The Anti-Definition League?

Things seem to be hotting up over the former European Union Monitoring Centre (EUMC) on Racism and Xenophobia's (now called the Fundamental Rights Agency) so-called working definition of antisemitism. I reported earlier on the motion being presented at the Universities and Colleges Union to reject the EUMC working definition. Well now the Jewish Chronicle is reporting on a "fightback" by various zionist groups to defend their attempt at stifling criticism of the State of Israel.

In a tough statement, a spokesman for the Board [of Deputies of British Jews], the JLC [Jewish Leadership Council] and the CST [Community Security Trust] said: "After several years of promoting discriminatory boycotts and ignoring the resignation of dozens of Jewish members, UCU has never taken claims of antisemitism in the union seriously. Now, in a final insult to its Jewish members, UCU is cynically redefining the meaning of 'antisemitism' so it never has to face up to its own deep-rooted prejudices and problems.

"The joint representations by senior communal leaders to the leaders of UCU, the EHRC and the TUC send a clear signal that our community will not sit back and allow further red lines to be crossed as the boycotters unleash moves designed to curtail the rights of British Jews on our campuses."

Let's just have another little look at the section of the working definition that troubles Palestine solidarity types:

• Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, for example by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour.

• Applying double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

• Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (for example claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterise Israel or Israelis.

• Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

• Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel.

The EUMC Definition goes on to state that criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic.

Now I have always understood antisemitism to be racism against Jews so clearly point 3 could be considered antisemitic if there was some agreement as to the symbols. And point 5 is definitely antisemitic in that all Jews cannot be held responsible for anything. But points 1, 2 and 4 are definitely not antisemitic unless of course you do hold all Jews responsible for the State of Israel. So this redefinition of antisemitism that is being presented by the Board of Deputies, the Jewish Leadership Council and the Community Security Trust (and also Engage) as the definition is itself antisemitic and is itself a cynical redefinition. Still, the pro-zionist Jewish establishment seems determined to get its own way on this one so it could run and run for a while.

A big question for me is what they intend to do with the working definition if they do get it established as conventional wisdom or even in law regarding hate crime and incitement. We could see lots of Jews being rounded up for antisemitism and all for speaking out against the last of the colonial settler states.

Zio-Nazi comparisons update

I've only just seen a letter in yesterday's Independent responding to this nasty little one from the increasingly unhinged Professor Geoffrey Alderman:

The Palestine Mandate of 1922, read together with Article 80 of the UN Charter, confers on Jews the right of settlement in areas of that Mandate that subsequently fell under Jordanian control.

These areas of course include East Jerusalem and the West Bank. The government of Israel is therefore fully entitled – indeed obliged – to permit and facilitate Jewish settlement there.

Those who oppose this settlement need to reflect on whether they are not indeed, at least in some sense, "carrying on Hitler's work".

Professor Geoffrey Alderman

London NW9

And here's the response:

Professor Alderman (letters, 23 May) says that any opposition to Israeli settlements is "continuing Hitler's work". Nazi policies included Lebensraum (with forced evictions to make way for people of a specific ethnicity), ghettoisation, and withholding human rights based on race. I think the comparison to Nazism is gratuitous, offensive, and irrelevant. But if one is brazen enough to make it, one should at least think it through fully.

James Ingram

London SE1

It's funny how some zionists jump through hoops to accuse others of trivialising the holocaust and yet when one of their own commits the offence we don't hear a peep out of them.

More bad news from Israel

There is an update of the Greg Philo and Mike Berry book, Bad News from Israel titled More Bad News from Israel. Here's former BBC reporter, Tim Llewellyn in The Guardian:

Philo and Berry quote the BBC correspondent Paul Adams, a Middle East expert: what is missing from the coverage, he says, is the view that the Palestinians are engaged in a war of national liberation, trying to throw off an occupying force. Any Israeli casualty is headline news, shown in high quality images. BBC teams are based in West Jerusalem, de facto Israeli territory, and are on hand. Arab casualties may be shown in reports of a funeral, usually agency film, the victim anonymous. The Israelis, it seems, are for the BBC "people like us". The Arabs are "the other".

Racist bias at the beeb? Surely not. Here's the beeb's response published by The Guardian at the bottom of the Lllewellyn article:

BBC News endeavours to report on all matters in the Middle East – as elsewhere – impartially, objectively and accurately.

We have extensive editorial guidelines which all reporters and producers are required to observe.

In a highly charged political atmosphere any impartial and accountable broadcaster will rightly find itself under scrutiny by all shades of opinion.

In the Middle East debate there are organised, motivated and effective lobby groups on both sides of the argument.

We listen to their concerns and act on them where we think they are justified, but in doing so we bear in mind that our audiences expect us to remain independent of political pressure.

Although Tim Llewellyn was indeed a BBC correspondent some years ago, we note that he subsequently was active for a period with the Council for Arab-British Understanding (CAABU).

