In support of the contention that age doesn't automatically confer wisdom, I offer the following reflection by birthday boy, Uri Avnery:
"The Arabs were here before we arrived... I still believe that the early Zionists made a terrible mistake when they did not try to combine their aspirations with the hopes of the Palestinian population. Realpolitik told them to embrace their Turkish oppressors instead. Sad. The best description of the conflict was given by the historian Isaac Deutscher: a man lives in an upper floor of a house that catches fire. In desperation the man jumps out of the window and lands on a passerby down below, who is grievously injured and becomes an invalid. Between the two, there erupts a deadly conflict. Who is right?" (A confession: Uri Avnery turns 93, antiwar.com, 8/9/17)
The first 3 sentences indicate either that Avnery has no real understanding of the settler-colonial nature of the Zionist movement or, more likely, is merely having a lend of us. Beyond sad.
Given its settler-colonial nature, at no stage in its history could the Zionist movement have given any serious thought to "combining their aspirations with the hopes of the Palestinian population."
Just to drive home the point, let me quote from an early Zionist document which a reader of this blog kindly referred me to recently. The author of Our Program, Menachem Ussishkin, Secretary of the First Zionist Congress (1897) and head of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) from 1923 until 1941, wrote in 1904:
"In order to create... a Jewish state in Palestine, it is above all necessary that the whole soil of Palestine... should be in the possession of Jews... But how is land obtained in any country? Only in one of the following three ways: by force, that is, by depriving the possessor of his property by violent means; by forced sale, that is, by expropriation (the taking of private property for public purposes) by the state; or by voluntary sale. Which of these three means is applicable in Palestine? The first is entirely excluded. For that we are too weak... "
Not excluded, mind you, because it was morally repugnant, but excluded because the Zionist movement had yet to take up arms and ethnically cleanse Palestine. Ussishkin, btw, would go on, in 1936, to advocate that the Palestinian Arabs be transferred to Iraq.
As for Avnery's "best description of the conflict [with the Palestinians]," Deutscher's fable of the falling man, see Christopher Hitchens' demolition job on that, quoted in my 27/2/14 post George Brandis, 'Hitch 22' and Some Burning Questions.
Showing posts with label Christopher Hitchens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christopher Hitchens. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Thursday, February 27, 2014
George Brandis, 'Hitch-22' & Some Burning Questions
I'm always fascinated by what our politicians do and don't read. Herewith, for example, is an insight into the reading habits of Attorney General Senator George Brandis:
"Senator Brandis has defended, as within his rights, spending almost $13,000 over 4 years on books and magazines including cartoons, [Mickey Mouse? Batman?] the thriller The Marmalade Files and Christopher Hitchens' memoir Hitch-22." (Brandis orders library ladder, Jared Owens, The Australian, 25/2/14)
Just dealing with Hitchens' book, and assuming he's actually read it from cover to cover, a most interesting question arises. Might this singular event constitute some kind of Australian record? I mean, could this be the very first time a sitting federal politician has actually read something on Palestine/Israel that in any way deviates from the hermetically-sealed, Israel lobby-mandated party line?
Read these two passages from Hitch-22 and you'll see why I'm asking:
"Actually - and this is where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable - some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan - 'a land without a people for a people without a land' - disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?"
"Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building - as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago - and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no', but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom' - one of Yvonne's stock phrases - makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders."
Moreover, keeping in mind Brandis' 2009 and 2010 rambammings, what terrible tsunami of cognitive dissonance must have swept over him on reading the above, and with what, if any, result? For example, could Brandis now be the weakest link in the Israel lobby-forged chain of the federal Liberal government?
Oh yes, and will he be lending his copy of Hitch-22 to his recently rambammed protege, Tim (Freedom Fighter) Wilson? (See my 23/2/14 post I Want My Money Back!)
"Senator Brandis has defended, as within his rights, spending almost $13,000 over 4 years on books and magazines including cartoons, [Mickey Mouse? Batman?] the thriller The Marmalade Files and Christopher Hitchens' memoir Hitch-22." (Brandis orders library ladder, Jared Owens, The Australian, 25/2/14)
Just dealing with Hitchens' book, and assuming he's actually read it from cover to cover, a most interesting question arises. Might this singular event constitute some kind of Australian record? I mean, could this be the very first time a sitting federal politician has actually read something on Palestine/Israel that in any way deviates from the hermetically-sealed, Israel lobby-mandated party line?
Read these two passages from Hitch-22 and you'll see why I'm asking:
"Actually - and this is where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable - some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan - 'a land without a people for a people without a land' - disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?"
"Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building - as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago - and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no', but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom' - one of Yvonne's stock phrases - makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders."
Moreover, keeping in mind Brandis' 2009 and 2010 rambammings, what terrible tsunami of cognitive dissonance must have swept over him on reading the above, and with what, if any, result? For example, could Brandis now be the weakest link in the Israel lobby-forged chain of the federal Liberal government?
Oh yes, and will he be lending his copy of Hitch-22 to his recently rambammed protege, Tim (Freedom Fighter) Wilson? (See my 23/2/14 post I Want My Money Back!)
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Kahane Down Under?
Anti-Zionist journalist and blogger Antony Loewenstein's newmatilda.com essay, Are the Greens ready for hard ball? (30/3/11) shines some light on the dirty war waged behind the scenes against the Greens' candidates in the seats of Marrickville and Balmain in the context of last Saturday's NSW state election:
"Jamie Parker revealed to New Matilda the extent of the hatred directed at him during the campaign due to the Greens BDS policy. He had countless letters sent to him calling him a Nazi and Jew hater. His car was vandalised and campaign signs spray-painted with swastikas. He received death threats and some abusers said they knew where he lived. 'One letter said I wanted to turn Balmain power station into a gas chamber and the light rail would take people there', Parker tells me. 'Lefty Jews told me that you can't be surprised if extreme people do extreme things but they wouldn't come out in public and condemn it'. He was appalled. When the Murdoch press editor David Penberthy wrote that '(Fiona) Byrne's been busy advocating a polite modern rendering of Kristallnacht in the Inner West', Parker hoped progressive Jews he knew would condemn the offensive comparison. They did not. 'These Jews provide cover for extreme actions if they occur. If there's a sniff of you being critical of Israel, such Jews will attack you and cut you loose'. BDS simply made many Jewish people unreasonable and extremely upset, Jews told Parker. Parker says that the reaction of the Zionist lobby and local Jewish community during the election has revealed that they are willing to allow smears and violent actions against the Greens. Parker, who has spent years working on collaborative projects between local Jews and Palestinians, is now fed up with what he sees as Jewish silence. Local Jewish leaders have contacted him since Saturday to try and repair the damage but they still refuse to apologise for aggressive Jewish behaviour."
So who are these extremists? I have aleady, in a previous post on the Greens and BDS, alluded to the late US Rabbi Kahane's fascist, terrorist Jewish Defense League (JDL), and wonder if we are now seeing here the first stirrings of our own version of this creature.
For those unfamiliar with the JDL, Robert I. Friedman's The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane - from FBI Informant to Knesset Member (1990) provides the best intoduction. Here, for example, is Friedman on the founding of the JDL in New York in 1968:
"Preaching Jewish pride and Jewish power, [Kahane] captured the imagination of thousands of Jews, particularly from the lower-middle-class sections of Brooklyn and Queens that were near black ghettoes. His slogans were 'Never Again' and 'Every Jew a .22'. With a Torah in one hand and a gun in the other, Kahane set up a weapons and martial arts training camp in the Catskill Mountains in New York State, just a shotgun blast away from Grossinger's, the famous Jewish-owned hotel. A handful of his elite bodyguards, known as chayas (animals), were trained in munitions and sharpshooting by former officers of the Irgun and Stern Gang. Soon the JDL graduated from confronting black militants to bombing Soviet and Arab diplomats in Europe and America." (pp 83-84)
In his Forward to Friedman's study, Christopher Hitchens succinctly described the JDL as a "movement which spits on democracy, reviles the secular Jew, borrows the language and tactics of the Munich beer-hall and elevates the Fuhrer principle while boasting of an addiction to war, expulsion and triumphalism." (p xi)
One can only hope I'm barking up the wrong tree here, but the behaviour described by Parker, and the silence of so-called progressive (Zionist?) Jews in the face of such behaviour, is a worrying trend indeed.
Loewenstein's expose also quoted the recently retired Greens MLC Ian Cohen. Cohen's words, interestingly, contain no hint of condemnation of the smears and thuggery perpetrated against his fellow Greens, and leave little doubt as to where his sympathies lie:
"Many pro-Israel people worried about the lack of consistency and this included Greens members. Nothing was said about dictatorships in the Arab world from the Greens... I believe there is a huge scope for criticism of Israeli behaviour against the Palestinian people but BDS for the Greens was an old style, in the trenches method of pushing a campaign. It wasn't properly assessed how it would affect the NSW election campaign. The Jewish community outrage had a significant impact on our candidates."
