He’s back! Martin Peretz, the rabid supporter of Israel who left the New Republic in disgrace after saying “Muslim life is cheap,” and lots of anti-Arab comments —
The “general afflictions of Arab politics are the principal resistance to compromise . . . the endless patience for vengeance.”
is given a platform at the Daily Beast to spout— well, lots of generalizations about Arabs! They’re given to fantasy and metaphor and fratricide and women don’t count to them. The usual spiteful tone runs throughout his column, which is about Obama’s peace initiative coming to nothing, because of– the Arabs, of course. Peretz:
Egypt has for the moment robbed the headlines from Syria, although the Syrian fratricide is still the real measure of Arab politics….
Targeting fellow Arabs is what Arabs have been doing for many decades. In 1938, George Antonius—Lebanese born, Egyptian raised, British schooled, Palestine domiciled—published a book called The Arab Awakening, arguing the essential unifying nationalism of the otherwise religiously sundered Arabs. The volume became their bible against Zionism. It was popular in England and the United States. It even attracted the support of wealthy Judeaophobic Americans, who influenced Nicholas Murray Butler, president of Columbia University, to offer Antonius a job. Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser took from the book’s tenets his ambition to unite the Arabs, finally joining his own country, Egypt, with Syria and North Yemen in the United Arab Republic. The union lasted all of three years. Then he initiated the disastrous Six-Day War against Israel. Such armed action with Israel is now utterly unfeasible. So the Arabs are driven to fantasy and metaphor…
All that is left of Obama’s diplomacy in the Middle East is John Kerry’s stubborn and heroic effort to keep its Israel-Palestinian scope alive. Despite the rhetorical mischief coming out of certified troublemakers in the Israeli government, Netanyahu is ready to go not perhaps the extra mile, but the extra half mile. The Palestinians, however, are aware that all of their Arab brothers—there are no relevant sisters!—are otherwise engaged. This is the moment of truth for the Arabs of Palestine, perhaps the last moment. They will have to sign on to what Israel will give up. Obama cannot help them. And it might just be that, after all of the soppy rhetoric about the disinherited people, he also doesn’t really care.
gawker on the Ernst Rohm of the Neocon Sturmabteilung :
Peretz’s life has sort of fallen apart over the last year. Though he has been an avowed bigot for most of his adult life, he has only been held to account for his ethnic hostility to Arabs and Persians recently, when he wondered aloud on his New Republic blog “whether I need honor these people and pretend they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment, which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” The “these people” were Arabs, for whom Peretz also said “life is cheap” (he later apologized for the First Amendment line). The naked racism of the sentiment caused even some of Peretz’ oldest friends to hang their heads in shame, and served as an ignominious cap to his career. He and his wife divorced in 2009 (they had been separated since 2005), and late last year he stepped down as the New Republic’s titular editor-in-chief and moved to Tel Aviv, where he teaches high school students and is active on the social circuit (he still maintains residences in New York City and Cambridge, Mass.).
http://gawker.com/5742857/why-wont-anyone-tell-you-that-marty-peretz-is-gay
Peretz is back because the zios, including the libs ones, even though secure in their ownership of our government, see they are bit by bit losing their grip on the public, some flashpoints like the universities, Palestine and Muslim voices poping up here and there.
The more hyper and reckless they get with vicious talk and attack dogs —the more we can tell they are feeling the pressure.
Let them scream, rant and rave, …all the better for our side.
Peretz is back, because he ran the New Republic for thirty or was it forty years. So they let him talk. Some of his earlier stuff is racist and I accept that people here hate him and disdain him, but I don’t.
The current state of the Arab Spring is discouraging. Two and a half years ago I drew an analogy between the Arab Spring and a 15 year old. The 15 year old, suddenly aware of his own power, but also scared, not entirely in control of his impulses. Well at this point, the 15 year old is under curfew (in Egypt) and actually bleeding profusely in Syria. The idea that sectarian violence is natural smacks of racism, but to tell you the truth I have no idea what to make out of Shiite versus Sunni animus and am nowhere expert enough to toss Peretz’s assumptions aside. Sure I hope for an evolution towards a better world: Evolution from dictators to democrats, from mullahs to modernity, from sectarianism to pluralism is the fantasy.
But in the end I find myself wishing for the evolution of a part of the world that I don’t sufficiently understand and I have no idea whether the odds against are as formidable as they seem or whether the urge for freedom can find a path towards freedom and tolerance and order and prosperity. But meanwhile getting back to the analogy to the 15 year old, between Syria and Egypt, the Arab Spring is seriously heading towards juvie hall and not graduation and the first generation to go to college. But I am not surprised that it will take time.
Peretz has a short cut answer to all the problems of the Arab world and it provokes me into wondering whether with enough study I could come up with a theory or two of my own. Meanwhile the superficial knowledge I possess is not enough to dismiss Peretz’s theories, although I don’t swallow them whole either. Maybe those of you who have sufficient knowledge of the Arab world can dismiss his theories as merely narrow minded, but I found the column useful. I hope ten or twenty years will prove Peretz wrong and “can’t we all just get along?” will be answered in the affirmative by the Arab world. But for the moment, his thoughts provoke me usefully.
This is being televised on Egyptian TV and the moderators are preventing me from telling you about it. I will keep trying to post it because it is relevant and very pertinent to the current discussion. It tells us about Arab mentality and how that impedes conflict resolution.
Watch the youtube video at http://www.youtube.com about the latest sensation on Egyptian TV. This virulent material plainly reinforces the fact that Muslim anti-Semitism is a major obstacle to progress in the region. We see Arab Muslims resorting to the same foul anti-Semitic tactics that were used by the Nazis.
Why is there no concern expressed about this kind of incitement on MW?Why aren’t the supposedly socially concerned individuals around here appealing to organisations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty to condemn this TV series?
If anybody cares they can sign the petition at https://www.change.org/petitions/human-rights-ngos-condemn-upcoming-antisemitic-khaybar-ramadan-mini-series or join the Facebook campaign at https://www.facebook.com/CondemnKhaybar to condemn this imminent mass incitement against Jews that is being broadcast to hundreds of millions of Arabs.
This offensive garbage perpetuates the kind of hatred that is a gigantic obstacle to peace and reconciliation, because it closes the minds of people to rationality – they become the victims of media brainwashing that destroys any prospects for understanding and acceptance of the other.
To be ignoring this crucial damage to prospects for peace and understanding and instead be harping on continually about settlements and bringing up the old bogey of colonialism is only demonstrating a complete lack of awareness of current realities.
This was manifest recently in the talks that Kerry was trying to get going between Israelis and Palestinians, where the Palestinian side continued in its well-worn obstructionist fashion – the Palestinians were insisting on no Jews being involved – read http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3783/palestinians-no-jews-allowed.
Where does one even begin to correct the many, many wrongs in the quote by Peretz?
Antonius’ work was a work of history that traced the origins of Arab nationalism to the 19th century revolts by Muhammad Ali Pasha in Egypt in the 1820s against Ottoman rule and the civil war/revolt against Ottoman rule in Lebanon in 1860 led by Yousef Karam. It’s in no way a bible against Zionism unless you wish to claim that Arab nationalism born more than a century prior to the creation of the state of Israel and at least 70 years before modern Zionism could somehow have predicted the rise of Zionism in order to ‘react’ to it. Which is patently stupid.
And yes, we have the zionist canard of Egypt staring the 1967 Six Day War. Just how many Israeli historians and former Prime Ministers does Peretz need before he will acknowledge that Israel started that war?