Muslim Anti-Semitism, Israel, and the Dynamics of Self-Destructive Scapegoating

(There’s a shorter version of this up at the Daily Telegraph. Check out the amazing comments.)

One of my daughters recently wrote me: “I was speaking to a friend of mine who had been dating a very, very, anti Israel activist for about a year. We don’t usually breech the topic but she asked me if most of the Muslim antisemitism in Europe wasn’t based on their dislike of what is going on in Israel and not so much on religion.”

This is a widely held belief among not only anti-Zionists, but among liberals in general. It takes a number of forms, all of which serve to explain the explosive and virulent hatreds of the Muslim world for Israel and the Jews (who support it), as a function of the evil that Israel has done to the Palestinians. It includes the widely held assumption that suicide bombings were a response to the despair that Palestinians felt because Israel denied them independence and dignity. It is also directly related to the problem of “Islamophobia is the new Anti-Semitism,” in which speaking of Muslim anti-Semitism becomes a new form of anti-Semitism.

I won’t so much argue against this approach – it has some data points to deploy – as I will argue an alternative approach to the problem, then discuss the consequences of (mis)reading the situation by either approach, and let readers decide for themselves which makes more sense.

From my point of view (medievalist familiar with Christian anti-Semitic words and deeds, and a student of the current scene), the argument works exactly in the opposite direction: Palestinian anti-Semites have produced the images – icons of hatred – that, through modern media, have spread the virus throughout the Muslim world. The violence that Israel does against the Palestinians – a fraction of the violence that Arab leaders do towards their own people with far less provocation – responds to Palestinian attacks inspired by anti-Semitc propaganda.

Because the Western mainstream news media (MSNM) has mainstreamed some of this propaganda (inexcusably but pervasively), many people, including my daughter’s friend – whose only data points are the TV images of terrible violence Israelis do to Palestinians, and TV images of Palestinian hatred – assume that the hatreds are at least in part justified. The number is legion of French Jews in the early “aughts,” under assault from a wave of hostility, who heard some variant of “no wonder French Muslims hate you, look at what your brethren in Israel do to their cousins in Palestine.”

Of course, let’s grant the news media everything they claim – that Israelis “massacred” hundreds of Palestinians in Jenin (2002), that they devastated Lebanon in 2006, that they killed over 1400 Gazans mostly civilians in Operation Cast Lead. This is nothing in comparison with what toxic Arab dictators do to their own people, the over million Muslims that Saddam Hussein killed in his career, the tens of thousands that Hafez al Assad killed a matter of weeks in the city of Hama (1982), even the brutal behavior that marks the current authorities in the Arab world, despite the watchful gaze of the world. And yet we have nothing resembling the thorough “critique” of Zionism in the Arab world that tackles the far older and more widespread problem of authoritarianism in Arab political culture. In a sense, anyone who “grants” the Palestinians and other Muslims “permission” to hate the Jews “given what Israel does to them,” just reveals their unthinking racism: “I don’t really expect anything remotely rational or balanced from these folks. If you piss them off, you deserve their rage.”

But to return to the main issue, the silence of the MSNM about the pervasiveness of a grotesque hatred: it is guilty in two senses here. In addition to reporting Palestinian lethal narratives bordering on blood libels as news, they did not report the hatreds that lay behind such narratives. In the summer of 2000, before the collapse of the Oslo Peace talks at Camp David, months before the intifada, the PA was blasting hatred of Israel and calls to war on its media. Perhaps the MSNM, like Clinton and Barak, were surprised by Arafat’s “no” at Camp David because they did not listen to – or heed – what he and his friends were saying in Arabic. On the contrary, driven by a (soft millennial) belief that peace was around the corner, they felt that dwelling on such bad news would queer the peace process. I still remember someone in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Jerusalem telling me they would not allow Itamar Markus to present his material (what Palestinians say in Arabic), to the foreign media, “because Israel is officially in favor of the peace process.” As if denying the problem were somehow going to bring peace.

Nor did this change once war broke out. On October 12, 2000, Palestinians shouting “Revenge for the blood of Muhammad al Durah!” tore two Israeli reservists apart with their bare hands and paraded them through the streets. The next day, Sheikh Halabiya gave a sermon calling on Muslims to slaughter the Jews (NB Jews, not Israelis) wherever they see them. Two weeks later, NYT veteran reporter William Orme wrote a piece assessing the Israeli claim that the horrendous violence of the intifada – the attacks on Israelis on both sides of the Green Line – came from the incitement of the Palestinian media. In it he never discussed the al Durah case (which he had specifically covered, and which was the most explosive component in the campaign of incitement, and which his Palestinian informant alluded to when he claimed (dishonestly) claimed that “we have no fabricated pictures, and no fabricated stories”); and when it came time to quote a passage to illustrate incitement, he quoted the genocidal Halabiya as saying, “Labor, Likud, they’re all Jews.” How could a consumer of the MSNM – much less the anti-Zionist media – know any of this?