It is surely time for the Greens to break with Zionists of whatever hue, euphemistically referred to by Cohen as pro-Israel people, and come out strongly and unapologetically in support of BDS.
"Jamie Parker revealed to New Matilda the extent of the hatred directed at him during the campaign due to the Greens BDS policy. He had countless letters sent to him calling him a Nazi and Jew hater. His car was vandalised and campaign signs spray-painted with swastikas. He received death threats and some abusers said they knew where he lived. 'One letter said I wanted to turn Balmain power station into a gas chamber and the light rail would take people there', Parker tells me. 'Lefty Jews told me that you can't be surprised if extreme people do extreme things but they wouldn't come out in public and condemn it'. He was appalled. When the Murdoch press editor David Penberthy wrote that '(Fiona) Byrne's been busy advocating a polite modern rendering of Kristallnacht in the Inner West', Parker hoped progressive Jews he knew would condemn the offensive comparison. They did not. 'These Jews provide cover for extreme actions if they occur. If there's a sniff of you being critical of Israel, such Jews will attack you and cut you loose'. BDS simply made many Jewish people unreasonable and extremely upset, Jews told Parker. Parker says that the reaction of the Zionist lobby and local Jewish community during the election has revealed that they are willing to allow smears and violent actions against the Greens. Parker, who has spent years working on collaborative projects between local Jews and Palestinians, is now fed up with what he sees as Jewish silence. Local Jewish leaders have contacted him since Saturday to try and repair the damage but they still refuse to apologise for aggressive Jewish behaviour."
So who are these extremists? I have aleady, in a previous post on the Greens and BDS, alluded to the late US Rabbi Kahane's fascist, terrorist Jewish Defense League (JDL), and wonder if we are now seeing here the first stirrings of our own version of this creature.
For those unfamiliar with the JDL, Robert I. Friedman's The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane - from FBI Informant to Knesset Member (1990) provides the best intoduction. Here, for example, is Friedman on the founding of the JDL in New York in 1968:
"Preaching Jewish pride and Jewish power, [Kahane] captured the imagination of thousands of Jews, particularly from the lower-middle-class sections of Brooklyn and Queens that were near black ghettoes. His slogans were 'Never Again' and 'Every Jew a .22'. With a Torah in one hand and a gun in the other, Kahane set up a weapons and martial arts training camp in the Catskill Mountains in New York State, just a shotgun blast away from Grossinger's, the famous Jewish-owned hotel. A handful of his elite bodyguards, known as chayas (animals), were trained in munitions and sharpshooting by former officers of the Irgun and Stern Gang. Soon the JDL graduated from confronting black militants to bombing Soviet and Arab diplomats in Europe and America." (pp 83-84)
In his Forward to Friedman's study, Christopher Hitchens succinctly described the JDL as a "movement which spits on democracy, reviles the secular Jew, borrows the language and tactics of the Munich beer-hall and elevates the Fuhrer principle while boasting of an addiction to war, expulsion and triumphalism." (p xi)
One can only hope I'm barking up the wrong tree here, but the behaviour described by Parker, and the silence of so-called progressive (Zionist?) Jews in the face of such behaviour, is a worrying trend indeed.
Loewenstein's expose also quoted the recently retired Greens MLC Ian Cohen. Cohen's words, interestingly, contain no hint of condemnation of the smears and thuggery perpetrated against his fellow Greens, and leave little doubt as to where his sympathies lie:
"Many pro-Israel people worried about the lack of consistency and this included Greens members. Nothing was said about dictatorships in the Arab world from the Greens... I believe there is a huge scope for criticism of Israeli behaviour against the Palestinian people but BDS for the Greens was an old style, in the trenches method of pushing a campaign. It wasn't properly assessed how it would affect the NSW election campaign. The Jewish community outrage had a significant impact on our candidates."
It is surely time for the Greens to break with Zionists of whatever hue, euphemistically referred to by Cohen as pro-Israel people, and come out strongly and unapologetically in support of BDS.
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Bonzer Bloke. Shame About His People
Senior American officials just loved President Ben Ali. He made them feel so secure, and he was good for the ladies too:
"Hello. I just finished a really very good and extensive discussion with the president. Tunisia is a good friend of the United States, and has been for decades. It is a deep relationship. We have broad cooperation across a range of issues. We have obviously discussed the circumstances here in the region, in terms of security and counter-terrorism... Tunisia has taken a lead in the Arab Maghreb Union, which we believe is a useful organization for addressing all kinds of issues... We talked about internal matters here in Tunisia, about the course of reform. And I do want to say that the extraordinary role of women in Tunisia was something that I raised, that women have made great progress here." (Condoleezza Rice, Remarks after Meeting with Tunisian President Ben Ali, Tunis, 6/9/08, 2001-2009.state.gov)
The creme de la creme of Western intellectuals were impressed too. There may have been a tad too many portraits of the president for their liking, but hell, Colonel Qaddafi he ain't. And, of course, he was good for the ladies too:
"On the face of it, the country is one of Africa's most outstanding success stories. In the 2006-7 World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report, it was ranked No. 1 in Africa for economic competitiveness, even, incidentally, outpacing 3 European states (Italy, Greece, and Portugal). Home ownership is 80%. Life expectancy, the highest on the continent, is 72. Less than 4% of the population is below the poverty line, and the alleviation of misery by a 'solidarity fund' has been adopted by the United Nations as a model program... [Tunisia's] Code of Personal Status was the first in the Arab world to abolish polygamy, and the veil and the burka are never seen. More than 40% of the judges and lawyers are female. The country makes delicious wine and even exports it to France... Mr Ben Ali does not make lengthy speeches on TV every night, or appear in gorgeously barbaric uniforms, or live in a different palace for every day of the week. Tunisia has no grandiose armed forces, the curse of the rest of the continent, feeding parasitically off the national income and rewarding their own restlessness with the occasional coup." (Christopher Hitchens, At the desert's edge, Vanity Fair, July 2007)
But his people? What can I say? There's no satisfying the rabble:
"My host introduced me to the gardener... He explained that he was from Jbal Dinar, a small village about 40km from Ain Drahem in NW Tunisia. He told me about an incident in his village. A few weeks ago there was a cold snap in Tunisia and it snowed heavily in some parts of the country, including the area around Ain Drahem. Being a remote area, it lacked facilities. The people there are poor due to the scarcity of resources and lack of jobs. Therefore, they could not endure the cold snap. The authorities promised to help them. The day aid arrived, a TV crew was there to record and preserve the historic moment! According to the gardener, people were handed some old wool blankets and some food. But after the cameras had left, these were taken back!... My only question is: Where is the Solidarity Fund?" (What happened is not an isolated case!, atunisiangirl.blogspot.com, 2/1/11)
"Zine Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia's president since Bourguiba's ouster in 1987, has called the hijab 'an imported form of sectarian dress' that 'does not fit with Tunisia's cultural heritage'. At a meeting of the state-dominated National Union of Tunisian Women, officials demanded that women in the audience remove their veils [sic] and in some cases tugged on them, according to a 2006 US State Department human rights report on Tunisia. 'The authorities stepped up harassment of women wearing the hijab', Amnesty International... said in its 2007 report on Tunisia. 'Some were reportedly ordered to remove their hijabs before being allowed into schools, universities or workplaces; and others were forced to remove them in the street', the report said." (Tunisia veil case threatens 'odious rag' struggle, Daniel Williams, bloomberg.com, 3/6/08)
"Meanwhile, the full horror of repression over four weeks of demonstrations is beginning to emerge. Human rights groups estimate at least 150-200 deaths since 17 December. In random roundups in poor, rural areas youths were shot in the head and dumped far from home so bodies could not be identified. Police also raped women in their houses in poor neighbourhoods in and around Kasserine in the rural interior. Sihem Bensedrine, head of the National Council for Civil Liberties, said: 'These were random, a sort of reprisal against the people. In poor areas, women who had nothing to do with anything, were raped in front of their families. Guns held back the men; the women were raped in front of them. A handful of cases were reported in Kasserine and Thala last Monday. Rape was often used as a torture technique under the regime; opposition women report they were raped in the basement of the interior ministry, as were men, too." (Confusion, fear & horror in Tunisia as old regime's militia carries on the fight: Tunisian capital witnesses violent clashes between armed forces and those loyal to former president Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali, Angelique Chrisafis, guardian.co.uk, 16/1/11)
