s relativistic account, and politics can be only a selfish struggle. What can it mean even to say that people disagree about social meanings? The fact of the disagreement shows that there is no shared social meaning to disagree about. Walzer has simply not thought through the consequences of his relativism for a society like ours; in which questions of justice are endlessly contested and debated.

      --

      link to nybooks.com

    • Miura August 12, 2011 at 12:17 pm with 4 replies

      A nice overview of the standard Walzerian rhetorical formula as exhibited in the passage at the end from his take on the 'uprising':

      A 'relaxed and easygoing vision' of reality, said Ronald Dworkin of one of Walzer's previous books...homey, egalitarian, melioristic...As you read Walzer and mull over his various agreeable conclusions and affirmations, you begin to wonder how the world has become so malleable and so possible a place. Not that Walzer actually says it is a possible place; on the contrary, he insists on its complexity and difficulty at almost every opportunity. No: what bothers you is the world of Walzer's discourse, the verbal space in which his discussions and analyses take place, as well as the political locale isolated by him for reflection and hypothesis. Then you begin to realize how many extremely severe excisions and restrictions have occurred in order to produce [this] calmly civilized world...Walzer's 'relaxed and easygoing' work is the result of a very curious and, to my mind, extremely problematic antithetical mode, insistent and uncompromising in places, indifferent and curiously forgiving in others...The effect of Walzer's chatty style is to disarm those who might look for evidence, argument, proof and the like...

      When the emerging leaders of the uprising insist that their protest is "non-political," they mean that it's not about war and peace. They know, of course, that everything is connected and that the difficulties they are experiencing are partly caused by massive state investment in the occupied territories. But they have their own dream of Zionist normality: They want to focus on their own lives and on the quality of domestic society. One can see the focus in their signs and placards. In the old Peace Now demonstrations, there were many signs in English, and this made perfect sense: The message of the demonstrators wasn't aimed only at Israelis, but at Arabs, Europeans, American Jews, and Americans generally. But, in these demonstrations, all the signs are in Hebrew. The people of Israel are talking to each other.

  • Afghanistan helicopter crash fuels antiwar feeling in American military community
    • Miura August 9, 2011 at 4:55 pm

      "I find war detestable but those who praise it without participating in it even more so."

      Romain Rolland, that rare Westerner whom Gandhi visited, wrote that in his diary in the first weeks of World War I, before the carnage reached a crescendo in places like Verdun and Somme.

    • Miura August 9, 2011 at 4:52 pm

      Funny how Amos Oz was himself neck deep in the deception of the '67 war coining arresting phrases such as "Shooting and Crying":

      Three weeks after the 1967 Mideast war, the secular kibbutz member Avraham Shapira and Amos Oz, then a rising young author, were summoned to Labour Party headquarters. They were asked to make the demobilized soldiers from the kibbutzim break the wall of silence and discuss their war experience. Titled "Soldiers' Talk" ("Siah Lohamim"), the collection of interviews they edited was a national and international success. It was translated into several European languages--never mind that the interviews were not infrequently manipulated.

      The book, which forged the image of the handsome, dilemma-ridden, existentially soul-searching Israeli soldier, was a hymn to that frightening oxymoron --"purity of arms" and the ideal of an exalted Jewish morality. It was also a kind of central casting from which Oz drew many of his fictional protagonists. Not surprisingly, the book became an invaluable propaganda tool. In a well-attended gathering in the United States, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (then ambassador to the U.S.) and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel read passages from the book "in order to present the Israeli soldier's profile," according to one account.

      The book also elicited self-righteous and self-congratulatory pronouncements from some sanctimonious figures. "We are fortunate to have been blessed with such sons," declared Golda Meir. "It's a shame that no one has seen to its translation in all the languages of the world," said Wiesel a year later. The latest version of "Soldiers' Talk," in terms of register and success, is Ari Folman's 2008 Golden Globe award-winning animated documentary film "Waltz with Bashir."

  • Tent 1948
    • Miura August 6, 2011 at 2:17 pm with 1 replies

      If it is not justice to all including all Palestinians, then it is a fake justice, elite justice or “Justice for Jews only” exactly as the Israeli democracy functions “for Jews only”.

