"A Coalition MP who lashed out at supermarkets selling halal meat* took 'arduous' taxpayer-funded overseas study tours to broaden his cultural understanding. Luke Simpkins argued he needed 'to visit the homelands of major non-English speaking communities' of his WA electorate to better understand their concerns. His trips to Vietnam, Thailand, Greece and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia in 2011 cost taxpayers $15,840 but he argued they were a success... Mr Simpkins said disputes in Macedonia were 'complex'." (Taxpayers pick up tab for jet set, Daniel Hurst & Jonathan Swan, Sydney Morning Herald, 8/10/13)
How interesting that the Herald should neglect to mention Simpkins' February 2012 trip to Israel - a journey that seems to have inspired several parliamentary fulminations against Iran.**
So, what exactly do we, the people - Simpkins' employers, actually - get for our generous funding of his wanderlust?
Well, here's a sample, an extract from his fulmination of 11 February 2013 in which he contends that Iran is bent on conquering the Middle East and imposing a "Shiah theocracy" on its Sunni Arab majority:
"Iran has a sense of entitlement as the dominator in the region, which leads to fears that they are willing to go to extreme measures in acquiring this domination. For too long, Iran has positioned itself as the victim and continues to claim ancient conflicts between Shiah and Sunni denominations and even between Persian and Arabic ethnicities as justification for violence and hatred. Shiah belief portrays itself as being the little fish in the Arabic Sunni pond. Iran believes it is its responsibilty to return to Persian dominance, as before the Arabisation of the region between the 7th and 14th centuries. So they view it as their right to spread the Shiah theocracy and to suppress the Sunni majority."
Now exactly where Simpkins gets this stuff & nonsense from is anyone's guess. Israel's foreign ministry perhaps? One thing's for sure, though, if he'd had a genuine interest in Iran or Shi'ism, for a mere fraction of that $15,840, he could've picked up a copy of Shi'ism: A Religion of Protest (2011) by Hamid Dabashi, Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia University, turned to pages 302-303, and meditated on the following:
"The appeal and significance of the Islamic Revolution [1977-1979] went far beyond Iran or Shi'ism and reached farthest into the heartland of the Arab and Muslim world. This Iranian revolution has never been called a 'Shi'i' revolution, always an 'Islamic' revolution, for not a single ideologue, militant or moderate, turbaned or tied, thought of himself as a Shi'i revolutionary before thinking of himself as a Muslim. It is imperative now to keep in mind that Shi'is have never considered themselves Shi'is who happened to be Muslims, but exactly the opposite, Muslims who happened to be Shi'is. Shi'ism for the Shi'is is a take on their Islam, not Islam a take on their Shi'ism. Undue emphasis is put on the distinction between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Islam or any other religion. Every religious orthodoxy is a politically successful heterodoxy. The political logic of that medieval fact transcends any single world religion and has a larger claim on universality. What ultimately emerged as the Islamic Revolution in Iran was never branded a 'Shi'i revolution' in its character or disposition, political aspirations or institutional foregrounding. That revolution always had a global claim on Islam and the world it inhabited. From its very first rumbles, the Islamic revolution had regional, cross-sectarian, and even trans-Islamic aspirations... The Shi'is have always thought of themselves as Muslims. Sectarian thinking in and out of Muslim communities is always a matter of external political manipulation of internally dormant doctrines. Throughout history, every single revolutionary uprising for or against Shi'ism has had more immediate material and political causes and consequences. Today only the United States, Saudi Arabia, and al-Qaeda speak of Shi'is as Shi'is, for Shi'is themselves think of their identities as integral to the Muslim world at large. The reason for Iranian support for the Lebanese Hezbollah is not because they are Shi'is; nor do Iranians withhold their even more active support for Hamas because they are not Shi'is. "
Think of the saving to the taxpayer. But then, hey, what would someone like Dabashi know?
[*See my 6/2/12 post Here We Go Again; **See my 10/10/12 post Izzy Izzy Izzy, OI Oi Oi.]