As a result, the ferocious strain of anti-Semitism in Palestinian irredentism, from the Mufti – who visited Hitler in Berlin 70 years ago today, discussed his contribution to the “final solution,” and pumped the Arab world with Nazi propaganda – to the escaped Nazis who fled to Egypt and Syria to continue their work, to Arafat and his pseudo-secular patter of “national liberation,” to Hamas’ apocalyptic paranoia, has gone largely undocumented and unknown to the average observer of what’s quaintly known as the “Middle East conflict.” Nor is this merely a quirk of journalism, but a widespread practice of the “post-colonial” field of Middle East studies in the wake of Edward Said’s masterpiece of cognitive warfare forbidding Westerners from “othering” Muslims.

Why the Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism? In a book published in the 1986, Bernard Lewis noted that by and large, even though Arabs adopted anti-Semitic material from the worst European sources as part of an anti-Zionist campaign, they remained friendly to Jews personally: 9-5 anti-semitism of the workplace.

No longer. Jews have been driven from places like Egypt, and now “democracy” crowds rallied by the Obama-administration-designated “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood chant, “One day we will kill all Jews.” (As Barry Rubin noted, does that make them “moderate” because they don’t want to do it this week?) Since 2000, Arab and Muslim news media have been awash with gory video depictions of the Elders of Zion carrying out their blood sacrifices of innocent Muslim youth. Specialists disagree over whether this is primarily an import from the worst of European hate-mongering, especially the Nazis, or an indigenous growth with roots in the Qur’an.

From a the point of view of a medievalist who studies millennialism, both these sources share a single genealogy, that of supersessionist, invidious identity formation activated by honor-shame insecurity. Both Islam and Christianity arise as apocalyptic offshoots of Judaism – Jesus and Muhammad were both “roosters” announcing in the former case, the imminent arrival of the kingdom of heaven, in the latter, the imminent Last Judgment. In both cases, early on, the founding prophets included Jews in their scope of those to whom they preached in the hopes of winning them over into apocalyptic time. In both cases their effort to win over the Jews and their prophecies failed: still today, neither kingdom of heaven, nor the Last Judgment have occurred. In both cases, one strain of belief blamed the Jews for the apocalyptic failure.

In both cases, the newer religions developed a replacement theology whereby they did not just become a new and additional chosen people, but had to replace the previous claimant(s). I make myself look bigger by making others (in this case, people I have been directly inspired by) look smaller. I can only be chosen of God if He has rejected you.

In the honor-shame, zero-sum variant of monotheism, one proves the superiority of one’s beliefs by subjecting those who do not share it to humiliations. Christianity took this attitude towards the Jewish minority in their midst (centuries before shariah law of dhimmis, Theodosius forbade Jews to build new synagogues or to have any synagogue higher than the Christian churches); and Muslims took the same honor-shame attitude towards both Christians and Jews under their power. And, not surprisingly, Christians and Muslims fought it out as only imperialist monotheists can do for well over a millennium.

As Gavin Langmuir pointed out decades ago, virulent anti-Semitism (which he distinguished from garden-variety anti-Judaism or dislike of Jews, but rather a demonization of the supernaturally evil Jews) arises when the supersessionist religion has a crisis of faith and becomes radically insecure. This can be provoked by a variety of circumstances – in the case Langmuir studied, it was a theological crises around the high medieval doctrine of transubstantiation (i.e., the wine and the wafer actually become the blood and body of Christ in the course of the mass). In any case, insecurity denied and weaponized can lead to apocalyptic paranoia and its genocidal hatreds.

In the current case of Islam, the realization that the West has far outstripped the Muslim world in technology and power, that Islam stands humiliated in the world scene, that modernity threatens to castrate Islam, and the belief that the Jews stand at the heart of modernity, has led to a virulent strain of not just anti-Zionism – itself the ultimate insult of modernity, a tiny bunch of should-be dhimmi who defeat Arab armies ten times their size – but of anti-Semitism.

