This is more cult-like thinking, of the sort I discussed yesterday, in which ‘good’ equals ‘us’ and ‘evil’ equals people we don’t agree with.
The German poet Heinrich Heine (d. 1856), in his play lamenting the forced conversion of Spain’s Muslims to Christianity, “Almansor,” wrote, “Wherever they burn books, in the end they will burn human beings.” (When the Nazis burned books in 1933, Heine’s were among those set afire, and his prediction was borne out).
The antidote to hateful and grandstanding ignorance such as this is learning and reading. The way to combat book-burning is to spread around books and consume them.
I discuss in my book, Engaging the Muslim World, the various charges against Islam from groups like this one and show how they are not true.
I liked the response of CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations, to this proposal, which is that Americans should take the opportunity presented by this controversy to actually read the Qur’an. I’d go them one better and suggest that some book reading groups who meet regularly select the Qur’an for their next set of discussions.
I’ve done study groups on the Qur’an from time to time in informal settings, and was surprised to find that the translation people told me they found most accessible is Abdullah Yusuf Ali’s rendering of the Holy Qur’an. Intended in in part for English-speaking South Asian Muslims, it is steeped in the Muslim tradition of Qur’an commentary but goes out of its way to explain phrases that are cryptic or telegraphic in the original Arabic.
Reading the Qur’an without context is actually not very useful since it is a highly historical work that refers to contemporary events constantly. Although it is now an older book, W. Montgomery Watt’s Muhammad, Prophet and Statesman is still a good place to start for understanding the context of the Qur’an. In fact, I’d advise people to read it first, and then read the Qur’an backwards, starting with the shorter Meccan chapters that Sells translated and moving toward the front of the book with its longer Medinan chapters, many of which retell the stories of Abraham, Moses, Joseph, and Jesus or refer to Muslim attempts to avoid being wiped out by the attacking Meccan pagans (which anti-Muslim polemicists misinterpret as Muslim aggression).
And, speaking of Heine and old Muslim Spain or Andalus, for a delightful book about the relations of Christians, Jews and Muslim in medieval Spain, see Maria Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain. You’ll find there that current controversies like that in Florida are nothing new. But Menocal argues that while there were periods of fundamentalism and persecution, the over-all achievement of Spain (both Christian states like Valencia and Muslim ones like the Umayyad Caliphate centered at Cordoba) was of a broad tolerance and a shared love of learning (the library at Cordoba had 600,000 volumes at a time when there were probably only a few thousand manuscripts in all of France). In many ways, the multicultural religious atmosphere of medieval Spain , before the Almohads from one direction and the Inquisition from another did it in, most resembles that in the United States today.
Menocal is brilliant throughout, but especially good at recognizing the secular aspects of Arab culture that often formed an attraction even for those in Andalusia who did not convert to Islam. Alvarus, a hard line Christian priest, lamented:
‘The Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets or apostles? Alas! All talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literture as unworthy of attention. They have forgotten their own language. For everyone one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are a thousand who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write better poems in this language than the Arabs themselves.’
Menocal suggests, in more elegant language, that Arabic romantic poetry was a babe magnet in Cordoba even for the Christian girls.
In many ways, the shoe is now on the other foot. Young Muslims often devote themselves to English and to American pop culture, and it is English that has the massive library, whereas the modern Arabic one is thin despite areas of excellence, as with the novels of Nobelist Naguib Mahfouz. But all along, the two cultures have interacted on a basis of admiration, not just competition or bigotry. Menocal thinks that the Renaissance and Enlightenment were actually peculiarly parochial in Europe, in contrast to the mixed-up character of medieval Spain, and despite the ugly periods and occasional fundamentalist movements, there are certainly innovations in toleration achieved in Valencia (a Christian kingdom that made a legal place for its Muslim subjects) and Cordoba that can inspire us today.
It finally happened. The Jerusalem Post has declared archeology itself anti-Semitic.
To tell you the truth, I am frankly worried about some of my colleagues who are committed Zionists having difficulty in dealing with reality in the wake of the severe difficulties facing the Zionist project in historical Palestine.
