Peter Beinart Backs Munayer

The Arab who termed Jewish residency in portions of its national homeland as a cancerous poison [ "when it comes to the peace process we all know the cause of death; unending Israeli colonization—perhaps they will call the next settlement Polonium Adumim"], Yousef Munayyer, is still publishing over at Open Zion. 

Israel in Judea and Samaria is actually worse than South Africa!

From his latest:

...the guise of occupation remains a significant problem and must be brought down anyway. To achieve this end we need to advance new terminology that adequately describes the situation as it is...The most apt description for this situation is Zionist Apartheid. The ‘Zionist’ modifier is crucial because it differentiates between the situation in Israel/Palestine and Afrikaaner Apartheid. [that is so much BS] In both cases, systems of human rights abuses and an unequal distribution of rights were used to ensure a particular group remained politically empowered throughout the territory controlled by the state. Yet both cases also have unique characteristics. For example, South Africa's Apartheid regime did not back an active settlement program to implant white colonists in the black 'homelands’.

...Occupation is an integral part of Zionist Apartheid, but the lexicon of occupation alone does not capture the entire picture. The first step to adequately addressing any problem is understanding it, and the current terminology limits our understanding at best and at worst, confuses it.

If anyone if confusing the reading public it is Beinart who allows this sick individual to spew his perverse worldview.

Liberalism triumphs.

^

Islamism As Religionized Politics

In his book review of Bassam Tibi's new book, Islamism and Islam published over at The New Republic, naughtily entitled "Term Warfare", Samuel Helfont, a Ph.D candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, hunkers down in a cognitive war trench and effectively snipes away.  He is critical but the book has a contribution to make.

Extracts:

IN FEBRUARY, The New York Review of Books’ website hosted a debate in which several prominent feminists criticized Human Rights Watch for issuing a report that whitewashed the record of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists poised to take power in the Middle East. Human Rights Watch responded by stating that this critique amounted to, among other things, “intolerance for Islam.”...

Bassam Tibi...spends most of the book bravely arguing against Islamism from a liberal Islamic perspective. The meaning of “bravely” here is not to be confused with its normal usage in Western intellectual discourse. Tibi is brave in that as a prominent Muslim critic of Islamism, religious fanatics have threatened to kill him (a threat that likeminded extremists have carried out against others in the past).

...Islamic tradition contains seeds which could form the basis of a modern humanistic Islam. Yet this humanistic understanding of Islam’s past and potential future has been routinely undermined by Islamists who have been somewhat successful in monopolizing Islamic discourse...what Tibi terms, “religionized politics.”

...Islamism clearly shares an intellectual heritage with European totalitarian movements of the last century. He correctly stresses that Islamism is not a “revival” but an invention of an Islamic past. In fact, many of the terms that Islamists employ, such as “Islamic State” or “Islamic System,” are neologisms that do not exist in traditional Islamic sources...many Islamists have appropriated the worst of European views toward Jews...

...Tibi offers no way out of this puzzle...he sees no difference between al-Qaida and Turkey’s Freedom and Justice Party (AKP), which rules a NATO member-state currently fighting Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Nor does he distinguish between intellectuals such as Tariq Ramadan and the Taliban...Tibi’s lumping of these groups and intellectuals together results from his failure to take his own argument about Islamism as an “invented tradition” to its logical conclusion. If Islamists neologisms such as “Islamic State” and “Islamic System” did not exist in classical Islam, then it follows that they have no intrinsic meaning. One cannot look to Islamic history and find an example of an “Islamic system.” Therefore Islamists need to define these terms...

...Probably the most problematic aspect of Tibi’s depiction of Islamism is the future it portends: there is no way forward except conflict. What else is the reader to infer about his depiction of a totalitarian movement that he equates to Nazism and Stalinism; a movement which he claims is by its nature incapable of reform or moderation, and with which engagement is impossible? He never says it, but the only future one could resonably imagine is drenched in violent confrontation. That conclusion is neither favorable nor necessary...

An interesting read, it seems, criticism notwithstanding.

^

This is Cognitive Warfare

Richard Landes on the conduct of cognitive warfare :

...we don’t recognize the nature of the foe, partly because we are so committed to the rules and values of civil society that we have difficulty even acknowledging that a state of war exists. Most of us are too secular to appreciate the beliefs involved. And as a result of this ignorance, we misidentify and badly analyze the phenomenon in question.