Thus the Jewish slap on the faces of the Christians continues, who apparently enjoy and allow this sort of humiliation and attack, and give them their other cheek so that the Jew can continue to slap the Christians—just as we see—ruling them in Europe through the Masons who dig the grave of Western civilization through corruption and promiscuity. The Crusader West continues like a whore who is screwed sadistically, and does not derive any pleasure from the act until after she is struck and humiliated, even by her pimps—the Jews in Christian Europe. Soon they will be under the rubble as a result of the Jewish conspiracy. (Arif, Nihayat al-Yahud , 85, cited in Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic, 220; discussed in Landes, Heaven on Earth, pp. 455-57).

European anti-Zionist may like their fantasy that their attitude is not anti-Semitic, but in the case of the Arab and Muslim world, the slide from opposing Israel to ranting about “al Yahud” everywhere is effortless.

Given the power of genocidal anti-Semitic sentiments in the Arab and Muslim world – press and TV, mosques, public officials – one might wonder why the Western silence on the subject. Indeed it is so deafening, so understudied and underreported, that a less-well informed person might think that it doesn’t exist and my complaint is really just paranoia. It’s not enough to point to the degree of intimidation that pervades journalism in the Palestinian territories (and other places where state terrorists dominate the scene), an intimidation that came through loud and clear in the aftermath of the Ramallah lynch affair. Although that explains much of the behavior of journalists on the scene, like NYT reporter Steven Erlanger who waited until he left the region before – at long last – mentioning the problem in an article.

It’s also related to a particularly dangerous form of political correctness, in which speaking badly of Muslims is the new form of Anti-Semitism. As a colleague said to me in Paris, “The experience of the Muslims in Europe today is exactly the same as the Jews a century ago.” Of course, that’s not the case at all: both in terms of the wildly different behavior of the two minorities, and in terms of how the European elites behaved and behave towards them. By that (completely erroneous historical) logic, however, any attack on Islam is immediately comparable to a 19th century attack on Jews. To claim that Muslims want to take over Europe is the same as believeing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; to accuse them of planning terror attacks, is the same as believing in the blood libel. Little matter that Islamists themselves say they want to take over Europe, and they want to bring a holocaust on the European infidel, that they actually do carry out terror attacks. The triumph of the will over reality.

Demonstrations outside Danish Embassy in London over Muhammad Cartoons (February 2006). Police tried to prevent observers from photographing a protestor wearing a mock suicide vest, this 6 months after the 7-7 London suicide attacks.

This problem is everywhere. Even Jewish organizations designed to protect Jews from anti-Semitism spend much more of their time sponsoring inter-religious dialogues, opposing Islamism, and applauding human rights initiatives, than even discussing, much less mobilizing against Muslim Anti-Semitism. In the USA, the once legendary ADL has become a 20th century relic in the 21st century, still pursuing the nice, liberal policy of protecting everyone’s rights in the (dashed) hopes that others will come to their defense when they need it. A recent study shows that only 1.3% of the ADL’s 4269 press releases (1995-present) focused on Islamic extremism and another 1.3% on Arab anti-Semitism. Of the 57 press releases devoted to Islamic extremism, only 13, about .005 were issued in the ten years since September 11, 2001, precisely when the threat to Jews from Islamic extremism dramatically increased. (That’s almost as small as the percentage of Jews in the world, or the percentage of the Arab world “occupied” by Israel – .002.)

In Germany, the Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung in Berlin actually held a conference whose main theme was the close identity of Islamophobia and Judeophobia. Challenged, they replied indignantly that the mafioso tactics of their opponents (public criticism) were intolerable. A German colleague was surprised when I told him that Hamas is much closer to the Nazi attitude towards Jews than the neo-Nazis. These latter are closer to violent but garden variety xenophobes, and Jews barely register on their list of concerns, while Hamas shares the same fevered (apocalyptic) paranoia and genocidal loathing of Jews that the Nazis did.

Which brings us to the dilemma that faces the Western observer, especially the one who believes that moral behavior matters, and wants to support those who behave well and oppose those who behave badly. We are faced with two opposing narratives: one in which the Muslims (especially the Palestinians) are victims who might be forgiven their hatred of the imperialist Israelis, one in which the Israelis are victims, who might be forgiven their violent resistance to Palestinian and Muslim anti-Semitic assaults.

Why not toss a coin?

Because (aside from the fact that in so doing one would greatly increase support for the imperialist Zionists to 50%), there are serious consequences to misreading this situation. If I am wrong, and Palestinian hatred is merely a result of the “occupation”, then concessions from the Israelis should lead to a lessening of Palestinian hatred, and the road to peace. As Stephen Bronner, prominent scholar of Anti-Semitism noted in an article on the Protocols,

Nevertheless, it makes sense to believe that an anti-Semitism that has only grown with the success of Israeli imperialist policy will diminish with a change in that policy.

