Trying to Rewrite History
Dec 25, 2013 11:16:29 #
Israel and the Moral Midgets of American Academe
December 24, 2013 by Bruce Thornton
American_Studies_Association_1A province of the academic Lilliput called the American Studies Association has v**ed to boycott Israeli academics because of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the systematic discrimination against Palestinians. The well-earned criticism of this v**e is probably the most attention this organization has ever received outside the parochial precincts of the American university, where conferences of like-mindedness pedants regularly gather together to read papers to each other and ritualistically affirm their fossilized political and intellectual orthodoxy. Indeed, what this v**e tells us about the corruption of American higher education is more worthy of comment than its impact on Israels intellectual life, considering that American Studies is a political rather than a scholarly enterprise unlikely to concern genuine Israeli scholars. Martin Kramers response gets it just about right: Boycott me, please.
The first thing revealed by this v**e is the massive ignorance of history, including current events, that permeates American universities. Most obvious is the rote repetition of the phrase Israeli occupation of Palestine. This phrase is historically meaningless. There is no occupation in legal terms, because there has never existed a country to be occupied. The territory under question last existed formally as a province of the Ottoman Empire, which has long settled into the dustbin of history because it miscalculated badly and allied with the Central Powers in World War I. The legal disposition, through a U.N. resolution, of this territory by the mandatory powers that replaced the Ottomans after World War I was rejected and violently contested by the Arab nations that attacked Israel in 1948.
Until 1967, this territory was controlled by Jordan, whose annexation of it was never recognized internationally. It came under control of Israel as a result of the defensive Six Day War. Without that event, it is likely that despite international disapproval, the territory would have in time become part of Jordan according to the ancient wisdom that possession is nine-tenths of the law. After all, who boycotts China over its absorption of Tibet? If after their victory in 1967 Israel had behaved as most states do in such circumstances, she would have annexed the territory that by the legitimacy of history is part of Israel, and that was fairly won on the battlefield. And again following the usual practice of most states, Israel then would have expelled all the Arabs. This historically has been the common practice that no one other than the losers complained about after other wars. One and a half million Greeks, for example, were booted out of Muslim Turkey in 1923, from lands their ancestors had inhabited for nearly 3 thousand years, while half a million Muslims, descendants of invaders or Christians converted under the shadow of the sword, were sent to Turkey. Or consider the 12 million Germans kicked out of Eastern Europe after World War II. Thats what happens when a people start a war and lose.
And dont forget, the Arabs living in the ancient Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria are the descendants of conquerors and occupiers, or recent immigrants drawn by the economic development by Jewish settlers. By any measure of historical justice or coherent thinking, what the historically challenged now call the occupied West Bank would have become part of Israel. The only accurate description of this territory is disputed, its final disposition dependent on successful negotiations that the so-called Palestinians have never engaged in sincerely, since their ultimate goal is not their own state but the destruction of Israel. And apparently the ASA agrees with that aim, as it refers not to the occupation of the West Bank, but of Palestine, which the Arabs consider encompasses all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
The same incoherence is evident in the phrase discrimination against Palestinians. There is no such thing as Palestinians. Palestine was the name given to Judea by the Romans after the destruction of the country in 136 A.D., an act of damnatio memoriae by which the Romans attempted to obliterate any trace of the existence of an enemy. Thus they renamed the country after the Philistines, a people that in effect no longer existed. Later Palestine was an administrative unit of the Ottoman Empire, and Palestinian denoted anyone living there, including Jews, just as today Californian does not refer to a distinct national or ethnic group but to anyone living in California. The Arabs today called Palestinians are not significantly different ethnically, linguistically, or culturally from the Arabs living in Jordan, Lebanon, or Syria.
If you have any doubt, listen to Farouk Kaddoumi, head of the PLO Political Department in 1977. Jordanians and Palestinians are considered by the PLO as one people, he told Newsweek magazine. Earlier, after the Six Day War, Executive Council of the PLO member Zouhair Muhsin said, There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel. The idea of a Palestinian nation has been a device for promoting the incremental war against Israel, appealing to ignorant Westerners and their own cultural ideals of ethnic self-determination or nationhood, concepts alien to traditional Muslim ideas of the ummah, the world-wide community of Muslims united not by blood or nationality but by religion.
This tactic, of course, has been wildly successful, as the continuing duplicitous diplomacy over the two-state solution, and as the latest boycott by American academics show. For the latter, another bit of unexamined received wisdom contributes to their demonization of Israel, and that is the continuing currency of colonialism as a substitute for precise historical thinking. All that your typical American professor knows about colonialism is that it is a bad thing perpetuated by evil r****t white Westerners seeking resources and markets from oppressed peoples of color. That most human communities with the power to do so have invaded and appropriated the lands of resources of others is a fact ignored by those who substitute epithets for thought. Indeed, if colonialism and imperialism are such serious evils, then Arab Muslims would head the list of malefactors, as their historical record of invasion, exploitation, and occupation from Spain to India demonstrates.