"Hello. I just finished a really very good and extensive discussion with the president. Tunisia is a good friend of the United States, and has been for decades. It is a deep relationship. We have broad cooperation across a range of issues. We have obviously discussed the circumstances here in the region, in terms of security and counter-terrorism... Tunisia has taken a lead in the Arab Maghreb Union, which we believe is a useful organization for addressing all kinds of issues... We talked about internal matters here in Tunisia, about the course of reform. And I do want to say that the extraordinary role of women in Tunisia was something that I raised, that women have made great progress here." (Condoleezza Rice, Remarks after Meeting with Tunisian President Ben Ali, Tunis, 6/9/08, 2001-2009.state.gov)
The creme de la creme of Western intellectuals were impressed too. There may have been a tad too many portraits of the president for their liking, but hell, Colonel Qaddafi he ain't. And, of course, he was good for the ladies too:
"On the face of it, the country is one of Africa's most outstanding success stories. In the 2006-7 World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report, it was ranked No. 1 in Africa for economic competitiveness, even, incidentally, outpacing 3 European states (Italy, Greece, and Portugal). Home ownership is 80%. Life expectancy, the highest on the continent, is 72. Less than 4% of the population is below the poverty line, and the alleviation of misery by a 'solidarity fund' has been adopted by the United Nations as a model program... [Tunisia's] Code of Personal Status was the first in the Arab world to abolish polygamy, and the veil and the burka are never seen. More than 40% of the judges and lawyers are female. The country makes delicious wine and even exports it to France... Mr Ben Ali does not make lengthy speeches on TV every night, or appear in gorgeously barbaric uniforms, or live in a different palace for every day of the week. Tunisia has no grandiose armed forces, the curse of the rest of the continent, feeding parasitically off the national income and rewarding their own restlessness with the occasional coup." (Christopher Hitchens, At the desert's edge, Vanity Fair, July 2007)
But his people? What can I say? There's no satisfying the rabble:
"My host introduced me to the gardener... He explained that he was from Jbal Dinar, a small village about 40km from Ain Drahem in NW Tunisia. He told me about an incident in his village. A few weeks ago there was a cold snap in Tunisia and it snowed heavily in some parts of the country, including the area around Ain Drahem. Being a remote area, it lacked facilities. The people there are poor due to the scarcity of resources and lack of jobs. Therefore, they could not endure the cold snap. The authorities promised to help them. The day aid arrived, a TV crew was there to record and preserve the historic moment! According to the gardener, people were handed some old wool blankets and some food. But after the cameras had left, these were taken back!... My only question is: Where is the Solidarity Fund?" (What happened is not an isolated case!, atunisiangirl.blogspot.com, 2/1/11)
"Zine Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia's president since Bourguiba's ouster in 1987, has called the hijab 'an imported form of sectarian dress' that 'does not fit with Tunisia's cultural heritage'. At a meeting of the state-dominated National Union of Tunisian Women, officials demanded that women in the audience remove their veils [sic] and in some cases tugged on them, according to a 2006 US State Department human rights report on Tunisia. 'The authorities stepped up harassment of women wearing the hijab', Amnesty International... said in its 2007 report on Tunisia. 'Some were reportedly ordered to remove their hijabs before being allowed into schools, universities or workplaces; and others were forced to remove them in the street', the report said." (Tunisia veil case threatens 'odious rag' struggle, Daniel Williams, bloomberg.com, 3/6/08)
"Meanwhile, the full horror of repression over four weeks of demonstrations is beginning to emerge. Human rights groups estimate at least 150-200 deaths since 17 December. In random roundups in poor, rural areas youths were shot in the head and dumped far from home so bodies could not be identified. Police also raped women in their houses in poor neighbourhoods in and around Kasserine in the rural interior. Sihem Bensedrine, head of the National Council for Civil Liberties, said: 'These were random, a sort of reprisal against the people. In poor areas, women who had nothing to do with anything, were raped in front of their families. Guns held back the men; the women were raped in front of them. A handful of cases were reported in Kasserine and Thala last Monday. Rape was often used as a torture technique under the regime; opposition women report they were raped in the basement of the interior ministry, as were men, too." (Confusion, fear & horror in Tunisia as old regime's militia carries on the fight: Tunisian capital witnesses violent clashes between armed forces and those loyal to former president Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali, Angelique Chrisafis, guardian.co.uk, 16/1/11)
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
About That Falling Man
Surprise! Surprise! The Australian has bookended Christopher Hitchen's Dear Virginia, there really is an Israel lobby in its Saturday edition with Benny Morris' Look at moi, look at moi, Chrissy, look at moi please... in its Monday edition.
While Morris hearts Hitchens on his fingering of those bloody Arabs/Muslims as corrupt, violent, autocratic, nihilistic, medieval etc, he complains that, alas, "he still has a soft and blind spot for the Palestinians, who can apparently do no or little wrong..." (Portraying Palestinians as victims who can do no wrong is one-eyed, 11/10/10)
"In Hitch-22," moans Morris, "Hitchens approvingly cites (and expands) a metaphor coined (I think) by Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for The Atlantic* : a man (the Zionist Jew), to save himself, leaps from a burning building (in anti-Semitic and Holocaust Europe) and lands on an innocent bystander (a Palestinian), crushing him. To which Hitchens adds - and the falling man lands on the Palestinian again and again (the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, the suppression of the intifadas, the construction of settlements in the territories, etc). But the metaphor is disingenuous, and it requires amplification to conform to the facts of history." [*Wrong. It was coined by Isaac Deutscher.]
Now Morris is correct about Hitchens' metaphor being disingenuous, but not for the reasons he thinks. The falling man metaphor is based on the false premise that the Zionist project in Palestine was first and foremost a rescue mission for persecuted European Jewry, when, as American academic M Shahid Alam argues convincingly, it was more of a Jewish power-trip:
"It is unlikely that anti-Semitism was the chief catalyst in the thinking of the Zionist precursors. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Jews of Western and Central Europe were moving toward legal equality with the Gentiles; they were making their mark in Europe's finance, industry, politics, science, academia, and in artistic and literary circles. At this time, Jews were keenly aware of their success; they were acquiring a sense of their growing economic and social power. The Zionist precursors wanted to leverage this power, only recently acquired, to claim nationhood for the Jews. Anti-Semitism may not have been too far from the minds of these Zionist precursors, but, primarily, they were seeking Jewish national self-expression, a chance for the Jews to become important actors on the stage of history." (Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism, 2009, pp 55-56)
IOW, to place Alam's insight in the context of Hitchens' misleading metaphor, the crushing of the innocent Palestinian bystander did not arise as the result of a desperate leap from a burning building, as this self-serving Zionist fairytale would have it, but rather as the inevitable result of a colonial-settler project set in train by the latest and strangest of all the species of toxic, ethnic European nationalisms.
Erstwhile historian, now unbuttoned Zionist propagandist, Morris continues: "In fact, as the leaping man nears the ground he offers the bystander a compromise - let's share the pavement, some for you, some for me. The bystander responds with a firm 'no' and tries, again and again (1920, 1921, 1929, the Arab revolt of 1936-39 and the 1947-48 War of Independence), to stab the falling man as he descends to the pavement. So the leaping man lands on the bystander, crushing him. Later, again and again, the leaping man, now firmly ensconced on the pavement, offers the crushed bystander a compromise ('autonomy' in 1978, a 'two-state solution' in 2000 and in 2008), and again and again the bystander says 'no'. The falling man may have somewhat wronged the bystander, but the bystander was never an innocent one, he was an active agent in and a party to his own demise."
Ho hum. What gives the game away here, though, is Morris' reference to the falling man somewhat wronging the bystander. Somewhat wronging! Ain't that a doozy? Morris was actually far more forthcoming in a 2004 interview with Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit:
"I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy... Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history." For the real Benny Morris, as opposed to the crafty apologist for the Zionist project on display in Monday's Australian, see my 11/5/08 post Benny Unhinged.
What a fraud!
While Morris hearts Hitchens on his fingering of those bloody Arabs/Muslims as corrupt, violent, autocratic, nihilistic, medieval etc, he complains that, alas, "he still has a soft and blind spot for the Palestinians, who can apparently do no or little wrong..." (Portraying Palestinians as victims who can do no wrong is one-eyed, 11/10/10)
"In Hitch-22," moans Morris, "Hitchens approvingly cites (and expands) a metaphor coined (I think) by Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for The Atlantic* : a man (the Zionist Jew), to save himself, leaps from a burning building (in anti-Semitic and Holocaust Europe) and lands on an innocent bystander (a Palestinian), crushing him. To which Hitchens adds - and the falling man lands on the Palestinian again and again (the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza, the suppression of the intifadas, the construction of settlements in the territories, etc). But the metaphor is disingenuous, and it requires amplification to conform to the facts of history." [*Wrong. It was coined by Isaac Deutscher.]