This is the prevailing paradigm that currently dominates thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict. It projects a kind of positive-sum rationality on Arab political culture, and assumes that if something’s wrong, it is the fault of the stronger party unwilling to compromise (Israel). It’s the same mentality that gives us the universal and universally wrong excitement of the MSNM about the “Arab Spring” – get rid of a dictator… get democracy. No? No.

Of course, if the Palestinians really are rational, really want their own state (rather than to destroy Israel), then they should, in principle, be amenable to making some important moves towards reconciliation, like, say, cutting off the hate incitement on TV, and building settlements in the land they control (Area A of the West Bank and all of Gaza) to resettle their refugees. No? No.

But if I’m right, if it’s a profoundly rooted anti-Semitism among Arabs today, one that has been “cooking” for over a century, got jacked up on steroids during the Nazi period, and hit a rolling boil in 2000 with the al Durah blood libel, then it’s another story entirely. If I’m right, then “solving the refugee problem” by allowing these poor victims of war to have a real home is not on the Palestinian agenda – even if they got their state. On the contrary, these “refugees” are designated victim-weapons in a war of annihilation.

If I’m right, then every time Israel makes concessions, it encourages further aggressions. Thus, despite what the politically correct paradigm, based on projecting our own liberal mentality on others, anticipated, every time Israel engaged in anti-imperialist activities – like withdrawing from most of the West Bank (1994-2000), all of southern Lebanon (2000) and all of Gaza (including uprooting 8000 settlers) – the result was more and more vicious aggression.

Nor is this merely a problem faced by Israel. (I know there are many anti-Zionists out there who treasure the thought that if only they throw Israel into the maw of the beast, that they’ll be spared, but that too is a piece of cognitive egocentrism in which their imagined distinction between the West (us) and despised Israel (them) is shared by the Jihadis.) Israel is to Europe dealing with Jihadi Islam what the Sudetenland was to the French and English in dealing with the Nazis. The difference is that, thankfully for the West, Israel is armed and refuses to commit suicide – even though that infuriates those who would prefer they do so quietly.

For ultimately, the problem of anti-Semitism is not a Jewish but a gentile problem. Granted the Jews suffer from anti-Semitism, indeed they’re often the first to suffer. But the ultimate price is paid by those foolish enough to either get sucked into the world of hatred and paranoia that anti-Semites peddle, or ignore its presence as a sad but inevitable part of life.  As any historian of World War II can tell you, if six million Jews were murdered, more than ten (!) times as many non-Jews died in that madness.

The Arab world in the latter half of the 20^th century offers a striking parallel to Spain in the 16^th century. Both worlds had expelled their Jews (Spain in 1492, Arabs in 1948); both experienced a flood of wealth (Spain got New World gold and the Arabs got Petrodollars); and both were failed societies unable to parlay that wealth into a thriving culture that made life better for all its people.  As Ruth Wisse put it recently: “Arab leaders do not yet acknowledge that they sealed the doom of their societies in 1948 when they organized their politics against the Jewish state rather than toward the improvement of their countries.” And they’re doing it again, this time not from the top down, but from the bottom up.

In a recent article, Jeffrey Goldberg tried to acknowledge the problem of anti-Semitic sentiments pervading the “Arab Spring” all the while preserving the belief that “The people of the Middle East are finally awakening to the promise of liberty.” But the two are intimately related. The Judeophobia of these alleged “liberty-seekers” isn’t some deplorable but ultimately separate issue. The Judeophobia is not the problem, but the symptom. It’s the conspiracy thinking that blames every problem on the “other”: Muslims attack Copts? It’s the Jews. Police turn violently on the crowds? It’s the Jews. Arab Spring turning into Islamist Winter? It’s the Jews (or, if you’re on the BBC, “outside forces”). How can one possibly inaugurate, foster, and sustain a democratic culture of freedom, one that, the in words of Isaiah Berlin, considers it “shameful not to grant to others the freedom one wants to exercise oneself,” without an ability to self-criticize?

Anti-Semitism is everyone’s problem, especially the Muslims. And the sooner the “progressives” who want to help them, stop feeding their anti-Semitic vulnerabilities by joining them in demonizing Israel, and help them deal with the problem of self-criticism (a virtue to which the “left” could well afford to renew its commitments), the sooner we are likely to see a real Arab Spring, one that benevolent people the world over can sincerely cheer. Of course that would mean that anti-Zionists would have to overcome their own scapegoating fantasies.

For other responses to Crumley, see Nick Cohen and Jamie Kirchick.

