Job's Dung Heap

The first part of this long essay has now been posted (there have been 14 parts, but because of a mistake there is both a Part 9A and Part 9B and the last one to appear is Part 13).

Given the unfamiliar nature (to me) of writing an essay (both in response to on-going events in the world and thus in small units) I find that I have kept putting off two of the main arguments.  On the one hand, I keep anticipating and foreshadowing discussions of suggestion, psychotic trances and other facets of group fantasy known to psychohistorians); and on the other, a fuller discussion of Bernard Lazare's Job's Dungheap, from my title comes, and which incoudes interesting introductory material, with Lazare's essay itself written in the last phases of the Dreyfus Affair (which went on from Alfred Dreyfus's arrest in 1894 until his almost complete exoneration in 1906) and thus at a time when the future of anti-Semitism was still unclear and the role of Zionism highly contested; and the publication of the essay in English translation very soon after World War II, along with some other shorter writings on Jewish Nationalism by Lazare, ansd thus at a time when the full impact and significance of the Holocaust was still being realized.

Though it may be some time before I am ready to complete the whole essay, I think readers will be able to profit from perusing all fourteen parets, but I h ope you will forgive the often choppy natuire of the effort.  Perhaps some day there will be an occasion to rewrite the whole thing and present it in a more coherent and logical format.

Job's Dung Heap: No. 13

Disconnection, Oversight and Missing the Point "I think every single day that goes by [Obama] is finding that there's a bigger and bigger gulf between his hoped-for view of the world and reality," Cheney said. "I think the danger is enormous, I don't think the president understands it."[i]

Why do commentators, even those who are very pro-Israel and anti-Hamas, feel they have to make a concessionary statement that to make statements against Israel is not to be anti-Semitic?  Is there a category of speech which condemns Israel for what it is doing in Gaza in a valid way? Yes, it is called anti-Semitism.  In other words, there is no valid criticism of Israel because the motivations and the consequences of such statements are invalid, made on false premises, and merely disguise more or less vicious hatred of Jews and Judaism.  One may, to be sure, argue with or against, as is done within Israeli politics, decisions taken by the government.  That is not the same as taking all of Israel, each and every citizen and resident as representative of all the Jews in the world and Judaism, now and forever. 

There is no valid criticism of Operation Defensive Edge until there is first and foremost condemnation of of all the very real mass killings going on in Syria,. Iraq, Nigeria and all those other murdering states which belong to the so-called Human Rights Council of the United Nations, all the countries that have espoused the cause of Durban, and all the individuals and groups who take part in the Boycott, Divest and Censure movement which singles Israel out, unjustly and groundlessly, for the very crimes against humanity which scores of other governments are perpetrators.[ii] 

But while it is becoming increasingly clear that the context of the current crisis in Gaza is much larger than any conflict between Israel and the Hamas-led Palestinian mini-state (a small part of what was once a larger, though still very small) Palestinian Authority territory in Judea and Sumaria, that is, something that involves Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Syria, Turkey, Iran, Iraq and other nations in the Middle East; what is not clear, and therefore doubly dangerous through its ambiguities, is the role that the Great Powers of the West—as well, eventually, in the East—will play once the emergence of the caliphate of ISIS establishes itself (as it seems certain to do until there is an essential change in the policies of the United States, the UK, and so on—an d any such fundamental shift lies two or three years down the road, after the next American elections).  Until then, smaller decisions on the part of Israel will either shift the balance of power too much one way or the other or, God willing, maintain some equilibrium through the (temporary) holding of Hamas at bay.[iii] 

Through a Glass Darkly

While Wearing Sunshades, Blinkers

and Looking the Other Way

Judging by the U.S. leadership’s surprise, one has to reach the conclusion that the U.S. Administration was either not privy to similar information, or that it decided to ignore it.

Incredibly, Obama said the conflict was not a “religious” one, but rather one of a shared “common security and a common set of values.”[iv]

Why should the White House choose to ignore the build-up of ISIS for more than a year, and thus be surprised by its rapid advance through large parts of northern Iran and much of Syria?  What does Obama mean by saying that a fanatical Islamicist declaration of war against Christendom and the Jews everywhere is not religious?

There are only three ways to understand what the policies are of governments when they make public statements to a wide television audience, including, of course, the citizens of one’s own country who have to be convinced that the president or prime minister and his officials are doing all that they should to defend them and their interests around the world; yet we know for strategic reasons and for the sake of behind-the-scenes negotiations, not everything they say is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  Such statements are also made to send signals to other governments, and to the very groups with whom proper diplomatic channels are not possible or unwished for.  Therefore we also have to examine actions actually being taken, or as much as we can come to know; after all, a raid to rescue kidnapped journalists or businessmen or soldiers will not be disclosed until months or years later, unless it is spectacularly successful; and attempts to negotiate a deal for ransom or prisoner exchange also must be conducted out of the bright lights of television cameras.  That leaves us with finding a way to evaluate the trustworthiness of leaks, unofficial statements, and unofficial hackers.  But perhaps, more than that, as we have been trying to do, we have to learn to read the words and images symptomatically, doing fantasy-anbalysis and seeking the very aspects of government policies that leaders do not wish the public to be aware of—or perhaps do not know themselves.

