How erudite is Piers Akerman! All of history is lodged in the man's noble cranium! One cannot but be humbled by the depth of his scholarship:
"Alexandria had housed the greatest library in the ancient world before it was burnt by the Romans in pre-Christian days. Historians say the fire may have spread accidentally from ships in the harbour. The library was rebuilt and the city retained its reputation as one of the most cosmopolitan seats of civilisation in the world. Egypt became a Christian nation, not through invasion, but through persuasion. That changed with the Arab invasion 600 years after St Mark's arrival. In 642AD, Caliph Omar promptly ordered the burning of the papyrus books and records in the rebuilt library. It is held that he told a general: 'If those books are in agreement with the Koran, we have no need of them, and if these are opposed to the Koran, destroy them. The destruction of knowledge, beauty and culture was deliberate - as deliberate as the most recent destruction of the ancient monuments and temples in Palmyra in Syria by ISIS and the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan." (Christianity attacked at holiest celebration, Sunday Telegraph, 16/4/17)
Oh, wait:
"From Professor Hugh Lloyd-Jones's review of Luciano Canfora's book on the library of Alexandria [NYR, June 14], one learns, with astonishment, that the author, and perhaps even to some degree the reviewer, are still disposed to lend credence to the story of how the great library of Alexandria was destroyed by the Arabs after their conquest of the city in 641 AD, by order of the Caliph 'Umar.
"This story first became known to Western scholarship in 1663, when Edward Pococke, the Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, published an edition of the Arabic text, with Latin translation, of part of the History of the Dynasties of the Syrian-Christian author Barhebraeus, otherwise known as Ibn al-'Ibri. According to this story, 'Amr ibn al-'As, the commander of the Arab conquerors, was inclined to accept the pleas of John the Grammarian and spare the library, but the Caliph decreed otherwise: 'If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless and need not be preserved; if they disagree, they are pernicious and ought to be destroyed.' The books in the library, the story continues, were accordingly distributed among the four thousand bathhouses of the city, and used to heat the furnaces, which they kept going for almost six months.
"As early as 1713, Father Eusebe Renaudot, the distinguished French Orientalist, cast doubt on this story, remarking, in his History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria published in that year, that it 'had something untrustworthy about it.' Edward Gibbon, never one to miss a good story, relates it with gusto, and then proceeds: 'For my own part, I am strongly tempted to deny both the fact and the consequences.' To explain this denial, Gibbon gives the two principal arguments against authenticity - that the story first appears some six hundred years after the action which it purports to describe, and that such action is in any case contrary to what we know of the teachings and practice of the Muslims.
"Since then, a succession of other Western scholars have analyzed and demolished the story - Alfred J. Butler in 1902, Victor Chauvin in 1911, Paul Casanova and Eugenio Griffini, independently, in 1923. Some have attacked the internal improbabilities of the story. A large proportion of books of that time would have been written on vellum, which does not burn. To keep that many bathhouse furnaces going for that length of time, a library of at least 14 million books would have been required. John the Grammarian who, according to the Barhebraeus story, pleaded with 'Amr for his library, is believed to have lived and died in the previous century. There is good evidence that the library itself was destroyed long before the Arabs arrived in Egypt. The 14th century historian Ibn Khaldun tells an almost identical story concerning the destruction of a library in Persia, also by order of the Caliph 'Umar, thus demonstrating its folkloric character. By far the strongest argument against the story, however, is the slight and late evidence. Barhebraeus, the principal source used by Western historians, lived from 1226 to 1289. He had only two predecessors, from one of whom he simply copied the story and both preceded him by no more than a few decades. The earliest source is a Baghdadi physician called 'Abd al-Latif, who was in Egypt in 1203, and in a brief account of his journey refers in passing to 'the library which 'Amr ibn al-'As burnt with the permission of 'Umar.' An Egyptian scholar, Ibn al-Qifti, wrote a history of learned men in about 1227, and includes a biography of John the Grammarian in the course of which he tells the story on which the legend is based. His narrative ends: 'I was told the number of bathhouses that existed at that time, but I have forgotten it. It is said that they were heated for six months. Listen to this story and wonder!' Barhebraeus merely followed the text of Ibn al-Qifti, omitting his final observation on the number of baths. The number is provided by other Arabic sources, in quite different contexts.
