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Tuesday 26 August 2014
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.
Saturday 23 August 2014
Job's Dung Heap: No. 13
Disconnection, Oversight
|
|
"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.
[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/
Friday 22 August 2014
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.
Thursday 21 August 2014
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.
[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.
Wednesday 20 August 2014
Job's Dung Heap: part 11
In Quest of Questions
Making itself
intelligible is suicide for philosophy.
Martin Heidegger
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).
[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
Tuesday 19 August 2014
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?
[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)
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Sunday 17 August 2014
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]
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]
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]
[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.