Now Morris is correct about Hitchens' metaphor being disingenuous, but not for the reasons he thinks. The falling man metaphor is based on the false premise that the Zionist project in Palestine was first and foremost a rescue mission for persecuted European Jewry, when, as American academic M Shahid Alam argues convincingly, it was more of a Jewish power-trip:
"It is unlikely that anti-Semitism was the chief catalyst in the thinking of the Zionist precursors. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Jews of Western and Central Europe were moving toward legal equality with the Gentiles; they were making their mark in Europe's finance, industry, politics, science, academia, and in artistic and literary circles. At this time, Jews were keenly aware of their success; they were acquiring a sense of their growing economic and social power. The Zionist precursors wanted to leverage this power, only recently acquired, to claim nationhood for the Jews. Anti-Semitism may not have been too far from the minds of these Zionist precursors, but, primarily, they were seeking Jewish national self-expression, a chance for the Jews to become important actors on the stage of history." (Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism, 2009, pp 55-56)
IOW, to place Alam's insight in the context of Hitchens' misleading metaphor, the crushing of the innocent Palestinian bystander did not arise as the result of a desperate leap from a burning building, as this self-serving Zionist fairytale would have it, but rather as the inevitable result of a colonial-settler project set in train by the latest and strangest of all the species of toxic, ethnic European nationalisms.
Erstwhile historian, now unbuttoned Zionist propagandist, Morris continues: "In fact, as the leaping man nears the ground he offers the bystander a compromise - let's share the pavement, some for you, some for me. The bystander responds with a firm 'no' and tries, again and again (1920, 1921, 1929, the Arab revolt of 1936-39 and the 1947-48 War of Independence), to stab the falling man as he descends to the pavement. So the leaping man lands on the bystander, crushing him. Later, again and again, the leaping man, now firmly ensconced on the pavement, offers the crushed bystander a compromise ('autonomy' in 1978, a 'two-state solution' in 2000 and in 2008), and again and again the bystander says 'no'. The falling man may have somewhat wronged the bystander, but the bystander was never an innocent one, he was an active agent in and a party to his own demise."
Ho hum. What gives the game away here, though, is Morris' reference to the falling man somewhat wronging the bystander. Somewhat wronging! Ain't that a doozy? Morris was actually far more forthcoming in a 2004 interview with Haaretz journalist Ari Shavit:
"I feel sympathy for the Palestinian people, which truly underwent a hard tragedy... Even the great American democracy could not have been created without the annihilation of the Indians. There are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history." For the real Benny Morris, as opposed to the crafty apologist for the Zionist project on display in Monday's Australian, see my 11/5/08 post Benny Unhinged.
What a fraud!
Tell Us Something New
Christopher Hitchens discovers the Israel lobby:
"A few months ago, I wrote that the recent sharp deterioration in Israeli-Turkish relations was at least partially explicable by a single fact: this past March, a key house committee voted to refer to the Turkish massacre of the Armenians in 1915 as genocide. The difference from previous years, I pointed out, was this: until recently, the Israel lobby on the hill had worked to protect Turkey from such condemnation. But after Turkey's Prime Minister and Israel's President had a public quarrel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the lobby was in no mood to do any more favours. In other words, a vote with major implications for US foreign policy - positive ones in my opinion - was determined by the supporters of a single power." (Fuss puts focus on influence of Israel lobby, The Australian/Slate, 9/10/10)
Finds Israel lobbyists somewhat whiffy:
"Self criticism among Jews, on matters of religion and statecraft, is actually rather noticeable. But anyone who has ever had a dispute with some of the spokesmen for the holy state may possibly [!] have detected a whiff of righteousness here and there." (ibid)
"A few months ago, I wrote that the recent sharp deterioration in Israeli-Turkish relations was at least partially explicable by a single fact: this past March, a key house committee voted to refer to the Turkish massacre of the Armenians in 1915 as genocide. The difference from previous years, I pointed out, was this: until recently, the Israel lobby on the hill had worked to protect Turkey from such condemnation. But after Turkey's Prime Minister and Israel's President had a public quarrel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, the lobby was in no mood to do any more favours. In other words, a vote with major implications for US foreign policy - positive ones in my opinion - was determined by the supporters of a single power." (Fuss puts focus on influence of Israel lobby, The Australian/Slate, 9/10/10)
Finds Israel lobbyists somewhat whiffy:
"Self criticism among Jews, on matters of religion and statecraft, is actually rather noticeable. But anyone who has ever had a dispute with some of the spokesmen for the holy state may possibly [!] have detected a whiff of righteousness here and there." (ibid)
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Knife? What Knife?
Christopher Hitchens reckons Islamophobia is not only a "fake term" but also a "dangerous" one.
Here's his 'reasoning': a phobia is an "irrational fear or dislike." "Islamic preaching very often manifests precisely this feature." Therefore, "suspicion of it is by no means irrational." (Apply the test of tolerance to Muslims, too, The Australian, 28/8/10)
Putting to one side the bleeding obvious - that in religious preaching of any kind the irrational is likely to predominate over the rational - I wonder how Hitchens would characterise the 24 August knife attack on New York taxi driver Ahmed Sharif, consequent on the latter divulging to his attacker, when asked, that he was a Muslim.
Here's his 'reasoning': a phobia is an "irrational fear or dislike." "Islamic preaching very often manifests precisely this feature." Therefore, "suspicion of it is by no means irrational." (Apply the test of tolerance to Muslims, too, The Australian, 28/8/10)
Putting to one side the bleeding obvious - that in religious preaching of any kind the irrational is likely to predominate over the rational - I wonder how Hitchens would characterise the 24 August knife attack on New York taxi driver Ahmed Sharif, consequent on the latter divulging to his attacker, when asked, that he was a Muslim.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Telling, Not Talking, Points
Just occasionally, so occasionally as to prompt a post such as this, the voices of those who know what they're talking about stand out among the propagandists, spinmeisters and ignoramuses who dominate mass media discourse on the Middle East.
I refer in this case to free lance journalist Michael Otterman and University of California academic Reza Aslan, here for the Sydney Writers' Festival (SWF). They were interviewed on consecutive days (17 & 18/5/10) by Fran Kelly on ABC Radio National's Breakfast program.
Otterman is the co-author of a new book about the "sociocide" of Iraq, Erasing Iraq, based on interviews with some of the 2 million* externally displaced Iraqis living today in dire circumstances in Syria and Jordan. He made these telling points:
On support for Western intervention among Iraqis:
"Some Iraqis I spoke to supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein, but I didn't meet any who supported this prolonged occupation."
On the extent of the Iraqi refugee crisis:
"The Iraqi refugee crisis is the largest in the region since 1948 and the establishment of Israel."
On the roots & results of Iraqi sectarianism:
"Before 1991 Iraq had the strongest public health system in the region, one of the strongest education systems and all this Sunni/Shia violence did not exist. This [sectarian conflict] has all occurred after the [2003] invasion, as the US literally empowered certain tribal and religious leaders in their quest to stabilise [Iraq], which they really didn't do successfully, but the end result of all this has been the rise in fundamentalism which has obliterated ethnic and religious groups like the Mandaeans, and still today many people cannot return to their homes because, for many, they don't have a home to return to...Baghdad had over 200 mixed neighborhoods before the war, now there's only roughly 25..."
On media neglect of the issue:
"We didn't feel that the media was sufficiently asking or answering this question: what do Iraqis think about the invasion, before during and after?"
Aslan, author of How to Win a Cosmic War, neatly cut through the usual USraeli claptrap about Iran's nuclear program:
"[This] emphasis [on Iranian nukes] has to be understood by outsiders. When we think of Iran, all we care about is the nuclear issue. It's the number one issue in our minds. Iranians couldn't care less about this issue. In their top 10 list of to-do items, the nuclear issue is number 11. They are in the midst of the greatest social challenge to the regime, great political fracturing, an economy on the verge of collapse. Frankly, they don't really talk about the nuclear issue all that much... It's so far down on their list of concerns right now that there's a real disconnect between the way the US and the international community wants to deal with Iran and the way Iran wants to deal with the international community. In fact, if we focus too much just on this nuclear issue, there is a very real chance that we could derail what could be a very significant social challenge to this regime... Here's a question nobody bothers asking: why does Iran want nuclear weapons? It's not a difficult question to answer. 1) Iran is literally surrounded, I mean encircled, by American troops, troops from a country whose stated foreign policy for 3 decades towards Iran has been, unambiguously, regime change. 2) As much of a threat as Iran with nuclear weapons could conceivably pose to Israel sometime in the near future, as you and I sit here having this conversation, Israel has 200 nuclear weapons, most of them pointed at Tehran. Why wouldn't Iran want nuclear weapons? My argument is that if you want to deal with Iran's nuclear ambition, you cannot deal with it as just a national issue. It's a regional problem, and unless you're willing to deal with the other nuclear powers in that region - Israel, Pakistan and India - all of whom have nuclear weapons outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and all of whom receive tens of billions of dollars in foreign and military aid from the US, despite their illegal programs, unless you're willing to deal with that, you're never going to deal with Iran."
