“The Maghrebi culture of hatred drew sustenance from the Nazi legacy. On November 28, 2002, in a Beaumarchais de Meaux secondary school, a young Jew was beaten up by a North African Arab schoolmate, apparently inspired by a history lesson about the mass murder of the Jews. At the Turgot School in Paris, nearly a month later, a Jewish student heard her Maghrebi classmate (who had just insulted her during a lesson) brazenly tell the teacher: “Hitler should have finished his work and exterminated you.” On January 15, 2003, a terrified Jewish student at the Arago School in Paris was surrounded by some thirty young Maghrébins shouting “sale Jude” (dirty Jew), using the German word for Jew! On May 22, 2003, a Jewish public school teacher in the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris found, on the table of a Muslim student, graffiti describing her as a sale Juive (dirty Jewess) with the macabre racist message: “We will burn you all, you arseholes!” In another incident, a plastic arts teacher of Jewish origin in a fifth-year class of Maghrebi students was first subjected to an obscene torrent of abuse (“Fuck the Jews!” “Fuck Israel” “Hitler was right, they should all be gassed!,” and so on), and then, at the end oft he lesson, pelted with paper pellets, erasers, pens, and anything else her students could lay their hands on, as she crouched behind her desk for protection.
“Such violence seems, if anything, to be fed by history lessons about the Holocaust. A third-year student from Algeria in a Lyon suburb told his French teacher, “We like history at the moment because we’re doing Hitler and he killed off many Jews. So we like him.”
When I was in junior high school (8th grade), I sat in class as sundry mates pelted a male substitute teacher — generally among the most financially pressured, least rewarded, and most beleaguered of well educated and qualified good souls — with spitballs, aiming for a boil behind his ears.
We heard he had committed suicide the following week.
That age group, roughly in the same park as that from which Wistrich reports in the above passage, also picks up, explores, and starts to validate its communal and individual identity.
By 9th grade, I suppose, the star struck, musically talented, mathematically inclined, and drug prone or troubled know themselves and their emerging themes at least a little bit. Who knows what they will keep or discard or how they will make those decisions about themselves in the earliest stages of their own narrative?
Although one might expect much in the way of juvenile behavior and expression to recede with maturation, this knowing that kids say the darndest things, one knows too how well the same give voice to themes permeating their experience of home, media, playground, and street.
Wistrich’s research and political analysis throughout: compelling, factual, straight, and sympathetic, and that not only to Jews but those so egregiously saddled with what the reasoning may interpret primarily as an adverse, indoctrinated, unproductive, politically reprehensible, and poisonous habit of mind.
On the page following the above excerpt, the author notes, “But the victim status of Jews as a result of the Holocaust is doubly infuriating to a significant number of French Muslims, especially those who have been exposed to Salafist and radical preachers. They are as little inclined to listen empathetically to the story of Jewish persecution in Europe as they are interested in visiting churches and synagogues or hearing about the Crusades” (p. 197).
Perhaps expressions of malignant political narcissism coincide with the depth and spread of emotional damage — damaged self-concept, reduced self-assurance — within populations.
I once told my students at the University of Maryland, “You may look out on the world, but the world cannot look in except by what you do and what you say” (“and I’m here to help you say what you have to say”).
Back than, that was a day-one gift-wrapped incentive for reviewing and studying basic composition; today, the other facet serves: a good listener will hear the heart and intuit its character and integrity, its fears and its strengths, by way of how each voice expresses itself in relation to myriad others.
* * *
The back-of-the-book index accompanying Wistrich’s magnum opus exceeds 60 pages, so I am approaching the middle of a book, about 300 pages in, where most books have reached their conclusions.
Even gifted as a Jew with a rainy Easter Sunday — and happy and busy with family may that be for my Christian friends — I don’t think I’m going to zip through it today, although I could go 14 hours with it, reading like I haven’t since I was myself 14 years old.