Learning the Hard Way—or Not at All

Israelis have learned the hard way that the conflict is not over borders, but over the existence of the Jewish state, even the presence of Jews in the Middle East. The idea that economic incentives could override the ideology of the PLO (not to mention Hamas) has been shown to be an illusion. The rapid changes in the Arab world, the rise of the Islamic State and the Sunni-Shiite conflict may have made Israel some temporary allies, but have also raised the general level of tension and insecurity in the region.[v]

Meanwhile, the way in which the strategic game is played out between Israel and Hamas is also partly dependent on the influence of the balance between left and right wing—and hopefully some role for the middle as well—and that means a balance between what the media people, the intellectuals, the academics are able to do in terms of their own coming to realize at some point that they are misreading the whole situation, that they are filtering the facts on the ground and the historical earthquake happening in the region through discourses either utterly outdated already since 9/11 (2001) or some other crucial date up to a year or two ago, and further believing themselves correct because of the sweeping surge of anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic rage throughout the world, taking this mixture of gross ignorance and fanatical racism as evidence that Hamas is right and Israel is wrong, that the people in Gaza are suffering mainly because of a non-existent blockade and an aggressive, genocidal war waged by the Zionist Entity (the Jewish Conspiracy) and that Israel’s actions have nothing to do with what is going on in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, or even Nigeria.

What Israelis have learned the hard way, not just not to trust Hamas under any circumstances or, much more bitter a pill to swallow, do not trust your oldest and usually most faithful; allies in the United States, the intellectual chattering classes of the left and in the Jewish liberal movements have yet to figure out: instead, they remain fixated on the idea that the conflict between Israel and Gaza is part of an older struggle over land, sovereignty, or geo-politics.  Such notions seem comforting because, on the one hand, they seem tractable, open to negotiation, while on the other, as though there had been no Holocaust, it makes you feel part of the majority of thinkers who identify with Hamas for their own perverse needs and thus give to such well-intentioned, good-hearted souls an illusion of being part of the politically-correct game (whose real name is Appeasement, Dhimmitude and Surrender). 

It also has a more pernicious and subtle aspect to it, insofar as many believe that they are acting and feeling in a more Jewish way than the aggressive Zionists.  What was a virtue spawned of necessity for Ashkenazim huddled in ghettos and shtetlech, the need for seeking to bribe officials with your show of loyalty, to make yourself so useful to the state that they would not kill or expel you yet again, and to agree with the masters or prison guards (sometimes to join them as kapos) so as to put off for as long as possible the awful day of destruction for your family and yourself, does not work in the twenty-first century, not in the atmosphere of pure hatred emanating from the various caliphates, rabid statelets run by Jew-hatred, or those faubourgs, suburbs, districts, and no-gone areas lorded over by fervent preachers of martyrdom and mass murder. 

Whatever debates were legitimate and necessary for and against the foundation of a modern state of Israel from the 1890s to the 1930s no longer obtain after the State has come into existence and become the homeland for millions of people, as well as a continuing refuge for persecuted Jews from all parts of the world.  Israel has gone so many demographic shifts—from its earliest origins as a place of pioneering from Central and Eastern Europe through tis absorption of millions of refugees from Islamic and Arab lands to the last major shift with the arrival of people from the old Soviet Union—that generalizations made in the 1940s or even 1970s don’t work. Today the wide-spread danger of anti-Semitism nominally caused by—but actually, as we have argued above, in existence long before—under the code of anti-Zionism and Arab-nationalism means that debates which seemed to have some purpose ten or twenty years ago are now also otiose.  Internal dissension within the Diaspora Jewish communities, like those within the halls of power of western democracies, sound like hollow shouting today: voices from the peace-camp or the appeasniks are full of sound and fury signifying nothing but gut feelings and self-righteousness.  The issues fly past one another blindly.  Meanwhile, as Israel still faces more dangers than it dares name—not least, the possibility of a “truce” with Hamas and a concession of power to the PLO, would mean the transfer of rocket attacks, tunnels, and other suicide missions from Gaza to land of the Palestinoan Authority, just as the probability of British or French or American Jihadis fighting in Syria and Iran now will (in a matter of hours, thanks to modern air transport) will take their experiences and training home.

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[i] Mike Goldstein , Daily blog message, New Conservative (24 August 2014)

[ii] Jonathan Carey, “Israel’s Endless Trials” The Times of  Israel (14 August 2014) online at http://blogs. timesofisrael.com/israels-endless-trials.  Also see Caroline R. Glick, “Column One: Understanding the Israeli-Egyptian-Saudi Alliance“ The Jerusalem Post (21 August 2014) online at http://www. jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.asp?id=371891

[iii] For a more long-term perspective see Nicholas Saidel, “Axing the Axis: A Doctrinal Assessment of  Israel’s War with Iran’s Resistance Axis’ The Times of Israel (22 August 2014) http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/axing-the-axis-a-doctrinal-assessment-of-israels-war-with-irans-resistance-axis

[iv] Rachel Ehrenfeld, “It’s Jihad, Stupid!”  American Center for Democracy (24 August 2014) online at http:// acdemocracy.org/its-jihad-stupid/

[v] Vic Rosenthal, “URJ officials: ask your cabdriver for the facts |” Abu Yehuda (22 August 2014) online at http://abuyehuda.com/2014/08/urj-officials-ask-your-cabdriver-for-the-facts/

Some of my previous essays on Job (excluding poetry)

“Job in Auckland: Karl Wolfskehl’s Poetry in the Light of the Jewish Job, The Topos of the Galut, and the Lurianic Theme of God’s Exile from Himself” in Friedrich Voit and August Obermayer, eds. Exul Poeta: Leben und Werk Karl Wolfskehls im italienischen und neuseeländischen Exil 1933-1948.  Dunedin, NZ: University of Otago, 1999.  (Otago German Studies vol. 11)  pp. 102-120.

“Theodicy and Job in Three Eighteenth-Century Novels” in Serge Soupel, ed., Crime et Châtiment dans les îles britaniques au dix-huitième siècle (Paris: RBC, 2001) pp.  201-222.

 “The Alienated Woman: or, Mrs. Job Suffered Too” in Vladimir M. Bychenkov, ed., Anonymity, Impersonality, Virtuality  (Moscow: Russian and British Cathedra, 2002) pp. 280-297.

With Israel David, “God’s Answer to Job: Revelation and Confession” in Simms, In a Season of Hate (2002) pp. 52-56.