***

Western purveyors of news are, of course, a strategic target for jihadi cognitive warriors: Journalists are the main shapers of Western public opinion, and, it turns out, they are highly susceptible to intimidation and manipulation. As a result, the mainstream news media have, surely unwittingly but nonetheless consistently, played a crucial role in mainstreaming jihadi themes in the Western public sphere, even as they disguise the source and nature of these themes. A study of perhaps the single most powerful attack in the cognitive war of global jihad and its aftermath offers a detailed insight into the ways in which this has occurred. It illustrates the weaknesses of our media, as well as the critical but obscured relationship between jihad and the so-called Israel problem.

^

Confronting the Cognitive Conflict Clash (CCC)

I have mentioned previously the need for Cognitive Combat warriors for there is a requirement of this generation to confront the Cognitive Conflict Clash (CCC) in my conceptualization *.

In the meantime, I found this as a good graphic illustration of the problem:

The West blinds itself and refuses to see.

_______________

Another formulation of the crisis:

...primary spokespeople for the progressive causes of human freedom, equality, rights and dignity have lost battle after battle in a cognitive war launched by an astonishingly regressive foe. Global Islamism and Jihad openly champion intolerance of the “Other,” sacred violence, misogyny, homophobia, theocracy, scapegoating and hatred of other religions...Islamist Jihadi apocalyptic discourse has, in this last decade, played an astonishingly prominent role in defining 21^st century narratives, and has established major centers of discourse in both the Muslim and the Western public sphere. This has permitted a succession of stunningly stupid moves by the West which have not only weakened democratic culture, but strengthened radicalization is the Islamic world...The pattern emerged that when faced with angry Muslims demanding “respect,” Western moderates backed down and Western radicals sided with the Islamists...our passivity in the face of Islamist maximalist claims has hardened over time into a strategic consensus: the best way to deal with Muslim violence is to make friends with (appease) it; sooner attack the critic of Islam for provoking the violence.

At the same time as a broad range of our cognitive elite has adopted these paralyzing measures of appeasement, making it difficult to even perceive the existence of a cognitive war, a more militant branch has actively mobilized on the side of the Jihadi enemy. In particular, “left-wing” radicals have adopted the Palestinian narrative of suffering, in which the Israelis are the Nazis and the Palestinians are the Jews, in which the existence of Israel represents the single greatest obstacle to world peace and justice...And among the demands that the Islamists make on those who would befriend them, is the acceptance of this particular scapegoating, “lethal narrative,” aimed not only at justifying and inciting the extermination of the Jews, but also the subjection of the kuffar (infidels) the world over. This anti-Zionism has become almost a shibboleth of identity for the mobilized, progressive left in the 21^st century...

^

When All Is Said and Done

John Meeks of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago had been doing research on Nietzsche and productive (kataphatic) discourse and taught religion at De La Salle Institute when he decided to publish an article on Edward ("stone-thrower") Said.

I found these two extracts worthy of attention:

... in Said’s hands the experience of being a Palestinian, of the irrecoverable [really?  well, that is good news] loss of “home” and homeland and of the atrocities [??? exactly which ones?] that have been passed over in silence by “the news” [are you kidding?] never translate into the ressentiment of an exclusive nationalism based on religion or ethnicity.

For the record, ressentiment is

a sense of hostility directed at that which one identifies as the cause of one's frustration, assigning blame for one's frustration. The sense of weakness or inferiority and perhaps jealousy in the face of the "cause" generates a rejecting/justifying... a morality which attacks or denies the perceived source of one's frustration. The ego creates an enemy in order to insulate itself from culpability.

But that is exactly what the Arabs of the former Mandate for Palestine territory have done and continue to do.  Theirs is a refined "victimhood" phenomenom.

Meeks continues -

Living as a Palestinian exile made it necessary for Said to exist, as he says, “between worlds” without succumbing to an Orwellian “tourism among the dogs.” [dogs??]...in the work of Edward Said lines of interaction are always brought to the forefront [like his PLO membership]. As an exile, Edward Said claimed to have existed between many worlds. For him this was not a source of tragedy but an opportunity for a truly cosmopolitan future. One vision of this future may be culled from the remembrance of Said by Daniel Barenbaim: addressing a room of music students (Arabs, Germans, and Israelis), Said reminded them of Weimar, city of Goethe and Buchenwald and “did so in a way that did not offend the Israelis, did not distribute collective guilt to the Germans and made the Arabs see the necessity of understanding that period in Jewish history.” He brought the very heterogeneous history of Weimar to students in a manner that justified neither guilt nor victimization but in a manner, as in all of his writing, that makes solidarity among divergent peoples possible. This, finally, is Edward Said’s poesis.