Antisemitism has certain specific features which make it a unique form of bigotry. It is founded upon unshakeable beliefs which are in fact total lies; it is deeply irrational and immune to factual evidence; it accuses Jews of atrocities of which they are not only innocent but of which they are in fact the victims; it singles them out for double standards by expecting them to behave in ways expected of no-one else; it holds falsely that they form global conspiracies of manipulative influence; and it is utterly, pathologically obsessive about the Jews and their alleged cosmic misdeeds.
Acquiring a language includes grasping its “social grammar”, i.e. all of the intuited and unspoken rules about what may be said and what not to whom, about how one is supposed to feel about many things, from ancient warriors to wildfires, about the beliefs one should own. In that regard, a part of self-concept simply reflects what one has internalized from an environment and used as a basis — a forgotten basis, so fundamental and without definite words it may be — for responding to new information, filtering it, and expressing one’s true opinion, however murderous and unfounded.
I’ve been bookmarking articles on anti-Semitism, but it has been a while since I have opened the bin.
Mohamed Morsi: These futile [Israeli-Palestinian] negotiations are a waste of time and opportunities. The Zionists buy time and gain more opportunities, as the Palestinians, the Arabs, and the Muslims lose time and opportunities, and they get nothing out of it. We can see how this dream has dissipated. This dream has always been an illusion. Yet some Palestinians, who erroneously believe that their enemies might give them something… This [Palestinian] Authority was created by the Zionist and American enemies for the sole purpose of opposing the will of the Palestinian people and its interests.
Nature would seem by nature anti-monoclonal. It is elaborate and vigorous in invention, and perhaps “the survival of the fittest” refers not only to niche competitions among species over time but “survival of all that fits!”
In anthropology, culture, language, and religion, a great variance fits (and as great a legacy has been buried by time and left to recovery by scholars).
As a Jew, I believe in God in two dimensions: Tevye’s, to whom one may speak, and Einstein’s, the presence of which in every aspect of the universe fills one with awe.
Be that as it may, the world’s confrontation with Islam, which shimmers in perceived scale and threat, looming large at times when violence against any of its avatars’ endless array of targets has made it the news focus of the day, growing small in the company of Muslim associates and friends facing the same foe, comes freighted with an unseemly anti-Semitic streak, a fair part of it supported by officials in Muslim-majority states. Herewith a haphazard assembly of excerpts and links to more on the lowest standard of all: the quiet acceptance of the promotion of anti-Semitic bigotry (which usually belies other prejudices as well) in the Arab sphere.
+++++
First, however, a paragraph of rose colored counterpoint:
“Amongst the politicians elected in Egypt’s first democratic elections, one still hears the occasional anti-Semitic remark. Fayza Abul Naga, a secular 61 year-old woman who is a holdover from the Mubarak regime, recently claimed that Freedom House, an American NGO that conducts research into democracy advocacy, was ‘a tool of the ‘Jewish lobby.”’
This is ugly and regrettable, but not, I think, insidious — and not because there are almost no Jews left in Egypt, but rather because Jew hatred is a relatively new, imported phenomenon that has little history in Egypt and does not seem to run very deep.”
“Whatever you do, don’t accuse the person of being Jewish. That may cause an irrevocable breach, and could even provoke violence.
“Anti-Semitism, the socialism of fools, is becoming the opiate of the Egyptian masses. And not just the masses. Egypt has never been notably philo-Semitic (just ask Moses), but today it’s entirely acceptable among the educated and creative classes there to demonize Jews and voice the most despicable anti- Semitic conspiracy theories. Careerists know that even fleeting associations with Jews and Israelis could spell professional trouble.”
“During World War II, the leader of the Palestinians lived in a Berlin villa, a gift from a very grateful Adolf Hitler, who clearly got his money’s worth. Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and as such the titular leader of Muslim Palestinians, broadcast Nazi propaganda to the Middle East, recruited European Muslims for the SS, exulted in the Holocaust and after the war went on to represent his people in the Arab League. He died somewhat ignored but never repudiated.”
“The cartoons in this compilation are consistent with anti-Israel and anti-Semitic caricatures regularly appearing in the Arab and Muslim world depicting Jewish and Israeli power over the international community, demonic imagery to stereotype Jews – including big noses, black coats and hats Ð blood libels and animal references Ð snakes and spiders – to sinisterly portray Israel.”