"To accept the story of the Arab destruction of the library of Alexandria, one must explain how it is that so dramatic an event was unmentioned and unnoticed not only in the rich historical literature of medieval Islam, but even in the literatures of the Coptic and other Christian churches, of the Byzantines, of the Jews, or anyone else who might have thought the destruction of a great library worthy of comment. That the story still survives, and is repeated, despite all these objections, is testimony to the enduring power of a myth.
"Myths come into existence to answer a question or to serve a purpose, and one may wonder what purpose was served by this myth. An answer sometimes given, and certainly in accord with a currently popular school of epistemology, would see the story as anti-Islamic propaganda, designed by hostile elements to blacken the good name of Islam by showing the revered Caliph 'Umar as a destroyer of libraries. But this explanation is as absurd as the myth itself. The original sources of the story are Muslim, the only exception being Barhebraeus, who copied it from a Muslim author. Not the creation, but the demolition of the myth was the achievement of European scholarship, which from the 18th century to the present day has rejected the story as false and absurd, and thus exonerated the Caliph 'Umar and the early Muslims from this libel.
"But if the myth was created and disseminated by Muslims and not by their enemies, what could possibly have been their motive? The answer is almost certainly provided in a comment of Paul Casanova. Since the earliest occurrence of the story is in an illusion at the beginning of the 13th century, it must have become current in the late 12th century - that is to say, in the time of the great Muslim hero Saladin, famous not only for his victories over the Crusaders, but also - and in a Muslim context perhaps more importantly - for having extinguished the heretical Fatimid caliphate in Cairo, which, with its Isma'ili doctrines, had for centuries threatened the unity of Islam. 'Abd al-Latif was an admirer of Saladin, whom he went to visit in Jerusalem. Ibn al-Qifti's father was a follower of Saladin, who appointed him Qadi in the newly conquered city.
"One of Saladin's first tasks after the restoration of Sunnism in Cairo was to break up the Fatimid collections and treasures and sell their contents at public auction. These included a very considerable library, presumably full of heretical Isma'ili books. The break-up of a library, even one containing heretical books, might well have evoked disapproval in a civilized, literate society. The myth provided an obvious justification. According to this interpretation, the message of the myth was not that the Caliph 'Umar was a barbarian because he destroyed a library, but that destroying a library could be justified, because the revered Caliph 'Umar had approved of it. Thus once again, as on so many occasions, the early heroes of Islam were mobilized by later Muslim tradition to give posthumous sanction to actions and policies of which they had never heard and which they would probably not have condoned.
"It is surely time that the Caliph 'Umar and 'Amr ibn al-'As were finally acquitted of this charge which their admirers and later their detractors conspired to bring against them." (Bernard Lewis, letter in response to The Vanished Library by Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The New York Review of Books, 27/9/90)
Showing posts with label Bernard Lewis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bernard Lewis. Show all posts
Sunday, April 23, 2017
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Busting Those Mind-Forged Manacles
I'm always inspired by the stories of those who manage to break free of the limitations of their cultural/tribal conditioning - what the great English poet William Blake referred to as "mind-forged manacles" - and see things afresh. Here is one such story. I came across it at mondoweiss.net and feel it deserves the widest possible distribution. In April this year, grad student Greg Eow wrote the following letter to Ussama Makdisi, a professor of Middle East history at Rice University:
"Dear Professor Makdisi, I don't know if you remember me, but I finished my PhD in the Rice history department in 2007. I was one of Thomas Haskell's students. We ran into each other a handful of times, including once when I helped you with some of the microfilm machines in Fondren Library. Anyway, this is a strange email, both to write and most likely to receive. But I wanted to tell you about some recent experiences which have profoundly changed my view of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. You have demonstrated an interest in changing how people think about the issue, and so I thought you might be interested in what for me has turned out to be a transformative event.