Unfortunately, the ms media being what it is, another SWF invitee, Christopher Hitchens, is far more likely to hog the media limelight than either of the above. In a Good Weekend feature, Devil's advocate (15/5/10), we get an insight into Hitchens' terrifying tunnel vision : "His last book, God Is Not Great, promoting the characteristically gloves-off view that 'religion poisons everything', brought him a wider audience and placed him in good company with Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Philip Pullman (The Good Man Jesus & The Scoundrel Christ), bang up with the zeitgeist. 'I knew when I saw Dawkins' book that there was something in the air'. Why now, does he think? He waves a hand: 'Depraved papacy, jihads, Palestine, creationism in American schools - all in the name of theocracy'."
That's right, Palestine is all about theocracy. Not Israel, the Jewish state, but Palestine for Christ's sake!
[*Another 3 million are internally displaced.]
I refer in this case to free lance journalist Michael Otterman and University of California academic Reza Aslan, here for the Sydney Writers' Festival (SWF). They were interviewed on consecutive days (17 & 18/5/10) by Fran Kelly on ABC Radio National's Breakfast program.
Otterman is the co-author of a new book about the "sociocide" of Iraq, Erasing Iraq, based on interviews with some of the 2 million* externally displaced Iraqis living today in dire circumstances in Syria and Jordan. He made these telling points:
On support for Western intervention among Iraqis:
"Some Iraqis I spoke to supported the toppling of Saddam Hussein, but I didn't meet any who supported this prolonged occupation."
On the extent of the Iraqi refugee crisis:
"The Iraqi refugee crisis is the largest in the region since 1948 and the establishment of Israel."
On the roots & results of Iraqi sectarianism:
"Before 1991 Iraq had the strongest public health system in the region, one of the strongest education systems and all this Sunni/Shia violence did not exist. This [sectarian conflict] has all occurred after the [2003] invasion, as the US literally empowered certain tribal and religious leaders in their quest to stabilise [Iraq], which they really didn't do successfully, but the end result of all this has been the rise in fundamentalism which has obliterated ethnic and religious groups like the Mandaeans, and still today many people cannot return to their homes because, for many, they don't have a home to return to...Baghdad had over 200 mixed neighborhoods before the war, now there's only roughly 25..."
On media neglect of the issue:
"We didn't feel that the media was sufficiently asking or answering this question: what do Iraqis think about the invasion, before during and after?"
Aslan, author of How to Win a Cosmic War, neatly cut through the usual USraeli claptrap about Iran's nuclear program:
"[This] emphasis [on Iranian nukes] has to be understood by outsiders. When we think of Iran, all we care about is the nuclear issue. It's the number one issue in our minds. Iranians couldn't care less about this issue. In their top 10 list of to-do items, the nuclear issue is number 11. They are in the midst of the greatest social challenge to the regime, great political fracturing, an economy on the verge of collapse. Frankly, they don't really talk about the nuclear issue all that much... It's so far down on their list of concerns right now that there's a real disconnect between the way the US and the international community wants to deal with Iran and the way Iran wants to deal with the international community. In fact, if we focus too much just on this nuclear issue, there is a very real chance that we could derail what could be a very significant social challenge to this regime... Here's a question nobody bothers asking: why does Iran want nuclear weapons? It's not a difficult question to answer. 1) Iran is literally surrounded, I mean encircled, by American troops, troops from a country whose stated foreign policy for 3 decades towards Iran has been, unambiguously, regime change. 2) As much of a threat as Iran with nuclear weapons could conceivably pose to Israel sometime in the near future, as you and I sit here having this conversation, Israel has 200 nuclear weapons, most of them pointed at Tehran. Why wouldn't Iran want nuclear weapons? My argument is that if you want to deal with Iran's nuclear ambition, you cannot deal with it as just a national issue. It's a regional problem, and unless you're willing to deal with the other nuclear powers in that region - Israel, Pakistan and India - all of whom have nuclear weapons outside the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and all of whom receive tens of billions of dollars in foreign and military aid from the US, despite their illegal programs, unless you're willing to deal with that, you're never going to deal with Iran."
Unfortunately, the ms media being what it is, another SWF invitee, Christopher Hitchens, is far more likely to hog the media limelight than either of the above. In a Good Weekend feature, Devil's advocate (15/5/10), we get an insight into Hitchens' terrifying tunnel vision : "His last book, God Is Not Great, promoting the characteristically gloves-off view that 'religion poisons everything', brought him a wider audience and placed him in good company with Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion) and Philip Pullman (The Good Man Jesus & The Scoundrel Christ), bang up with the zeitgeist. 'I knew when I saw Dawkins' book that there was something in the air'. Why now, does he think? He waves a hand: 'Depraved papacy, jihads, Palestine, creationism in American schools - all in the name of theocracy'."
That's right, Palestine is all about theocracy. Not Israel, the Jewish state, but Palestine for Christ's sake!
[*Another 3 million are internally displaced.]
Sunday, April 18, 2010
More Sewage from Hitchens
"[Edward Said] never lost the capacity to be wounded by the treachery and opportunism of supposed friends. A few weeks ago he called to ask whether I had read a particularly stupid attack on him by his very old friend Christopher Hitchens in The Atlantic Monthly. He described with pained sarcasm a phone call in which Hitchens had presumably tried to square his own conscience by advertising to Edward the impending assault. I asked Edward why he was surprised, and indeed why he cared. But he was surprised and he did care. His skin was so, so thin, I think because he knew that as long as he lived, as long as he marched forward as a proud, unapologetic and vociferous Palestinian, there would be some enemy on the next housetop down the street eager to pour sewage on his head." (Edward Said, Dead at 66, Alex Cockburn, 25/9/03)
Christopher Hitchens once co-edited a book with Edward Said called Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship & the Palestinian Question (1988). Now, in a recent book review in The Atlantic Monthly (Idealism of an earlier age), recycled in Murdoch's Australian Financial Review (16/4/10), Hitchens is blaming the (Palestinian) victims and putting the spew into spurious scholarship:
"Almost no concession made by either side was ever sincere, or would not have been withdrawn or amended if the other party had accepted it."
There are no Palestinian victims here, no colonised, no occupied - just one of two presumably evenly-matched sides, slugging it out, and, most importantly, refusing to concede an inch to the other.
Yet, in 1996, in his introduction to Said's essays on the bankrupt Oslo 'peace process', Peace & Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Processs, Hitchens couldn't have been clearer on the subject of who was wielding the hammer:
"Consider merely the question of Gaza. If the Belgians or the Dutch or the British had ever dared run a conquered territory in this way, in the period after 1945, it can be hoped (and it may even be believed) that a torrent of international condemnation would have descended. Nobody has ever visited this part of the projected 'Greater Israel' and come away with anything but the most decided revulsion. Having shamed themselves beyond description in this little strip of former Palestine, the Israeli authorties smilingly decided to make a present of it to their former subjects. I should here like to quote from an interview I conducted, in the week of the White House handshake, with Ilan Halevi of the PLO delegation. (Mr Halevi is a Palestinian Jew and was at the time the ambassador of the PLO to the Socialist International, as well as a strong supporter of the Arafat-Rabin accord.) 'When they offered us Gaza as a beginning', he told me, 'I suggested that we say, 'Sure. But what will you give us in exchange?' It may or may not be significant that the only decent Jewish joke to come out of the whole affair was told by a member of the PLO. The offer was, in other words, always understood at some level as a sordid trap. On the day of the White House accords, I also dined with a senior American diplomat who had once had charge of Israel-Palestine negotiations. He told me of a previous occasion, when the late Gen. Moshe Dayan had suggested a 'Gaza first' ploy. Instructed to wait upon Dayan and tell him that such an offer was too transparent by half, my vis-a-vis had found him no whit abashed. 'Never mind', said the hero of 1967, 'We'll still double-cross that bridge when we come to it'." (p xvi-xvii)
But it gets worse. According to the Hitchens of 2010, not only does he entertain the notion that the victims of Zionist aggression should have been in the business of making concessions to their aggressors, but that they should also have been owning up to their hand in... the Nazi Holocaust no less:
"There was perhaps a moment when an unambivalent Israeli admission of responsibility for the original expulsion of the Palestinians could have had a healing and even cathartic effect. There may even have been a time when a sincere Arab denunciation of the role of the grand mufti of Jerusalem in the Holocaust* might have softened a heart or two. But that time is well in the past... The parties of God have the ordering of things now, and we must wait meekly upon their awful pleasure."
If only the Palestinian victims had damned one of their own for daring to sup with the devil of the day in defence of his people and homeland (conveniently overlooking, of course, the fact that Zionist ultras were actively seeking the same devil's blessing in their war with the British), a heart or two might have softened!?
Here's the spew in Hitchen's spurious scholarship: 1) The mufti's doings in Nazi Germany and the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 are on a par and a mutual apology is therefore in order; 2) Ben-Gurion and his successors had a heart.