Glick is actually alleging that anyone who practices critical history of the ancient world or the Middle East in general is thereby an anti-Jewish bigot. Glick, from Chicago, was a captain in the Israeli army and a judge advocate-general during the first Intifada or Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which the Israeli army brutally crushed. She seems to be going off the deep end, having made herself notorious with the sick satirical video ‘We Con the World,’ which made fun of the civilian aid workers killed by Israeli commandos on May 31 of this year (and which appears to have had some backing from the Israeli government itself).
I don’t know if Captain Glick ever was not a zealot, but the bitterness and extremeness of her comments are now to the point of irrationality.
It is not just she. I’ve been at conferences where committed Zionists in the audience would afterwards approach me and, with a sort of glazed look in their eyes, give me a little set speech, then abruptly walk away. I initially always think they want to have a discussion. They don’t. They want to engage in some sort of strange ritual speech to exorcise the doubts I raised. They want to tell me off and then escape before I can reply.
One time some Orthodox students approached me at a conference to say that in their reckoning, Israeli settlers on the West Bank had almost never done any harm to anyone and maybe in total had killed 14 persons, for which they were sorry. I was frankly outraged. I mean, what world did these university students live in? Had they never read even one academic book on the effects of the Israeli Occupation on the Palestinians of the Palestinian West Bank? Why invent fairy tale statistics, and what is with the passive aggressive ‘apology?’ There is something wrong with this way of thinking, and it is a kind of group think that reinforces itself in small, tight, communities of discourse.
Last month, I was at a conference where a prominent academic at a prominent university gave a whole series of set speeches on various occasions.. Hamas is a terrorist organization that says it will never negotiate with Israel. Iran is near to being able and willing to nuke Israel. It was like a series of mantras to ward off any real, critical thought. When I told the person he was being essentialist, he was taken aback, then in a passive aggressive way, said he ‘hoped’ that what I was saying was true. It is so weird dealing with people who are supposed to be critical thinkers by trade who, when it comes to Israel, suddenly exhibit all the originality of a mynah bird. And they don’t let you get a word in edgewise once they start. And they constantly imply, with body language and innuendo, that you are misinformed or actively lying.
Other strange features of this discourse are the disregard for any evidence that contradicts the set talking points, unwillingness to seriously reconsider positions in the light of such evidence, the repetition of key phrases in an impenetrable way, the allegation that critics said things they never said, and insistence on demonizing the source of the alternative evidence.
I got exactly the same treatment in the 1970s from Maronite Christians in Lebanon and in the 1990s from pro-Milosevic Serbs, and recognize the condition. It is Failing Nationalism Syndrome (FNS).
Not all national projects succeed. There are by some counts 5000 ethnic groups in the world of a sort that could be the basis for a nation-state, but there are only about 190 countries. Some political projects, such as French Algeria (dominated by colons or colonists as a privileged group) or a Christian-dominated Lebanon, get going but just don’t have staying power. Algeria is now an almost wholly Muslim country, and Christians in Lebanon, while still powerful and numerous, are probably down to less than a third of the total population. But if we went back in time to 1935, we could sit at cafes in Algiers or Beirut and talk with these two about the future of their countries, and the ones in Algiers would have said that Algeria’s fate was to always be a part of France, and the Lebanese Maronites would talk have talked about their majority being strengthened and about the Phoenician identity of their country in the future.
Since the government of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is doing its best to run out the clock on a two-state solution, the only two plausible outcomes in Israel/Palestine in the coming decades are long years of dreary Apartheid or a one-state solution. It is not plausible that the Israelis will be allowed to keep the Palestinians stateless and without, ultimately, any real rights, forever. So Zionists (Israel nationalists) are increasingly suffering from Failing Nationalism Syndrome, and it is causing them to flail about saying the strangest things.
Let me take Glick’s weird screed section by section (she is replying to my : essay in Salon.com
‘ One of the most prominent anti-Zionists today is Prof. Juan Cole from the University of Michigan.