"First of all, a quick word about presuppositions. I confess that I never previously paid a great deal of attention to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Insofar as I did follow the issue, my sympathies were with the neoconservatives. Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis were my guides. They were realists, I would tell myself, whereas those who quarreled with them - for instance colleagues at Rice who were more interested in postcolonial studies than I - had political axes to grind. Not for me the romance of resistance. I was a good sceptic, an empiricist; and if there was a problem in Israel, it was clear to me it had to do with Muslim fundamentalism, terrorism, and the clash between Enlightenment values and democracy on the one hand and premodern tribalism and totalitarianism on the other.
"Flash forward a couple of years. I'm through with grad school, I finally have some time and money, and I embark on a self-directed course of study on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I have my feelings, sure, but I realize that I don't know a whole lot, that a lot of smart people disagree with me, and now I want to make a good faith effort to learn about the issue and test my prejudices against the scholarship in the field. I read Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, Benny Morris, Patrick Seale, David Fromkin, Juan Cole, Efraim Karsh, Tom Segev, William Cleveland, Bernard Rougier, Albert Hourani. I read your book and article on anti-Americanism. And I spent 2 weeks traveling through Syria, Lebanon, Jerusalem and the West Bank. In sum, I read about 40 books from a number of different standpoints and traveled through the region to see what is going on with my own eyes.
"The result? Well, the whole experience essentially knocked me on my butt. I was wrong about a great many things. And not just wrong, but deeply wrong. Wrong to such a degree that to realize it has left me shaken, wondering how exactly I got to be so intellectually, and in this case morally, obtuse. Just a taste of the data that undid my world view:
"1) The Arab people I met in Syria, Lebanon and the West Bank (and Jerusalem), the vast majority of them Muslims, were almost uniformly lovely, warm and welcoming. I wasn't expecting passersby in the street in all of these places to invite me into their homes for tea to discuss how much they 'hate George Bush, but like Americans'. (This happened too often to count.) Pretty much everyone thought US policy was a disaster, but they were angry about policy and lovely to me in ways that make the 'they hate us for our freedom' line not only inaccurate but criminal. Among the people I met: a 20-year old Shiite Muslim named Muhammad whom I met in the Beqaa Valley. Muhammad supports Hezbollah because of their a) resistance to Israeli incursions into Lebanon (he didn't say anything about Hezbollah provocations); b) their welfare programs; and c) their support of the Palestinian cause (all his words). He's been to mosque no more than twice in his life, eats pork, and likes nothing more than going dancing in Beirut. That is to say, he is entirely secular. With Lewis and Huntington as my guides, I have no way to make sense of such an encounter.
"2) Driving through the West Bank at night allows one to see the proliferation of illegal Israeli settlements with immediate and striking force. They are everywhere, some small, some huge, on the high ground lit up like prisons. I thought the reason why the two-state solution had failed was Palestinian intransigence. A look at the settlements - even a quick look - demolishes such a simple explanation. Traveling through the West Bank at night, and later visiting and talking with people in Ramallah, reinforced an essential point: Israel, or at least powerful forces within Israel, is actively pursuing policies to colonize and annex the West Bank, while simultaneously making life so difficult for Palestinians that they will pick up and leave. The evidence was there for anyone with eyes to see, irrefutable and horrible in its obviousness. How I got duped by the 'Israel wants peace behind the 1967 borders, but extremists deny it to them' line is a question I will be asking myself again and again with embarrassment and not a little shame.