“In the run up to the 2012 US presidential elections, media outlets across the Middle East have been featuring cartoons depicting the candidates – President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney – as well as the Democratic and Republican parties and the US electorate as subservient to Israel and the Jews.”
“We have to build a society of respect and brotherhood in accordance with the Prophet’s commandments,” he told me in Urdu. “We will treat non-Muslims kindly, but we have a big fight against the Jews ahead of us. We will take that up, God willing.” This manifesto for the future was identical – almost word for word – to what Yahya Mujahid, a senior leader of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based outfit charged with carrying out the Mumbai attacks in November 2008, told me in Lahore in 2009: that the LeT would take up the “fight” with the Jews after “liberating” Kashmir from Indian rule.”
“The purported “Franklin Prophecy” has been an anti-semitic staple since it was created in the 1930s. The version quoted in Al Madinah is similar to this:
There is a great danger for the United State of America. This great danger is the Jew. Gentlemen, in every land the Jews have settled, they have depressed the moral level and lowered the degree of commercial honesty. They have remained apart and unassimilated; oppressed, they attempt to strangle the nation financially, as in the case of Portugal and Spain.
“Several years ago, there was a survey (methodology unknown) that asked Saudi school children what they thought of Jews. Now, none of these children had actually met a Jew. They were uniform in their reactions, though: they should be spat upon or chased away with stones or simply killed. That reaction did not spring unattended from the minds of these children: it was put there.”
“Despite a promise to the USA in July of 2006 to undertake a program of textbook reform by eliminating all passages that disparage or promote hatred toward any religion or religious groups,” the report finds that “the encouragement of violence and extremism remains an integral part of Saudi Arabia’s national textbooks. As before, there continues to be a great preoccupation throughout the texts with Jews and with Israel. Rank antisemitism saturates the curriculum. Repeatedly, Jews are demonized, dehumanized, and targeted for violence.”
“The Saudi justice minister said that the Protocols is treated as part of Islamic culture because it is a book that has long been found in plentiful supply in Saudi Arabia (one of the relatively few non-Muslim books to be so), and was a book that his father had in his home.”
“Do I see things more clearly than at the very beginning of my investigation, when things seemed simpler–an American Jew, Muslim extremists, a video playing in a loop in the militant shock mosques?
“Sometimes I think yes. I hang on to my conclusions. I remind myself it’s not every day you find a killer who is both in the upper ranks of al-Qaida and the agent of the ISI.”
Bernard Henri-Lévy, 2003
“If you look at a photograph and think you have seen it, look again.”
Odl NASA Observation Group Slogan
“Part of the perversity of evil is that, the greater its depravity, the greater is our temptation to avert our eyes from it, to look away, to convince ourselves that we cannot possibly be seeing what we are in fact seeing. Indeed, that is one of the reasons such evil persists.”
Senator Joseph Lieberman, 2009
It will be ten years ago in September of next year (2013), which is just a few days away from this one, that French “public intellectual” Bernard Henri-Lévy published a remarkably detailed and exhaustively argued account of his own one-year investigation of the murder of The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Pearl who had journeyed into that heart of darkness I prefer calling the Pakistan theater of the Islamic Small Wars.
In pursuit of the Pearl story, Henri-Lévy stepped into the dark social sphere of a war zone advertising itself primarily with small eruptions of violence within its own quarters: mosque bombings; wedding party shoot-em-ups; motorbike-assisted assassination; curbside suicide bombings; and the like. Along those lines, the murder of interest fit the perverse gangland style of the God mob, i.e., something seen, grotesque and horrifying, belying much not seen but equally present in the atmosphere.
The book’s worth every minute of reading, and I’m not going to be the spoiler but for one web-searchable bit of curiosity: has anything changed?
“The report is based on material from 27,000 interrogations with more than 4,000 captured Taliban, al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters and civilians.
It notes: “Pakistan’s manipulation of the Taliban senior leadership continues unabatedly”.
It says that Pakistan is aware of the locations of senior Taliban leaders.”
The leaked NATO report, judging by Sommerville’s account of it, and this as much as much else having to do with the Islamic Small Wars, tells of states-of-affairs worse than the image generally delivered to the public.