      There have been many salient critiques of the two-tier approach to justice--as exemplified by its poor cousin "human rights"--in the last few years, as for instance noted here:

      What, then, happens to human rights when they are the rights of homo sacer, of those excluded from the political community; that is, when they are of no use, since they are the rights of those who, precisely, have no rights, and are treated as inhuman? Jacques Rancière proposes a salient dialectical reversal: 'When they are of no use, one does the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes. One gives them to the poor.'

      and here:

      Even among the well-intentioned, the magnificent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the reduced, far more fragile discourse of "human rights". This is an alarming shift. The difference is that notions of equality, of parity, have been pried loose and eased out of the equation. It's a process of attrition. Almost unconsciously, we begin to think of justice for the rich and human rights for the poor. Justice for the corporate world, human rights for its victims. Justice for Americans, human rights for Afghans and Iraqis. Justice for the Indian upper castes, human rights for Dalits and Adivasis (if that.) Justice for white Australians, human rights for Aborigines and immigrants (most times, not even that.)

  • Community board of leftwing radio station in Houston is so freaked out by boycott it calls for boycotting 21 countries, including US
    • Miura August 6, 2011 at 2:32 pm

      Interesting how Palestinians often have less than charitable feelings toward those given to pontificating at them in the name of "socialism", "universal values", etc., as espoused by likes of the Pacifica general manager you mentioned and as opposed to the openly supremacist ones given to shouting "Death to the Arabs".

  • US Muslims more opposed than other groups to violence against civilians
    • Miura August 3, 2011 at 3:41 pm

      Nothing particularly surprising here, except that it might trigger cognitive dissonance in those who have fallen prey to Islamophobic phantasms. After all, 'American media have had no qualms in using terms such as "intifada" or "jihad" to describe the [2005] riots' in suburbs of large French cities--functional equivalents of economically depressed "projects" in American cities. This discourse lives on like a zombie without any reality to sustain it, even when social science research data spanning decades as cited by French sociologists of the caliber of Loïc Wacquant shows that the level of religious observance in French banlieues is even lower than the rest of French society, itself among the most secular in the world.

  • Islamophobia has deep roots in our pathologies: Americanism, KKK, and supine media
    • Miura August 3, 2011 at 2:32 pm with 4 replies

      Although the Islam=Terror=Existential Threat to Democracies discourse was already in the air by the late 70s--as proclaimed by the likes of the Neoconservative presidential hopeful "Senator from Boeing" Henry Jackson in Jerusalem--it really came into its own with the coming to power of the Reagan administration in '81 as pointed out by Chomsky and the very few academics who dare to track down the history of reigning ideologies. Edward Said was already quoting knowledgeable Israelis in 1986--when the Soviet Union and East Bloc seemed likely to stick around for decades--about the origins of the West vs. Islam variant of the War on Terror (the only type now left as the Russians "unsportingly threw in the towel" as Gore Vidal quipped):

      An interesting article by the Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk in the February 1986 issue of Le Monde diplomatique suggests that it became a conscious aim of Israeli policy in the mid-1970s to delegitimize Palestinian nationalism in toto by defining its main expression—the PLO—as terrorist, the better to be able to ignore its undeniable claims on Israel. The major consequence of this policy was, of course, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, allegedly carried out to defeat terrorism but in reality designed to settle the fate of the West Bank and Gaza, particularly given the fact that the PLO had scrupulously observed a cease-fire between July 1981 and June 1982.

      Yet one of the complexities of the 1982 invasion was that it showed the West a side of Israel hitherto well hidden. All the more reason, therefore, to efface the picture of Sabra and Shatila by waging a full-scale ideological and cultural battle against terrorism—a battle whose main thrust has been, first, its selectivity ('we' are never terrorists no matter what we may have done; 'they' always are and always will be), and, second, its wholesale attempt to obliterate history, and indeed temporality itself. For the main thing is to isolate your enemy from causality, from prior action, and thereby to portray him or her as ontologically and gratuitously interested in wreaking havoc for its own sake. Thus if you can show that Libyans, Moslems, Palestinians and Arabs, generally speaking, have no reality except that which tautologically confirms their terrorist essence as Libyans, Moslems, Palestinians and Arabs, you can go on to attack them and their 'terrorist' states...

  • Geller and Spencer's work actually shaped Breivik's ideas, Walt explains
    • Miura July 31, 2011 at 1:14 pm

      Why only a couple of weeks before the outrage? How about after the evil had occurred under the Sun:

      Italian Northern League MEP Mario Borghezio described [Breivik's ideas] as "100% good".

      This from a country where the next Prime Minister--who also comes from the "family" of the far-right--is likely to be a man who as late as the mid-90s regarded Mussolini as "the greatest statesman of the 20th Century". Of course, all is forgiven after he cleaned up his act and like dozens of ex-hitmen became a vocal pentito getting a certificate of good neighborliness from the Man of Peace himself, Ariel Sharon:

      He is a good and friendly leader--it is time to look to the future, not the past.