"I could go on, but this (unsolicited) email has gone on long enough and you get the point. What I'm saying is this: keep writing, keep telling US citizens to better inform themselves about what is going on in their name and with their tax dollars. If they're honest, and they go see for themselves what's going on, I can guarantee that the reasonableness of what you and others have written on the matter will soon become apparent."
Bull's-eye!
"Dear Professor Makdisi, I don't know if you remember me, but I finished my PhD in the Rice history department in 2007. I was one of Thomas Haskell's students. We ran into each other a handful of times, including once when I helped you with some of the microfilm machines in Fondren Library. Anyway, this is a strange email, both to write and most likely to receive. But I wanted to tell you about some recent experiences which have profoundly changed my view of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. You have demonstrated an interest in changing how people think about the issue, and so I thought you might be interested in what for me has turned out to be a transformative event.
"First of all, a quick word about presuppositions. I confess that I never previously paid a great deal of attention to the Israeli-Palestinian issue. Insofar as I did follow the issue, my sympathies were with the neoconservatives. Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis were my guides. They were realists, I would tell myself, whereas those who quarreled with them - for instance colleagues at Rice who were more interested in postcolonial studies than I - had political axes to grind. Not for me the romance of resistance. I was a good sceptic, an empiricist; and if there was a problem in Israel, it was clear to me it had to do with Muslim fundamentalism, terrorism, and the clash between Enlightenment values and democracy on the one hand and premodern tribalism and totalitarianism on the other.
"Flash forward a couple of years. I'm through with grad school, I finally have some time and money, and I embark on a self-directed course of study on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I have my feelings, sure, but I realize that I don't know a whole lot, that a lot of smart people disagree with me, and now I want to make a good faith effort to learn about the issue and test my prejudices against the scholarship in the field. I read Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said, Benny Morris, Patrick Seale, David Fromkin, Juan Cole, Efraim Karsh, Tom Segev, William Cleveland, Bernard Rougier, Albert Hourani. I read your book and article on anti-Americanism. And I spent 2 weeks traveling through Syria, Lebanon, Jerusalem and the West Bank. In sum, I read about 40 books from a number of different standpoints and traveled through the region to see what is going on with my own eyes.
"The result? Well, the whole experience essentially knocked me on my butt. I was wrong about a great many things. And not just wrong, but deeply wrong. Wrong to such a degree that to realize it has left me shaken, wondering how exactly I got to be so intellectually, and in this case morally, obtuse. Just a taste of the data that undid my world view:
"1) The Arab people I met in Syria, Lebanon and the West Bank (and Jerusalem), the vast majority of them Muslims, were almost uniformly lovely, warm and welcoming. I wasn't expecting passersby in the street in all of these places to invite me into their homes for tea to discuss how much they 'hate George Bush, but like Americans'. (This happened too often to count.) Pretty much everyone thought US policy was a disaster, but they were angry about policy and lovely to me in ways that make the 'they hate us for our freedom' line not only inaccurate but criminal. Among the people I met: a 20-year old Shiite Muslim named Muhammad whom I met in the Beqaa Valley. Muhammad supports Hezbollah because of their a) resistance to Israeli incursions into Lebanon (he didn't say anything about Hezbollah provocations); b) their welfare programs; and c) their support of the Palestinian cause (all his words). He's been to mosque no more than twice in his life, eats pork, and likes nothing more than going dancing in Beirut. That is to say, he is entirely secular. With Lewis and Huntington as my guides, I have no way to make sense of such an encounter.
"2) Driving through the West Bank at night allows one to see the proliferation of illegal Israeli settlements with immediate and striking force. They are everywhere, some small, some huge, on the high ground lit up like prisons. I thought the reason why the two-state solution had failed was Palestinian intransigence. A look at the settlements - even a quick look - demolishes such a simple explanation. Traveling through the West Bank at night, and later visiting and talking with people in Ramallah, reinforced an essential point: Israel, or at least powerful forces within Israel, is actively pursuing policies to colonize and annex the West Bank, while simultaneously making life so difficult for Palestinians that they will pick up and leave. The evidence was there for anyone with eyes to see, irrefutable and horrible in its obviousness. How I got duped by the 'Israel wants peace behind the 1967 borders, but extremists deny it to them' line is a question I will be asking myself again and again with embarrassment and not a little shame.
