Lawrence of Cyberia

One Not Unimportant Fact

Veteran Israeli leftist Haim Hanegbi wrote in August 2003:

I am not a psychologist, but I think that everyone who lives with the contradictions of Zionism condemns himself to protracted madness. It's impossible to live like this. It's impossible to live with such a tremendous wrong. It's impossible to live with such conflicting moral criteria. When I see not only the settlements and the occupation and the suppression, but now also the insane wall that the Israelis are trying to hide behind, I have to conclude that there is something very deep here in our attitude to the indigenous people of this land that drives us out of our minds.

There is something gigantic here that doesn't allow us truly to recognize the Palestinians, that doesn't allow us to make peace with them. And that something has to do with the fact that even before the return of the land and the houses and the money, the settlers' first act of expiation toward the natives of this land must be to restore to them their dignity, their memory, their justness.…

-- Cry, the beloved two-state solution; Ha’aretz, 10 Aug 2003.

I think I’ve found an example of the madness he is talking about. The following poem was published pseudonymously in Israel’s leading Russian language newspaper, Вести (Vesti), on 25 Aug 2005, in support of Avigdor Lieberman’s proposal to rid the Jewish state of its citizens of the “wrong” religion by transferring the Arab villages of the Galilee to the Palestinian Authority. (Translation, and all errors therein, by Lawrence of Cyberia):

Парадигма Либермана / The Lieberman Paradigm

А ягодки – кошмарный сон: число израильских арабов
зашкалило за миллион и далее растет не слабо.

Their progeny are a nightmare: How many Arabs in Israel?
Already more than a million there, and still growing, right off the scale.

Взгляни на них – темно очам! Скажу, евреям не в обиду:
Арабы пашут по ночам Во имя восполненья вида.

Just look at them – they blacken your sight! I say this without reproaching the Jew:
The Arab is ploughing his furrow by night that his race might outnumber you.

Затменье лунного луча, Дыхание смерти, след напасти?
Крольчиха, кошка, саранча Не ведают подобной страсти!

A lunar eclipse? Does that explain it? Is it the mark of misfortune? Is it death’s kiss?
Even the cat, the locust and the rabbit are unfamiliar with lust like this!

И как ты счастья не пророчь, Уже нам путь мостит ко гробу
За ночью ночь, за ночью ночь aрабской женщины утроба.

There is no happy end in sight. They are paving the path to your tomb,
Night after night, night after night, in the Arab woman’s womb.

- "Гершона Бен-Яакова" / "Gershon Ben Ya'akov"

Free Speech 2: The Whole World Is Not American

This is the second part in a series of posts about the Danish "Muhammad cartoons" controversy. If you haven't already read it, it would probably be useful to start with part one.

3. Nous ne sommes pas tous americains.

[C]ontemporary Orientalist attitudes flood the press and the popular mind. Arabs, for example, are thought of as camel-riding, terroristic, hook-nosed, venal lechers whose undeserved wealth is an affront to real civilization. Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being.

...[A] white, middle-class Westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition "it" is not quite as human as "we" are. There is no purer example than this of dehumanized thought.

-- Edward W. Said; Orientalism (Vintage Books edition, 1979, page 108).

Well. Sometimes you get a reply to things you write that just leave you speechless. I knew the Muhammad cartoons were controversial and might elicit a whole range of responses. But when I wrote earlier about how offensive it is to caricature Muhammad as a hook-nosed, bigotted, bloodthirsty old deviant, the one response that I really didn’t anticipate was that it isn’t offensive to say that because that’s just how Muhammad really was! Specifically:

"Muhammad was just simply a pedophile (he married a six-year-old girl) and a warlord".

I’m going to respond to that comment in some detail, not only because it’s profoundly ignorant in itself, but also because it is suggestive of a wider self-imposed national ignorance of all things foreign that seems to have a lot of us in its thrall right now, and that leaves us alternately confident that the whole world is just like us and then confused about why hordes of bearded men are burning our flag instead of showering us with the chocolates and roses we expect and deserve.

Free Speech 1: Hate Speech As Free Speech

I wasn’t going to comment on the Danish cartoons, because there can't be much left to say that hasn't already been said. But I've been participating in discussions on the subject in other "progressive" fora, where I've been really stunned at some of the ugly sentiments about Muslims and Islam that this affair has dredged to the surface, and I'd like to respond to some of the things I've heard. In short, my own view of the cartoons is that they are gratuitously and deliberately offensive, and their offensiveness was deliberate. So the issue they raise is not free speech per se, but the use of free speech to express and incite religious and racial hatred. I also believe that in Denmark both racial incitement and blasphemy are illegal, so if someone commits those offences, you seek redress by taking them to court.