Showing posts with label Hamid Dabashi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hamid Dabashi. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Monday, May 23, 2011
Obamanation
In America, where brown is now the new black, and Arab/Muslim the new Jew, Iranian-born American academic and author Hamid Dabashi guides us through the brave new world of Obamanation:
"For 8 long and murderous years (2000-08), the world was at the mercy of George W Bush. He ruled the United States - and, with it, the world - with utter disregard for the most basic principles of human decency. He ended his term leaving a desperate and desolate world covered with human corpses and spotted with the bodies of tortured men, murdered mothers, raped women, orphaned children, ruined buildings, burned farms and burning factories, firms, and oilfields, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine to Lebanon to the streets of New Orleans. There has been much talk in the United States about prosecuting Bush and his subordinates for war crimes. But no tribunal could ever issue a verdict harsh enough to equal the pain and suffering that this man caused among the poor and disenfranchised. Aided by his European and Israeli allies, and actively or passively endorsed by corrupt and incompetent Arab and Muslim heads of state, George W Bush looks like a nightmare from which the world has finally woken up; after a clean, cold shower it may once again remember humanity, decency and morality. Bush's last act before getting lost in historical ignominy was endorsing the Israelis' massacre of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
"After 8 catastrophic years, Americans from all walks of life, disgusted with what this man had done to the world in their name, came together on November 4, 2008, in a momentous occasion of collective redemption and catharsis, and chose Barack Hussein Obama as the first African-American to hold the highest office in the land. More profoundly, this was the expression of their highest aspirations and their hope to return to the fold of humanity and to stop embodying the principle source of menace and mayhem around the globe. But it did not take more than a mere couple of days for the euphoria of Obama's victory to begin giving way to an icy cold fear and wonder. From the windy winter cold of Chicago he announced his selection of Illinois Congressman Rahm Israel Emanuel as his chief of staff - effectively the gatekeeper of his White House. Congressman Emanuel comes from a strongly pro-Israeli family. He served in the Israeli army for a short time; his father Benjamin Emanuel, served for a much longer period with the notorious Irgun, the Zionist terrorist organization chiefly responsible for scores of murderous acts, among them the ethnic cleansing of Palestine when Israel was being superimposed on the world map in the 1940s. Throughout his presidential campaign, Obama had remained a suspicious figure to pro-Israeli voters, and no matter how hard he tried to convince them that he held the American relationship with Israel 'sacrosanct', as he put it on a number of occasions, he was not completely successful. In his infamously obsequious speech in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) soon after he declared victory in June 2008 in his pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, he spent a great deal of time refuting the allegations with which he had been charged - chief among them that he was a Muslim. The appointment of a pro-Israeli chief of staff went a long way toward reassuring pro-Israeli lobbies and voters, and the ground opened up like an abyss under the feet of those who had hoped for something different.
"The disappointment that a wide spectrum of Obama supporters now faced was neither limited to this single appointment nor confined to what their candidate would do toward reconciling the idealism of his youthful community activism (over which the memory of Malcolm X shone brightly) with the pragmatism of his adult presidency vis-a-vis the predicament of Palestinians and the warmongering of the Jewish apartheid state. Every appointment that he made in public in November and December 2008 called for a reassessment of his campaign promises. When he finally announced New York's junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton (who stands to the right of the Likud Party when it comes to Israel), as his choice for Secretary of State, and the news spread that Dennis Ross (a key AIPAC operative) would be his choice to head Middle East Affairs, the disappointment deepened. When Israel commenced the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza late in December 2008, President-elect Obama seemed thoroughly preoccupied with the mounting economic problems that his administration was inheriting; he remained silent on the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians, calling on the mantra 'We have only one president at a time'. While many were dismayed, I for one was relieved that at least he did not repeat the nauseating Bush administration line that Hamas was responsible for the carnage the Israeli army was visiting upon Gaza. As we say in Persian: Ma ra beh kheyr-e to ommid nist, shar marasan. We have no hope in your doing any good; prithee do us no evil.
"It did not help matters when Rahm Emanuel's father, Benjamin Emanuel, gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper Ma'riv in which he predicted that 'obviously' his son 'will influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn't he be? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to clean the floors of the White House'. The crudely racist remark delighted Zionists from Tel Aviv to New York and created havoc among the Arab and Muslim communities in the US, forcing the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) - hardly known for its daring imagination or principled postion on anything - to write a letter to Rahm Emanuel demanding that he repudiate his father's comment and send a copy to the president-elect. According to reports, the younger Emanuel called Mary Rose Oakar, the ADC president, to dissociate himself from his father's remark and apologize.