Oh how they fool themselves these academics.

P.S.

Excerpted this from an article just sent to me by Richard Landes:

Edward Said’s masterpiece of cognitive warfare forbidding Westerners from othering Muslims.

^

LWieseltier in the Cognitive Warfare Trenches

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic and has come up against a phenomenon that we have witnessed for decades but, being of the 'liberal' persuasion, he is...shocked.

He is forced to acknowledge crude anti-Zionism and perhaps anti-semitism amongst the elite he so much would like to think is like him: open, fair and rational.

In his Justice for Jebusites, he deals with the cognitive warfare waged against Israel, the idea of Zionism and the Jews.

Excerpts:

...here is [Sari] Nusseibeh, in Al Jazeera, instructing the Jews on “why Israel can’t be a ‘Jewish State.’” He prefers “a civil, democratic, and pluralistic state whose official religion is Judaism and whose majority is Jewish,” which is fine, if the purpose of that Jewish majority is to establish the state also as a permanent unchallenged sanctuary for Jews: Zionism, after all, is primarily a remedy for a danger. But Nusseibeh’s reasonableness has its limits. He rehearses the old argument that “a ‘Jewish State’ implies that Israel is, or should be, either a theocracy (if we take the word ‘Jewish’ to apply to the religion of Judaism) or an apartheid state (if we take the word ‘Jewish’ to apply to the ethnicity of Jews).” This is absurd. The prospects of a Jewish theocracy in Israel are much less than the prospects of a Muslim theocracy in Palestine — none of the religious parties in Israeli politics are as powerful as Hamas is in Palestinian politics; and the guarantee of equal rights under law to all the inhabitants of Israel, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian, is the obvious antidote to the dystopian fantasy of apartheid...

...then Nusseibeh goes wild. The “more serious reason ... why Palestinian leaders—and indeed no responsible person—can morally recognise Israel as a ‘Jewish State’ ... has to do with the very Covenant of God in the Bible with Ancient Israelites.”...

...he explains, “no one then can blame Palestinians and descendants of the ancient Canaanites, Jebusites and others who inhabited the land before the Ancient Israelites...for a little trepidation as regards what recognising Israel as a ‘Jewish State’ means for them.” They have that Jebusite feeling!

Never mind that Palestinians are not the descendants of Canaanites. The Arab scion of Oxford rationalism is here concurring with the Jewish chiliasts in the West Bank that the Bible is the warrant for the politics of today. Nusseibeh is right: the conquest of Canaan by the Israelites was a genocidal affair. I never read those passages of my Bible without horror, though I know of no monotheism that has not justified the mass murder of innocents. But this Jewish state is not that Jewish state, and never was; and it is a slanderous misreading of the history of Zionism to suggest otherwise.

...MEANWHILE, IN The New York Review of Books, where a good word about Israel must never be said, David Grossman is denounced as an apologist for Israeli racism and expansionism. Yes, that David Grossman. In an incompetent and obtuse review of To the End of the Land, Patricia Storace accuses the Israeli writer of evasiveness and cowardice in his treatment of the Palestinian question. His book, she declares, reads like “the effect of a doctrinal national memory,” when in truth Grossman’s novel is a vast interrogation of doctrine and memory.

...Grossman is no more “confined” to Israel than Joyce was to Dublin or Faulkner was to Mississippi...What really bothers Storace about Grossman’s novel is that it is so damned Israeli, and that its attention wanders from the Palestinians, who are of course all you need to know about Israel. Her intolerant piece is yet another example of the new heartlessness toward Israel. A whole country and a whole people have been expelled from the realm of imaginative sympathy...

He is not a supporter of the Jewish communities in Yesha but nevertheless, realises that that issue is only a cover for the onslaught on Jewisah nationalism and the concept of a Jewish state in any geographical or political configuration. That animosity is what drives "Palestinianism".

It is evil, intolerant and life-threatening.

I love his title and remind you of my contra to the theme of "in Canaanite eyes", here, and here and here.

^