Aha! So he'd be with "the other" then...

"Working definition" update

The UK's Universities and Colleges Union's congress takes place on 30 May 2011.  Under the Business of the equality committee there is a motion on the former European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia's so-called "working definition of antisemitism":

70 EUMC working definition of anti-semitism - National Executive Committee

Congress notes with concern that the so-called 'EUMC working definition of antisemitism', while not adopted by the EU or the UK government and having no official status, is being used by bodies such as the NUS and local student unions in relation to activities on campus.

Congress believes that the EUMC definition confuses criticism of Israeli government policy and actions with genuine antisemitism, and is being used to silence debate about Israel and Palestine on campus.

Congress resolves:

1. that UCU will make no use of the EUMC definition (e.g. in educating members or dealing with internal complaints)
2. that UCU will dissociate itself from the EUMC definition in any public discussion on the matter in which UCU is involved
3. that UCU will campaign for open debate on campus concerning Israel's past history and current policy, while continuing to combat all forms of racial or religious discrimination.

---

Needless to say, the UK's ADL wannabees at the Community Security Trust and Engage are none too happy.

Obama and the Arab Spring

Israel's Herrenvolk police slaps a Palestinian lawyer

At the end of this clip, Herrenvolk police officer Kobi Bachar, deputy commander of the Galilee District Police, slaps a Palestinan lawyer after she asked him why he is arresting protesters (972mag). Of course, by the macho apartheid rules of the state also known as "the only feminist, queer friendly, democratic, pluralistic haven in the Middle East (TM)", she's asking for it. She is, after all, both a Palestinian, and a woman, and she dares speak to a police officer. For all we know, she might have even looked him in the eyes when she questioned his authority to enforce the rule that Jews rule. I am sure the poor man needed counseling to overcome the sheer trauma.

In an effort to save readers time I provide below copy that can be directly incorporated into New York Times and Washington Post articles:

In a recent flare up of violence (1) in Arab towns in Israel, an Arab (2) protester, a woman according to some Palestinian sources (3), hit the palm of a police officer with her cheek. The police officer was briefly hospitalized but his life is reportedly not in danger. Some Middle East experts (4) see the hand of the Iranian government behind the attack (5).

footontes:

1. because normal repression is not violent, only opposition to repression can be violent.


2. as in the crowd scenes in "The Mummy."


3. To prevent bias, we send only blind reporters to the Middle East


4. the reporter's brother in law


5. what else could cause the happy and pampered Palestinian citizens of Israel to take the streets?

JC on the peacemakers

That's the Jewish Chronicle, not Jesus Christ. Harriet Sherwood, The Guardian's woman in Jerusalem has just got wind of Geoffrey Alderman's op-ed piece celebrating the murder of ISM activist, Vittorio Arrigoni:

I was sent a link this week to a piece published in the Jewish Chronicle by historian Geoffrey Alderman, the opening sentence of which I found pretty shocking.

Under the headline This Was No Peace Activist, Alderman wrote:

"Few events - not even the execution of Osama bin Laden - have caused me greater pleasure in recent weeks than news of the death of the Italian so-called 'peace activist' Vittorio Arrigoni."

Arrigoni, an activist with the International Solidarity Movement, was murdered in Gaza last month after being abducted by Islamic extremists. He was strangled with a plastic cord. Hamas subsequently killed those responsible for Arrigoni's death.

His murder, wrote Alderman, "was immediately pounced upon by the western media as an affront to the civilised world". This is indeed the case; many newspapers - including the Guardian - ran stories andprofiles describing Arrigoni's commitment to the Palestinian cause and the extremist stance of those who killed him.

But, wrote Alderman, "the truth is very different. Vittorio Arrigoni, a disciple of the International Solidarity Movement, had travelled to Gaza to assist in the breaking of the Israeli naval blockade. As a supporter of Hamas he was a consummate Jew-hater."

He said Arrigoni's Facebook page - in Italian - contained "explicit anti-Jewish imagery".

I asked Alderman - who has occasionally contributed to the Guardian - whether he regretted recording his "pleasure" at Arrigoni's death. "It's still my view," he told me on the phone from London. "He was a Jew-hater like Adolf Hitler. Yes, he deserved to die for being a Jew-hater. I rejoiced in the death of a Jew-hater. I have no regrets."

Jeff Halper, an Israeli activist and academic, who knew Arrigoni well, said Alderman's charges against him were "outrageous".

"Sometimes things are so outrageous there simply isn't a response. Vik [Arrigoni] was unique. He was political and he had strong opinions. But the idea that he would differentiate between someone Jewish and someone non-Jewish - there has never been a hint of that."

Stephen Pollard, the editor of the Jewish Chronicle, told me he had no qualms about publishing the piece. "I have no problem at all with publishing it. I don't agree with [Alderman], it's not my view - it's his."