In what I hope is part of the last gasps of the disorienting moral relativism that marked so many intellectuals during the aughts (’00s), Bruce Crumley was given the pages of Time Magazine to spin out a now classic critique based on the internalizing of “Islamophobia” as proposed by Muslims who want to avoid public criticism, something approaching the level of a dogma in journalistic circles. In response to the Charlie Hebdo firebombing, Crumley not only blamed Charlie Hebdo for the attack, but those political and intellectual figures in France who condemned the bombing.

[N]ot only are such Islamophobic antics futile and childish, but they also openly beg for the very violent responses from extremists their authors claim to proudly defy in the name of common good. What common good is served by creating more division and anger, and by tempting belligerent reaction?

It’s yet to be seen whether Islamist extremists were behind today’s arson, but both the paper’s current edition, and the rush of politicians to embrace it as the icon of French democracy, raises the possibility of even moderate Muslims thinking “good on you” if and when militants are eventually fingered for the strike. It’s all so unnecessary.

But that seems more self-indulgent and willfully injurious when it amounts to defending the right to scream “fire” in an increasingly over-heated theater. Why? Because like France’s 2010 law banning the burqa in public (and earlier legislation prohibiting the hijab in public schools), the nation’s government-sponsored debates on Islam’s place in French society all reflected very real Islamophobic attitudes spreading throughout society. Indeed, such perceived anti-Muslim action has made France a point of focus for Islamist radicals at home and abroad looking to harp on new signs of aggression against Islam.

Crumley has here made the classic moral inversion so characteristic of HRC: he treats Muslims as a force of nature, and not as autonomous moral agents. In his analogy, the “burning theater” corresponds to the increasing hostility of Muslims towards the West. He identifies it at the end of his article:  ”a climate where violent response—however illegitimate—is a real risk.” In other words, since Muslims are prone to (increasingly) violent responses, we must avoid “gratuitously” provoking them, and in the process (still more gratuitously) “offending millions of moderate people as well.” In short, we can’t say to them: “This is the minimal level of criticism in our culture. If you want to participate in public sphere of a civil society, you have to learn to live with it. We all have.” We have to infantilize them.

And yet, what kind of Muslim would be insulted by this cartoon? Unlike many of the Danish ones which were not even critical, this one is actually quite sympathetic: a smiling Muhammad “threatens” 100 lashes if you don’t die laughing.” What’s offensive here? Would a Christian find a picture of Jesus saying this offensive? Personally I think the “vast majority” of European Jews would find such a cover with Moses and the text, delightful (decided relief from the genuinely antisemitic cartoons that grace European newspapers).

This post has been updated with material from an Facebook exchange with Paul Halsall.

In an article in Ha-Aretz, where he argues a stylish pomo-poco case that the prisoner exchange reveals Israel’s racism, Alon Idan makes a number of statements that reveal the counter-empirical assertions that necessarily underly his argument:

Yet behind this feeling of superiority [at how much Israelis value life more than Palestinians] lurked a murky, inverted truth. The fact is, the release of one Israeli soldier for 1,027 Palestinian prisoners is not normal; certainly it does not represent an inferior love felt by a Palestinian mother for her son compared to an Israeli mother…. This equation derives from the way we, not Hamas, view reality: 1,027 Palestinians are worth one Jewish life not because the Palestinians minimize the importance of their own lives, but because we diminish the value of their lives.

Certainly. I remember hearing the same from Ted Koppel at the outbreak of the intifada. Hosting a program in which he had to have the Israelis separated from the Palestinians – on the insistence of the Palestinians – he responded to one Israeli claiming that the Palestinians wanted war: “I don’t believe that for a minute. A Palestinian mother cares about her children every bit as much as an Israeli mother.”

It was indeed these dogmatic kinds of politically correct statements that led me to formulate the expression “liberal cognitive egocentrism.” This kind of thinking, which Edward Saïd insisted we – not the Arabs – adopt, is a major element in the cognitive war that Islam wages against us, and creates an extensive epistemological confusion in which we cannot identify the problems or analyze how to resolve them. The editors of the NYT, and their major columnists like Friedman, Kristof, and Cohen, all participate in this liberal, PC dogma, and accordingly, find themselves constantly ignoring reality and coming up with ludicrous solutions. (As Pierre Taguieff pointed out long ago, when all the fishes swim in the same direction it’s because they’re dead.”)

Indeed, as long as you believe that the Palestinians are “just like us” and all they want is a state of their own, and their terror is a sign of the desperation at not getting what everyone else has (rather than aspiration to destroy someone else’s), then obviously, Bibi  (and any other Israeli leader who doesn’t retreat to the 67 boundaries) is responsible for the impass which – everyone knows – could be resolved, in the words of one BBC commentator, by email. Never mind that in the real world, people who pursue these satisfying if fantastic solution end up looking – at best – like keystone cops.