Job's Dung Heap: No. 12

Worse than Nonsense: Post-Modernism and

the Scourge of Orientalist Ideology

By treating the likes of Edward Said as reservoirs of unchallenged morality, the left had become complicit in the oppression of others. The old lessons of the USSR and the French Revolution, the danger of handing unlimited moral authority to outraged fanatics with an agenda, had not been learned. Instead class made way for race. The elites who had claimed to speak for the workers in France and Russia were dismissed. The new elites were wealthy prep school grads like Edward Said who claimed to speak for a non-existent people in an imaginary country based on three vacations he had taken there.[1]

It is difficult to write about events that are in process and thus are changing in their configuration all the time.  There is a need therefore, as much as possible, to be able to stand back just a little, enough so as to begin to gain perspective. 

What kinds of perspective?

To begin with, there is a need to find the historical context, the reasons why and how the current crisis came into being: who were  the parties involved, and why are some of the original players no longer in evidence but only there through the traces they have left of their actions and ideas. 

Then, there is the need for a perspective that studies the discourses used and the panoply of imagery that seem to constitute the crisis itself, whereas close scrutiny of the words and pictures shown reveal not only that these are manufactured, manipulated and imported from other times and places, but that they have been deliberately been constructed for the purposes of confusion and obfuscation.  Therefore one must become highly sensitive to the neologisms, the cant, and the clichés at work in what purports to be news. 

The perspective of logic calls for an examination of the coherence of the texts and videos shown: does one idea or one action follow on from what proceeds? Are there contradictions between what you see and hear and what introductory remarks or voice-overs tell you is there?  Who ate claimed to be the authority for the sources? Watch out for incomplete passive voices—it is said that, or worse, so-and-so was killed, where no acting subject is ever given; and times when complex events are reduced to single, simple acts, as when “ceasefire ends”, not that one side or the other deliberately did something to violate the terms of the agreement.  False or exaggerated analogies also show up, and illogical or unsafe extrapolations and conclusions: single, random instances taken as general proofs:  “Unnamed sources” or “a spokesman for” or “witnesses claim”. 

Some analysts have been able to parse video clips and been able to compare frame by frame sequencing, checked angles of shadows, particular sounds of rifles, rockets, drones and voices from afar.  Why do certain settings keep reappearing, or the same adults carrying a variety of corpses at different times of the day, or the same bloodied body of a child shown in front of a variety of buildings and moaned over by three or four female persons called “his mother”?

While all sides in a conflict tend to use propaganda for their own purposes—to win sympathy, to prove culpability on the other-side—be sure that you know what is going on.  Why do Gazans, for instance, revel in the sufferings of others and boast of their own martyrdom, while the Israelis seek to show themselves as concerned, careful, caring people and display acts of charity and mercy? 

The Alchemical Soup of Fanatical Islam

What you can see is a biochemical high from a combination of the bonding hormone oxytocin and the dominance hormone testosterone.  Much more than cocaine or alcohol, these natural drugs lift mood, induce optimism and energize action on the part of the group.[2] 

Though there has been (so far as I know) no chemical analysis of the hormone levels in ISIS or other terror-fanaticists before during and after murderous rampages of savage proportions, it is likely that Ian Roberston’s statement above is true, so far as it goes; and, to be sure, he does not explain the entire phenomenon as a consequence of stress-induced hormonal triggers, but only offers a description of what the physiological dimensions of group action on a population of individuals made susceptible to these triggers based on personal developmental history, ideological indoctrination, and specific adult events that strip away inhibitions to violence and cruelty.  Nancy Hartvelt Kobrin’s studies of Chechyan and other Jihadi mass-murderers has shown that they have profound difficulties in socialized bonding with society after broken or malfunctioning relationships with their mothers and fathers. Psychohistorians have long known, too, that children abused often by their caregivers and abandoned or neglected by circumstances throughout infancy and through adolescence become highly susceptible to suggestion and entry into trance-like states, particularly those which involves shared hypnotic dreams, nightmares and other hallucinations. More than specific instances of psychotic behaviour resulting in suicide shootings, the group phenomena seen recently in ISIS collective killings by hanging, stoning, crucifixion and beheading, and the zombie-like collective gathering of Gazans to serve as human-shields, the reinforced collective lying about what they have seen and experienced during the war with Israel, and the willingness of many young children to service as suicide agents demonstrate sociopahic conditioning throughout much of a relatively confined population. 

Yet this does not explain the persistent propensity of western media, intellectuals and academics to identify with fanatical murders and to hate with a self-blinding fury the people of Israel and Jews around the world, at the very least to believe in and to purvey vicious and insidious lies contrary to their own intellectual skills and personal experiences—as demonstrated by a few journalists who have m their sanity when removed from the heart of the crisis.

Are they merely variations on what Goldhagen denominated Hitler’s “willing executioners”, that is, German-speaking persons long imbued with a culture of anti-Semitism, both religious and racial, so that, rather than the denials uttered immediately after the close of World War Two that they neither knew what was happening nor had any opportunity to prevent the Holocaust, they had been—as contemporary photographs, newspaper articles, private correspondence, diaries and similar documentation—not coerced or physically threatened into cooperation, but eagerly took part in the round-ups, humiliations and execution of Jews. Because of the extended period during which the Final Solution was in progress and the systematic methods used, it would be difficult to speak in terms of spontaneous triggers of hormonal rage—as say, one can do in terms of the Rwandan genocide or the mass killings in Pol Pot’s Cambodia.  Moreover, aside from a few days, at best, of western journalists misunderstanding the nature of the ethnic cleansing going on in the one instance, or the large-scale incarcerations and cruel killings of the other, there is no indication that intellectuals or academics either rationalized away these outbursts of genocidal activity or sought to identify themselves with the parties or governments involved. 