He rejected the description of Arrigoni as a "peace activist". "He was a member of the ISM, for God's sake. That's not peace activism, that's hard core Palestinian terror."

Neta Golan, an Israeli founder of the ISM, denied the organisation supported terror attacks or backed Hamas. "The ISM supports the avenue of non-violent and popular resistance," she told me. "It is a grassroots group, and we will work with anyone who wants to organise non-violent resistance. The ISM does not have a position on internal Palestinian politics."

She also rejected suggestions that Arrigoni was anti-Semitic. "It was so obvious he wasn't a racist. Absolutely he was not anti-Semitic."

I never met Arrigoni and I don't know what his views (if any) on Jews, as opposed to his views on Israel, were. Attempts to conflate opposition to Israeli policies with anti-Semitism are not new.

Scenes of Palestinian militants handing out sweets to celebrate suicide bombings or other deadly attacks are familiar - and sickening.

Now Alderman's rejoicing in the death of a pro-Palestinian activist seems to me a new and repugnant development.

Comments are still open for now.

Thanks to Senhal in the comments in an earlier thread.

Return!

Israel commemorates the establishment of apartheid 63 years ago with massacre

Four people were reportedly shot dead by Israel Defense Forces troops Sunday as they opened fire on large numbers of infiltrators trying to breach Syria's southern border with Israel. Another four people were said to have been killed on the Lebanese side of its shared frontier with Israel, as Palestinian protests for the annual Nakba Day, which mourns the creation of the State of Israel, took hold across the region.

In Majdal Shams, which runs along the Israel-Syria border, scores of Palestinian refugees from Syria spilled into the town. The Magen David Adom rescue service said about a dozen others had been wounded. The Israel Defense Forces confirmed opening fire on infiltrators.(Haaretz)

Israeli soldiers respond to unarmed civil protest in the only way Israel knows, deadly violence. This coordinated protest by Palestinians refugees happened on four borders. But the Egyptian border was apparently quiet thanks to the the Mubarak clones who still rule Egypt. The Egyptian military government, still eager to serve the US and its unhinged mini-me, Israel, blocked the roads to Sinai, because "the timing was inappropriate." But the time is always appropriate for sucking up to the empire.

The Israeli press called the protesters "infiltrators," reviving a term used in the fifties for the thousands of Palestinians refugees who tried to get back to their homes after the expulsion. Between 1949 and 1954, Israeli forces, with shoot to kill rules, murdered about 5,000 Palestinians caught near the borders.

The term was offensive already then, declaring people "infiltrators" in their own houses, fields, and country. But today the term is also misleading. Those murdered in the fifties were mostly trying to be invisible and to get home. The eight murdered today were involved in a direct action commemorating the Nakba, inspired by the massive Arab awakening that has swept the region from Tunisia to Yemen. Like Assad, Qaddafi, and the kings of the Gulf, Israeli generals believe that if they kill enough people the protests will peter out. One cannot say that this strategy never works. It is a double-down strategy. Like every double-down strategy, whether it works or not depends on the quality of credit possessed by the player. If the defiance of the people remains steadfast, or, as often happens when people are martyred, grows stronger, sooner or later the carnage is too much for key allies and constituencies, and then it is over for the regime. But the Israeli Junta believes it has enough credit to withstand any bloodbath. Given Israel's dependence on the good grace of its Western supporters, we all have a role to play in seeing that it doesn't.

Apartheid is Murder. The time for ending it is yesterday.

UPDATE:

16 dead counted so far. at least 90 injured. All dead in massacres on the Syrian and Lebanese borders. There was also a massive protest in Ramallah, Amman, Gaza, El-Arish.

The Lebanese government and army, like the Egyptian army, and like Hamas, like the PA police, tried to stop the protests. This is Shimon Peres's vision of the "New Middle East": all governments working together to defend Israel from popular anger.

The only wrinkle in this idyllic peace of the knaves is the people.

Hitchens and Chomsky: So this is war

Noam Chomsky issued a statement in Guernica magazine shortly after the American invasion of Pakistan and the summary execution of Osama bin Laden. Just to give a taste, here's the opening bit:

It’s increasingly clear that the operation was a planned assassination, multiply violating elementary norms of international law. There appears to have been no attempt to apprehend the unarmed victim, as presumably could have been done by 80 commandos facing virtually no opposition—except, they claim, from his wife, who lunged towards them. In societies that profess some respect for law, suspects are apprehended and brought to fair trial. I stress “suspects.” In April 2002, the head of the FBI, Robert Mueller, informed the press that after the most intensive investigation in history, the FBI could say no more than that it “believed” that the plot was hatched in Afghanistan, though implemented in the UAE and Germany. What they only believed in April 2002, they obviously didn’t know 8 months earlier, when Washington dismissed tentative offers by the Taliban (how serious, we do not know, because they were instantly dismissed) to extradite bin Laden if they were presented with evidence—which, as we soon learned, Washington didn’t have. Thus Obama was simply lying when he said, in his White House statement, that “we quickly learned that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by al Qaeda.”