Two months later (March 24, 2012), Pakistan Today reported, “The Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) continues to maintain ties with the Taliban and the Haqqani network, the top commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan has told American lawmakers . . . .”
A few days later (March 29, 2012) this indecipherable and morbid video posted to YouTube: http://youtu.be/g6tOCvy8NbA
Even if on the surface, we see what the title says, “Pakistani military police ISI capture taliban 2012” — which Taliban? how? where? when?
We know we’re not seeing the Taliban, certainly not as the west has percieved it, being shut down. At best, there’s a moment in the clip in which the arrested name their points of origin, and as regards Pakistan, most, perhaps all, are foreign fighters.
“Numerous U.S. officials have also accused the ISI of supporting terrorist groups, even as the Pakistani government seeks increased aid from Washington with assurances of fighting militants. In a May 2009interview with CBS’ 60 Minutes, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said “to a certain extent, they play both sides.” Gates and others suggest the ISI maintains links with groups like the Afghan Taliban as a “strategic hedge” to help Islamabad gain influence in Kabul once U.S. troops exit the region.”
“May 2009” (the italics are mine today and their absence in the bloc are mine too) — that’s about five-and-one-half years past the publication of Who Killed Daniel Pearl?
From 2010, more than two years prior to 2012 reporting on about the same thing, this from The New York Times: “The Taliban’s top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces, according to American government officials . . . The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago.”
Arrest some, not others?
The Mazzetti and Filkins report notes the ambivalence and ambiguities accompanying their lead: “One Obama administration official said Monday that the White House had “no reason to think that anybody was double-dealing at all” in aiding in the capture of Mullah Baradar. A parade of American officials traveling to the Pakistani capital have made the case that the Afghan Taliban are now aligned with groups — like the Pakistani Taliban — that threaten the stability of the Pakistani government.”
Remember: that above hails from 2010.
Yesterday, December 25, 2012, from the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP): “At least 20 persons, including four Policemen, were killed in separate incidents in Karachi, the provincial capital of Sindh on December 25, reports Daily Times.”
One appreciates that passive voice: ” . . . were killed . . . .”
By whom?
For what reason?
Along with much else, Bernard-Lévy’s investigation focuses the reader, perhaps inadvertently, perhaps only this reader, on what is most hidden in crimes against notable professionals and states: intimate relationships — not sexual but deeply personal — and their psychology: the buy-in to life-defining common purpose, the concerted efforts by many parties to spill innocent blood, the human nets in which secrets may be contained and suspended, the many ways in which once one is in, drawn in — or kidnapped — one may not be able to get out.
Daniel Peal’s kidnapping took place January 23, 2002 (again: after a full year of independent investigation, Henri-Levy’s book came out in September 2003), so we’re approaching the 11th year marker on a murder that would have by way of partial homage, which Henri-Lévy notes, an illuminating after life.
Instead of “sending a message” and hiding criminals, it promoted another kind of message — a message about character, friendliness, love, integrity, justice, and resolve by way of its reception and the global response to it — and afterward, and with many parties taking up every strand of thought and relationship involved, opened avenues for insight, law enforcement, evolving politics, and, again, a broadened and democratized global intelligence.
Indeed, if not much has changed, or change has not been as much as one would have wished, the collective “we”, has today a host of names and relationships with which to catch up and, if in our own small way, search out by web and by way of new social relationships.
“When the police found Pearl’s remains, Abdul Sattar Edhi, one of the most active philanthropists in Pakistan, arrived promptly on the scene, personally collected all ten body parts, and took them to the morgue.”
Language may be in its totality — all art and artifacts, all spoken and wrtten communication — many things, but a part of what everyone hears and sees in the course of living is their own reflection cast back in impressions expressed by others. In that way, an intolerant and intolerable mentality may find itself facing itself. The awful deed accompanied by its unrepentant braggadocio may become also where unseen a most soul crushing and deeply humiliating burden, a thing eventually to be exculpated quietly, privately, out of the light.
A friend of mine lost an old friend today over the surfacing of anti-Semitic expression and obsession.
