Commenter Profile

Total number of comments: 32 (since 2010-05-03 02:29:30)

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a Muslim professor of Islamic Studies working in the United States.

Website: http://www.muslimcomment.com

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  • Animals Lara Logan Arabs brutal animals Lara Logan rape culture Lara Logan
  • Israel lobby group describes an adversary as a 'Muslim apologist'
    • MuslimCommenter February 18, 2011 at 1:13 pm with 1 replies

      "Apologist" is a weirdly equivocal term. C.S. Lewis is often called a Christian apologist, i.e. "explainer", and this has a positive connotation. In that sense it is quite correct to call Ramadan a Muslim apologist. But it's become debased in public discourse, and is used almost exclusively as a smear.

  • 'Our only agenda is love of Egypt' -- Freed activist Wael Ghonim reenergizes protesters
    • MuslimCommenter February 8, 2011 at 1:30 pm

      The NYT has the interview up, with subtitles. I watched the whole thing. Even though the text is rough, it's basically accurate. Sometimes the translation of "individual" and "private" gets somewhat confused, but that's minor.

  • Q: Does Chomsky feel Jewish responsibility for Israel's crimes?
    • MuslimCommenter November 17, 2010 at 7:56 pm with 1 replies

      I've seen Chomsky on video basically saying something like, "When it comes to the Palestinians it probably is the lobby," thus echoing Finkelstein's main position, namely that the Lobby is able to influence Americans regarding the OPT because the Palestinians don't matter in this country. But this does not extend to strategic questions.

      Actually, I just found the video, a "debate" between him and someone else (not really a fair debate, but Chomsky was gracious, didn't crush him). link to youtube.com

      Chomsky doesn't like ideological or psychological explanations in general. His propaganda theory of the media, for example, hardly ever delves into the areas discussed by someone like Jay Rosen, who really unlocks the psychology of journalists (desiring to be always 'savvy' and dealing with what is 'realistically possible' and so forth). Surely such things also matter. People are motivated by all sorts of things, not just power structures.

      Chomsky knows full well what the intellectuals' role is in this country, including Jewish intellectuals (remember his warning to Finkelstein regarding the Peters' book?). But I think he sincerely thinks that the structural explanation is better. Business will do what is good for business. For him private power has no ethnicity. What he avoids explaining is what makes Soros different from Saban, for example.

  • They asked for it
    • MuslimCommenter July 14, 2010 at 2:16 pm

      Moreover, this newspaper report says that before he left Furkan asked for 'hellallik' which is basically a way, particularly in Turkey, of saying to another person, "Please acquit me of any moral obligations I may have towards you," meaning, so that they are not held against me on the Day of Judgment. This can also be misread as some extremist statement, but in Turkey people say this all the time, for example when a man couldn't give me exact change, and I had to sacrifice a few kuruz (cents) he said to me, "Hakkini helal et" which means, "Acquit me of your right against me".

      This can all be twisted to make the kid seem like a zealot.

    • MuslimCommenter July 14, 2010 at 2:12 pm with 1 replies

      "Gemide yolculuk yaparken herkesin geri dönebilir miyiz gibi söylemleri olmuş. 'Bu sırada kardeşim 'biz buraya insanlar için yardım getirdik, geri dönmeyi mi düşünüyorsunuz' şeklinde söylemleri olmuş. Demek ki kendisinin de içine şehit olacağı doğmuş."

      This is from Zaman, a Turkish newspaper. Perhaps it is what the report was citing, but this is very different. The passage above is the words of Furkan Dogan's older brother:

      (quote) While on the boat, everyone started to say things like, 'Can we turn back?'. Then my brother said, 'We came here to bring help to people, and you are thinking of turning back?' So he must have felt within himself that he was going to become a shahid. (endquote)

      I would bet it's this kind of connection they made in trying to say that this teenager was hellbent on becoming a martyr. It was his brother speaking of his younger brother after the fact.

      BTW, in Turkish anyone who dies in a good cause is called a 'sehit' or shahid. Even the ultra-secular military calls fallen soldiers sehit.