Nothing serious has been provided since. There is much talk of bin Laden’s “confession,” but that is rather like my confession that I won the Boston Marathon. He boasted of what he regarded as a great achievement.

And a couple of days ago Christopher Hitchens issued a counter statement in Slate magazine. To give you a taste, the title is Chomsky's Follies.  He quotes from the piece above thus:

We have no more reason to credit Osama Bin Laden's claim of responsibility, he [Chomsky] states, than we would have to believe Chomsky's own claim to have won the Boston Marathon.

Here Hitchens has directly equated "rather like" with "no more reason". Rather like is not no more. No more is the same. Rather like is similar. And in a forensic sense, as an excuse for an invasion and an execution, bin Laden's "confession" has no more validity than the claim that Chomsky won the Boston marathon.

But what made me do this post was Hitchens's resort to what certain people said at the time of 9/11.

I can't immediately decide whether or not this is an improvement on what Chomsky wrote at the time. Ten years ago, apparently sharing the consensus that 9/11 was indeed the work of al-Qaida, he wrote that it was no worse an atrocity than President Clinton's earlier use of cruise missiles against Sudan in retaliation for the bomb attacks on the centers of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. (I haven't been back to check on whether he conceded that those embassy bombings were also al-Qaida's work to begin with.)

I don't see any evidence there for Chomsky "sharing the consensus".  What he said does not amount to "shar[ing] the consensus".

Hitchens goes on to take a swip at Michael Moore for what he said closer to the time of 9/11:

At the Telluride Film Festival in 2002, I found myself debating Michael Moore, who, a whole year after the attacks, maintained that Bin Laden was "innocent until proved guilty" (and hadn't been proven guilty). Except that he had, at least according to Moore one day after the attacks, when he wrote that: "WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden! Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!"

But the quote doesn't support the idea that bin Laden had been found guilty by Moore "at least according to Moore one day after the attacks".

But since he is resorting to what people said back in 2001 or 2002, let's have a look at what Christopher Hitchens himself had to say in The Guardian published two days after 9/11 though obviously written the day before:

One day into the post-World Trade Centre era, and the question "how" is still taking precedence over the question "why". At the presidential level, the two questions appear to be either crudely synthesised or plain confused, since George Bush has taken to describing the mass murder in New York and Washington DC as "not just an act of terrorism but an act of war". This strongly implies that he knows who is responsible; an assumption for which he doesn't care to make known the evidence. Instant opinion polls show the same cognitive dissonance at the mass level. Most people, when asked if they agree with the president about the "war" proposition, reply in the affirmative. But in follow-up questions, they counsel extreme caution about retaliation "until all the facts are in". This means, in ordinary words, that they have not the least idea whether they are at war or not.

Over the years since the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran in 1979, the public has become tolerably familiar with the idea that there are Middle Easterners of various shades and stripes who do not like them. The milestones of this - the marine barracks in Beirut, the Gulf war, the destruction of PanAm flight 101 - actually include a previous attack on the WTC in 1993. And on that occasion, the men convicted of the assault turned out to have backgrounds in a western-sponsored guerrilla war - actually a jihad - in Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden had pretty good name-recognition among American news consumers even before Tuesday's trauma. He's already survived a cruise-missile attack ordered by President Clinton in 1999 (in the same cycle of attacks that destroyed a Sudanese aspirin factory in the supposed guise of a nerve-gas facility). Bin Laden is perhaps unlikely to die in his bed, but his repeated identification as a "Saudi millionaire" - we thought the Saudi Arabians were on our side - makes consistency in demonisation rather difficult; the image somehow doesn't compute.

But of course, that was the old Hitchens. The new Hitchens of the Slate article even managed to misrepresent the position of the increasingly deranged David Shayler. Shayler was imprisoned in France and the UK for blowing the whistle on "mismanagement and incompetence" at the UK secret service, MI5.  Here's Hitchens in Slate mag:

 As far as I know, only leading British "Truther" David Shayler, a former intelligence agent who also announced his own divinity, has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all. (It was apparently by means of a hologram that the widespread delusion was created on television.)

Now follow the links to the New Statesman and the Daily Mail. From the New Statesman:

They [including David Shayler] believe there weren't any planes on 9/11, just missiles wrapped in holograms

And from the Daily Mail:

in recent years he's been scratching a living giving talks to conspiracy theorists about the September 11 attacks - last year he was ridiculed for insisting that the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre were brought down by a U.S. Government conspiracy using "missiles surrounded by holograms made to look like planes".

Ok, he's lost the plot and is claiming that he is G-d and that the World Trade Center was felled by hologram wrapped missiles. But that is not the same as saying that he:

has denied that the events of Sept. 11, 2001, took place at all.