"I could go on, but this (unsolicited) email has gone on long enough and you get the point. What I'm saying is this: keep writing, keep telling US citizens to better inform themselves about what is going on in their name and with their tax dollars. If they're honest, and they go see for themselves what's going on, I can guarantee that the reasonableness of what you and others have written on the matter will soon become apparent."
Bull's-eye!
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Stop It or You'll Go Blind!
And you'll ask: why doesn't his poetry speak of dreams & leaves,
And the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come & see the blood in the streets.
Come & see
The blood in the streets.
Come & see the blood
In the streets.
Pablo Neruda
The consummate cluelessness of yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald editorial, Israel, Gaza & Huntington, was truly beyond belief.
Over 300 Palestinian inmates of the Gaza Ghetto slaughtered, over 1,000 maimed, and the Herald editorialist can't resist an intellectual wank: "It is perhaps an appropriate epitaph for the American scholar Samuel Huntington that news of his death coincided with renewed hostilities along one of the fault lines he identified in the post-Cold war era. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict preceded Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' theory, and has outlived its author." What has Huntington, or his* 'clash of civilizations', to do with the Gaza massacres? In a word, nothing. [*The first use of this term rightly belongs to neocon 'scholar' Bernard Lewis.]
After relieving himself with this monumental irrelevance, the editorialist follows with this monumental nonsense: "Violence has scarred the region for more than six decades, long enough to make arguments about who started the troubles redundant." There you are. It's like the schoolmaster who comes across the schoolyard bully beating the shit, yet again, out of the scrawny little wog, but who can only respond with, 'I don't know which of you started this, and I don't care!' So Huntington's relevant, but history isn't?
But it gets worse: "In the current bloodletting Hamas fired first, wrecking a ceasefire whose restoration must be the first priority of international peacemaking efforts. " But of course, it's always the Palestinians that begin these dust-ups, isn't it? Remember the party line laid down in an earlier editorial? - "Of course the militant Islamist movement Hamas... provoked the Israeli strikes by firing its rockets into nearby Israeli settlements." (Time for bolder diplomacy in Gaza*, 5/3/08). So just ignore your own paper's report, Militants declare early end to truce agreement (19-20/12/08), which reported that "The truce has been unravelling since Israel crossed into Gaza, killed 6 Hamas fighters and destroyed a tunnel on November 4," and lapse into 'rocket/militant' mantra mode. Saves heaps on thought and research. [*See my 6/3/08 post Mainsewer Media Clueless in Gaza.]
And that business of "the first priority of international peacemaking efforts" being the "restoration" of the ceasefire - how does the Herald get around Tzipi Livni's flat rejection of all "initiatives calling on both sides to hold their fire," and her demand that the international community "support things that are not easy to support"? (See Livni to foreign envoys: pressure Hamas, ynetnews.com, 28/12/08)
Then there's this outright rubber-stamping of a familiar Israeli talking point: "Israel's response - that civilians are being used as human shields for Hamas's terrorist infrastructure - has merit." Would the editorialist still see "merit" in Israel's talking point if he knew that Israel used Israeli Arabs as human shields during its 2006 rampage in Lebanon? According to a 2006 Arab Association for Human Rights report, "[d]uring the war on Lebanon, the Israeli army installed rocket launching bases near [Israeli] Arab towns and villages in the north [of Israel], in some cases only a few metres away," and "the IDF has also transformed areas of certain Arab towns and villages into training camps." (Israeli rocket launching bases and army training camps deliberately constructed near Arab towns and villages, electronicintifada.net, 17/8/06) Or if he'd bothered to acquaint himself with the documentation that shows that the IDF uses Palestinians as human shields in the West Bank? Probably.