Elder of Ziyon catches the latest of the depressingly long list of examples that say something radically different about Palestinian culture.

 The Islamic Jihad website Saraya has an article about Khansa Fatima Sheikh Khalil, a Gaza mother who has had five of her terrorist sons killed “in martyrdom.” She is looking forward to joining her sons in paradise. The article says that she did not cry for more than five minutes upon news of her son Ahmad’s death on Saturday. She expressed joy and praised Allah for what happened, and expressed hope that her sons are all accepted into Paradise where they would be, presumably, happily screwing a bunch of virgins for eternity. Khalil also expressed her fervent wish that Islamic Jihad continue to create Jewish widows and orphans. She called on Allah to grant success to the “resistance” and to defeat the Jews for “our land.” She has two more sons left, as well as two daughters. Ahmed also leaves behind three wives. One of Ahmad’s remaining brothers said “we always expected him to be killed.”

Khansa Fatima Sheikh Khalil and her dead sons (in heaven, for sure)

Now will someone please show me a mother in Israel today (cf. 2 Maccabees, 7) who would be proud about not crying for her dead children, and eager to send more to their death if only she could create widows and orphans among the Arabs? Even if some mother felt so, she would not express such emotions openly: for Israelis such overriding desire for revenge is shameful.

And if you wish to argue that this mother doesn’t really feel these things, she’s just responding to social pressures, from a moral point of view you’ve jumped from the frying pan into the fire: what culture demands that its mothers not mourn their dead children, indeed, that in some cases, mothers kill their own daughters?

Amira Qaoud who killed her daughter (raped by two of her sons) so that the community would accept the family.

The problem here runs deep. Ever since I debated some ISMers in 2002, I’ve become familiar refrain that if you talk about what’s wrong with the Palestinians you’re a racist. But I’ve come to realize that it’s the liberals who don’t think Palestinians (or Arabs, or Muslims) can handle serious criticism, who are the racists, and they defend themselves by pretending that “they’re just like us” and demonizing anyone who disagrees. In the words of Simon Deng, a freed Sudanese slave, it’s not only “absurd, it’s immoral.”

We need a spatial term to correspond to the chronological term anachronism. Just as we tend to project our contemporary experience and attitudes on people who lived in the past, so we do that to people who live in other cultures. It may make us feel good for not passing judgments on others, for cleaving to moral equality, but one has to wonder at what price we are willing to indulge. It makes us easy marks for demopaths.

Better dead than [considered a] racist?

How… honor-shame, and how utterly wasteful!

In an exchange with Paul Halsall at Facebook, he encouraged me to make the following clarification.

Paul wrote: “I think your problem is that that you have got into some sort of circular thought pattern, and are now not showing that you are able to see the common humanity of actual individual Palestinians.”

I respond: I have no problem seeing the common humanity of actual individual Palestinians. I’m all for those kinds of friendships, and it’s clear that a real friendship with Arabs is not a dull affair. My problem is with Palestinian culture right now, with what’s permitted and encouraged in the public sphere. Are there mothers who secretly grieve? I’ll bet many, most. But they can’t show it because of a dominating, disgusting political culture that runs right down from the religious and secular tyrants to the alpha males who dominate their women – daughters and wives – with death threats in the service of their honor. That’s what we should be criticizing as progressives, not reinforcing that predatory patriarchal elite by buying into their scapegoating of Israel to distract from their terrible deeds (eg the Palestinian refugees).

Readers of this blog may recall Lee Hiromoto’s reflections on Operation Cast Lead. This is his latest:

The Dangers of a Premature Palestinian State

Posted by NSJ

NGO Monitor and the JCPA have published The Goldstone Report “Reconsidered” – A Critical Analysis, a collection of essays on theReport and its impact on international law and principles of universal human rights, in particular in the context of asymmetric warfare.Reconsidered is the essential volume for analyzing the origins and background of Goldstone’s “fact-finding mission”, its activities and failures, and the wider implications.  

In my previous post I fisked Ali Younes’ complaint that the media – even the Arab media – had been sucked into the Israeli PR machine, and point out the mindset that lay behind his complaint. Here I try and interpret why perceptions are so wildly divergent between the Israeli and the Palestinians that both feel wronged, misrepresented, and offended by the same media coverage.

Obviously (for those who go no further), the fact that “both sides” object confirms the oft-uttered tropes of moral equivalence.