Moreover, working in collusion, reinforcing one another’s false narratives and engaging in toxic conversations that invert real facts, project on the other the criminality of the guilty parties, and congratulate one another on the virtues of victimhood, the Hamasniks and the so-called journalists who work closely with the terrorist-gang that purports to be a government in Gaza, the current group delusion of a genocidal Israel and a murderous Jewish ideology have very few precedents in history.  Though as a few writers and artists could see in the 1930s and into the 1940s, such as André Suarès, their colleagues and friends were completely taken in either by Soviet propaganda or Nazi vaunts of a Brave New Order to save Europe and the World.  And when they pointed this out to them in public, that Lenin and then Stalin were, like Hitler and Mussolini, dangerous dictators who spouted forth disgusting, more than merely errant, nonsense, Suarès and his few supporters in France, especially through their own essays in cultural reviews and weekly newspapers, were vilified and their own access to publishing houses and magazine editors cut.  This is similar to those speakers who attempt stand up for Israel in universities, lecture halls, community centres, television interviews other venues of supposedly free discussion: they are mocked, shouted down, and ejected physically (or as is sometimes said: disinvited).

Because these so-called journalists, intellectuals and academics believe so deeply in their own—that is, the adopted and adapted arguments and illusions (or delusions) of the anti-Jewish regimes that have no other goal than the destruction of Israel (to wipe it off the map) and to kill all Jews everywhere and anywhere in the world—they reduce the image of Zionism and of Judaism to caricature and stereotype.  They mock (in denial) Israel’s claims that its retaliation against Hamas rocket launched into Israel are preceded by warnings, by careful monitoring of who may be in the target zone, and by aborting raids when it would involve too many innocent, civilian casualties.  They disregard the fact that the government in Jerusalem does not blockade food, medicine, and other essentials into Gaza, though it does prevent materials that would be used to construct tunnels or build weaponry. They gloss over (at best) the fact that the IDF hunts down individuals who actually do break the rules of war or perform acts of gratuitous cruelty, just the government tracks down individuals who murder Palestinians or appropriate land illegally. 

If Israel is not perfect in every fine point, these opponents of Zionism proclaim, then it does not deserve to exist as a Jewish state, they say; and some, with a religious bent, take this further to say that Jews are hypocrites and desecrators of their own Law.  These detractors (some call them self-loathing Jews) try to drive a wedge between different modes of Judaism, such as Ashkenazi (deemed arrogant manipulators of Talmudic logic through pilpul), Sephardi (overly proud of their Spanish-Portuguese nobility and bigotterd against those they deem inferior), West European Jews (German and Central European Yekkers) against East Europeans (Litvacks and Galizianas), new migrants and native-born Sabras,  or in religious terms between Ultra-Orthodox, Modern Orthodox, Conservative, Liberal, Reform and then different schools of Hasidus—and not least between modern secular Israelis and more traditional and spiritual believers.

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[1] Daniel Greenfield, “Edward Said: Oppressed Fraud” Frontpage Mag (20 August 2014) online at http://www/frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/edward-said-oppressed-fraud#U_T_rUVQqs.facebook

[2] Ian H. Robertson, “ISIS Savagery Explained”. Psychology Today (18 August 2014) online at http;//www. psychologytoday.com/blog/the-einner-effect/201408/isis-savagery-explained.  The essay is based on the author’s book  The Winner Effect: Exploring the Neuroscience of Success and Failure.

Job's Dung Heap: part 11

In Quest of Questions

Making itself intelligible is suicide for philosophy.

                                                                  Martin Heidegger

There is much madness abroad in the world now.  Not all of it stems from Heidegger or Kant, but they do give the pretence of philosophical depth to the post-modernist ideology.  Unlike Judaism which demand intelligence, intellectual acumen, scientific knowledge of the real world, and constant questioning of sac red texts, one another, and oneself.  Not submission.  Not faith.  But questioning and study, debate and self-discipline.  Otherwise, as Heidegger the Nazi points out, philosophy is impossible couched in the discourses of neologistic post-modernism and the obscurantism of Edward Said’s anti-Orientalism.

Because there can be no “conversations” when there are no shared “narratives,” it seems pointless to construct rational arguments in which to debate the strategies of asymmetrical warfare.  The statements by Hamasniks are, on the face of it, completely absurd, as wildly far from the realities on the ground as can be.  The reports in the Western media and the speeches made by academics in various forums established to isolate Israel and Judaism from universities, discussions, and civilized discourse are something else: and yet again there can be no careful analysis, interpretation of facts or compromises made when the other side premises its texts on outrageously inaccurate news or outright lies, and is firmly unwilling to hear the other presentation, although it keeps calling for a free and open debate.  That is why I set out the paradigm of text/counter-text, antitext, untext and non-text.  

John Milton’s whole argument in the Areopagetica falls away in such situations where the opposition denies you your right to exist and keeps bellowing out for your annihilation.  At very best, a concession for the sake of argument permits the other side to trounce on your weakness.  Giving the opposition a fair hearing is impossible, when the audience is primed to shout down your statements—if at all they allow you into the auditorium to take part in the discussion or conversation, which usually means all invited speakers are on the same page, the Hamas version of reality.

A Theatre of Cruelty in Gaza

[Antonin] Artaud understood that the theatre is a means for structuring mythogenes which lend meaning to the lives both of performer and spectator, just as the paintings of van Gogh mythogenically linked the artist and his audience over time and space, and revealed some important insight, to both.[i]

Whereas as it is usual to take discussions of art, popular culture and terrorism as separate categories and to treat them as divorced from the dynamic of historical processes—and thus, by the way, to romanticize artists and folk, while demonizing terrorists as pure simple fanatics.  However, it may be better to see all of us as doing more than passively listening to or observing from out of the darkness of our private selves the performance of horrible deeds, such as massacres, suicide bombings, and endless “resistance” to order and civilized governance. 