But dont confuse professors with facts. They have supped from the poisoned chalice of Edward Saids orientalism. His book of the same name, a work of malignant charlantry, as Robert Irwin calls it, has for 35 years shaped the beliefs of Western academics about the Middle East. As Martin Kramer writes in his analysis of Middle Eastern Studies programs, Said rejected the idea of objective standards, disguised the vice of politicization as the virtue of commitment, and replaced proficiency with ideology. From the Saidian perspective, then, Israel is a neo-colonialist outpost of the West, an agent of exploitation and oppression of the dark-skinned other in contrast to whom the West defines its r****t superiority. Thus every European, Said alleged, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a r****t, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric. Given this oppressive prejudice and blindness to historical crimes, the attacks by Middle Eastern Muslims on these imperialist incursions, particularly the state of Israel, is perfectly justified resistance not to be judged or condemned.
In Saids work one finds the foundational gospel of the academic cult of cultural and intellectual relativism incoherently married to bigoted hatred of the West, the moral and historical idiocy on display in the ASAs boycott and the hatred of Israel, the only liberal democracy in the region filled with illiberal regimes that scorn the human rights that spoiled American professors claim to uphold. Such political antics and the moral idiocy behind them are just one more symptom of the deep-seated rot undermining American universities.
December 24, 2013 by Bruce Thornton
American_Studies_Association_1A province of the academic Lilliput called the American Studies Association has v**ed to boycott Israeli academics because of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the systematic discrimination against Palestinians. The well-earned criticism of this v**e is probably the most attention this organization has ever received outside the parochial precincts of the American university, where conferences of like-mindedness pedants regularly gather together to read papers to each other and ritualistically affirm their fossilized political and intellectual orthodoxy. Indeed, what this v**e tells us about the corruption of American higher education is more worthy of comment than its impact on Israels intellectual life, considering that American Studies is a political rather than a scholarly enterprise unlikely to concern genuine Israeli scholars. Martin Kramers response gets it just about right: Boycott me, please.
The first thing revealed by this v**e is the massive ignorance of history, including current events, that permeates American universities. Most obvious is the rote repetition of the phrase Israeli occupation of Palestine. This phrase is historically meaningless. There is no occupation in legal terms, because there has never existed a country to be occupied. The territory under question last existed formally as a province of the Ottoman Empire, which has long settled into the dustbin of history because it miscalculated badly and allied with the Central Powers in World War I. The legal disposition, through a U.N. resolution, of this territory by the mandatory powers that replaced the Ottomans after World War I was rejected and violently contested by the Arab nations that attacked Israel in 1948.
Until 1967, this territory was controlled by Jordan, whose annexation of it was never recognized internationally. It came under control of Israel as a result of the defensive Six Day War. Without that event, it is likely that despite international disapproval, the territory would have in time become part of Jordan according to the ancient wisdom that possession is nine-tenths of the law. After all, who boycotts China over its absorption of Tibet? If after their victory in 1967 Israel had behaved as most states do in such circumstances, she would have annexed the territory that by the legitimacy of history is part of Israel, and that was fairly won on the battlefield. And again following the usual practice of most states, Israel then would have expelled all the Arabs. This historically has been the common practice that no one other than the losers complained about after other wars. One and a half million Greeks, for example, were booted out of Muslim Turkey in 1923, from lands their ancestors had inhabited for nearly 3 thousand years, while half a million Muslims, descendants of invaders or Christians converted under the shadow of the sword, were sent to Turkey. Or consider the 12 million Germans kicked out of Eastern Europe after World War II. Thats what happens when a people start a war and lose.
And dont forget, the Arabs living in the ancient Jewish lands of Judea and Samaria are the descendants of conquerors and occupiers, or recent immigrants drawn by the economic development by Jewish settlers. By any measure of historical justice or coherent thinking, what the historically challenged now call the occupied West Bank would have become part of Israel. The only accurate description of this territory is disputed, its final disposition dependent on successful negotiations that the so-called Palestinians have never engaged in sincerely, since their ultimate goal is not their own state but the destruction of Israel. And apparently the ASA agrees with that aim, as it refers not to the occupation of the West Bank, but of Palestine, which the Arabs consider encompasses all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
The same incoherence is evident in the phrase discrimination against Palestinians. There is no such thing as Palestinians. Palestine was the name given to Judea by the Romans after the destruction of the country in 136 A.D., an act of damnatio memoriae by which the Romans attempted to obliterate any trace of the existence of an enemy. Thus they renamed the country after the Philistines, a people that in effect no longer existed. Later Palestine was an administrative unit of the Ottoman Empire, and Palestinian denoted anyone living there, including Jews, just as today Californian does not refer to a distinct national or ethnic group but to anyone living in California. The Arabs today called Palestinians are not significantly different ethnically, linguistically, or culturally from the Arabs living in Jordan, Lebanon, or Syria.