The MSNM often congratulates itself on its balanced coverage – what one analyst called the “he-said-she-said” narrative - by claiming that “we get criticized by both sides,” and then concluding, “so we must be doing something right.” I’m sure it’s tempting for them to view the presence of unhappiness “on both sides” – eg, me and Younes – as a good sign.

I’d suggest a different dynamic (obviously, but not necessarily incorrectly). Israelis are so self-critical that you have to get really nasty before they start to complain. (Granted, over the last decade, many Zionists have become more vocal in their complaints, I’d argue justifiably.) Criticism fine, demonization, not. And there’s a huge and legitimate debate on where to draw the line(s). But it has to be something pretty huge to get a loud complaint – like, say, making (or strongly suggesting) a moral equivalence between the plight of unrepentant mass-murderers of children and a soldier who was manning a hostile border taken hostage in a raid. 

I ran across this comment from an Arab-American Kuwaiti-born journalist based in DC on the blog of comedian, activist, dialoguer Ray Hanania. In preparing a post at the Telegraph in which I cite it, I analyze it here.

09-01-09 Gilad Shalit in the Arab media
By Ali Younes –

Every time I read and watch how Arab media outlets cover the story of prisoner’s exchange of the Israeli solider Gilad Shalit and hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, I come to think how Arab media have fallen victims to Israeli PR machine (propaganda).

This is pretty interesting for me, since I just posted something to the exact opposite effect at the Telegraph (and, in longer form, here). Each side feels betrayed by the MSNM; each side bemoans the superiority of the PR machine of the other side. It seems like two parallel universes that do not intersect. Let me try to explain both these responses within the same universe.

There are several issues at play here when covering this story. Note that Gilad Shalit is always mentioned by name, I know his name, you do, and maybe my grandmother knows his name too!

So before we go to details, Younes lets us in on an emotional issue. It really bothers him that his grandmother knows Shalit’s name. Why will become clear if we read the rest (the substantive material) with this initial confession in mind.

Why, because the Israeli government has made sure that the whole world, and even my grandmother knows this soldier name. Every effort to release him ( note its always about him ) was made specifically for him, the Egyptians, the Germans, the Americans, even some Palestinians care more about him than their own.

Now we know two further things. 1) Younes sees the immense and sympathetic attention that Shalit, his central place in the narrative of that prisoner exchange, as a victory for the Israelis. 2) If the Zionists succeeded, it must be because of the (immensely effective) PR machine.

How many Palestinian prisoners’ names do we know? We know that there are 12000 of them in captivity. I might know Marwan Barghouthi, whose only image I know is him in chains and handcuffs waving them off. Maybe few others and that’s about it. The rest I just see them without actually see them in Israeli busses or cages, or jail cells. Or, we might see a crying wife, a saddened son, or an ailing mother clinging to a picture of her imprisoned son. But I don’t know who he is, or how, when and why did the Israeli army arrest him. We don’t even know if those prisoners have children or if they are married even.

In other words, why is Gilad Shalit humanized and not the Palestinians. Younes here confesses, perhaps unconsciously, to his sheer ignorance about the details of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In Israel, many of these prisoners are widely known, some, like the two in prison for the Ramallah lynching on October 12, 2000, to the sociopathic icon Ahlam Tammimi, who specifically chose the target of Sbarro Pizza because it was full of religious kids, and broke into a beaming smile when she found out she and her human weapon had killed eight, not three, children.

This piece appeared in a shorter form in the Daily Telegraph.

The Hostage-Prisoner Exchange and the world of imaginative sympathy

One of the supreme ironies among the European moral stances has to do with their discourse on the “death penalty.” It’s a standard trope of European contempt for the USA that it still has a death penalty, a sign of its cowboy nature and its retardation in the moral progress of nations. At least when it comes to the death penalty, America is still in the 20^th century. “Moral Europe,” on the other hand, stands at the vanguard of the global community of nations and its appreciation of the value of human life undergirds its horror at the execution of criminals, no matter what their deeds.

And yet when that same moral entity turns its gaze on the Middle East, the country they have the most contempt for is the only country in the entire region to reject capital punishment, and they have the most admiration for a country that among a widespread political culture that extensively uses torture and execution for the maintenance of public order, shows perhaps the most contempt for the lives of its own peoples and its enemies.

Normally, this would not be even worth mentioning. Most people would just roll their eyes while others complain about Zionist imperialists trying to divert attention from their oppression of the Palestinians. But if you want to understand the “hostage-for-prisoner-exchange” that just took place in Israel and the Western media’s coverage of the event, then you need to pay attention to the issue.