Zionism is just Israel nationalism. Nationalism is of two sorts. It can be a sane patriotism in which people take pride in their identity and pull together to achieve national projects of self-improvement. Or it can be an aggressive, expansionist, grasping and destructive movement that exalts the in-group over out-groups and disadvantages or damages the latter. The second sense of the word ‘nationalism’ was the more common in the 19th and the early 20th century.
So, I am not an anti-Zionist in principle (and it is weird that Glick would accuse me of being one), since Israel nationalism is fine with me as long as it is of the first sort. Any nationalism of the second sort, I roundly denounce, whether adopted by Jews, Arabs, or Melanesians. It is the virulent sort that Closes the Mind.
‘ Part of being a successful anti-Zionist involves claiming that Jews have no right to the land of Israel. So to be a good anti-Zionist, one needs to deny Jewish history.
To this end, in March Cole published a piece of historical fiction in the Salon online magazine.
Titled “Ten reasons why East Jerusalem does not belong to Israel,” Cole mixed half truths with flagrant lies to justify his denial of Jewish history and belittlement of the Jewish rights.
Cole wrote, “Jerusalem not only was not being built by the likely then non-existent ‘Jewish people’ in 1000 BCE, but Jerusalem probably was not even inhabited at that point in history. Jerusalem appears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, the traditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon.”
This assertion is so mendacious that it takes your breath away. As anyone who has actually been in Jerusalem can attest, it is all but impossible to be physically present in the oldest areas of the city and not bump into relics dating from between 1000 and 900 BCE.’
There is no evidence for a monotheistic cult in Canaan in the period leading up to 1000 BCE. Monotheistic Judaism appears to have been invented in the Babylonian exile or perhaps a little before, and the fables of a great kingdom of David and Solomon were woven together then. The Assyrians were the gossips of the ancient world and they wrote down everything that happened in their clay tablets, and even talk about minor Arab queens in the Hijaz, and they didn’t know anything about a magnificent kingdom of David and Solomon with palaces. If these figures existed at all, I suspect they just had really, really nice tents, not golden palaces (which by the way have not been found despite what ideologues like Glick assert). Historical Judaism was a reformation of Canaanite religion over a period of time. (Some readers asked me who I thought was carried off to Babylon in the first place, and the answer is simple: Canaanites, perhaps those of a certain religious cult, but very possibly not the sort of monotheist depicted in the Bible).
‘ Cole’s allegation is the academic equivalent of Louis Farakhan’s claim that white people are devils planted on earth by aliens. As an anti-Zionist anti-Semite, it was just a matter of time until Cole traveled into the fetid swamp of denying the historical record to facilitate his false claim that Jews are not a people and therefore are bereft of rights as a nation to our national homeland.
I don’t know where she found a quote by me saying that the Jews are not a people. She doesn’t actually seem good with like, evidence. But peoples anyway are not eternal essences. They are formed over time. All I am saying is that her timeline for the formation is off by several hundred years.
Anyway, if Israel nationalism depends on the Bible’s stories of David and Solomon being historical, then kiss it goodbye. But note that my point in the Salon article was not that Israelis had no right to be in Israel but rather that they have no right to expel all Palestinians from Jerusalem ( Yes, that is what Israelis of Glick’s stripe are doing) . Glick’s shouting is designed to cover up an ongoing set of crimes against someone else, by painting herself the victim of, horror, biblical minimalism of an academic sort.
And note Glick’s segue from calling me an ‘anti-Zionist’ to calling me an ‘anti-Semite’ because I won’t accept the bible at face value as a privileged text without some kind of supporting evidence (and in the face of contrary such evidence). I’ve gotten so I really don’t care about being called a bigot by people who are very obviously bigots.. And I am afraid that pretty much everyone is getting that way, which is a shame. Because the history of anti-Jewish bigotry in the West is cosmically ugly and should not be trivialized.
‘ And why shouldn’t he cover himself in anti- Semitic muck? So far, the stench has brought him great success. The very fact that I felt compelled to write an essay explaining why anti- Semitism is anti-Semitism and why anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism is depressing proof that anti- Semites have been wildly successful in whitewashing their bigotry.’