  • Liberal Rx for Muslims in Europe is kryptonite for Zionists
    • Miura July 26, 2011 at 12:11 pm

      Keep in mind it took several generations for integration to work itself out in a country where the concept of citizenship is not tied explicitly to one's bloodline--a concept that Germany is still wrestling with:

      An important feature of Hough's account is the generational remaking, or refabrication, of ethnic allegiances. Anglicans and Puritans were redefined--and redefined themselves--as English, in face of a new wave of Irish and German immigrants; Ulstermen and Lutherans became Protestants with the arrival of the mainly Catholic wave of Irish and Germans in the mid-19th century. The latter differentiated themselves from the Ellis Island immigrants from the 1890s on: mezzogiorno farmworkers and East European Jews. In the 1960s came the fabrication of the 'European races' of English-, German-, Irish-, Jewish- and Italian-Americans into the 'white' race, not least by immigration and civil-rights legislation. This amounted, as Hough points out, to a de facto acceptance of the South's formulation of 'race' as a black-white dichotomy...Hough estimates that today, 'blacks are where the Irish were in 1910, or Italians, Jews and Poles in 1950--not ideal, but a long way from the original prejudices and discrimination'.

  • Douglas begat Trumbo, and Trumbo begat Exodus
    • Miura July 26, 2011 at 11:46 am with 1 replies

      Yes, it was with a few honorable exceptions the whole left: from Marxists, Social Democrats, intellectuals known for their fierce independence such as Bertrand Russell and Sartre--although they changed their mind near the end of their lives--all the way to the freewheeling anarchists:

      When I joined the socialist students--English, Irish, Jewish, Chinese, Indian, African...I had to fight my friends on the issue of Jewish socialism, to defend the fact that I would not accept Arabs into my trade union, the Histadrut; to defend preaching to housewives that they not buy at Arab stores; to defend the fact that we stood guard at orchards to prevent Arab workers from getting jobs there...To pour kerosene on Arab tomatoes; to attack Jewish housewives in the markets and smash the Arab eggs they had bought; to praise to the skies to Keren Kayemet [Jewish National Fund] that sent [Zionist Organization agent Yehoshua] Hankin to Beirut to buy land from absentee effendis [landowners] and to throw the fellahin off the land...to do all that was not easy.

  • 'JPost' does 'on the one hand/on the other hand' with Norway massacre!
    • Miura July 26, 2011 at 11:34 am

      Samuel Huntington only marketed the script, but the man who came up with the original idea and the catchy title, 'Clash of Civilizations' is Bernard Lewis. He has become a specialist, especially since 9/11, on topics such as how Muslims are about to "take over Europe" and the imminent "Fall of Europe to Islam". This in addition to his Clash of Civilization Thesis which he's been palming off from the leafy groves of academia for generations (at least since 1958), and providing sage-like advice to a sizable chunk of DC policymakers — Dick Cheney holds him in particular regard — when it comes to matters Islamic or Middle Eastern:

      ...[Lewis] spoke at length about the millennial struggle between Christianity and Islam. Lewis argues that Muslims have adopted migration, along with terror, as the latest strategy in their "cosmic struggle for world domination." This is a familiar framework from the original author of the phrase "the clash of civilizations" — made more famous by Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington.

      Here's a more recent nugget of psychological insight into what was going on in the minds of young Egyptian men in Cairo when they were peacefully protesting against the 3 decades old Mubarak dictatorship:

      Another thing is the sexual aspect of it. One has to remember that in the Muslim world, casual sex, Western-style, doesn't exist. If a young man wants sex, there are only two possibilities  —  marriage and the brothel. You have these vast numbers of young men growing up without the money, either for the brothel or the brideprice, with raging sexual desire. On the one hand, it can lead to the suicide bomber, who is attracted by the virgins of paradise  —  the only ones available to him. On the other hand, sheer frustration.

  • Open letter to the German left on BDS, from Palestinian and Israeli Activists
    • Miura July 16, 2011 at 1:19 pm

      Norman Finkelstein's 'Reflections on "Political Correctness" in Germany' still has useful insights, almost a decade after it was first published:

      ...I agree with Daniel Goldhagen's claim in Hitler's Willing Executioners that philo-Semites are typically anti-Semites in "sheep's clothing." The philo-Semite both assumes that Jews are somehow "different" and almost always secretly harbors a mixture of envy of and loathing for this alleged difference. Philo-Semitism thus presupposes, but also engenders a frustrated version of, its opposite. A public, preferably defenseless, scapegoat is then needed to let all this pent-up ugliness ooze out.