Israel first outlawed the death in 1954, thus reversing the Mandate Law, which, in most other instances, Israel took over from the British. They based themselves both on rabbinic precedent (concerns for both respecting the image of God in man and the unattainable burden of proof) and modern liberal sentiment (Robespierre initially opposed the death penalty). In doing so, they became the first modern Western democracy after Germany (1949) to ban the death penalty, followed a decade later by Britain (1965), Sweden (1972), Canada (1976) and France (1981).

Note that Israel passed this law five years after the creation of a polity dedicated to equality before the law for all its citizens, a move that earned them the ferocious hostility of their neighbors in the Arab Muslim world. Normally, when countries attempt these egalitarian revolutions and find themselves surrounded by hostile enemies, they have, by year five, descended into mass executions of their own citizens (French Revolution in their fourth year, Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, almost immediately). Israel, on the other hand, outlawed the death penalty even for Arab terrorists who were captured while killing Israeli civilians. Israel has only executed one person, Adolph Eichmann, held responsible for the extermination of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.

If the Israelis had hundreds of terrorists in their prisons, in some cases serving multiple life sentences, available to trade for Gilad Shalit, a soldier kidnapped from Israeli soil by Hamas combatants five years ago, it’s because of this attitude towards human life, both their own and those of the Palestinians. And that attitude was on full display throughout this exchange, with people agonizing over endangering future Israelis from releasing these men, and the profound commitment to getting Gilad Shalit back. Some Arabs recognized the unflattering light this shed on their own culture, while others reveled in it.

The Palestinians, on the other hand, represent almost the polar opposite. This is a culture in which killing daughters and wives and homosexuals for shaming the family with (even suspected and loosely interpreted) inappropriate sexual behavior is a regular feature of society, where “collaborators” are summarily executed, where official statistics for executions put the PA at a rate of formal, legal execution that cedes only to China, Iran, N. Korea, Yemen and Libya.

Recently a number of articles by photojournalists who turned their cameras on their fellow photojournalists have reinforced an argument I first made in 2005 with my first documentary short, Pallywood. They revealed the extent to which journalists, with their pack mentality and their eagerness to get pictures of the victimization of the Palestinian David by the Israeli Goliath, may influence, even make the “news” they record about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The Ritual from Andrew Lampard on Vimeo.

Photojournalism Behind the Scenes [ITA-ENG subs] from Ruben Salvadori on Vimeo.

Obviously such charges runs the risk of undermining the narrative that the MSNM so relentlessly record for their audiences, a narrative that has had an enormous impact on images of Israel in the West. In response Lisa Goldman, a blogger at 972, has come to the defense of this kind of news. Her piece illustrates from many angles just what’s wrong with people who think they’re “journalists” when they’re really advocates.

The questions people don’t ask about ’staged photojournalism’

A few years ago, a far-right commentator on Israel-Palestine coined the term “Pallywood” to describe video clips and photographs which were allegedly staged or manipulated to score public relations points against Israel.

Lisa defines what she means by “far-right” later in this essay: those who call the occupied territories the ‘administered territories’ and insist that Israel must keep its settlements in the West Bank. There are two major points to be made here.

1) This is a pretty weak definition of “far-right.” I would have imagined something more along the lines of forceful transfer of population from both Israel and the territories for the sake of an Arab-free greater Israel. That would, after all, be a fairly neat parallel to an apartheid position that has its mirror opposite among so many Palestinians. But what Goldman’s trying to do here is to label anything that isn’t close to her position “far-right.” Presumably, she’d have no problem labeling “far-right” anyone who referred to them as “disputed territories” or felt that some of the settlements should, indeed remain part of Israel.

2) Nowhere can Lisa, who knows me personally because I invited her to participate in a conference at the IDC in 2006, find in my fairly copious writings, anything resembling these positions. I personally find even the “right-wing” label inaccurate, much less “far-right,” but that’s probably because I don’t skew the political spectrum heavily to the left in order to define anything that disagrees with me “right-wing.” On the contrary, I think that, when speaking of the Arab-Israeli conflict we need to have a spectrum that can accommodate both Palestinian and Israeli politics. That way we can avoid such foolish generalizations as, on the one hand, calling Abbas a “moderate” when, by my definition, he and his fellow PA officials are “far-right,” in favor of ethnic cleansing of a Palestinian state and keeping the refugees in camps, and on the other, avoid calling Netanyahu a “hardliner” when, in comparison, he’s far more accommodating than Abbas.

So we learn from Lisa Goldman’s first sentence of her post that: a) she is a poor journalist who doesn’t even care to research her claims, b) she’s into smearing people who get in the way of her narrative, and c) she defines matters with a heavy skew to the PCP (2) as normative, rather than one-sided.

All three of these observations will continue to hold true throughout an examination of her piece.