"Under ordinary circumstances this apology would have been the end of the matter. But these are not ordinary times. The unabated and in fact growing racism toward Muslims in general and Arabs in particular in North America (and Western Europe) requires far more serious attention - for it is the newest gestation of classical Christian anti-Semitism and white supremacist racism, now coming together in their fullest unfolding. For what seems to have happened since the events of 9/11, but particularly during the presidential election of 2008, is the semiotic transmutation of 'blacks' and 'Jews' into 'Arabs' and 'Muslims', respectively, in the evolving lexicon of American racism - and for this reason Benjamin Emanuel's remark deserves closer attention, as does the entire presidential election in 2008, during which, on countless occasions, this recodification of American racism was fully on display, particularly when it came to the figure and phenomenon of Barack Hussein Obama himself.
"What does it mean, exactly, to say: 'He's not going to clean the floors of the White House' - of all things? What does it signify? Who has stereotypically, and in a racist cliche, cleaned the floors of the White House? Certainly not Arabs - though perhaps in Israel, where cheap Palestinian labor is systematically abused, Israelis are used to seeing Arabs clean their floors. In Washington DC and the rest of the United States, and certainly in the White House, a whole history of African slavery has determined who, as a matter of racist cliche, cleans the floors. In the racist mind of the aging Benjamin Emanuel - who does not know the language of concealing one's bigotry and speaks like the Irgun terrorist that he was - he simply switches the African for the Arab and lets go of 'the values upon which he has raised his family'. What the senior Emanuel uttered is not all that odd for an Israeli racist. The domain of anti-Arab bigotry in Israel, from which Benjamin Emanuel draws freely, is not limited to Irgun terrorists. 'Mohammed's a pig', and 'Death to Arabs' are the staples of Israeli racism regularly sprayed on mosques and spewed at the residents of occupied Palestine, as is the hurling of severed pigs' heads into Muslim houses of worship. What is embedded in the senior Emanuel's remark is the regenerative transfusion of two differently coded modes of racism: Ashkenazi Israeli racism toward Arabs (and, for that matter, Sephardic Jews) and white American racism toward blacks. In a simple act of cross-codification, the two modes of racism come together and announce not just a mere Israelification of American political culture but also the transformation of racist registers of Blacks into Arabs (or 'sand niggers' as they have been popularly dubbed)." (Brown Skin, White Masks, 2011, pp 112-115)
"For 8 long and murderous years (2000-08), the world was at the mercy of George W Bush. He ruled the United States - and, with it, the world - with utter disregard for the most basic principles of human decency. He ended his term leaving a desperate and desolate world covered with human corpses and spotted with the bodies of tortured men, murdered mothers, raped women, orphaned children, ruined buildings, burned farms and burning factories, firms, and oilfields, from Afghanistan to Iraq to Palestine to Lebanon to the streets of New Orleans. There has been much talk in the United States about prosecuting Bush and his subordinates for war crimes. But no tribunal could ever issue a verdict harsh enough to equal the pain and suffering that this man caused among the poor and disenfranchised. Aided by his European and Israeli allies, and actively or passively endorsed by corrupt and incompetent Arab and Muslim heads of state, George W Bush looks like a nightmare from which the world has finally woken up; after a clean, cold shower it may once again remember humanity, decency and morality. Bush's last act before getting lost in historical ignominy was endorsing the Israelis' massacre of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza.
"After 8 catastrophic years, Americans from all walks of life, disgusted with what this man had done to the world in their name, came together on November 4, 2008, in a momentous occasion of collective redemption and catharsis, and chose Barack Hussein Obama as the first African-American to hold the highest office in the land. More profoundly, this was the expression of their highest aspirations and their hope to return to the fold of humanity and to stop embodying the principle source of menace and mayhem around the globe. But it did not take more than a mere couple of days for the euphoria of Obama's victory to begin giving way to an icy cold fear and wonder. From the windy winter cold of Chicago he announced his selection of Illinois Congressman Rahm Israel Emanuel as his chief of staff - effectively the gatekeeper of his White House. Congressman Emanuel comes from a strongly pro-Israeli family. He served in the Israeli army for a short time; his father Benjamin Emanuel, served for a much longer period with the notorious Irgun, the Zionist terrorist organization chiefly responsible for scores of murderous acts, among them the ethnic cleansing of Palestine when Israel was being superimposed on the world map in the 1940s. Throughout his presidential campaign, Obama had remained a suspicious figure to pro-Israeli voters, and no matter how hard he tried to convince them that he held the American relationship with Israel 'sacrosanct', as he put it on a number of occasions, he was not completely successful. In his infamously obsequious speech in front of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) soon after he declared victory in June 2008 in his pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, he spent a great deal of time refuting the allegations with which he had been charged - chief among them that he was a Muslim. The appointment of a pro-Israeli chief of staff went a long way toward reassuring pro-Israeli lobbies and voters, and the ground opened up like an abyss under the feet of those who had hoped for something different.