Like The Australian editorial analysed in my last post, Israel's wanton spilling of Palestinian blood is really the last thing on the editorialist's mind, the only reference to it being that "[t]he deaths of almost 300 people and wounding of some 600 so far have drawn understandable criticism that the military response is disproportionate." All that matters is its "potential to further radicalise Palestinian youth," which could lead to "retaliation... including a possible new wave of suicide bombings in Israel's cities." So touching, this concern for the serial perpetrator of crimes against humanity.
The sheer inanity of the Herald's editorial wank on the Gaza massacres is capped by a further reference to Huntington in its concluding sentence: "The world is looking to the Obama administration for policies that will discourage all Middle East players from so regularly resorting to violence along one of the cultural and religious fault lines highlighted by Huntington."
Well, well, well. So the world is looking to an American president (-elect) to discourage Israel's resort to violence? Please, spare us the naivete! Is this the same America that's supplied Israel with the GBU-39 smart bombs they're now dropping all over Gaza? (See Israel using new US-supplied smart bombs in Gaza, antiwar.com, 28/12/08) Whoever the world is looking to in this matter, readers seeking an informed analysis of the issue will be well-advised to give Herald editorials a wide berth.
And the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come & see the blood in the streets.
Come & see
The blood in the streets.
Come & see the blood
In the streets.
Pablo Neruda
The consummate cluelessness of yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald editorial, Israel, Gaza & Huntington, was truly beyond belief.
Over 300 Palestinian inmates of the Gaza Ghetto slaughtered, over 1,000 maimed, and the Herald editorialist can't resist an intellectual wank: "It is perhaps an appropriate epitaph for the American scholar Samuel Huntington that news of his death coincided with renewed hostilities along one of the fault lines he identified in the post-Cold war era. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict preceded Huntington's 'clash of civilizations' theory, and has outlived its author." What has Huntington, or his* 'clash of civilizations', to do with the Gaza massacres? In a word, nothing. [*The first use of this term rightly belongs to neocon 'scholar' Bernard Lewis.]
After relieving himself with this monumental irrelevance, the editorialist follows with this monumental nonsense: "Violence has scarred the region for more than six decades, long enough to make arguments about who started the troubles redundant." There you are. It's like the schoolmaster who comes across the schoolyard bully beating the shit, yet again, out of the scrawny little wog, but who can only respond with, 'I don't know which of you started this, and I don't care!' So Huntington's relevant, but history isn't?
But it gets worse: "In the current bloodletting Hamas fired first, wrecking a ceasefire whose restoration must be the first priority of international peacemaking efforts. " But of course, it's always the Palestinians that begin these dust-ups, isn't it? Remember the party line laid down in an earlier editorial? - "Of course the militant Islamist movement Hamas... provoked the Israeli strikes by firing its rockets into nearby Israeli settlements." (Time for bolder diplomacy in Gaza*, 5/3/08). So just ignore your own paper's report, Militants declare early end to truce agreement (19-20/12/08), which reported that "The truce has been unravelling since Israel crossed into Gaza, killed 6 Hamas fighters and destroyed a tunnel on November 4," and lapse into 'rocket/militant' mantra mode. Saves heaps on thought and research. [*See my 6/3/08 post Mainsewer Media Clueless in Gaza.]