There is a unity for those who gather in what Artaud once called “the theatre of cruelty”, and we have also seen as le Grand Guignol and the festivals of Laughter or Tears, Blood and Mangled Corpses, and Justice or psychological relief for the distorted, dysfunctional and incomplete bonding between the child and the closest care-giver (who in those particular instances, abuses, betrays and rejects him or her).  It is no wonder, then, that much of the video-news of Gaza plays out either with film-grabs from Hollywood horror films (zombis, vampires and other monsters) or images taken from Syria, Iraq, or even sites in Israel of terrorist attacks.  Those shots beamed out from Gaza itself are carefully staged, cleansed of all indications of Hamas activity, and covered by reportial voice-overs interpreting the scenes according to the official party line. 

The Melodrama of Masochism

Meanwhile Arab masochism has been elevated to a new art form.  It is their refusal to grow up and assume responsibility for their plight.  Hamas articulates the masochist’s motto—“victory through defeat.”  Hamas has lost and remains addicted to its melodrama.  Just watch Al Jazeera [to see how] the Arab world drowns in the blood and guts of such masochism while cleverly denying its own sadism.  Hamas and the Islamic State are the carriers of rage which exceeds murder itself.[ii]

Yet again, le t me say, the analysis and interpretation of terrorism and manipulated “resistance” can only be properly understood as part of a long history of ideological and religious prejudice against Jews and Christians, wherein individuals and whole communities are brain-washed repeatedly, kept in a state of stress and excitability by threats of punishment and, above all, by psychological dysfunctions in the basic family structure of infant care and early domestic control. But since the collapse of classical Marxist states and ideology, the leftist mentality in the West has operated by post-modernist concepts of denial—no master narrative, no right and wrong in the notion of truth since all people have their own valid positionalities, knowledge is a construct of powerful persons and parties, and victimology: whoever suffers more casualties and deaths must be politically correct. 

The Fantasies, Myths and Hallucinations of Hamas:A Double-Refraction and a Carnival Mirror in the Madhouse

“Woe to the makers of the pit (of fire)” Surah 85:4

Palestine, the heart of this entire world, is still shrouded in smoke… The degraded [Israeli] savages, the Tartars and Nazis of our times, have no future unless the [Palestinian] nation is destroyed, leaving no survivors except for traitors, fools and those who are submissive… The disasters befalling us in this blessed land help to clarify the Surah of the Constellations [chapter in the Quran]… The scene [in the Surah] involved the ancient Christian believers… The Quran provides no details about the story, [which] is the summary of a tale about a group of evil men who dug and plowed ditches in the ground, lit raging fires in them and gave the believers [Muslims] a choice between being burned alive and renouncing their faith… In Palestin e, they [Israelis] have dug ditch after ditch for us… There is a struggle [going on] between those who carry in their hearts the right [to Palestine], the truth and the cause, and [Israelis] despised creatures devoid of human feelings, who mock man’s right to life and liberty.  They are armed by the US and imperialism, who helped them produce and market weapons, and to obtain nuclear warheads, with full impunity.

Al-Hayar A-Jadida, 26 July 2014[iii]

The distorting mirrors and lenses of Hamas propaganda have been partly shaped by clever awareness of how Western intellectuals respond to code words, conventionalized imagery honed in regions where colonialism and imperialism have interfered with the normal political and economic development of indigenous peoples; and partly been generated by very sick minds that are without self-consciousness and filled with boundless rage seeking outlets for destruction of the self through destruction of the seemingly happy, contented and successful others—infidels, dhimmis, Americans and Israelis.  Ever since Jean-Jacque-Rousseau, Pierre Loti, Paul Gauguin, and Victor Segelen for instance, Western intellectuals have primed themselves on the notion of the Noble Savage, the romantic Arab, and the erotic and exotic other, with all their irrationality, mythic thinking, and spiritual closeness to Mother Nature (in her various, usually violent, forms).

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[i] C. Giroa Shoham, “Antonin Artaud: Noah’s Ark Outside Time” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 8:3 (2001) 204.

[ii] Nancy Hartvelt Kobrin, “Trains: What Do They Have In Common with Tunnels?” The Times of Israel (18 August 2014) online at http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/trains-what-do-they-have-in-common-with-tunnels

[iii] Cited in translation in Palestinian Media Watch online at www.palwatch.org.

Job's Dung Heap: Part 10

How Do We Know What We Remember?

Is there an ancestral memory? I can no longer doubt it, because that which I then learned seems to me not to have been learned at all but to have been remembered.[1]

To be sure, great events—traumatic occurrences—and not just the passage of time make breaks in the memory of large groups of people, individually and collectively; and that is not always bad, as cleansing of the mind and the culture of too many details is necessary to make room for new experiences of more importance to the present to interact without getting bogged down in things no longer vital.  Thus, aside from historians, professional and amateur, there is no stigma attached not to recognizing names like Lazare and Fleg or Péguy, although if either Dreyfus or Arendt do not tug some little bells, then perhaps there is a fault in the way people are educated these days…just as ware shocked when young students can’t tell the difference between World War I and World War II.  But the questions here are rather: what happens when the memories and associations connected to those memories are wrong, fully or only in part, so that decisions taken in regard to current events that stem from past events go awry? or What do we do or say in reply to those who have completely false versions of the past and thus different premises upon which to live out their lives and those different ways intrude on our memories and lives? If people who believe they inhabit the same cultural zone, let alone the same political and social space, disagree fundamentally on the form, extent and value of those areas, and thus do not share memories to the extent that they can even argue over the reality in which they live, how can there be peace?