At two points in Said's introduction to Blaming the Victims, it's almost as though, in relation to this particular bucket of Hitchens', he had his co-editor in mind:
"Almost from the moment that the state of Israel came into being in 1948 - and although the preparations were made well before that time - the West was deluged with a whole series of narratives and images that acquired the solidity and the legitimacy of 'truth'. In spite of the presence of a comfortable 67% majority of Palestinian Arabs who owned over 90% of the land in 1948 (this was after decades of Jewish immigration and settlement) the world heard of an 'empty' territory whose inhabitants brutishly opposed Jewish settlement in Zion even after the Holocaust had occurred. Thereafter the myths proliferated and formed a system which, in the West at least, it became inordinately difficult to deny. The 'Arabs' left Palestine because their leaders told them to; the Arabs were out to destroy the Jewish state, and since they were already in league with Hitler, their opposition to Israel was essentially racist and fascist..." (pp 3-4) And, further on: "Most of all the Palestinian has suffered because he or she has been unknown, an unacknowledged victim, and worse, a victim blamed not only for his or her disasters, but for those of others as well." (p 6)
Said had expanded on this idea in an earlier work, After the Last Sky (1986):
"There has been no misfortune worse for us than that we are ineluctably viewed as the enemies of the Jews. No moral and political fate worse, none at all, I think: no worse, there is none. With so much discussion recently of the Holocaust, I am centrally aware of the fact of the destruction of European Jews, an abomination which nevertheless I find hard to consider separately; there is always the connection made between Israel and the Holocaust, how one makes restitution for the other. I find myself saying that a generation later the Holocaust has victimized us too, but without the terrifying grandeur and sacriligeous horror of what it did to the Jews. Seen from the perspective provided by the Holocaust, we are as inconsequential as children on a playground; and yet - one more twist in the reductive spiral - even at play we cannot be enjoyed or looked at simply as that, as children playing games that signify little. Just by virtue of where we stand, every playground is seen as a 'breeding ground for terrorists', every pastime a 'secret plan for the destruction of Israel', as if our own destruction was not a great deal more probable. Something either pernicious or negligible can be attributed to us, no matter what we do, wherever we are, however we think or act." (p 134)
Hitchens' obscene suggestion that the victims of the Zionist project in Palestine should be apologising for their alleged part in the Hitlerian Holocaust would have Said turning in his grave.
[* See my 22/3/08 post The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 6]
Christopher Hitchens once co-edited a book with Edward Said called Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship & the Palestinian Question (1988). Now, in a recent book review in The Atlantic Monthly (Idealism of an earlier age), recycled in Murdoch's Australian Financial Review (16/4/10), Hitchens is blaming the (Palestinian) victims and putting the spew into spurious scholarship:
"Almost no concession made by either side was ever sincere, or would not have been withdrawn or amended if the other party had accepted it."
There are no Palestinian victims here, no colonised, no occupied - just one of two presumably evenly-matched sides, slugging it out, and, most importantly, refusing to concede an inch to the other.
Yet, in 1996, in his introduction to Said's essays on the bankrupt Oslo 'peace process', Peace & Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Processs, Hitchens couldn't have been clearer on the subject of who was wielding the hammer:
"Consider merely the question of Gaza. If the Belgians or the Dutch or the British had ever dared run a conquered territory in this way, in the period after 1945, it can be hoped (and it may even be believed) that a torrent of international condemnation would have descended. Nobody has ever visited this part of the projected 'Greater Israel' and come away with anything but the most decided revulsion. Having shamed themselves beyond description in this little strip of former Palestine, the Israeli authorties smilingly decided to make a present of it to their former subjects. I should here like to quote from an interview I conducted, in the week of the White House handshake, with Ilan Halevi of the PLO delegation. (Mr Halevi is a Palestinian Jew and was at the time the ambassador of the PLO to the Socialist International, as well as a strong supporter of the Arafat-Rabin accord.) 'When they offered us Gaza as a beginning', he told me, 'I suggested that we say, 'Sure. But what will you give us in exchange?' It may or may not be significant that the only decent Jewish joke to come out of the whole affair was told by a member of the PLO. The offer was, in other words, always understood at some level as a sordid trap. On the day of the White House accords, I also dined with a senior American diplomat who had once had charge of Israel-Palestine negotiations. He told me of a previous occasion, when the late Gen. Moshe Dayan had suggested a 'Gaza first' ploy. Instructed to wait upon Dayan and tell him that such an offer was too transparent by half, my vis-a-vis had found him no whit abashed. 'Never mind', said the hero of 1967, 'We'll still double-cross that bridge when we come to it'." (p xvi-xvii)
But it gets worse. According to the Hitchens of 2010, not only does he entertain the notion that the victims of Zionist aggression should have been in the business of making concessions to their aggressors, but that they should also have been owning up to their hand in... the Nazi Holocaust no less:
"There was perhaps a moment when an unambivalent Israeli admission of responsibility for the original expulsion of the Palestinians could have had a healing and even cathartic effect. There may even have been a time when a sincere Arab denunciation of the role of the grand mufti of Jerusalem in the Holocaust* might have softened a heart or two. But that time is well in the past... The parties of God have the ordering of things now, and we must wait meekly upon their awful pleasure."
If only the Palestinian victims had damned one of their own for daring to sup with the devil of the day in defence of his people and homeland (conveniently overlooking, of course, the fact that Zionist ultras were actively seeking the same devil's blessing in their war with the British), a heart or two might have softened!?
Here's the spew in Hitchen's spurious scholarship: 1) The mufti's doings in Nazi Germany and the Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 are on a par and a mutual apology is therefore in order; 2) Ben-Gurion and his successors had a heart.
At two points in Said's introduction to Blaming the Victims, it's almost as though, in relation to this particular bucket of Hitchens', he had his co-editor in mind:
"Almost from the moment that the state of Israel came into being in 1948 - and although the preparations were made well before that time - the West was deluged with a whole series of narratives and images that acquired the solidity and the legitimacy of 'truth'. In spite of the presence of a comfortable 67% majority of Palestinian Arabs who owned over 90% of the land in 1948 (this was after decades of Jewish immigration and settlement) the world heard of an 'empty' territory whose inhabitants brutishly opposed Jewish settlement in Zion even after the Holocaust had occurred. Thereafter the myths proliferated and formed a system which, in the West at least, it became inordinately difficult to deny. The 'Arabs' left Palestine because their leaders told them to; the Arabs were out to destroy the Jewish state, and since they were already in league with Hitler, their opposition to Israel was essentially racist and fascist..." (pp 3-4) And, further on: "Most of all the Palestinian has suffered because he or she has been unknown, an unacknowledged victim, and worse, a victim blamed not only for his or her disasters, but for those of others as well." (p 6)
Said had expanded on this idea in an earlier work, After the Last Sky (1986):
"There has been no misfortune worse for us than that we are ineluctably viewed as the enemies of the Jews. No moral and political fate worse, none at all, I think: no worse, there is none. With so much discussion recently of the Holocaust, I am centrally aware of the fact of the destruction of European Jews, an abomination which nevertheless I find hard to consider separately; there is always the connection made between Israel and the Holocaust, how one makes restitution for the other. I find myself saying that a generation later the Holocaust has victimized us too, but without the terrifying grandeur and sacriligeous horror of what it did to the Jews. Seen from the perspective provided by the Holocaust, we are as inconsequential as children on a playground; and yet - one more twist in the reductive spiral - even at play we cannot be enjoyed or looked at simply as that, as children playing games that signify little. Just by virtue of where we stand, every playground is seen as a 'breeding ground for terrorists', every pastime a 'secret plan for the destruction of Israel', as if our own destruction was not a great deal more probable. Something either pernicious or negligible can be attributed to us, no matter what we do, wherever we are, however we think or act." (p 134)
Hitchens' obscene suggestion that the victims of the Zionist project in Palestine should be apologising for their alleged part in the Hitlerian Holocaust would have Said turning in his grave.
[* See my 22/3/08 post The Israeli Occupation of Federal Parliament 6]
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Zionist Svengalis
"Not every despairing person can make, at home, the necessary belts, fuses and lethal charges. These things require a godfather." (Christopher Hitchens, Svengalis behind the murderers, The Australian, 20/7/09)
To return to Hitchens' column and the subject of Palestinian suicide bombers (see my previous post), you'll remember the gin-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay's contention that "nasty, vicious, fanatical old men, not human emotions," were the be-all & end-all of the Palestinian suicide bombing phenomenon.
Well, I got to thinking about those grumpy old Svengalis and their bomb belts. Who made the first bomb belt? I asked myself.