In considering some of these points, I am going to reproduce some undeniably offensive images, including the worst of the Danish cartoons. It would be absurd to try to talk about why the Danish images are as offensive and hateful as caricatures used to demonize other minority groups, without being able to look at them. If you are uncomfortable at the thought of what you might see - and I assure you there will be something to hurt everyone's feelings - then don't click the links or thumbnails.

I'm going to write about several diverse issues that don't real hang together very well. So I'll post them separately over the next few days, and lump them all together in a single post when I'm done.

1. Racism disguised as freedom of speech

"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." - Soren Kierkegaard (1815-1855), Danish philosopher and theologian.

The Gospel According To Don

Poor Don Imus on MSNBC this morning was offended by the behavior of the eulogists at Coretta Scott King's funeral. Apparently, they were "politicizing" the event by mentioning that the struggles to which Coretta Scott King devoted her life - for social justice, civil rights, and against unjust war - are as urgent in George Bush's America as they ever were in the civil rights era. Imus suggested that at a funeral people should "act like Jesus", which apparently equates to not complaining about Americans being wire-tapped by their own government or duplicitously led into an illegal war by a mendacious President.

Imus is uniquely qualified to talk about proper decorum at funerals, seeing as he provided the commentary for MSNBC's coverage of Yasir Arafat's funeral in November 2004, and graced the occasion with Jesus-like comments such as:

1. “The scene is disorderly, but seems fairly peaceful. It hasn’t turned into the complete chaotic mess that we were hoping for…”

2. Arafat was a “rodent-looking weasel”.

3. “Yasser Arafat’s fat wife didn’t make it to Ramallah for the funeral. And if she had, she’d never have made it out alive anyway.”

And the piece de resistance of his commentary:

DON IMUS: They're (the Palestinians) eating dirt and that fat pig wife of his is living in Paris.

COLLEAGUE: They’re all brainwashed, though. That’s what it is. And they're stupid, to begin with, but they’re brainwashed now. Stinking animals. They ought to drop the bomb right there, kill ‘em all right now…

IMUS: Well, the problem is we have (reporter) Andrea (Mitchell) there; we don't want anything to happen to her.

COLLEAGUE: Oh, she's got to get out. Andrea, get out and then drop the bomb and kill everybody… Look at this. Animals. Animals!

Very classy. Perhaps Don Imus knows of some hidden gospel in which Jesus declines to lay his hands on lepers because they're just a bunch of scabby "rodent-looking weasels", or restores to life both Jairus' daughter AND "his fat pig of a wife". The only other alternative is that Imus is talking out of his ass, again.

God Slams Partition Of Palestine; Favours One State Solution

The man’s not even officially dead yet, and the vultures are already out to see what they can scavenge from his demise.

According to Pat Robertson, the self-serving yet inexplicably enduring voice of the “Christian” Zionist fringe, the stroke that Ariel Sharon suffered yesterday was God’s punishment upon him for “dividing the land” of Israel. Additionally, God had Yitzhak Rabin assassinated for the same reason:

I have said last year that Israel was entering into the most dangerous period of its entire existence as a nation. That is intensifying this year with the loss of Sharon. Sharon was personally a very likeable person. I am sad to see him in this condition. But I think we need to look at the Bible and the Book of Joel. The prophet Joel makes it very clear that God has enmity against those who, quote, "divide my land." God considers this land to be his.

You read the Bible, he says, "This is my land." And for any prime minister of Israel who decides he going carve it up and give it away, God says, "No. This is mine." And the same thing -- I had a wonderful meeting with Yitzhak Rabin in 1974. He was tragically assassinated, and it was terrible thing that happened, but nevertheless, he was dead.

And now Ariel Sharon, who was again a very likeable person, a delightful person to be with. I prayed with him personally. But here he is at the point of death. He was dividing God's land, and I would say woe unto any prime minister of Israel who takes a similar course to appease the EU, the United Nations or United States of America. God said, "This land belongs to me, you better leave it alone."

(via Media Matters)

Coincidentally, God speaks to me too. Or rather, he speaks to me as much as he speaks to Pat Robertson. In fact, just this morning God told me to tell you that Pat Robertson is an idiot.

A Nation Without Mirrors

A couple of my posts since returning from hiatus have discussed the tendency we have in this country to highlight extremist behaviour among people we don't like, pretend that it is representative of the whole, and use that as a justification for our own prejudice against them. We do this even when the behaviour that we condemn in "them" is exactly the same kind of behaviour that we will excuse or turn a blind eye too when it is carried out by "us" or "people like us".

I really don't understand the logic behind that line of argument, but as both of my posts were written in response to readers who had gone to the trouble of finding acts of Palestinian extremism that they could wave triumphantly as proof that "they" are hateful, "they" aren't like us, and "they" don't want peace, it's clearly an important prop in some people's logic.