      To account for Germany's obsession with the Nazi holocaust, a German friend explained that Germans "like to carry a load." To which I would add: especially if it's light as a feather. No doubt some Germans of the post-war generation genuinely accepted the burden of guilt together with its paralyzing taboos on independent, critical thought. But today German "political correctness" is all a charade of pretending to accept the burden of being German while actually rejecting it. For, what is the point of these interminable public breast-beatings except to keep reminding the world: "We are not like them."

      It can also be safely said that politically correct Germans know full well that, more often than not, the criticism leveled against Israeli policy and misuse of the Nazi holocaust is valid. In private conversation (as I've discovered) they freely admit to this. They profess to fear that, if Jewish abuses become public knowledge, it will unleash a tidal wave of anti-Semitism. Is there really any likelihood of this happening in Germany today? And isn't vigorous and candid debate the best means to stem an anti-Semitic tide: exposing the abuses of the Jewish establishment as well as the demagogues who exploit these abuses for nefarious ends? What politically correct Germans really fear, I suspect, is the loss of power and privilege attendant on challenging the uncritical support of all things Jewish. Indeed, their public defense of the indefensible not only breeds cynicism in political life but, far from combating anti-Semitism among Germans, actually engenders it.

  • Unsafe, unfair, unreasonable Hitchens
    • Miura July 6, 2011 at 1:10 am

      How appropriate! Just keep in mind, that with Hitch, "there's no there there". As Finkelstein says, it's all about moi with Hitchens. He's among the last of a dying breed of ex-Trotskyites who used to be "plentiful in the higher reaches of the media"--emblematic of "a cynical, sardonic, amoral generation, without faith or optimism."

    • Miura July 5, 2011 at 10:51 pm with 6 replies

      By far the best account of this pseudo-intellectual shill's modus operandi is by Norman Finkelstein.

  • Brooklyn-Jenin: A farewell prayer to Zionism
  • In Hebron: This is not about politics, it is about right and wrong
    • Miura July 5, 2011 at 4:08 pm

      The riots of 1929 shook one of the great historians of the 20th century Hans Kohn and prompted his subsequent departure from Palestine. As Craig Calhoun noted in his introduction to Kohn's magnum opus, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in Its Origins and Background:

      [Hans] Kohn in particular was deeply troubled by the ways in which Palestinian settlement put Jews in the position of dominating others by power alone, rather than cultural renewal and a dialogical exchange. He was especially unimpressed with arguments based on "historic right" (just as he would be in his writings on nationalism years later). "With the term 'historic right," he suggested, "one can rationalize every kind of injustice." As he wrote to Buber in 1929: "We have been in Palestine for 12 years now and have not once seriously tried to secure the acceptance of the people or to negotiate with the people that live in the country. We have relied exclusively on the military power of Great Britain. We have set goals that inevitably and in themselves had to lead to conflicts with the Arabs and about which we should say that they are reason--and justified reason--for a national uprising against us."

  • A Pipeline of Injustice: Greek consular official admits that natural gas pipeline drives complicity in Gaza siege
    • Miura July 5, 2011 at 4:28 pm

      ...Greek public opinion, which even the World Jewish Congress concedes is "clearly pro-Palestinian."

      Indeed, Sofia Sakorafa, a Greek athlete who once held the world record for Javelin throw acquired a Palestinian passport in 2004 and wanted to enter the Olympics parade as a Palestinian but was not allowed to compete because of regulations declared at the time:

      This was a symbolic gesture to show my support for the Palestinian people ... I will continue to support them.

  • Europe embraces the silences of Aharon Appelfeld
    • Miura July 1, 2011 at 3:41 pm

      Joan Peters's From Time Immemorial first appeared in 1984.

      By the end of 1984, From Time Immemorial had...received some two hundred [favorable] notices...in the United States. The only 'false' notes in this crescendoing chorus of praise were the Journal of Palestine Studies, which ran a highly critical review by Bill Farrell; the small Chicago-based newsweekly In These Times, which published a condensed version of this writer's findings; and Alexander Cockburn, who devoted a splendid series of columns in The Nation to exposing the hoax....The periodicals in which From Time Immemorial had already been favorably reviewed refused to run any critical correspondence (e.g. The New Republic, Atlantic, Commentary). Periodicals that had yet to review the book rejected a manuscript on the subject as of little or no consequence (e.g. The Village Voice, Dissent, The New York Review of Books). Not a single national newspaper or columnist contacted found newsworthy that a best-selling, effusively praised 'study' of the Middle East conflict was a threadbare hoax.