I’m still looking for evidence of anti-Semitic muck in anything I’ve written, as opposed to just practicing history. And, I’m glad she thinks me a success, but lets face it, I’d have gone much further in conventional life if I hadn’t gotten on the wrong side of strident fanatics such as she. But, I was never interested in a conventional career. I have a sneaking admiration for Hunter S. Thompson that I doubt very many deans share.
‘ What makes contemporary anti-Semitism unique is its purveyors’ great efforts to hide its very existence. Their motivation is clear. Outside the openly genocidal anti-Semitic Muslim world, most anti-Semites are self-described liberals who claim to oppose bigotry. For these people, pretending away their prejudice is the key to their continued claim to enlightenment.
And so the likes of Oliver Stone publish clarifications.
And Cole invents history. And the Europeans blame Jews and Israel and Zionism when Jews inside and outside Israel are assaulted and killed.
And I am sorry I wrote this column.
Because an audience that demands an explanation of why evil is evil is an audience that has already sided with evil.’
If all that ranting makes sense to anyone, they should please explain it in terms that sane people can understand. Some of it is just guilt by association and conspiracy thinking.
Glick let slip at the end what is really going on. She is a cultist, who sees the world as black and white, good and evil. She and her movement are pure good. Those who oppose anything it does, including Apartheid, are evil.
And since the world will increasingly oppose Israeli Apartheid against the Palestinians, we are in for lots more furious rants and character assassination like Glick’s.
The Closing of the Zionist Mind, so evident in Glick’s weird column, is dangerous because a cult-like, black and white mindset is the first prerequisite for a turn to violence and it makes compromise and flexibility impossible. But what the Mideast needs more of is reasoned, humane, complex openness to change, to negotiation, to seeing the Other as human. Glick is foreclosing that process, and in so doing is helping dig the grave of Israel as we know it.
Luckily, most Israelis I know are nice people and Glick is not representative, so maybe I’m wrong to see a trend here as opposed to just a supremely annoying and ignorant individual.
Those opposed to President Obama´s escalation of the Afghanistan War were crestfallen when Congress approved another $33 billion in war funding. But as Richard Wolfe at USA Today points out, the interesting thing about the vote is the 103 Democratic Party ´no´ votes, triple the number who voted against a similar bill in summer 2009. Even David Obey, the chairman of the committee that crafted the legislation, voted against it. War exhaustion is setting in with Democrats, who have big domestic priorities, and the Wikileaks will take their toll. Obama may end up being a Democratic president fighting a Republican war, since if the GOP does well in the mid-terms, they will be in a position to support the escalation.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan in Nimroz Province, a crowded bus hit a roadside bomb, which killed at least 25 passengers. I doubt the Taliban were trying to kill bus passengers, but once you set a roadside bomb you never know who will hit it. Meanwhile, another US soldier was killed, this time in the Pashtun south, on Wednesday, bringing July´s toll for US troops killed to 59, only a little less than the 60 who were killed in June, according to the Associated Press. The figure of 60 US troops killed in one month is the highest monthly toll since the war began in 2001.
In other news, it is being alleged that the Taliban have overrun much of the Qalai Zal district of Qunduz Province and actually captured a NATO aircraft. Pashtuns only make up one third of Qunduz, a northern province, but they have been militarily very active there, in part in hopes of cutting off NATO supply lines from Tajikistan and Central Asia. But, a plane? The only good news here is that they have no idea what to do with it.
Declan Walsh at the Guardian looks again at a 2007 incident in which US Marines, having had their convoy hit by a bombing near the eastern Pashtun city of Jalalabad, laid down suppressive fire all around them as they made a mad dash to base 6 miles away, so as to get medical help for a wounded colleague. The automatic machine gun fire killed innocent Afghans in cars along the way, including school girls. The whole incident was covered up when the papers were filed, simply by not mentioning the carnage.