And that business of "the first priority of international peacemaking efforts" being the "restoration" of the ceasefire - how does the Herald get around Tzipi Livni's flat rejection of all "initiatives calling on both sides to hold their fire," and her demand that the international community "support things that are not easy to support"? (See Livni to foreign envoys: pressure Hamas, ynetnews.com, 28/12/08)
Then there's this outright rubber-stamping of a familiar Israeli talking point: "Israel's response - that civilians are being used as human shields for Hamas's terrorist infrastructure - has merit." Would the editorialist still see "merit" in Israel's talking point if he knew that Israel used Israeli Arabs as human shields during its 2006 rampage in Lebanon? According to a 2006 Arab Association for Human Rights report, "[d]uring the war on Lebanon, the Israeli army installed rocket launching bases near [Israeli] Arab towns and villages in the north [of Israel], in some cases only a few metres away," and "the IDF has also transformed areas of certain Arab towns and villages into training camps." (Israeli rocket launching bases and army training camps deliberately constructed near Arab towns and villages, electronicintifada.net, 17/8/06) Or if he'd bothered to acquaint himself with the documentation that shows that the IDF uses Palestinians as human shields in the West Bank? Probably.
Like The Australian editorial analysed in my last post, Israel's wanton spilling of Palestinian blood is really the last thing on the editorialist's mind, the only reference to it being that "[t]he deaths of almost 300 people and wounding of some 600 so far have drawn understandable criticism that the military response is disproportionate." All that matters is its "potential to further radicalise Palestinian youth," which could lead to "retaliation... including a possible new wave of suicide bombings in Israel's cities." So touching, this concern for the serial perpetrator of crimes against humanity.
The sheer inanity of the Herald's editorial wank on the Gaza massacres is capped by a further reference to Huntington in its concluding sentence: "The world is looking to the Obama administration for policies that will discourage all Middle East players from so regularly resorting to violence along one of the cultural and religious fault lines highlighted by Huntington."
Well, well, well. So the world is looking to an American president (-elect) to discourage Israel's resort to violence? Please, spare us the naivete! Is this the same America that's supplied Israel with the GBU-39 smart bombs they're now dropping all over Gaza? (See Israel using new US-supplied smart bombs in Gaza, antiwar.com, 28/12/08) Whoever the world is looking to in this matter, readers seeking an informed analysis of the issue will be well-advised to give Herald editorials a wide berth.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Armenia On My Mind
The ABC's current affairs program Foreign Correspondent on 22/4/08 dealt with Turkey, Armenia, and the conflicting passions surrounding the Armenian genocide of 1915. In Armenia/Turkey: Ghosts of the Past, reporter Eric Campbell ably exposed the refusal of the Turkish establishment to acknowledge Turkey's responsibility for the ethnic cleansing of its Armenian minority. So far, so good. The synopsis of the program on Foreign Correspondent's website (www.abc.net.au/foreign), however, detracted massively from Campbell's report.
It contained the following sentence: "Respected historians say as many as a million people were killed and many more made refugees. (see extract*)" The extract turned out to be a quote from The Middle East by Bernard Lewis, billed as "an authority on Islamic and Middle Eastern History." Lewis' description of the mass deportations of Armenian civilians were oddly tentative, almost apologetic: "... a practice sadly familiar in the region since biblical times"/"... the task of escorting the deportees was entrusted to hastily recruited local posses"/"The Ottoman central government seems to have made some effort to curb the excess."
What possessed the ABC? Quoting neocon Godfather and Israel apologist Bernard Lewis ("respected historian" and "authority on Islamic and Middle Eastern history") on the subject of the Armenian genocide is like quoting David Irving on the Nazi genocide*. Despite the synopsis' acknowledgment that "in some countries such as France, it is a criminal offence to deny the Armenian genocide," it appears that those responsible for the program (or at least the synopsis) were unaware that they were quoting a holocaust (as in Armenian holocaust) denier.
In fact, Lewis was convicted of denying the Armenian genocide by a French court in 1995. The relevant part of the judgment reads, "... the fact remains that it was by concealing information contrary to his thesis that the defendant was able to assert that there was 'no serious proof' of the Armenian genocide; consequently he failed in his duties of objectivity and prudence by offering unqualified opinions on such a sensitive subject; and his remarks [in an interview with Le Monde], which could unfairly rekindle the pain of the Armenian community, are tortious and justify compensation..." The plaintiff's brief, quoted in the judgment, advanced the view that Bernard Lewis is "actually an engaged intellectual who conducts intensive 'lobbying' activities on behalf of Turkey."