Now that must be down to sloppiness on Hitchens's part. There is no reason to verbal up anything David Shayler has said in recent years. There are though many reasons for a born again imperialist to rubbish the likes of Chomsky and Moore, though I am no great fan of either.

Hitchens has completely failed to make a case against Chomsky or Moore and he even managed the get it wrong about Shayler. But how did he forget his own take in The Guardian on the appalling events of 9/11? Apostasy's a funny old business.

By the way, The Guardian article published two days after 9/11 was titled, So this is war.

uh hello?

Here's a song by Leon Rosselson called Conversation on a mobile:



Leon's appearing at the Cellar Upstairs soon:

Date:

Sat 21/05/2011

Times:

from 20:00

Place

Cellar Upstairs,  Exmouth Arms,
Starcross St.,
London NW1 2HR

Contact person:

Shela Miller 

Burchill wrong shock!

Here's a letter in today's Independent protesting Julie Burchill's "absurd analogy" between a boycott of Israel and the nazis anti-Jewish boycott:

Julie Burchill (5 May) makes an offensive, unfounded and absurd analogy when she accuses human-rights campaigners picketing Ahava of "carrying on Hitler's work".

The "little Ahava shop" in Covent Garden promises "beauty secrets from the Dead Sea". The real secrets it keeps are an ugly truth – its products come from stolen Palestinian natural resources in occupied Palestinian territory, and are produced in the settlement of Mitzpe Shalem. Israeli settlements on Palestinian land were declared illegal in a 2004 ruling of the International Court of Justice.

Ahava seeks to profit from violations of international law and receives Israeli government subsidies for its role in whitewashing Israeli oppression. That two years of pickets and direct action have forced a landlord to refuse to renew Ahava's lease and to end their relationship with this criminal enterprise should be celebrated and be seen as part of the broader movement for Palestinian rights.

Israel systematically denies Palestinians their basic rights and the international community has failed to hold it accountable. In response, Palestinian civil society calls for a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel until it complies with international law. Heeding this call, electronica band Faithless, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and scores of other artists have vowed not to play in Israel. Tower Hamlets council recently passed a policy excluding Veolia, a company that runs infrastructure projects for Israel's illegal settlements, from bidding on future service provision contracts in the borough.

Boycotts helped to end apartheid in South Africa and have an important role to play if we are to bring an end to Israeli apartheid.

Bruce Levy BDS London;

Deborah Fink Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods;

Sarah Colborne, Tim Hicks

Palestine Solidarity Campaign;

Pete Jones International Solidarity Movement London; Michael Kalmanovitz

International Jewish anti-Zionist Network,

London n7

There's another letter criticising Burchill for helping the case for the growth of Tesco, but that's another story.

The case of Tony Kushner

I first saw something about this Tony Kushner business in an email to the Just Peace UK group from Roland Rance.

Academic freedom and open debate should apply to everyone on campus, not just defenders of Israel's government. CUNY's [City University of New York] Board of Trustees recently violated these values when they made the unprecedented decision to block an honorary degree for Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Tony Kushner, solely because of his criticism of Israel. They did so based on the last minute objections of Board of Trustees member Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who has a history of opposing open debate. He opposed the first Arabic dual language public school in the country, opposed the rights of Muslims to build a mosque in Lower Manhattan, and tried to block Kristofer Petersen-Overton’s appointment as an adjunct lecturer at Brooklyn College because of his political opinions about Palestine and Israel. But he said that Glenn Beck should not be criticized for anti-Semitism. 

If you are outraged by this hypocrisy like me, please join me in signing this petition athttp://bit.ly/tonyatcuny to overturn this unjust decision and support a free and open debate at this public university.

Now Magnes Zionist has two posts on the same issue here and here.

Barak: fear of a BDS planet

The following is a partial translation, with some added comments in [brackets]. Hebrew original: http://www.haaretz.co.il/hasite/spages/1227196.html  

"...[Israeli defense minister Ehud] Barak believes that a UN declaration of Palestinian statehood without a prior Israeli political initiative will paint Israel into a corner previously occupied by South Africa during the apartheid era. His admonition is pungent and scathing: 'There are elements in the world, quite powerful, in various countries, including friendly ones, in trade unions, [among] academics, consumers, green political parties', he warns, 'and this impetus has culminated in a broad movement called BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) which is what was done with South Africa. This will not happen overnight. The day after September, people will say: 'so now October has come, the sky hasn't fallen, nothing has happened'. This is not true."

Will this happen in December or January?

"It will start coming at us like a glacier, from all corners. There are people in the European Council that deal with export and import, and they are capable, without any government decision, of inflicting significant damage on the Israeli economy. We will see this taking place in academia, we will see this taking place in dockworker unions, consumer groups, and this will seep into governments. This is unwise [apparently referring to Israeli policies which will bring about this outcome]. To me, this uncontrollable process looks more dangerous than what the [Israeli] public perceives at the moment. We have been ruling over another nation for 43 years, this is unprecedented. Perhaps China can allow itself to control some small nations in various corners of its empire, and perhaps Russia can [failing to discern that Tibetans and Chechens have citizenship]. We cannot, there is no chance that the world will accept this. The far right is exposing Israel to dangerous and unwarranted isolation."