They Hate, We Don't

This is in response to an email I received while on hiatus. Reader F_ sent me a story from the San Francisco Chronicle (Hamas camp: Sun, fun and ... indoctrination), about a Hamas summer camp where children are taught swimming, riding and... incitement against Jews. F_ asks: "Why dont you post this on your site. Don't you think your audience should know what Palestinian children learn at camp?"


My response would be that I wouldn't post a story about incitement at a Hamas camp and portray it as representative of "what Palestinian children learn at camp", any more than I would post an Israeli TV screenshot of children in a West Bank settlement doing paramilitary training in the classroom...

... and claim that I was simply showing my audience "what Israeli kids learn at school".

And I wouldn't post racist extracts from Israeli schoolbooks, and suggest that my audience now knows "what Israelis teach their kids in school".

And I don't link to pictures of Israeli children used as political props in support of ethnic cleansing, to show my audience that "Jewish Israelis indoctrinate their children to hate".

And I don't post photo albums of Israeli kids with guns, and scream that it's "Israeli Child Abuse!".

And it never occurred to me to write a post about about Gaza settlers teaching Holocaust manipulation and hatred of the non-religious to their preschool children, just so I could proclaim "Look what religious Jews teach their children".

And I don't post pictures of Israeli gunmen among children who are stoning Palestinians in the West Bank, so that I can show my audience that "Israelis don't love their children", but hide behind them so that they will be killed first.

And I don't link to select pronouncements by kooky Israeli religious figures, and pretend that this is representative of "what Jews learn from their rabbis".

And I don't write posts about Jewish Israelis celebrating religious holidays by dressing up their kids with combat gear and weapons, just so I can wring my hands in faux exasperation about "What's wrong with Judaism and why does it glorify violence?".

And I never linked to the March 2005 cartoon in the Shas magazine for kids - that taught its readers "ערבי טוב הוא ערבי מת”** - in order to "show my audience what ultra orthodox Jews teach their kids".

And I didn't link to Yedioth Ahronoth (Israel's most popular daily paper) on 7 May 2002, when it published a selection of letters from Israeli 7th to 10th graders urging IDF soldiers in the West Bank to "Please kill a lot of Arabs", so that I could pontificate to my audience about the ugly racial indoctrination that Israeli kids must go through to produce such hatred in children so young.

And I don't highlight this kind of handiwork from the Hebron settlers, and present it as proof that you simply can't make peace with Jewish Israelis, because theirs is a murderous religion that obliges them "to commit genocide" against the Palestinians.......

...etc,
...etc...

In other words, I don't look for the worst examples of extremism I can find and pretend they are representative of the whole culture, just so I can smear an entire religion as "a religion of hate" or a whole race as "not quite people like us".

It's not legitimate to select examples of extremism by Jewish Israelis, detach them from the wider context of Israeli society and the I/P conflict in general, and insinuate to my audience that I am sharing some representative or ontological insight into "how Israelis are", "how Jews are" or "how the religious are", etc etc. So I'm not sure why it's legitimate to do the same thing to Palestinians, Arabs or Muslims. I certainly don't plan to start. This is Lawrence of Cyberia, not MEMRI.

It is indefensible to incite hatred of Jews. It is yet more reprehensible when children are your target audience. But it is also reprehensible to want to cherry pick the worst examples of extremist behaviour, and to pretend it is representative of an entire people, just because it fulfils your own prejudices about what kind of people "they" are.

** "the only good Arab is a dead Arab."

Go Cornhuskers!

This weekend CSPAN showed a presentation by Prof. Mahmood Mamdani at the University of Michigan, in which he introduced his book Good Muslim, Bad Muslim.

The book deals with the Cold War origins of al Qaeda and our Global War On Terror™. It describes how, following defeat in Viet Nam, U.S. policy shifted from using American forces to challenge the spread of Soviet influence through conventional warfare, to manufacturing “national liberation movements” (like Renamo in Mozambique and the Contras of Nicaragua) who would fight guerilla wars against the Soviets and their allies instead.

The culmination of the policy was Afghanistan, where the U.S. organized armed resistance to the Soviet invasion. But this time the resistance was not to be a nationalist movement that could appeal to the patriotism of Afghans, but a religious, islamist movement that could appeal for recruits from a pool of more than one billion Muslims worldwide. It would be armed by the U.S., funded by the Saudis and the U.S., and manned by recruits trained at a network of schools, or madrassas, designed to offer not the Quranic-based religious education of the traditional madrassa, but specifically to churn out a generation of politically-motivated jihadis.