"The disappointment that a wide spectrum of Obama supporters now faced was neither limited to this single appointment nor confined to what their candidate would do toward reconciling the idealism of his youthful community activism (over which the memory of Malcolm X shone brightly) with the pragmatism of his adult presidency vis-a-vis the predicament of Palestinians and the warmongering of the Jewish apartheid state. Every appointment that he made in public in November and December 2008 called for a reassessment of his campaign promises. When he finally announced New York's junior senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton (who stands to the right of the Likud Party when it comes to Israel), as his choice for Secretary of State, and the news spread that Dennis Ross (a key AIPAC operative) would be his choice to head Middle East Affairs, the disappointment deepened. When Israel commenced the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza late in December 2008, President-elect Obama seemed thoroughly preoccupied with the mounting economic problems that his administration was inheriting; he remained silent on the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians, calling on the mantra 'We have only one president at a time'. While many were dismayed, I for one was relieved that at least he did not repeat the nauseating Bush administration line that Hamas was responsible for the carnage the Israeli army was visiting upon Gaza. As we say in Persian: Ma ra beh kheyr-e to ommid nist, shar marasan. We have no hope in your doing any good; prithee do us no evil.
"It did not help matters when Rahm Emanuel's father, Benjamin Emanuel, gave an interview to the Israeli newspaper Ma'riv in which he predicted that 'obviously' his son 'will influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn't he be? What is he, an Arab? He's not going to clean the floors of the White House'. The crudely racist remark delighted Zionists from Tel Aviv to New York and created havoc among the Arab and Muslim communities in the US, forcing the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) - hardly known for its daring imagination or principled postion on anything - to write a letter to Rahm Emanuel demanding that he repudiate his father's comment and send a copy to the president-elect. According to reports, the younger Emanuel called Mary Rose Oakar, the ADC president, to dissociate himself from his father's remark and apologize.
"Under ordinary circumstances this apology would have been the end of the matter. But these are not ordinary times. The unabated and in fact growing racism toward Muslims in general and Arabs in particular in North America (and Western Europe) requires far more serious attention - for it is the newest gestation of classical Christian anti-Semitism and white supremacist racism, now coming together in their fullest unfolding. For what seems to have happened since the events of 9/11, but particularly during the presidential election of 2008, is the semiotic transmutation of 'blacks' and 'Jews' into 'Arabs' and 'Muslims', respectively, in the evolving lexicon of American racism - and for this reason Benjamin Emanuel's remark deserves closer attention, as does the entire presidential election in 2008, during which, on countless occasions, this recodification of American racism was fully on display, particularly when it came to the figure and phenomenon of Barack Hussein Obama himself.
"What does it mean, exactly, to say: 'He's not going to clean the floors of the White House' - of all things? What does it signify? Who has stereotypically, and in a racist cliche, cleaned the floors of the White House? Certainly not Arabs - though perhaps in Israel, where cheap Palestinian labor is systematically abused, Israelis are used to seeing Arabs clean their floors. In Washington DC and the rest of the United States, and certainly in the White House, a whole history of African slavery has determined who, as a matter of racist cliche, cleans the floors. In the racist mind of the aging Benjamin Emanuel - who does not know the language of concealing one's bigotry and speaks like the Irgun terrorist that he was - he simply switches the African for the Arab and lets go of 'the values upon which he has raised his family'. What the senior Emanuel uttered is not all that odd for an Israeli racist. The domain of anti-Arab bigotry in Israel, from which Benjamin Emanuel draws freely, is not limited to Irgun terrorists. 'Mohammed's a pig', and 'Death to Arabs' are the staples of Israeli racism regularly sprayed on mosques and spewed at the residents of occupied Palestine, as is the hurling of severed pigs' heads into Muslim houses of worship. What is embedded in the senior Emanuel's remark is the regenerative transfusion of two differently coded modes of racism: Ashkenazi Israeli racism toward Arabs (and, for that matter, Sephardic Jews) and white American racism toward blacks. In a simple act of cross-codification, the two modes of racism come together and announce not just a mere Israelification of American political culture but also the transformation of racist registers of Blacks into Arabs (or 'sand niggers' as they have been popularly dubbed)." (Brown Skin, White Masks, 2011, pp 112-115)
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