(Translated by Ofer Neiman)

Winner of the Emperor Obama vacuity contest

Books have been published collecting and even analyzing George Bush the Younger's malapropisms and idiocies. I doubt anyone will do it for Emperor Obama. Not because he is any better. But because, as George Bush said, "fool me once, shame on , shame on,..." you, who were fooled. On the occasion of the not-even-judicial execution of the Master Signifier of terror,

“Today we are reminded that as a nation there is nothing we can’t do,” Obama said in a speech Sunday certain to stand as one of his most historical. (Stanford Herald)

So something in America is finally working. Not us. Even if, like every other project managed by the Pentagon, it took decades more than planned, cost billions more that expected, and resulted in "collateral" death in the millions.

This confirms that the best prism of reading that assassination is through Lacan's theory of discourse. It's just pitch perfect. What is the Master? The one who doesn't know what he wants because others know it for him. This is what is being celebrated here. Total, absolute ignorance, not only of the Muslim world but of oneself, and not only as fact, but as vision. For of course we know how false this is, how little is possible right now, when the limits of the possible are subordinate to keeping the bonuses of Wall-Street growing year after year. How there is no money for satisfying the most basic human needs of most people. But at the bargain price of cheering the death of one loathsome man, we can get rid of the knowledge of that gap between desire and reality. If only we accept that killing Bin Laden was our highest aspiration, that having had that there is nothing more that we could possibly want, then we reach blessed ignorance and achieve Nirvana. "We can do anything" means "we don't need to do anything any more." Everybody will either work for us or die. And every American will get the chance to say that to herself on the way to the soup kitchen.

American "Tahrir" Square

Only weeks after the Arab world began shaking off the rotten crop of imperial stooges that oppressed them for two generations, the frathouse American shabab responded with throwing off the last inhibitions that connected them to the rest of humanity. What a difference!

while celebrations of the not-even-judicial execution of Bin Laden were not limited to campuses, it is clear from the media reports that campuses played an unusual, and fairly unexpected, key role. Indeed, the media sometimes even noted with surprise that celebrations were not led by "the usual suspects" but by college students, for example, noting that "In a Military Town, a Muted Celebration About Bin Laden". It is worth reflecting not only about the existence of this abhorrent spectacle, a point noted quite a lot, but also on its unexpected university setting. The following is just a preliminary thought. I am sure that there will be a lot more that will be said on it.

American universities became prominent together with the rise of the White Collar, the new class of managers, accountants, lawyers, professionals, etc. a class that grew in power from the end of the 19th century as capitalism moved from family owned to shareholders owned and professionally managed. For half a century or more, this was a relatively progressive class. It successfully hegemonized working class discontent in the interest of a reform agenda that increased its power. It was also able to impose concessions on the capitalist class that stood above it. Limits on speculation and accumulation, funding of public services, the extension of civil rights to minorities, and even a cultural ethos based on so-called merit and workoholism, an ethos that forces even the scions of the wealthiest families to masquerade their rent extraction in the form of "compensation" for work.

As Dumenil and Levy show, a key aspect of neoliberalism was the switching of sides of this class, from a partial alliance with the working class in order to win concessions from capitalists, to a fully owned, and lavishly paid, sidekick of the rentier class. Comparing the nationalistic riots over Osama bin Laden's extrajudicial execution to the riots against the Vietnam war is dispiriting. It may be that what we are seeing on US campuses is the ideological completion of that process. These students are expressing in different forms the slogan of Louis XIV, "the state is I." There is complete identification with The Man.

Although superficially similar, and although both linked to imperialism and neoliberalism, there is a significant difference between the US nativism of the subaltern classes that has been so common in recent years and this. The former, even when it identifies with militarism and adopts racism against the other of the empire, particularly Muslims, always has an oppositional edge. It is directed against the professional class, often described as "the liberals," who are perceived as ruling the country without being patriotic enough. The structure of "heartland" nativism is always that of a lack. "The state isn't us," and that is what is damn wrong with the country. In contrast, in the recent celebration of Osama Bin Laden's execution there is no such contestation. It is the pure joy of the master. That is why one can refer to it as the "plus-de-jouissance," surplus joy, that the empire extracts from the knowledge of its (oversees) subjects. ( of course, there is a certain boundary breaking associated with frat-houses, which is a ritual, not a contestation.)

It remains to be seen how the neoliberal proletarization of the university, which is obviously not universal, as the scions still need a degree, will play out in this context. It is also a question of class identification and hegemony at a more comlicated level, as clearly not all these celebrating frat boys will become CEOs of Boeing. There are different modes of identification here, including the logic of the video game. (One is reminded of the music and splashing colors and forms that play on the screen when a level has been completed successfully.) But there is also a more extensive definition of the Master. Just as the CEO now "works" 18 hours a day, the overworked professional can feel part of the ruling class, as long as the gulf from below is growing deeper every day.