Grand Guignol

The name Guignol (pronounced Geen-yole) comes from a Lyonnaise puppet character who often touched upon both social and political satire in his comedy…The Theatre du Grand Guignol is therefore literally “the big puppet show”: a violent puppet show for adults, with big acting and larger-than-life stories to match—think Punch & Judy with an R rating.[2]

In her study of the making of a Chechan Jihadi,[3] Nancy Kobrin cites several scholarly authorities, including Stephen L. Carter and Leo Braudy, as well as crime novelist John le Carré (The Little Drummer Girl), who explicitly or implicitly compare the  performance of terrorists acts as theatre, something dramatic in both concept and execution.  She goes elsewhere to tell us the Russian theorist of fiction and satire in the 1930s Mikhael Bakhtin imagined propaganda as a form of potent and vivid theatrical acts. 

The idea of terrorism as drama or theatre is more than a nice metaphor.  First of all, the two terms do not historically or conceptually refer to the same phenomenon, though they are indeed closely related.  On the one hand, drama (drumenon, the thing done) has to do with the action, the players, a shaped performance and thus must be approached through the psychodynamics of an imitated action, Aristotle’s mimesis; this does not mean the work enacted necessarily must be scripted, performed by professionals, or seen by a passive audience.  On the other, theatre (actually the place, locus or topos where something is performed—and this could as well be in a script, a little book or libretto or in the mind or even in a longer event, such as a ritual or legal process) has to do with a public or private show, a set place, an audience, and a social function. When a drama—whether comedy or tragedy—is put on by actors before a gathering of the community—all together, players, viewers and listeners, embody a myth, a transformative narrative: so that for a moment, the at the time and in the place of the performance, ordinary chronological and normal spatial dimensions become something else—and that new experience of an enhanced or intensified reality indeed may continue to influence everyone’s lives thereafter.

In the grotesque, explosive moment of a terroristic action imitated on the stage of world history, not only are players (terrorists) and innocent victims transformed (dismembered and then fused in the ensuing scene of carnage) but, in the myth of the mass murderer’s sick mind they are made one, so that he returns to innocence and purity before his mind was insulted, humiliated and detached from a primary ideal of identity and the victims take into themselves the terrorist’s defilement, discomfort, and rage, thus justifying such punishment inflicted on them for no other reason.

In regard to the phantasmagoria of Gaza Propaganda, the Pallywood directors have attempted to create a vision of innocent civilians and children pummelled by an aggressive Israeli fighting power with no concern for the rules of war or compassion for the victims.  To manufacture this fictional scenario, they have expropriated victims from Israel itself and claimed it to be their own children, transferred scenes from Syria and Iraq.  

The idea of terrorism as drama or theatre is, however, more than a nice metaphor.  First of all, the two terms do not historically or conceptually refer exactly to the same phenomenon, though they are indeed closely related.  On the one hand, drama (drumenon, the thing done) has to do with the action, the players, a shaped performance and thus must be approached through the psychodynamics of an imitated action, Aristotle’s mimesis; this does not mean the work enacted necessarily must be scripted, performed by professionals, or seen by a passive audience.  On the other, theatre (actually the place, locus or topos where something is performed—and this could as well be in a script, a little book or libretto or in the mind or even in a longer event, such as a ritual or legal process) has to do with a public or private show, a set place, an  audience, and a social function. When a drama—whether comedy or tragedy—is put on by actors before a gathering of the community—all together, players, viewers and listeners, embody a myth, a transformative performance: so that for a moment, at the time and in the place of the drama, ordinary chronological and normal spatial dimensions become something else—and that new experience of an enhanced or intensified reality indeed may continue to influence everyone’s lives thereafter.

In the grotesque, explosive moment of a terroristic action imitated on the stage of world history, not only are players (terrorists) and innocent victims transformed (dismembered and then fused in the ensuing scene of carnage) but, in the myth of the mass murderer’s sick mind they are made one, so that he returns to innocence and purity before his mind was insulted, humiliated and detached from a primary ideal of identity and the victims take into themselves the terrorist’s defilement, discomfort, and rage, thus justifying such punishment inflicted on them for no other reason.

Would the kind of festive theatre that celebrates the blood of jihadist justice[4] have to do with an immediate audience of the players and the victims of terrorism themselves, and then with the wider group of spectators and audiences, especially now with electronic/digital ways of beaming out the staged performance?  In ancient Roman times, and even throughout the Græco-Middle Eastern world great states displayed, manifest, and embodied their actions in mimetic performances--the Romans re-staged great battles faraway they celebrated in Rome during triumphs; with great throngs of prisoners captured on parade, killed in the arena, and some kept in slavery captivity for years for subsequent performances.  Huge painted canvases, three stories high, were first paraded through the streets of Rome, then kept in temples, where parents could take their children.  Depicted on triumphal arches and other stone monuments, memories of such spectacular shows were available throughout the Middle Aghes and renaissance as paradigms of propagandistic acts.  

The Chechyans and ISIS killers perform before the cameras, commit their atrocities so that the terror precedes them, leads to submission or desertion in the ranks of the enemy.  The terrorists themselves embody mythical, i.e., Koranic and subsequent Islamic military action s, to recreate the Kaliphate.  They dress, speak and act as though they were no longer their modern selves, but their play-acting is not mere self-indulgent pretence or intensely willed fiction.  For reasons yet to be explained they lose their original selves and become what they imitate.

Obviously the Gaza "resistance" was long since prepared on children's television programmes, not least of which were puppet shows,  and in street parades, such as funerals of so-called martyrs.  The leadership identify with the ancient mujahadeen (warriors) and shadim (martyrs), and drag the populace into the shared illusion/delusion, so that everyone, in the tension and excitement, fear of blood and sexual arousal,[5] of battle come to live in a vast trance-like state.  