      This concerted effort was described by Edward Said as a "Conspiracy of Praise":

      Has it come to this then: an unconsciously held ideology that permits the most scandalous and disgusting lies--execrably written, totally disorganized, hysterically asserted--to pass as genuine scholarship, factual truth, political insight, without any significant challenge, demurral, or even polite reservation?

      Although, discourse has improved markedly over the ensuing quarter century, but praise is still heaped in super-sized doses:

      SOME NOVELS are met by such a hurricane of hostile criticism that they sink out of sight. Only word of mouth, the contrary opinion running from reader to reader, can occasionally bring them to the surface again. To the End of the Land has the opposite problem. It arrived on a foaming wave of praise which, when they actually get down to its pages, will leave many readers puzzled. Normally an author can deflect blurb hyperbole with a wince. But this fanfare has been on a Hollywood Bowl scale that does Grossman, who has proved himself in the past to be a wise and talented writer, no favors at all.

      'To read it is to have yourself taken apart, undone, touched at the place of your own essence; it is to be turned back, as if after a long absence, into a human being.' So wrote Nicole Krauss. Paul Auster ranked the book with Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina: 'wrenching, beautiful, unforgettable'. Grossman's American publisher called it 'one of the very greatest novels I shall have the privilege of publishing ... When critics look back at the 21st century and list its 20 best novels, it will be on it.' Several reviewers and interviewers have grabbed at the Tolstoy comparison: the vast scale, the humanity, the panorama of families in a land incessantly at war. Perhaps, they venture, this is the War and Peace of our own times.

      A Letter to the Editor cut to the chase:

      Reviewing David Grossman's To the End of the Land, Neal Ascherson is right to be reminded of 'those American war films, proclaimed to be 'against Vietnam', in which only the American victims are in focus' (LRB, 3 February). Grossman's novel--like most Israeli fictions about the conflict--is almost entirely preoccupied with Jewish suffering, its Arab characters never more than shadows that flit across the stage. What Ascherson misses is the thread that connects Grossman's aesthetics and his politics. Grossman is, to be sure, concerned about what Israel has done to the Palestinians, but he's far more concerned with what oppressing the Palestinians has done to Israel. The indifference to the inner lives of Palestinians and the emphasis on Jewish victimisation in To the End of the Land reflect the pinched sympathies--and imaginative failures--of the Zionist consensus to which he belongs. This is a major reason why Grossman is so enormously popular in Israel, even on the right. Despite his opposition to the occupation, he remains a loyal soldier. As George Packer touchingly noted in his New Yorker profile, 'even though he is alienated from Israel's leadership, he still sends his children into the army.' The fact that he continues to support a two-state solution 'even though Arab militants killed his son' (Packer again) has been turned into another reason to admire him: an example of his supreme generosity (never mind that these 'Arab militants' were defending their land against an Israeli invasion). Purportedly an anti-war novel, To the End of the Land breathes new literary life into the old cliché of Israel's anguished soul.

  • 'Peace Now' calls on Israel to end blockade but says flotilla is playing 'dangerous game'
    • Miura June 29, 2011 at 10:33 am

      Excerpts from a Chomsky interview from around the time the "Peace Process" was in its early, nebulous stages:

      One good thing that has happened in Israel is that for the first time, a significant, authentic peace movement has developed. I don't mean Peace Now, which is largely there in order to convince American liberals that they should continue to support Israel...As far as Peace Now goes, I met with their activists while I was there, and I read their literature. They refuse to take a position. They are extremely evasive. They say things vaguely like "Palestinians have rights."...They say something, and then they retract it. But Peace Now does much worse. Their statements are much more evasive...Peace Now is a very establishment group. They say in private that they see their role as ensuring that American liberals and liberals in the American Jewish community don't give up on Israel. I consider them very damaging. They are very harmful for the cause of peace. I have told them that many times.

  • Ethan Bronner's 'benign occupation'
    • Miura June 26, 2011 at 3:32 pm

      Claude Chabrol created a fine documentary based entirely on propaganda newsreels — available online in its entirety, albeit sans subtitles — which showed how life under German occupation was really not so bad, and it's still an issue that can disturb the summer idyll for many in France.

  • Israel warns foreign journalists who go on flotilla they could be barred from country for 10 years
    • Miura June 26, 2011 at 11:22 am with 4 replies

      As the Algerian war was tearing French society apart--a new constitution had to be instituted, colonels opened fire on de Gaulle's motorcade, there was a putsch led by Generals--Jean Paul Sartre wrote the following:

      "France in the past was the name of a country; let us take heed that it does not become the name of a neurosis."