      Here's the link: link to zaman.com.tr

  • Avishai: 'on the verge of fascism...'
  • New footage of flotilla attack contradicts Israeli account
  • Obama: No daylight
  • Turkish PM Erdogan calls on Israelis to challenge their 'bandit' gov't
    • MuslimCommenter June 1, 2010 at 11:28 am with 1 replies

      The Kurdish areas are not under a blockade. You can mail them all the assistance you'd like through regular mail. Can you say the same about Gaza?

      By the way, they blocked YouTube because of the Ataturk-mockery videos that were going up (the judiciary is staunchly Kemalist) saying he was gay and so forth. It was a Greek-Turkish thing. Sad, but true. It was not the elected government who blocked it.

      The Turkish press, by the way, is quite diverse and good (most people there actually read more than one paper a day), so the lack of YouTube, though lamentable, is not the end of the world.

  • Even Peter Beinart couldn't say this here
  • Beinart has pushed the reset button on Israel
  • The Wiesel industry
    • MuslimCommenter May 19, 2010 at 4:46 pm with 6 replies

      I don't think Finkelstein ridicules those "that differ with him". I don't recall him ridiculing Ali Abunimah though he disagrees with him about the two-state solution, or Mearshheimer, with whom he disagrees regarding the Lobby, or Raul Hilberg whose politics he disagreed with. He ridicules people who, it seems to me, merit it, and he documents why.

      Speaking as someone whose father was a survivor of the Stalinist terror - my father's father was sent to the Gulag, and his brothers and sisters either were exiled to Central Asia (a kind of giant gulag) from the Caucusus after WWII or were killed by the Communists - I can say that I know plenty of people who don't try to cash in on their suffering and walk around sad-eyed like Wiesel. Being a victim does not make anyone a saint. Among the survivors of the Stalinist terror I've known old folks who were mean and grabby, and others who were generous and great-hearted. I never heard my father or his friends say that the best way to remember Stalin's crimes is through silence or some other poetic balderdash.

      I have to say, I do agree with your four-fold taxonomy of reactions, but not with your attempt to sentimentalize Finkelstein. He's as serious as a heart attack. One can fault him for not being a "curator of his own career" (a phrase that's been going around) but that's hardly a sin.

  • Lame Specter, Blumenthal and Kagan show-- the American Jewish revolution is over
  • Kattan: Truman administration threatened sanctions against 'brutal' Israeli stance on refugees
  • Chomsky and Zionism
    • MuslimCommenter May 17, 2010 at 10:26 am

      I've never read that work of Herzl, and that kind of utopianism should have never come into fashion, but one could imagine a sincere desire to get out of Europe and settle somewhere, and also a sincere openness to people coming in who just want to live as neighbors, and who would necessarily bring their culture with them.

      The problem is that this would have reached a limit, and the Zionists wanted to bring in more Jews than the local population would have been willing to make room for willingly.

      Maybe Chomsky was just plain wrong early on, and he did not think through what the political ramifications were of being a "cultural" Zionist.

    • MuslimCommenter May 17, 2010 at 9:46 am with 3 replies

      I think he supported the idea of lawful emigration to Palestine, presumably with the actual purchase of property, not theft. Jews came to New York but they did not have to trespass against anyone. Besides, there were already Jews in Palestine, though much smaller numbers. Probably, and I'm speculating here, he would have thought that the Arabs could have seen incoming Jews as enriching their own culture and society (the way Americans have, at their best, viewed immigrants).

      Besides, Muslims had done this once before, when the Ottomans welcomed Jews who had to leave Spain in the late 15th century (there was a lot going on in 1492.) It could have, theoretically, happened again with the Jews of Europe.

    • MuslimCommenter May 17, 2010 at 9:40 am with 4 replies

      Jeffrey Goldberg tells us at his blog (in response to this story) that a "real" democracy does not need to fear "ridiculous" men like Chomsky. By what measure can a Goldberg use any adjective for a man who has forgotten more than Goldberg will ever know?

      I, for example, think Christopher Hitchens is immoral and self-aggrandizing, but "ridiculous"? No.

  • Scary video from UCSD
    • MuslimCommenter May 18, 2010 at 7:43 am with 1 replies

      Phil, there's nothing scary about it. That girl asked a valid question: where is your proof that my organization is tied with anyone? He dodged the question.

      I think her saying "For it" was nothing more or less than a "Fuck you."

      A terrorist neckerchief? What if she had said, "Where is your terrorist yarmulke?" Would Commentary have understood the irony?