Would the kind of theatre have to do with an immediate audience of the players and the victims of terrorism themselves, and then with the wider group of spectators and audiences, especially now with electronic/digital ways of beaming out the staged performance.  In ancient Roman times, and even throughout the Graeco-Middle Eastern world great states displayed, manifest, and embodied their actions in mimetic performances--the Romans re-staged great battles faraway they celebrated in Rome during triumphs; with great throngs of prisoners captured on parade, killed in the arena, and some kept in slavery captivity for years for subsequent performances.  Huge painted canvases, three stories high, were first paraded through the streets of Rome, then kept in temples, where parents could take their children.

The Chechans and ISIS killers perform before the cameras, commit their atrocities so that the terror precedes them, leads to submission or desertion in the ranks of the enemy.  The terrorists themselves embody mythical, i.e., Qoranic events, and subsequent legendary Islamic military actions, to recreate the Kaliphate.  

Obviously the Gaza "resistance" was long since prepared for on children's shows and in street parades.  The leadership identify with the ancient mujahadeen and shahim, and drag the populace into the illusion/delusion, so that everyone, in the tension and excitement, fear and sexual arousal, of battle come to live in a vast trance-like state.  

I have already suggested that enargeia (the generation of vivid images and speeches)  generate a sense of verisimilitude (that is, lying like the truth).  To be frank, of course, there are many schools of realism, Classical, Romantic, Naturalistic and Cynical, but they share one quality: they give a sense of what is realistic, what is, in other words, credible and plausible as equivalent to one’s apprehension of the sensory perception of the world, because unlike the real—which can be positively measured and logically registered, is a social construct.  Paintings of trees, mountains and other neutral objects in a landscape, for example, may seem to us as unreal: trees like stalks of asparagus, mountains as lumps of clay, and other features merely blobs of colour.  Even so-called film noir and hard-boiled motion pictures of the 1930s and 1940s now often appear to us as highly stylized, their speech patterns forced and absurd, and the psychological depths once thought to be there now sensed as superficial and clichéd. Yet thanks to photography we learned to see the real way horses galloped, not with their legs splayed out in parallel, but unevenly, assymmetrical curved limbs; how flowers unfold, drops of water turn into crowns, and insects dance elaborate information-filled messages.  When we try to speak of such works of art, our descriptions and narratives are called ekphrasis; and it is the constant movement back and forth from things actually seen to words renewed in ritual and festival occasions, and then recollected in memory, that shifts away from immediate experience to conventionalized pathosformeln, trauma inducing reproductions in the nachleben, the after life, of the now transformed reality.,

  

So how do we explain the way rhetoric and visualization transform ways of seeing?  There was recently (2008) a television documentary (now on video) on "Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies"[6] about the powerful impact of the first cinema on art (particularly Cubism) and actual perceptual, and therefore, I would add, on how we restage history, memorialize our own experiences, think about the world. cinematic techniques, George Méliès more than the Lumière Brothers or Pathé.   Through the Pallywood productions, from the children's programmes, the adult prapaganda and the phony news videos, the impressionable minds of toddlers and pre-schoolers can be manipulated. 

Yet does this account for adult intellectuals and artists in the West?  

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[1] Edmond Fleg, Why I Am A Jew, p. 48.

[2] “The Grand Guignol” online at http://www.thetheatreofblood.com/Guignol.html

[3]See my review of Nancy Hartvelt Kobrin, The Maternal Drama of the Chechen Jihadi in Family Security Matters (12 August 2014) http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-maternal-drama-of the-chechen-jihadi.

[4] Norman Simms, Festivals of Laughter, Blood and Justice in Biblical and Classical Literature  (London, Ont.: Sussco, 2008) gives a sustained look at the ancient models that lie behind the contemporary forms we are examining here.

[5] In an interesting video clip shown briefly on u-tube showed a group of teenage boys carrying a draped body of a flag-draped shahid, martyr, shortly after he had been killed in attempted suicide attack out of one of the myriad tunnels that elad from Gaza into southern Israel.  The youths were shouting “Allah Akhbar! God is mighty!” as they wended their way through the narrow streets of some Palestinian town.  Suddenly, because of the jerky movements, the suicide belt which had not been removed or at least disarmed on the corpse exploded, and several of the marchers were blown apart, others lay writhing with pain on the ground, and many changed their  formulaic chants to shocked, frightened and almost incoherent infantile screams of pain.  The reality of what they were play-acting intruded into their lives.  As some of the voices yelled “O my God, o my God” in English and with American accents, one wonders whether these were terror tourists brought by their parents to let them take part in the grand charade of a pseudo-jihad.  After all, someone stayed around to video the sights and sounds of this Grand Guignol.

[6] Arne Glimcher, director, Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies (2008; released as a video in 2010)

Job's Dung Heap: part 9A

An Epistemological Crisis:

The Fear of Knowing what we Know

To refuse to tell the truth when you know what the truth is
constitutes bad journalistic practice, to my mind. But it is also
deluding and utterly gutless.[i]

[Dr. Mads] Gilbert, a Norwegian anesthesiologist is a representative of the Norwegian Aid Committee (NORWAC), an NGO that has purportedly worked with Hezbollah-affiliated groups. He politicizes his humanitarian work to the extent of legitimizing terror attacks, including a defense of 9/11. In regards to the 2009 Gaza War, Gilbert stated[in The Lancet}  there was “clear evidence” that the IDF was using Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME)munitions. In another interview, he admitted that he had no proof concerning his earlier convictions.[ii]

An epistemological crisis is a failure in knowing how to recognize, accept and act on what plain everyday experience, common sense, logic and institutionalized wisdom around us tell us what is true and real in the world.  This is not a matter of simple error, naiveté, disingenuous pretence, or pure malice, that is, evil.  There is, no doubt, an element of mendaciousness and bigotry operative in some of the reporters, editors, intellectuals, academics and ordinary folk who gather on street corners to affirm their identity with a hate-filled terrorist group like Hamas (first cousin to ISIS and Al-Qaida and son of the Muslim Brotherhood), so that for reasons of total insanity, political gain, or economic advantage—or maybe to please or tease their girl or boy friends, work-mates, and other pals or comrades, they lie through their teeth.  This is, as I have been arguing, something different from the propagandistic ploys marshalled by Hamas agents and their associates or allies.  What is at issue in these essays on Job’s Dung Heap is why intellectuals and the so-called chattering classes in Western Europe, North America and even in Israel itself act and speak as though Israel were the most vicious, dangerous and wicked state in the universe.