100 years of non-violent Palestinian resistance

I picked up a freebie issue of Time magazine yesterday and I was surprised to see a letter on non-violent Palestinian resistance.

I'm copying it out as it appears on page 10 of the 2 May 2011 edition because the letters aren't available on line:

Nonviolence among Palestinians is not new.

The recently released book Popular Resistance

in Palestine, by Mazin Qumsiyeh, documents

over 100 years of everyday acts of resis-

tance, with suicide bombings and rocket

attacks as the exception.  The world needs

to hear more about these courageous acts.

Peggy Vander Meulen,

GRAND RAPIDS, MICH, US. 

The book is available from Pluto Press.

The death of a master signifier

"Osama Bin Laden," the master signifier of the US war on terror, is dead. The frail proper body that used to be attached to that signifier was assassinated in an imperial US military operation in a foreign country, Pakistan. That body is not important. The Master Signifer Osama bin Laden had only a passing and insignificant, literally, relation to that body. Rather, It represented the Middle Eastern subject, the rebellious native, the child who rejected the authority of the father, to America the Beautiful.

The operation was carried out among a people who despises the US for decades of misery that the US inflicted of them. It was the very kind of operation that convinced a much young Osama Bin Laden that killing lots of Americans is the only way to go. He was wrong. There are better ways. And his idea of liberty was kooky. But that is as much as one can say against him. The number of people he killed is pathetically small by the standards of US presidents. If Bin Laden merited a bullet, then Emperor Obama deserves to be quartered and drowned. As for Bush and Blair, if we set to punish them honestly we would need the sadistic creativity of the Olympian Gods. There is no human punishment that would be horrible enough to match their culpability.

Nevertheless, the death of a Master Signifier is a cause of celebration. It is appropriate that it happened in such close proximity to the Wedding of the Century, an opulent spectacle of violence in the name of the Holy right to violence, matching an opulent spectacle of looted wealth celebrating its God given right to loot. Death and Marriage, as Freud might have hummed one spring afternoon, go together like horse and carriage. The death of the master signifier puts into play the knowledge of God's love for his people. It is not, of course, "America" that knows. America knows nothing at all. Except that it knows that the Middle East knows it for it. On the occasion of his visit to Bin Laden's territory, Bernard Henri Levy already explained how the knowledge of race and the knowledge of God's election exchange fluids.

“The Taliban weren’t just defeated, they were defeated without a fight. …the image of these defeated fighters, lionized by the Arab street from Baghdad to Damascus, the image of these salahudins who were supposed to !bring America to its knees, and who, at the first shot, fled like chickens, could only astound those who identified with them.”

Out of the labor carried out by this Arab knowledge of America emerges what Jacques Lacan calls a "surplus-of-joy". The people of the US are jubilant. So I hear. I am not sure if that covers also the people whose houses were foreclosed in the last three years. But it is possible that they too are jubilant today. It is Purim in America today. The evil Haman is dead. Millions of his kins have been murdered in advance.

Only a doubting Thomas would fail to see here the ultimate proof that God loves America, England, and, of course, the Queen.

Arab spring and Palestine

I always think of this chap, Azzam Tamimi, as Hamas's man in London. He's certainly very close to them but I have heard him speak and he admitted to being "embarrassed", for example, by Hamas's charter. He also claims a fondness for democracy that you don't hear from many Hamas advocates. So, here's Dr Tamimi in The Guardian, print and on line today:

When, at the start of this year, Palestinians around the world marked the anniversary of the 2008-09 Israeli war on Gaza, few could see any hope. The Gaza Strip was still under siege, Palestinian reconciliation seemed out of reach, the Arabs were useless and the US unable, or unwilling, to broker a resumption of negotiations between Israel and the Palestine National Authority (PNA).

Then came the Arab popular revolutions, and the mood among Palestinians switched from desperation to euphoria. Soon after the fall ofHosni Mubarak I visited my old friend, the Hamas leader Khalid Mish'al, in Damascus. He told me he was sure the change in Egypt, which he expected would be followed by similar changes in other Arab countries, meant that it would not be too long before Palestine was free.

My friends in Gaza would tell me the same thing, and so would my relatives in Hebron and the diaspora. They all believed that the Mubarak regime was an impediment to the Palestinian struggle for freedom; once the Egyptian people were free, a genuine democracy in Egypt would support the Palestinians.

At the very least, in the short term, Palestinians believed that post-Mubarak Egypt would not take part in the siege of Gaza, which would all but collapse if Egypt were to open the Rafah crossing between Sinai and the Gaza Strip. Indeed, last Friday Egyptian foreign minister Nabil al-Arabi told al-Jazeera that, within seven to 10 days, steps will be taken to alleviate the "blockade and suffering of the Palestinian nation".