Military folks can correct me if I am wrong, but my understanding is that laying down fire all around is standard response to a bombing, though some green units take it too far and so produce a lot of civilian deaths. I was told that some National Guard units in Iraq were the worst in this regard. I have long suspected that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, having noticed the tactic, bomb US troop convoys near markets and other populated areas, counting on this response so that the US troops end up getting blamed for the carnage and the local people are turned against them. In this Jalalabad incident, the firing went way beyond an immediate response to danger, however.
Carlyn Meyer writes in a Guest Editorial for Informed Comment, also mirrored here:
NYT Saber-Rattling Against Turkey
The New York Times prides itself on being a newspaper “of record’ reporting crucial information for citizens to make informed choices in policy and elections. What I want to know is how NYTimes editors can claim that last Friday’s article, Sponsor of Flotilla Tied to Turkish Elite, about so-called ‘ties’ between Turkish officials and I.H.H., the Turkish foundation that organized the Gazan Blockade flotilla, did anything to inform me or anyone else who read it. Instead the article confuses and misinforms its readers by throwing several stand-alone facts and vague statements together, never clearly saying what it certainly implies. It plays brinkmanship with a loaded gun.
I’ve learned enough about Islam to know that the faith requires that observant followers contribute regularly to charity as one of five basic duties. “Giving” in Islamic countries if huge. And from the Dan Bilefsky/Sebnem Arsu article we learn I.H.H. is a large Islamic charity originally founded to help needy Turkish children and that now operates in over 100 countries. The article mentions I.H.H. support for besieged Bosnian Muslims during the Balkan wars, as well as a sizable donation to Haiti in the wake of last January’s disaster. We also learn that many currently-serving Turkish officials support I.H.H. (Most of this information is available through open public records.). Then the sizzling link: the article tells us I.H.H. is accused of having ‘ties to terrorists.’
What we don’t learn is the nature of those ties, who is making these accusations, whether the ties are direct or indirect and what those ties mean. This is not the first instance that a New York Times article linked I.H.H. to terrorists. Yet there is no indication that Times reporters have checked out and independently verified whether such ‘ties’ actually exist, even as the newspaper prints another story making that claim!
What is going on here? Before I give a hoot about Turkish officials giving to a large Islamic charity, I want the NYT to answer the immediate questions flowing from previous reporting.
Did I.H.H. give money to Hamas to buy guns? Did its $8 million donation in support of Gazan orphans filter through one of the many social service agencies Hamas runs in Gaza? Is I.H.H. funding a shell front-group or corporation? Or funding projects where money is illicitly skimmed off by genuine terror suspects? Are Turkish officials who serve on the board of I.H.H. also being accused for ‘ties’ to terrorism? Do they know of any I.H.H. ties to terrorism? These would be the logical questions to be answered by second and third NYT follow-up stories that focus on I.H.H.
Just as The Times quoted government officials certain that Iraq possessed MWD yet neglected to investigate other expert views and independent sources, the newspaper repeats a cavalier brand of reporting this time by linking I.H.H. to ‘terrorism’ and Turkish officials to I.H.H. – and by extension Turkish officials to terrorists – through innuendo and unnamed sources.
Addendum: The Times continues with its saber-rattling in today’s paper.
Turkey’s shift toward the Muslim world — from the recent clash with Israel to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s description of Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful — has prompted concerns in the United States and Europe that Turkey, an important NATO ally, is turning its back on the West.
Turkey, a NATO ally and candidate member of the European Union turning its back on the West? This type of alarmist rivals Fox News in its lack of documentation and example. Though the New York Times has mentioned some Western sources in a previous article who were critical of Turkey, Turkey has taken no actions that in any way supports the charge it is turning its back on the West. It is this type of preemptive saber-rattling that is disastrous to US foreign policy and paves the war for needless aggressive actions by the US government.
Carlyn Meyer
Apologies for the typo in Ms. Meyer´s name in the first edn.
Welcome to Informed Comment, where I do my best to provide an independent and informed perspective on Middle Eastern and American politics.
Informed Comment is made possible by your support. If you value the information and essays, I make available and write here, please take a moment to contribute what you can.