But it gets worse. Lewis' academic career kicked off with a fascination for Kemal Ataturk's secular/democratic transformation of Turkey, a seductive vision which he communicated directly to Dick Cheney in the months before the US invasion of Iraq and which came to be adopted as a blueprint for a post-Saddam Iraq. The 'Lewis doctrine' as it was known held that democratic transformation could be forced on Iraq and that Ahmad Chalabi was just the man to do it. It was also Lewis, not Samuel Huntington, who constructed the 'clash of civilizations' thesis, the intellectual underpinning of Islamophobia. (See Michael Hirsh's 2004 essay, Bernard Lewis Revisited, at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/)
*Nor can Lewis be entrusted with the subject of the Nazi holocaust. As US academic and author Norman Finkelstein points out, "Especially in the wake of Israel's ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and as Israeli propaganda claims came under withering attack by Israel's 'new historians', apologists desperately sought to tar the Arabs with Nazism. Famed historian Bernard Lewis managed to devote a full chapter of his short history of anti-Semitism... to Arab Nazism." (The Holocaust Industry, p 62)
It contained the following sentence: "Respected historians say as many as a million people were killed and many more made refugees. (see extract*)" The extract turned out to be a quote from The Middle East by Bernard Lewis, billed as "an authority on Islamic and Middle Eastern History." Lewis' description of the mass deportations of Armenian civilians were oddly tentative, almost apologetic: "... a practice sadly familiar in the region since biblical times"/"... the task of escorting the deportees was entrusted to hastily recruited local posses"/"The Ottoman central government seems to have made some effort to curb the excess."
What possessed the ABC? Quoting neocon Godfather and Israel apologist Bernard Lewis ("respected historian" and "authority on Islamic and Middle Eastern history") on the subject of the Armenian genocide is like quoting David Irving on the Nazi genocide*. Despite the synopsis' acknowledgment that "in some countries such as France, it is a criminal offence to deny the Armenian genocide," it appears that those responsible for the program (or at least the synopsis) were unaware that they were quoting a holocaust (as in Armenian holocaust) denier.
In fact, Lewis was convicted of denying the Armenian genocide by a French court in 1995. The relevant part of the judgment reads, "... the fact remains that it was by concealing information contrary to his thesis that the defendant was able to assert that there was 'no serious proof' of the Armenian genocide; consequently he failed in his duties of objectivity and prudence by offering unqualified opinions on such a sensitive subject; and his remarks [in an interview with Le Monde], which could unfairly rekindle the pain of the Armenian community, are tortious and justify compensation..." The plaintiff's brief, quoted in the judgment, advanced the view that Bernard Lewis is "actually an engaged intellectual who conducts intensive 'lobbying' activities on behalf of Turkey."
But it gets worse. Lewis' academic career kicked off with a fascination for Kemal Ataturk's secular/democratic transformation of Turkey, a seductive vision which he communicated directly to Dick Cheney in the months before the US invasion of Iraq and which came to be adopted as a blueprint for a post-Saddam Iraq. The 'Lewis doctrine' as it was known held that democratic transformation could be forced on Iraq and that Ahmad Chalabi was just the man to do it. It was also Lewis, not Samuel Huntington, who constructed the 'clash of civilizations' thesis, the intellectual underpinning of Islamophobia. (See Michael Hirsh's 2004 essay, Bernard Lewis Revisited, at http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/)
*Nor can Lewis be entrusted with the subject of the Nazi holocaust. As US academic and author Norman Finkelstein points out, "Especially in the wake of Israel's ill-fated invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and as Israeli propaganda claims came under withering attack by Israel's 'new historians', apologists desperately sought to tar the Arabs with Nazism. Famed historian Bernard Lewis managed to devote a full chapter of his short history of anti-Semitism... to Arab Nazism." (The Holocaust Industry, p 62)
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