  • Palestinian sports community appeals to UEFA to stop 2013 football tourney in Israel
    • Miura June 26, 2011 at 4:03 pm

      ...if Israel wishes to integrate itself in it's region--to compete in it's own region for qualifying.

      Integrate itself in it's region? How can you integrate yourself with those Asiatics when you feel European in your bones? Have you forgotten the words of Theodor Herzl from the 19'th century?

      In Palestine…we shall be for Europe a part of the wall against Asia, we shall serve as a vanguard of civilization against barbarism.

      Sentiments that are part of the subconscious heritage of almost all Ashkenazi Israelis still. "A villa in the jungle" is how Ehud Barak recently phrased the feeling. With such sentiments common as Uzi submachineguns in Israel, maybe they would be better served by bypassing Asia altogether and attempt to integrate instead with their sister European settler colonies Down Under:

      Israel and Australia are like sisters in Asia. We are in Asia without the characteristics of Asians. We don't have yellow skin and slanted eyes. Asia is basically the yellow race. Australia and Israel are not--we are basically the white race. We are on the western side of Asia and they are on the southeastern side. Israel has not fully acknowledged the value of working together with Australia in Asia. It's a way for us to cooperate with and enhance our position in the countries neighboring Australia.

  • Reporters hector State: Is the blockade legal? What right does Israel have to 'defend itself' from humanitarian aid?
    • Miura June 26, 2011 at 1:10 am

      Such psychotherapists remind one of the clinical staff in High Anxiety as this diagnosis by as Norman Finkelstein suffices to show:

      If virtually any criticism of Israel signals anti-Semitism, the sweep of the new anti-Semitism, unsurprisingly, beggars the imagination. Apart from usual suspects like Arabs, Muslims, and the Third World generally, as well as Europe and the United Nations, Chesler's rogues' gallery includes "Western-based human rights organizations, academics, intellectuals"; "Western anticapitalist, antiglobalist, pro-environment, antiracist," and "antiwar" activists; "progressive feminists," "Jewish feminists" ("American Jewish feminists stopped fighting for women's rights in America and began fighting for the rights of the PLO"); "European, and left and liberal American media" like Time magazine, the Associated Press, Reuters, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, British Guardian, Toronto Star, the BBC, NPR, CNN, and ABC, as well as many Israelis like the late "Yeshayahu Leibowitz of Hebrew university"--an orthodox Jew and one of Israel's most revered intellectuals. And "anyone who denies that this is so," Chesler throws in for good measure, is also "an anti-Semite." Small wonder that Chesler sees a world awash in "Nazi-level" anti-Semitism: "It's as if Hitler's Brown Shirts have returned from the dead, in greater numbers, and are doing their dirty Kristallnacht work everyday, everywhere."

  • Feldman: 'Israel’s out of control downward spiral will help bring about alienation in Birthright alumni'
  • The flotilla is a political response, not a humanitarian one
  • Brian Lehrer suggests Pakistan's establishment as a religious state was wrong
    • Miura June 22, 2011 at 4:27 pm

      The partition of India in 1947 was not a cut and dry affair in which the separatist Jinnah "vivisected Mother India". It was a very complex business in which the role of Congress leaders like Nehru and Gandhi is not the rose tinted one presented in Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. According to a significant school of historians it was Jinnah who was using the idea of Pakistan as a bargaining chip for increased minority rights until literally months before the Brits departed, and it was the hardline stance of Nehru whose vision of India was as a "hard state" to be run on serial 5 year plans for industrialization, albeit tempered with Fabian Socialist advice and not along Stalinist lines, which ruled out the possibility of a united India. For to remain united, it would have to be a decentralized "soft state", as Gunnar Myrdal labeled it, with the central government having much less power than what it enjoyed under the British. Such an outcome was unacceptable to upper-caste Congress elites such as Nehru, Bose, and Vallabhai Patel who envisaged an interventionist dirigiste state. We saw something along the same lines just a few months ago in Sudan--or as happened with Pakistan itself 40 years ago--where the riverine Khartoum based Arab elites preferred to let go of a significant chunk of territory only to retain strong control over what remained. It's a rather black and white reading of history to retrospectively view these as straightforward "religious" cleavages, when complex and Machiavellian power struggles were going on in which the chance of a united post-colonial state was a very distinct possibility, but one which for obvious reasons both sides now downplay in order to justify the eventual divorce, as it were. Here is a very readable account of the events that led to 1947 in that part of the world.