      Horowitz goes around peddling the idea that all Muslim organizations are tied to a global network bent on world domination loyal only to themselves. Sound familiar to anyone here?

  • 'NYT' offers neoconnish shelter to Berman, leaving liberal response to 'American Prospect'
    • MuslimCommenter May 15, 2010 at 7:31 pm

      I recently saw a talk of Harold Bloom on C-Span, recorded sometime around 2001, where he swore he would never read the NYT Book Review again, and that he'd never write for it again (he thought they'd succumbed to the "cultural studies" movement which he hates). He also was openly hostile to neoconservatives, and was glad they were hostile towards him. I wonder if his opinions have changed over the years.

  • If it was all about oil, we'd have boots on the ground in Venezuela...
    • MuslimCommenter May 14, 2010 at 2:02 pm

      Finkelstein is pretty insistent about the reach of the Lobby, saying it goes only so far as allowing the mistreatment of Palestinians, and that the rest is indeed the dog wagging the tail.

      Is he just wrong on his facts? It's an aspect of him I have a hard time understanding. Same for Chomsky. They never explain, for example, the behavior of Congress. They restrict it to policymakers in the administrations.

  • Dershowitz expects to teach another professor's class
    • MuslimCommenter May 14, 2010 at 10:22 am

      Why should a professor invite another professor to his course at all? Being asked by a colleague to give a lecture is a high compliment. As a professor, I'd be offended if someone thought they should come lecture in my course. If I were a student, I'd be honored for the invitation. "I bore an unequal burden"? Prof. Kennedy, it would seem, was probably too generous.

      How many Palestinians would Dershowitz invite if he taught a class on the Middle East?

  • 'New Yorker' profile of Haim Saban is pretty good
  • Pot calls kettle apartheid
  • There were righteous Afrikaners, too
    • MuslimCommenter May 4, 2010 at 9:07 am with 1 replies

      As sympathetic as I am with Mearsheimer, and as compelling as I found the first part of his talk, I was uncomfortable with his usage of "righteous Jews" vs. "the New Afrikaners". It resonates badly, and conjures, for me, the categorization of Muslims by both sympathetic and non-sympathetic non-Muslims. Terms like "moderate" and "fundamentalist" and "liberal" are almost always labels from the outside, and Muslims tend to resent them, especially when they are ambivalent about the relevant issues. So I am not surprised that Jews would bristle at these groupings. Maybe there is something a little obnoxious about calling a segment of another group "righteous" as part of a taxonomy. If he's trying to make it "sticky" then he takes just a little sheen off his academic credibility for the sake of PR.

      That said, I think trying to tie him to Father Coughlin is silly.

  • On Berman and projection
    • MuslimCommenter May 3, 2010 at 2:47 pm with 1 replies

      Paul Berman opened up with a blanket criticism of Edward Said, saying that with his influential book Orientialism Said had concocted an ideology that took all responsibility away from the Orient for their troubles. He also called Ibn Warraq a "major figure in the world of intellectuals". If Paul Berman thinks Ibn Warraq and Ayaan Hirsi Ali are important intellectuals, then just what are his standards?

      He also pulled one of the cheapest shots you'll see lately. He was just appalled that Tariq Ramadan called Ayaan Hirsi Ali a racist (I'm not exactly sure he did) but that this was particularly reprehensible because of the murderer of Theo van Gogh threatened Hirsi Ali. This murderer belonged, to quote Berman, "a splinter of a splinter" of an so-called racist ideology going back to Sayyid Qutb. Now, Ramadan's father was an important publisher of Qutb, and as we know Ramadan is the grandson of Hasan al-Banna.

      So according to Berman, it is just so, so ironic that Ramadan - whose grandpa and dad had something to do with a person whose writings were the inspiration for a splinter of a splinter who threatened the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali - could possible call Ayaan Hirsi Ali a racist. By that logic, Ramadan would not be able to call Hirsi Ali anything. Shame on Ramadan for not taking all those degrees of association into account.

    • MuslimCommenter May 3, 2010 at 1:11 pm

      A new video with Paul Berman
      link to youtube.com

      It's a panel called Independent Voices on the Middle East.

      No Arabs. Three American Jews. One Pakistani ex-Muslim.

  • More sea change
  • Berman doth project too much

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