Robert Pape, in his authoritative study of suicide bombing, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005), is of the opinion that "the first attacker to use a 'suicide belt'" was a young female Tamil Tiger recruit named Dhanu, who used the device to assassinate Rajiv Ghandi in 1991. "It is not known how the Tigers hit upon the idea," he writes, but speculates that they may have been inspired by a scene in Frederick Forsyth's 1989 novel, The Negotiator. (Pape, p 227)
Perhaps, but Pape has overlooked another, earlier bunch of Svengalis who beat Forsyth to the punch by decades. First, a little context: From 1945 to 1948, a branch of the Palmach, known as Ha'mossad Le'aliya Bet (or Mossad), organized the clandestine immigration of European Jewish refugees to Palestine in defiance of the restrictions on Jewish immigration imposed by the British Mandate authorities at the time. From August 1946, the British began deporting such illegal arrivals to camps in Cyprus. Now read on:-
"There was resistance of some kind to British capture in almost all the Mossad ships, but it became established Mossad policy beginning with the British government's Cyprus decision in August 1946. The Mossad then issued instructions for passive resistance during the transfer of refugees to the British deportation ships. The initiators of this resistance policy and its escalation were Palmach headquarters in Palestine and members of Mossad's operational arm there. They were responsible for bringing the refugees from ship to shore, and thus the potential sites of clashes with the British were within their 'jurisdiction'. Their commander was David Nameri, a kibbutz member and one of the founders and senior officers of both the Mossad and the Palmach and the liaison between the two. An activist in both his views and actions, he had no direct contact with the refugees as did his colleagues in Europe. He therefore formulated his positions without being influenced by the specific fate of the refugees, their sufferings and fatigue, or their ability to fight or resist. The first instructions on resistance were transmitted from Palestine to ships that were already at sea, before a comprehensive policy had been adopted: 'If there is an attempt to take control of the ships outside the territorial waters, there should be passive resistance such as: preventing them from coming up the ladder, blocking the approaches to the helm and the engine room, interference with handcuffing and creating havoc'. A few days after publication of the British decision on deportation to Cyprus, Nameri demanded that the refugee ships be transformed into true vessels of war. His opinion, and that of some of his colleagues, was that 'shouts and curses' were no longer sufficient and that it was time to act, to conduct a fierce and violent battle against deportation including deliberate sabotage of the deportation ships. Explosions were put on the ships and were sometimes attached to the bodies of refugee women, who thus became living bombs. Instructions were given as to how and when to carry out sabotage. 'If they are deported without any response we will never be forgiven', Nameri stated in a cable to the Mossad in Tel Aviv (he was himself in Haifa, where the refugee ships were held until deportation). Nameri, who undoubtedly remembered the Patria tragedy six years previously - more than 260 Jewish refugees drowned as a result of a badly executed dynamiting of the ship that was supposed to deport them - and his own role in it, was still not deterred from renewing his demand to sabotage ships loaded with thousands of refugees." (From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors & the Emergence of Israel, Idith Zertal, 1998, pp 140-141)
So here we have a bunch of "nasty, vicious, fanatical old (?) men" aka the Mossad, under the supreme command of another "nasty, vicious, fanatical old man" by name of David Ben-Gurion, turning female Holocaust survivors into ticking bombs for use against British sailors in a blatant attempt to make propaganda for the Zionist cause. Nice.
As to whether these ticking bombs ever went off, Zertal, an Israeli historian, records only that "[w]hile some [Mossad agents] organized resistance at almost any price, others calculated the cost and benefit, especially with regard to victims. With the deportation of both the Catriel Yafeh and the Twenty Three, orders came from shore to those accompanying the refugees to conceal and transfer explosives on the bodies of women refugee passengers. This appalling order was carried out, and a bomb was detonated on one deportation ship." (ibid p 169)
To return to Hitchens' column and the subject of Palestinian suicide bombers (see my previous post), you'll remember the gin-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay's contention that "nasty, vicious, fanatical old men, not human emotions," were the be-all & end-all of the Palestinian suicide bombing phenomenon.
Well, I got to thinking about those grumpy old Svengalis and their bomb belts. Who made the first bomb belt? I asked myself.
Robert Pape, in his authoritative study of suicide bombing, Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism (2005), is of the opinion that "the first attacker to use a 'suicide belt'" was a young female Tamil Tiger recruit named Dhanu, who used the device to assassinate Rajiv Ghandi in 1991. "It is not known how the Tigers hit upon the idea," he writes, but speculates that they may have been inspired by a scene in Frederick Forsyth's 1989 novel, The Negotiator. (Pape, p 227)
Perhaps, but Pape has overlooked another, earlier bunch of Svengalis who beat Forsyth to the punch by decades. First, a little context: From 1945 to 1948, a branch of the Palmach, known as Ha'mossad Le'aliya Bet (or Mossad), organized the clandestine immigration of European Jewish refugees to Palestine in defiance of the restrictions on Jewish immigration imposed by the British Mandate authorities at the time. From August 1946, the British began deporting such illegal arrivals to camps in Cyprus. Now read on:-
"There was resistance of some kind to British capture in almost all the Mossad ships, but it became established Mossad policy beginning with the British government's Cyprus decision in August 1946. The Mossad then issued instructions for passive resistance during the transfer of refugees to the British deportation ships. The initiators of this resistance policy and its escalation were Palmach headquarters in Palestine and members of Mossad's operational arm there. They were responsible for bringing the refugees from ship to shore, and thus the potential sites of clashes with the British were within their 'jurisdiction'. Their commander was David Nameri, a kibbutz member and one of the founders and senior officers of both the Mossad and the Palmach and the liaison between the two. An activist in both his views and actions, he had no direct contact with the refugees as did his colleagues in Europe. He therefore formulated his positions without being influenced by the specific fate of the refugees, their sufferings and fatigue, or their ability to fight or resist. The first instructions on resistance were transmitted from Palestine to ships that were already at sea, before a comprehensive policy had been adopted: 'If there is an attempt to take control of the ships outside the territorial waters, there should be passive resistance such as: preventing them from coming up the ladder, blocking the approaches to the helm and the engine room, interference with handcuffing and creating havoc'. A few days after publication of the British decision on deportation to Cyprus, Nameri demanded that the refugee ships be transformed into true vessels of war. His opinion, and that of some of his colleagues, was that 'shouts and curses' were no longer sufficient and that it was time to act, to conduct a fierce and violent battle against deportation including deliberate sabotage of the deportation ships. Explosions were put on the ships and were sometimes attached to the bodies of refugee women, who thus became living bombs. Instructions were given as to how and when to carry out sabotage. 'If they are deported without any response we will never be forgiven', Nameri stated in a cable to the Mossad in Tel Aviv (he was himself in Haifa, where the refugee ships were held until deportation). Nameri, who undoubtedly remembered the Patria tragedy six years previously - more than 260 Jewish refugees drowned as a result of a badly executed dynamiting of the ship that was supposed to deport them - and his own role in it, was still not deterred from renewing his demand to sabotage ships loaded with thousands of refugees." (From Catastrophe to Power: Holocaust Survivors & the Emergence of Israel, Idith Zertal, 1998, pp 140-141)
So here we have a bunch of "nasty, vicious, fanatical old (?) men" aka the Mossad, under the supreme command of another "nasty, vicious, fanatical old man" by name of David Ben-Gurion, turning female Holocaust survivors into ticking bombs for use against British sailors in a blatant attempt to make propaganda for the Zionist cause. Nice.
As to whether these ticking bombs ever went off, Zertal, an Israeli historian, records only that "[w]hile some [Mossad agents] organized resistance at almost any price, others calculated the cost and benefit, especially with regard to victims. With the deportation of both the Catriel Yafeh and the Twenty Three, orders came from shore to those accompanying the refugees to conceal and transfer explosives on the bodies of women refugee passengers. This appalling order was carried out, and a bomb was detonated on one deportation ship." (ibid p 169)
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
72 Virgins... Again!
"All you have to do is promise them 72 virgins, and they'll kill to get there." (Christopher Hitchens: Religion Poisons Everything, truthdig.com, 6/6/07)
Gin-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay, neocon windbag and Slate columnist Christopher Hitchens revisits the phenomenon of the Palestinian suicide bomber, reductively concluding that "nasty, vicious, fanatical old men, not human emotions [such as despair] were making the decisions and deciding the days and the hours of death." (Svengalis behind the murderers, The Australian, 20/7/09) Utterly shallow, of course, but that's Hitchens for you.
A corrective is needed.