The epistemological crisis occurs when, for some reason or another, for large groups of people, usually without their realizing what is happening to them, their sense of reality no longer fits what they experience, the language they use to express their concepts and feelings breaks down and so what they say, think and recollect as assurance of their sanity and reason is inadequate and they have a vague uncomfortable sense of something wrong, a discomfort they fill with denial, blame, rage or grief.  It does not happen consistently, coherently, gradually, but in fits and starts, usually prompted by some external event, some natural disaster, political collapse, military action: not everywhere, but in some places more than others, or just off on the side, virtually out of view; not everywhere, not all the time, but often enough to be exasperating, worrying, frustrating.  What we expected to see is not there; what we wanted to hear does not sound right; how we thought we would react has become something else.  But otherwise we feel fine.  Every day, ordinary things happen as they always have—or maybe not.

Back on the Dung Heap of History

The British newspaper The Guardian rejected an advertorial piece
penned by famed Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, JNS.org has
learned. In the ad, Dershowitz refutes statements by many media outlets that
all of the Gaza Strip is densely populated, a claim that has been used to
justify the use of human shields by Hamas in the terrorist group’s recent
conflict with Israel.[iii]

It isn’t merely that respected newspapers like The Guardian in the UK or The New York Times in the USA or important news networks like the BBC or CNN have become piles of excrement in regard to the Gaza Crisis but that they don’t realize or own up to their biases, and seem unaware of how they repeat (or re-actualize) the smut, the scandals and the hate propaganda of earlier Judeophobic events in the last century and a half. They think they are tolerant, liberal and compassionate people.  They believe they are on the right side of history.  If you tell them they are anti-Semites, they become rabidly defensive: they throw back the charges in your face, claiming Zionists are Nazis, Jews are bigots, and Judaism is a religion of child-murder.  These so-called defenders of human rights look like they still live in the world of their past ideals, but they have dropped off the planet and are now floating in a great heap of emptiness and irrationality. 

How Does It Happen?

I am a Jew because the faith of Israel demands no abdication of my mind.[iv]

I wrote early on in this essay that the processes by which susceptible minds are transformed from sane and rational into strange deformed creatures without commonsense or logical means of knowing are psychological events; and then added in this section of the piece that it takes an epistemological crisis to trigger off the lapse. 

There is the power of suggestion, that is, of providing versions of competing texts—anti-texts, un-texts and non-texts—by the persuasive power of rhetoric and image technology; this special kind of enargeia overwhelms the normal cognitive and affective faculties of the mind and sets off fantastical illusions and delusions.  What Aby Warburg called Pathoformelen, emotionally-loaded imagery embodying traumatic memories pass through the filters of rhetorical excess, illogical picture-creating lenses, allusions that short-circuit historical connections and other techniques. 

Then, by means of a trance-inducing contagion of hysterical anxiety, fear and confusion, the mind of individuals begin to imitate repeated non-texts, and each repetition and submission of other minds generates shared hallucinations.  For example, a supposed photograph of a school or home in Gaza that originally showed dead Hamas ighters, weapons, rockets, booby-trapped wires, entrances to a tunnel and perhaps one or corpses of children forced to stay in the building goes out into the world, carefully selected, photo-shopped, air-brush clean, so as to only transmit images of bloodied, dismembered young boys and girls.  The susceptible viewer—someone already convinced that Jews are aggressor and baby-sacrificers and Palestinians all passive innocent civilians—receives the picture and responds with a mixture of sympathy for the victims, rage at the aggressor, and increased expectation of further “war crimes” by the IDF.

The Nachleben (another term from Warburg meaning “after-life”) takes the images through repeated showings in different media, embeds the pictures into existing memories of similar grotesque visualizations, and enhances the mind’s misperception of the sentimental qualities, divorced from history, present contexts of motivation and consequences, and thus again increases expectations and distorting feelings of moral outrage. 

These topoi (conventionalized constructs of people, places, actions and ideas) of Jewish evil cannot be changed by rational argument, nor even by demonstrations of what actually happened; so that no matter how many times foreign reporters, once freed from the intimidation and threats within Hamas-ruled Gaza, speak freely of what they saw or offer video clips of the realty they were able to smuggle into Europe, the brainwashed viewers deny the existence of these less excited scenes.[v] 

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[i] Ron Liddle, “Who's responsible for these anti-Semitic attacks? Give me one guess” The Spectator (16 August 2014) online at http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/rod-liddle/9286532/its-ok-to-mention-anti-semitic-attacks-but-not-who-commits-them/

[ii] Eliana Trink, “Exploiting medicine for the politics of hate (August 14, 2014) first written for JNS.org and filed under “Israel, Opinion, World” online at http://www.jns.org/latest-articles/2014/8/14/exploiting-medicine-for-the-politics-of-hate.

[iii] Alina Dain Sharon, “Britain’s The Guardian Blocks Dershowitz Ad on Hamas Tactics” Jerusalem Post reprinted by The Algemeiner (16 August 2014) online at http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/08/16/britains-the-guardian-blocks-dershowitz-ad-on-hamas-tactics/

[iv] Edmond Fleg, Why I Am A Jew, trans. Louise Waterman Wise (New York: Block Publishing, 1933) p. 94.

[v] More detailed discussion of the principles laid out here as a mere sketch will be given in the later sections of this essay.