If you have any doubt, listen to Farouk Kaddoumi, head of the PLO Political Department in 1977. Jordanians and Palestinians are considered by the PLO as one people, he told Newsweek magazine. Earlier, after the Six Day War, Executive Council of the PLO member Zouhair Muhsin said, There are no differences between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. We are all part of one nation. It is only for political reasons that we carefully underline our Palestinian identity Yes, the existence of a separate Palestinian identity serves only tactical purposes. The founding of a Palestinian state is a new tool in the continuing battle against Israel. The idea of a Palestinian nation has been a device for promoting the incremental war against Israel, appealing to ignorant Westerners and their own cultural ideals of ethnic self-determination or nationhood, concepts alien to traditional Muslim ideas of the ummah, the world-wide community of Muslims united not by blood or nationality but by religion.
This tactic, of course, has been wildly successful, as the continuing duplicitous diplomacy over the two-state solution, and as the latest boycott by American academics show. For the latter, another bit of unexamined received wisdom contributes to their demonization of Israel, and that is the continuing currency of colonialism as a substitute for precise historical thinking. All that your typical American professor knows about colonialism is that it is a bad thing perpetuated by evil r****t white Westerners seeking resources and markets from oppressed peoples of color. That most human communities with the power to do so have invaded and appropriated the lands of resources of others is a fact ignored by those who substitute epithets for thought. Indeed, if colonialism and imperialism are such serious evils, then Arab Muslims would head the list of malefactors, as their historical record of invasion, exploitation, and occupation from Spain to India demonstrates.
But dont confuse professors with facts. They have supped from the poisoned chalice of Edward Saids orientalism. His book of the same name, a work of malignant charlantry, as Robert Irwin calls it, has for 35 years shaped the beliefs of Western academics about the Middle East. As Martin Kramer writes in his analysis of Middle Eastern Studies programs, Said rejected the idea of objective standards, disguised the vice of politicization as the virtue of commitment, and replaced proficiency with ideology. From the Saidian perspective, then, Israel is a neo-colonialist outpost of the West, an agent of exploitation and oppression of the dark-skinned other in contrast to whom the West defines its r****t superiority. Thus every European, Said alleged, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a r****t, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric. Given this oppressive prejudice and blindness to historical crimes, the attacks by Middle Eastern Muslims on these imperialist incursions, particularly the state of Israel, is perfectly justified resistance not to be judged or condemned.
In Saids work one finds the foundational gospel of the academic cult of cultural and intellectual relativism incoherently married to bigoted hatred of the West, the moral and historical idiocy on display in the ASAs boycott and the hatred of Israel, the only liberal democracy in the region filled with illiberal regimes that scorn the human rights that spoiled American professors claim to uphold. Such political antics and the moral idiocy behind them are just one more symptom of the deep-seated rot undermining American universities.
Dec 25, 2013 12:35:07 #
I wonder if Bruce Thornton is just caught up in semantics. You have to call the people who lived there something and they recognize the name Palestinian. The people that emigrated there from Europe the past century should be able to stay but the land needs to be shared equally.
Here's an interesting website from an Israeli general's son that tells of the actual modern Israeli history and his dream of the Levant becoming a secular democracy. It's quite a shock to read events opposite of what Israel teaches it's children in history class.
http://mikopeled.com/
Here's an interesting website from an Israeli general's son that tells of the actual modern Israeli history and his dream of the Levant becoming a secular democracy. It's quite a shock to read events opposite of what Israel teaches it's children in history class.