  • Gen'l Ashkenazi, architect of Gaza onslaught, joins Brookings Institution as 'Visiting Fellow'
    • Miura June 21, 2011 at 6:35 pm with 1 replies

      Not a good career move in the land of Think Tanks:

      "I knew bloody well it would bring horrible unpopularity…All my personal loyalties are the other way. I've literally dozens of Jewish friends; I have no Palestinian friends." Lieven says he was a regular at the Aspen Institute till he brought up the issue. "I got kicked out of Aspen…In early 2002 they held a conference on relations with the Muslim world. For two days nobody mentioned Israel. Finally, I said, 'Look, this is a Soviet-style debate. Whatever you think about this issue, the entire Muslim world is shouting about it.' I have never been asked back." In 2004 Lieven published a book, America Right or Wrong, in which he argued that the United States had subordinated its interests to a tiny militarized state, Israel. Attacked as an anti-Semite, Lieven says he became a pariah among many colleagues at the Carnegie Endowment, which he left for the fledgling New America Foundation.

  • Britain’s denial of democracy and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine
    • Miura June 20, 2011 at 2:08 pm with 1 replies

      btw, the role of United States was honorable toward the peoples of that region at the end of WWI given the low standards of racist mendacity set by the likes of Britain and France toward the colonized peoples of Africa and Asia. US government in face of staunch opposition by Britain and France established a fact-finding commission to gauge opinion of inhabitants of lands supposedly empty to be filled by Jewish immigration. Following are a few excerpts from the report of what Arthur Balfour, the former British Prime Minister derisively called the 'American Commission' (which as an author described it, 'was viewed as childish by the French and British career officials, who did not believe that public opinion, in the European and American sense, existed in the Middle East.'):

      The Commissioners began their study of Zionism with minds predisposed in its favor, but the actual facts in Palestine, coupled with the force of the general principles proclaimed by the Allies and accepted by the Syrians have driven them to the recommendation here made.

      ...

      For "a national home for the Jewish people" is not equivalent to making Palestine into a Jewish State; nor can the erection of such a Jewish State be accomplished without the gravest trespass upon the "civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." The fact came out repeatedly in the Commission's conference with Jewish representatives, that the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine, by various forms of purchase.

      In his address of July 4, 1918, President Wilson laid down the following principle as one of the four great "ends for which the associated peoples of the world were fighting"; "The settlement of every question, whether of territory, of sovereignty, of economic arrangement, or of political relationship upon the basis of the free acceptance of that settlement by the people immediately concerned and not upon the basis of the material interest or advantage of any other nation or people which may desire a different settlement for the sake of its own exterior influence or mastery." If that principle is to rule, and so the wishes of Palestine's population are to be decisive as to what is to be done with Palestine, then it is to be remembered that the non-Jewish population of Palestine — nearly nine tenths of the whole — are emphatically against the entire Zionist program. The tables show that there was no one thing upon which the population of Palestine were more agreed than upon this. To subject a people so minded to unlimited Jewish immigration, and to steady financial and social pressure to surrender the land, would be a gross violation of the principle just quoted, and of the people's rights, though it kept within the forms of law.

      ...

      The Peace Conference should not shut its eyes to the fact that the anti-Zionist feeling in Palestine and Syria is intense and not lightly to be flouted. No British officer, consulted by the Commissioners, believed that the Zionist program could be carried out except by force of arms. The officers generally thought that a force of not less than 50,000 soldiers would be required even to initiate the program. That of itself is evidence of a strong sense of the injustice of the Zionist program, on the part of the non-Jewish populations of Palestine and Syria. Decisions, requiring armies to carry out, are sometimes necessary, but they are surely not gratuitously to be taken in the interests of a serious injustice. For the initial claim, often submitted by Zionist representatives, that they have a "right" to Palestine, based on an occupation of 2,000 years ago, can hardly be seriously considered.

  • Report from a police holding cell
    • Miura June 19, 2011 at 1:51 pm

      You are immersed in Mussolini's sauce.

      Perhaps other methods for dealing with the recalcitrant ones need to be explored...Castor oil was used in Mussolini's Italy to get the point across: "This is what saddens us, this utter refusal to understand."

      After all, Israeli Navy prowling the Mediterranean in "defense of the Nation" carries with it illustrious traditions it can draw upon:

      Mussolini had favored Zionism for many years...In November 1934, Mussolini allowed the Betar to set up a squadron at the maritime academy at Civitavecchia run by the Blackshirts militia...[In 1935] Mussolini told David Prato, later to become chief rabbi of Rome: "For Zionism to succeed you need to have a Jewish state, with a Jewish flag and a Jewish language. The person who really understands that is your fascist, Jabotinsky." Wolfgang von Weisl, the financial director of Jabotinsky's party, had no hesitation to tell a diplomatic newspaper in Bucharest that "although opinions among the Revisionists varied, in general they sympathized with fascism," and that he was himself "personally a supporter of fascism, and [that] he rejoiced at the victory of Fascist Italy in Abyssinia as a triumph of the White races against the Black."