The presentation was excellent, and the book certainly sounds well worth reading, but the thing I found most striking was a brief remark that Mamdani made in the Q & A session after his speech, in which he gave specific examples of the kind of lessons taught in the madrassas. For example, from the textbook used to teach third grade math (i.e. nine year olds), he cited this problem:

“One group of mujahideen attack fifty Russian soldiers. In that attack twenty Russians are killed, how many Russians fled?”

And, a year later, Afghan 10 year olds progress to questions like:

“The speed of a Kalashnikov bullet is 80 metres per second. If a Russian is at a distance of 3200 m from a mujahid and that mujahid aims at the Russian’s head, calculate how many seconds it will take for the bullet to strike the Russian in the forehead.”

Nice. And the really nice thing about that is that those textbooks weren’t developed by mad mullahs in Afghanistan, Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, but by … the University of Nebraska. The U.S. government gave a federal grant of $50 million to the University of Nebraska to develop an appropriate curriculum for Afghan nine- and ten-year olds in U.S.-supported madrassas, and that’s what they came up with. Your tax dollars at work.

We hear so much phony handwringing these days from self-appointed Western “experts” about “What’s wrong with Islam?” Where does the hatred come from? Does it come from the religion or is it “the Arab mind” that breeds hate, even in the children? etc., etc… It’s interesting that it would take a Muslim scholar from East Africa to point out to an American audience the awkward fact that, at least when it suits our foreign policy agenda, the hatred can come quite deliberately from us, the U.S. taxpayer, via the University of Nebraska.

Of course the Russian soldiers are long gone from Afghanistan now. And all those nine- and ten-year-olds who passed through the mujahideen madrassas – organised by our Pakistani allies, funded by our Saudi allies, and supplied by the University of Nebraska – are adults. And whose soldiers are in those kids’ gunsights right now, awaiting a Kalashnikov bullet in the forehead, at a speed of 80 metres per second, from a distance of 3200m?

Confirming The Kill

Just last week I visited a well-known high school in Jerusalem. A good many of the students I spoke to told me appalling things. They said: When we are soldiers, we will kill old people, women and children without giving it a thought. They said: We will expel them, we will put them on planes and fly them to Iraq. We will fly hundreds of thousands of them. Millions. And most of the students in the audience applauded those opinions. They supported them even when I pointed out that that is how people talked 60 years ago in Europe.

-- Avrum Burg, former Speaker of the Knesset: On The Eve Of Destruction

Whenever I hear a statement that begins, “The Jews…”, “The Muslims….”, “The Arabs…” etc., I start to cringe as I wait to hear the sweeping generalization that is bound to follow. Here in the U.S. it’s not really politically correct to make racist statements that are openly hostile to Jews or blacks any more (so we use coded language when we do it), but there don’t seem to be any constraints on what we can say openly about Arabs and Muslims. Since 9/11 it really is open season on Islamofascists and towelheads.

It always matters when we use dehumanizing talk to demonize an entire race, because words aren’t passive, but incite and justify action against the people we demonize. I have just finished reading Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War, Robert Fisk’s account of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The invasion had the political goal of regime change: Israel intended to install at the point of a bayonet a Maronite President who, in return for the Israelis bringing him to power, would sign a peace treaty with Israel. Because regime change wasn’t such an openly acceptable excuse for invading a country in 1982 as it was in 2003, Israel’s public reason for invading was to combat [Palestinian] terrorism, to eradicate the “vermin”, to clean out the “vipers’ nests” from Lebanon, as the rhetoric of the time put it.

There were a few voices raised in Israel about the danger of using dehumanizing language against the Palestinians to whip up support for the invasion. But as you read the book, more than twenty years after the invasion, you already know that the warning voices are too few and too quiet, because you know how it is all going to end. You feel the “terrorist” drum beat building momentum as the book progresses, and you want to be able to stop it, because you know the frenzy is going to sweep the IDF all the way to Sabra and Shatila, and you know what will happen there. In Lebanon, painting Palestinians as vipers, and vermin and terrorists might have started out as just a political expedient to justify a war, but it ended up becoming a drum beat to a terrible genocide. You want to be able to stop the book and warn everyone in it about how it will end, but you can’t because it was twenty years ago, and now it’s too late.

Sabra and Shatila are one reaon why it matters when we use inflammatory language to dehumanize an entire race. Thirteen-year-old Iman al-Hams is another.

I Know What You're Thinking

But you're wrong.

I couldn't resist posting the following series of pictures that Thomas, at The Use of Fiction Fotolog, took at New York City's Salute to Israel parade, earlier this year.

(click on thumbnails to enlarge)

The photographs actually show part of a contingent of over 100 anti-Zionist Orthodox Jews who went to stand alongside Palestinians and their supporters to protest New York City's "Salute to Israel". I'm not suggesting that Satmar Jews are the mainstream in U.S. Jewry, but its an interesting series of photos for challenging preconceptions.