http://mikopeled.com/
ldsuttonjr wrote:
Israel and the Moral Midgets of American Academe b... (show quote)
Dec 26, 2013 11:17:47 #
UncleJesse wrote:
I wonder if Bruce Thornton is just caught up in se... (show quote)
Miko Peled is a progressive, a socialist, and he is just plain wrong...just like the socialists in this country. There was NO Palestine! There was NO Palestinians...they're made up! Israel has lived among the Arabs in the region for 3700 years! The entire middle East and Northern Africa were controlled by the Ottoman Empire (Turks) for over 400 years, up to WWI. Upon their defeat in WWI, the land was divided up. The area the British inherited was labeled the Palestine Mandate. Israel was promised a vast chunk of this Palestine Mandate, but Churchill in 1922 gave 80% of that land to the King of Jordan, which is now Jordan. Now, if the Arabs were worried about having their own country, Jordan would have been it. But, no it was their overwhelming hatred of the Jews in which they wanted to annihilate. Then, if that wasn't enough the remaining 20% was divided into two parts, one part to become Israel and the other part for the Arabs. Later, Jordan would annex the West Bank, and Egypt the Gaza Strip. Israel was left with the most uninhabitable portion of the land, 60% was desert. Israel made the desert bloom, made it into farm land. They offered to teach the Arabs how to successfully farm the desert, and they refused. During the several wars that Israel has fought with the Arabs, the Arabs have accused Israel of driving out the Arabs...it's untrue. It was the Arab leaders who told their people to live. The one million that remained, Israel welcomed them with open arms...many serve in Parliament today.
This Miko Peled, and the rest of the progressives (nothing but socialists) can distort history all they want, but that is just what it is...distorted history.
Why do I know this? I worked as a contractor for David Horowitz in making seven short videos on what really happened in the Middle east, and about radical Islam. And, the actual t***h is nothing what the LSM wants you to believe.
Dec 26, 2013 13:17:07 #
Hey OldSchool!
It sounds like Solomon and the baby. Horowitz says split it in half with religious states but Peled says keep it whole as a secular democracy. This point plus the fact that Peled has his Mother's and others testimony seems to give him a lot of credit in my book. I like the point he makes that most of the emigrants who are supposedly Jewish descent don't even look middle-eastern/Mediterranean anymore since it's been 2,000 years. Their skin is pale and they have completely different traditions. I think he has a point that if a history was rewritten, it was by the conquerors, not the conquered. I think it would be good to keep Israel as-is but wrap it into a United States of Levant with other Palestinian states Gaza (Philistine), West Bank and East Jerusalem.
It sounds like Solomon and the baby. Horowitz says split it in half with religious states but Peled says keep it whole as a secular democracy. This point plus the fact that Peled has his Mother's and others testimony seems to give him a lot of credit in my book. I like the point he makes that most of the emigrants who are supposedly Jewish descent don't even look middle-eastern/Mediterranean anymore since it's been 2,000 years. Their skin is pale and they have completely different traditions. I think he has a point that if a history was rewritten, it was by the conquerors, not the conquered. I think it would be good to keep Israel as-is but wrap it into a United States of Levant with other Palestinian states Gaza (Philistine), West Bank and East Jerusalem.
OldSchool wrote:
Miko Peled is a progressive, a socialist, and he i... (show quote)
Dec 26, 2013 14:05:24 #
jonhatfield
Loc: Green Bay, WI
A most interesting set of posts with details that correspond to reality (new in OPP posts from OldS!). I personally like and I think much of the moderate Muslim world accepts the idea of Israeli and Palestinian separate statehood, just that thte extremists have the emotional talking points that stalemate implementation--virtual same extremisms in misrepresentation story lines that paralyze our own political situation. Take note of the parallel and your part in it, Geezer.
Dec 26, 2013 14:05:44 #
Correct me if I am wrong you theologians out there but aren't the present day Palestinians decendents of the ancient Philistines who King David defeated(Goliath when David was a boy) in battle many times. When Moses brought the Hebrew people out of Egypt and to the promised land(original promise to Abraham), lands east and west of the Jordan river were broken up and portions given to each tribe of Israel(except the Levites). This is land given to them by GOD Almighty himself. So if the Palestinians want to get mad at someone, get mad at GOD not the people of Israel.
Dec 26, 2013 15:12:09 #
Unfortunately, Muslims don't believe that story. They see the story as written by men, not by God. They also point to the fact that there is no supporting archeological data to support that David ever existed. There is nothing to support Moses either. There are no relics or artifacts from archeological expeditions of people roaming the desert for 40 years. Muslims have their own belief and if you are going to use religious beliefs for international law, you will run into problems. Besides, even if Muslims did believe it they would argue that God took it back from Israelis and that is why there was the diaspora. God did not come down and anoint anyone in 1948 to give the land to anyone rather, it was the age-old strategy of military power. This Israeli General's son is really practical and does not use the traditional views that you normally see from an Israeli citizen:
http://mikopeled.com/
http://mikopeled.com/
SeniorVerdad wrote:
Correct me if I am wrong you theologians out there... (show quote)
Dec 27, 2013 12:42:00 #
I'll have to ask some Muslims I know about the Moses question and about David. Get back to you all on this.
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