The malignant poison the ears of their subjects to align them, create dependence in them, and to use them, eventually, for their own limitless aggrandizement. It’s a form well known and one becoming better known, understood, and resisted worldwide.
Herewith my response to my friend:
* * *
In a secular society in which people mix freely for years and enjoy company, bigotry within people has a kind of latency. Subjects don’t come up; on occasion, someone makes an off-color remark or joke, and we politely gloss over it. When nationalism, European style, asserts itself in response to political discomfort and drift, then politicians may play on latent prejudice to develop social energy for themselves. The fascist/socialist impulse within a leader may find the Roma (gypsies) or Tutsis (Rwandans) handy for the projection of grandiose and violent delusions, which, if he garners support, he may make real.
Demographic and succession pressures within the monotheist evolution maintain tension between Christians, Jews, and Muslims, and through the mouths of malignant leaders, each may be made foil to the other. If Israel were gone, Jihad (as defined by the violently strident) would still have (and would hear repeatedly about) the “crusader west”.
In any case, as conflict makes the news, these things come out, and I hear the same complaint from Jewish acquaintance about losing old friends in relation to discussion of events of the day. My answer, eternally the response of good parents worldwide: “were they really YOUR friends?”
A common complaint that makes its way to my ears involves the social enforcement (or leverage) of in-group norms. I phrase it that way because with an independent Muslim friend telling the tale or an independent Jew moaning about practices on the Far Left, the pattern is the same: the group providing social integration — camaraderie, business, good vibes — to a member may lean on the same to go along with bad ideas and plans. Some leave confronted with that kind of enforced conformism and exploitation; some, perhaps because of how they’re built or where they live or the arrangement of their dependencies, stay to go along with crimes, some no more than disingenuous ranting and sophistry, some more recognizably criminal in scope and murderous intents.
This is tough territory. We enjoy friends for many reasons, and we forgive friends many differences in relation to ourselves, but we need also good friends and reliable friends and, post-adolescence, friends more inclined to involve us in good things.
It’s those friends who will be with us far down the many roads.
* * *
My friends on the Right, and this intuitively speaking, would place the evil within the neighbor. All that’s needed is the Great Leader to bring that evil out in them. I feel differently, as perhaps a writer (wannabe) should: I think we carry around a great many signals or “signal potential” in our minds, and in certain conditions, well known and commented on after WWII, a particularly manipulative personality — the Pharaoh reincarnate of the day — can develop this potential fascist language and related drive in the hearts of some listeners who may then grow the enterprise into an ugly piece of large political machinery. To forestall, the targets of “malignant narcissists” may need some armoring among the target constituents sharing the same geopolitical space, i.e., apprehension of how they’re about to be used. The social machinery capable of delivering that insight where it’s needed doesn’t yet exist.
J. — wade into academe and you wade into a flood tide of anti-Semitic ranting.
What do you want to do about it?
Report it to CAMERA, Honest Reporting?
Kick it around in the peace groups?
For any close reader, the sophistry shows up in the first paragraph: “Just recall the final TV debate as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney competed to prove who could pander more to the pro-Israel side while treating Palestinians as if they didn’t exist.”
This is well-recognized false witness and slander, but because it targets a people and a state — the Jewish People and Israel — there are no legal remedies. The cultural remedy is to make ourselves honestly known through ourselves around the world.
More we cannot do.
God, although I know you don’t believe, or Nature, and that should suffice, inspired in us a great mission in a world much larger than ourselves, and we have been on it for 5,000 years — perhaps I should say only 5,000 years — and we have eased, fully, close to 3 billion people to monotheism, not that 2.85 billion give a rip about thanking us for their better tracks.
That, of course, is their problem.
I may publish this on BackChannels, it makes me so angry and, as the Jew-baiting writer might calculate, a little bit helpless as to how to approach the repair of this form of bigotry and hate. Such behavior in language stems from a deeply embedded social grammar — it is not a reasoning behavior but one rigidly set in attitudes and emotions — acquired by children in their earliest years, including probably some weeks in the womb with their ears turned on.
BackChannels 