Palestinians monitored the Israeli reaction to the collapse of the Mubarak regime. It did not surprise them to see Israel immensely worried. Mubarak was an ally who contributed to Israel's security in a very hostile Middle East. The neutralisation of Egypt, and the minimisation of its role in the Palestinian cause since President Anwar Sadat signed the Camp David peace treaty with Israel in 1978, constituted Zionism's greatest success since Israel was created 30 years earlier. Rather than spearhead the struggle to liberate Palestine, Mubarak's Egypt led the so-called Arab moderate camp, an alliance of pro-Israel and pro-US Arab states that included Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Morocco, the PNA and the United Arab Emirates.

Palestinians began to imagine what would happen if a popular revolution in Jordan were to bring about a similar change; then one in Saudi Arabia; and perhaps Morocco. Israel would have lost its most important allies in the region and the PNA would be isolated, having been fatally wounded by revelations in al-Jazeera and the Guardian about the concessions its negotiating teams offered in secret to the Israelis.

But although the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions did inspire Arabs to demand political reform or regime change, it was not Jordan, Morocco or Saudi Arabia that saw this the most. There were a few demonstrations, but demands were generally for political reform rather than a change of regime. Instead it was Yemen, Libya and Syria that witnessed the more dramatic protests, which soon escalated into armed struggle in Libya and calls for regime change in Yemen and Syria.

When I saw Khalid Mish'al in February, he did not expect a popular uprising in Syria. He believed the regime was less vulnerable because of its support for resistance in Lebanon and Palestine, as well as its anti-imperialist stance. But solidarity with the Palestinian or Lebanese resistance was not enough to protect any autocratic regime. This worried some Palestinians, and they rushed to express support for Bashar al-Assad's regime; but Hamas remained silent, to the regime's displeasure.

While the euphoria created by the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions has been dampened by the Libyan experience, seen by many in the Arab region as a revolution gone drastically wrong as a result of armament and western intervention, most Palestinians still believe a new era is coming. The more Arab dictatorships that are replaced by genuine democracies, the closer Palestine will be to liberation. Democracies representing the will of the Arab peoples can only be anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian.

One immediate fruit of Mubarak's removal and the uprising in Syria has been the revival of Palestinian reconciliation efforts. Responding to grassroots pressure, both Hamas and Fatah met in Cairo and decided to work for the formation of a unity government and the resolution of disputes over security and elections. Fatah is anxious that it may lose favour with Egypt, while Hamas is anxious it may soon lose Syria as a safe haven. Unsurprisingly, Israel threatened to take action against the PNA if Fatah went through with the deal with Hamas.

For many years Israel claimed to be the only democracy in the region. And yet Israeli politicians appealed to the US to intervene in Egypt to prevent Mubarak's fall, and campaigned for him to remain in power. Israel clearly believes it can count on Arab dictators who are more interested in power and personal wealth than in serving their nations, let alone serving the Palestinian cause.

Despite its claims of superiority, Israel appears to suffer from the same symptoms that plague Arab dictators; the failure to learn that they need to change before it is too late. It's been too late for Mubarak, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, Assad, Muammar Gaddafi and Ali Abdullah Saleh. Israel has oppressed the Palestinians for so long, and has incurred the wrath of the Arab masses whose revolutions are bringing hope to Palestinians.

Whichever way one looks at it, the Arab revolutions are the best news the Palestinians have had for decades.

Comments are still open.

"The anti-zionism of fools"

The Arabs and the Holocaust from Danny Bermant on Vimeo.

A fascinating discussion of the Arab reaction to the holocaust between Gilbert Achcar and Tom Segev, hosted at the Jewish Book Week. Achcar is at his best. Tom Segev however disappoints. He is an extremely generous writer, but every time I hear him talk I am disappointed. The Zionist defensiveness that he holds back when he writes returns in his on stage persona. You can hear him looking for imaginary opportunities to challenge Achcar for being "soft" on antisemitism. Worse is his recycling of Zionist historical disinformation, like the disturbing claim that Nasser wasn't ready to make peace with Israel. It is unimaginable that he doesn't know the truth. Achcar was very considerate in holding back on the history of the alliance between Zionism and the most pro-Nazi and reactionary Arab figures. I prefer more confrontation.

One point that Achcar makes that was never mentioned in the video is that the emblematic status of War World II as the supreme "good war" and the holocaust as the ultimate evil is a uniquely Northern perspective. It is not widely shared in the South and for goods reasons, as so many other atrocities compete on the imagination. That is something Jews need to hear from scholars like Achcar. Because by acknowledging Christian Europeans for their acknowledgment of the holocaust, Jews pay for their social mobility with a subtle form of holocaust denial themselves, the denial that the holocaust was not an isolated event, but the culmination of a history of European racism that is still far from over, even when Jews are no longer its victims.