  • 'NYT' report uncovers Bush plot to torpedo Juan Cole, but ignores some crucial questions
    • Miura June 16, 2011 at 1:38 pm

      Yes, Cole remains fascinated by the use of 'Air Power' against those who require 'attitude adjustment' when it comes to Washington's plans for their respective part of the world. A more critical academic described Yale as an "Imperial University".

  • And now for something completely different . . .
  • How 'A Gay Girl in Damascus' became a mascot of the liberal west
    • Miura June 15, 2011 at 11:45 pm

      btw, it's been four and a half centuries since the Valladolid debate and the terms of debate that were established there have continued to govern relations between the West and the Rest as Immanuel Wallerstein and others have argued:

      The intellectual justifications that Sepulveda gave, in the 16th century, to justify the conquests of the Indian lands are, almost word for word, the same ones used for colonization, and the ones that are given today for what is called intervention. Moreover, Las Casas' responses at that time seem to me much clearer than many criticisms of intervention today. Sepulveda's arguments were as follows: the others are barbarians, we must protect the innocent (whom the barbarians massacre)--constant justification for all interventions--and, finally, it is necessary to permit the diffusion of universalism, supposedly universal values. At that time, it concerned evangelization and the expansion of the Christendom. Today, these values are "freedom and democracy." But they are in fact the same thing.

    • Miura June 15, 2011 at 9:22 pm

      In my own experience I really do not understood homosexuality in the Moslem world.

      You might find this and this piece on instrumental use of Islamophobia to counter Homophobia of interest. Jean Genet's Prisoner of Love is a great read. Incidentally, Genet wasn't the only Westerner who would have found the hysterical trope of "gay people in danger" idiotic: Oscar Wilde, André Gide, E.M. Forster, William Burroughs, Paul Bowles, and Gore Vidal would likely have agreed with him as would generations of gay travelers to places like Morocco.

  • In London, Benny Morris runs the gauntlet
    • Miura June 16, 2011 at 12:22 am

      Here is Edward Said's impression of Benny Morris before he started spewing racist bile by the bucket. Said was prescient in recognizing the demons that were haunting Morris and which would eventually (actually a few weeks after Said's death) overcome Morris's better instincts:

      One of the most remarkable things about the Israelis, again except for Pappe, is the profound contradiction, bordering on schizophrenia, that informs their work. Benni Morris, for example, ten years ago wrote the most important Israeli work on the birth of the Palestinian refugee problem. Using Haganah and Zionist archives he established beyond any reasonable doubt that there had been a forced exodus of Palestinians as a result of a specific policy of "transfer" which had been adopted and approved by Be-Gurion. Morris's meticulous work showed that in district after district commanders had been ordered to drive out Palestinians, burn villages, systematically take over their homes and property. Yet strangely enough, by the end of the book Morris seems reluctant to draw the inevitable conclusions from his own evidence. Instead of saying outright that the Palestinians were, in fact, driven out he says that they were partially driven out by Zionist forces, and partially "left" as a result of war. It is as if he was still enough of a Zionist to believe the ideological version--that Palestinians left on their own without Israeli eviction--rather than completely to accept his own evidence, which is that Zionist policy dictated Palestinian exodus.

    • Miura June 15, 2011 at 1:06 pm

      What i can't believe is that he continues to get invitations--usually Jewish organization supported--outside his little sinkhole, and there are even people who shake his hand and invite him into their parlors!

      I'd like someone to correct me if I'm mistaken, but wasn't Benny Morris invited to start writing his blood-thirsty op-eds for NY Times only after he had shed his earlier persona of a "dove" and started "paint[ing] apocalyptic visions with a smile on his lips" (a sample is analyzed here):

      No person into whose mind had entered the idea that an Iranian may be a human being--and that there are millions of innocent Iranians--could have generated with such casual facility the image of Iran as a "nuclear wasteland." Yet this was the image of Iran that the Israeli Benny Morris decided to conjure up for American readers in the New York Times...[W]hether the attack on Iran comes sooner or later, whether it is executed by Israel or the U.S. or both, and whether carried out with conventional or nuclear weapons, Morris has no doubt of one thing. It will have served the "apocalyptic" vision of the "whole Zionist project," and it will coincide with the highest values of humanity properly defined.

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