Mohammed M Hafez' Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers (2006) is a nuanced and insightful study which examines the individual, organizational, and societal motives behind the phenomenon:
"[A]t the level of the individual, religious and nationalist appeals that equate self-sacrifice with martyrdom and national salvation are instrumental in producing volunteers for suicide attacks. Individuals are not inspired to carry out suicide bombings because these are the optimal tactic given the constraints of the political environment or the calculations of costs versus benefits; rather, they are inspired by the redemptive nature of self-sacrifice. The religious and nationalist framings of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades go beyond mere manipulation of individual minds; they combine religious texts and historical narratives with ritual and ceremony to foster a culture that venerates martyrdom. The cultural context of Islamic revivalism and the political context of nationalist conflict allow those appeals to resonate with the broader public and with potential bombers. Militant groups also draw on the desire for national empowerment in the context of powerlessness in order to motivate individuals to undertake 'heroic' acts to shake the passive public into action. Finally, militant groups draw on the desire for vengeance that arises when individuals perceive members of their actual or imagined community as humiliated or traumatized by hated enemies.
"At the level of the organization, the case of the Palestinian suicide bombers shows that despite the outwardly religious nature of militant groups, strategic considerations in the context of asymmetrical warfare are the primary drivers for the adoption of suicidal violence as the preferred method of resistance. The difference between those who support suicide bombings and those who oppose them does not correspond to a religious-versus-secular split - both religious and secular factions see the value of suicide attacks. Instead, the split among supporters and opponents corresponds to the divergence between those who believe resistance is the only viable option and those who believe negotiations are more effective. Thus, it would be a mistake to equate suicidal violence solely with Islamism or religious fundamentalism.
"At the level of society, the Palestinian case shows that communities embrace and venerate 'martyrdom operations' when 2 conditions converge: (1) communities feel a deep sense of victimization and threat by external enemies in the course of political conflict, and (2) legitimate authorities promote or acquiesce to extreme violence. Palestinian suicide bombings in the al-Aqsa uprising developed out of a mix of threats and opportunities. On the one hand, the Palestinians felt victimized by Israelis who used harsh measures and collective punishments to end the uprising. On the other hand, the Palestinians felt empowered by government and religious authorities to strike back with extreme violence to punish the Israelis. This dynamic suggests that the phenomenon of volunteerism for suicide bombings is intricately connected to the broader political contexts in a given society. Militant organizations, no matter how ideologically savvy and politically astute, cannot generate high rates of volunteerism for suicide attacks without the presence of opportunities and threats in embattled societies." (pp 67-68) [See also my 2/7/09 post Schmoozing With Aaron Klein!]
And here's the Israeli context, without which the above would not have been possible, from US academic Steve Niva: "While suicide bombings are often portrayed as individual and random acts of fanaticism or desperation, leading to an excessive focus on the 'mind of the suicide bomber', my research has found that suicide bombings are highly organized and patterned. They are the product of a deliberate strategy by militant groups to both punish Israel for specific acts and to mobilize popular support for their organizations. I trace the origins of this pattern to the first suicide bombing inside Israel in April 1994 that came exactly 40 days (the standard Muslim mourning period) after the massacre of 29 Palestinians praying in a Hebron mosque by the American-Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein in February 1994. Since that time, my research has shown that Palestinian militant groups have adopted a policy of using Israeli acts of violence, especially assassinations of militant leaders and civilian massacres, as the trigger for launching suicide bombing attacks inside Israel... [M]y research suggests that the pattern of suicide bombings can only be explained in the context of Israel's violent actions, often war crimes under international law, which routinely precipitate and provide a rationalization for such attacks." (academic.evergreen.edu)
Needless to say, a shot as cheap as Hitchens' just wouldn't be complete without the following: "To have added the promise of paradise to this pogrom is to have made spiritual and mental sickness complete; to have made it a sexual paradise is obscene into the bargain. (Women martyrs are obviously not offered the same level of bliss and promiscuity by the Koran [sic].)"
Nor are martyred men, Bozo. The 72 virgins are not found in the Quran, but in a 9th century hadith from Ahmad al-Tirmidhi: "The martyr has a guarantee from God: He forgives him at the first drop of his blood and shows him his seat in Heaven. He decorates him with the jewels of faith, protects him from the torments of the grave, keeps him safe on the day of judgment, places a crown of dignity on his head with the finest rubies in the world, marries him to 72 of the pure virgins of paradise and intercedes on behalf of 70 of his relatives."
Hitchens should be so lucky.
Gin-sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay, neocon windbag and Slate columnist Christopher Hitchens revisits the phenomenon of the Palestinian suicide bomber, reductively concluding that "nasty, vicious, fanatical old men, not human emotions [such as despair] were making the decisions and deciding the days and the hours of death." (Svengalis behind the murderers, The Australian, 20/7/09) Utterly shallow, of course, but that's Hitchens for you.
A corrective is needed.
Mohammed M Hafez' Manufacturing Human Bombs: The Making of Palestinian Suicide Bombers (2006) is a nuanced and insightful study which examines the individual, organizational, and societal motives behind the phenomenon:
"[A]t the level of the individual, religious and nationalist appeals that equate self-sacrifice with martyrdom and national salvation are instrumental in producing volunteers for suicide attacks. Individuals are not inspired to carry out suicide bombings because these are the optimal tactic given the constraints of the political environment or the calculations of costs versus benefits; rather, they are inspired by the redemptive nature of self-sacrifice. The religious and nationalist framings of Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades go beyond mere manipulation of individual minds; they combine religious texts and historical narratives with ritual and ceremony to foster a culture that venerates martyrdom. The cultural context of Islamic revivalism and the political context of nationalist conflict allow those appeals to resonate with the broader public and with potential bombers. Militant groups also draw on the desire for national empowerment in the context of powerlessness in order to motivate individuals to undertake 'heroic' acts to shake the passive public into action. Finally, militant groups draw on the desire for vengeance that arises when individuals perceive members of their actual or imagined community as humiliated or traumatized by hated enemies.
"At the level of the organization, the case of the Palestinian suicide bombers shows that despite the outwardly religious nature of militant groups, strategic considerations in the context of asymmetrical warfare are the primary drivers for the adoption of suicidal violence as the preferred method of resistance. The difference between those who support suicide bombings and those who oppose them does not correspond to a religious-versus-secular split - both religious and secular factions see the value of suicide attacks. Instead, the split among supporters and opponents corresponds to the divergence between those who believe resistance is the only viable option and those who believe negotiations are more effective. Thus, it would be a mistake to equate suicidal violence solely with Islamism or religious fundamentalism.
"At the level of society, the Palestinian case shows that communities embrace and venerate 'martyrdom operations' when 2 conditions converge: (1) communities feel a deep sense of victimization and threat by external enemies in the course of political conflict, and (2) legitimate authorities promote or acquiesce to extreme violence. Palestinian suicide bombings in the al-Aqsa uprising developed out of a mix of threats and opportunities. On the one hand, the Palestinians felt victimized by Israelis who used harsh measures and collective punishments to end the uprising. On the other hand, the Palestinians felt empowered by government and religious authorities to strike back with extreme violence to punish the Israelis. This dynamic suggests that the phenomenon of volunteerism for suicide bombings is intricately connected to the broader political contexts in a given society. Militant organizations, no matter how ideologically savvy and politically astute, cannot generate high rates of volunteerism for suicide attacks without the presence of opportunities and threats in embattled societies." (pp 67-68) [See also my 2/7/09 post Schmoozing With Aaron Klein!]
And here's the Israeli context, without which the above would not have been possible, from US academic Steve Niva: "While suicide bombings are often portrayed as individual and random acts of fanaticism or desperation, leading to an excessive focus on the 'mind of the suicide bomber', my research has found that suicide bombings are highly organized and patterned. They are the product of a deliberate strategy by militant groups to both punish Israel for specific acts and to mobilize popular support for their organizations. I trace the origins of this pattern to the first suicide bombing inside Israel in April 1994 that came exactly 40 days (the standard Muslim mourning period) after the massacre of 29 Palestinians praying in a Hebron mosque by the American-Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein in February 1994. Since that time, my research has shown that Palestinian militant groups have adopted a policy of using Israeli acts of violence, especially assassinations of militant leaders and civilian massacres, as the trigger for launching suicide bombing attacks inside Israel... [M]y research suggests that the pattern of suicide bombings can only be explained in the context of Israel's violent actions, often war crimes under international law, which routinely precipitate and provide a rationalization for such attacks." (academic.evergreen.edu)
Needless to say, a shot as cheap as Hitchens' just wouldn't be complete without the following: "To have added the promise of paradise to this pogrom is to have made spiritual and mental sickness complete; to have made it a sexual paradise is obscene into the bargain. (Women martyrs are obviously not offered the same level of bliss and promiscuity by the Koran [sic].)"
Nor are martyred men, Bozo. The 72 virgins are not found in the Quran, but in a 9th century hadith from Ahmad al-Tirmidhi: "The martyr has a guarantee from God: He forgives him at the first drop of his blood and shows him his seat in Heaven. He decorates him with the jewels of faith, protects him from the torments of the grave, keeps him safe on the day of judgment, places a crown of dignity on his head with the finest rubies in the world, marries him to 72 of the pure virgins of paradise and intercedes on behalf of 70 of his relatives."
Hitchens should be so lucky.
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