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How Liberals Arrive at “We Are Hamas”
By Josh Strawn / January 8, 2009
"WE ARE HAMAS," said protestors in London on January 3rd. Welcome to 2009, and to the thoroughly postmodern, ahistorical, depoliticized, world in which we live. And if the reader will kindly forgive the initial barrage of academic terms, and come with me on a short journey, I’ll explain why, for this avidly pro-Palestinian author and activist, spectacles like the one in the UK are both disheartening with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict but also in terms of the wider culture we live in…
First, some definitions: 
POSTMODERN. A term often deployed unspecifically, and just as often misunderstood by its adherents as by the layman. Postmodernism was a fad in philosophy that took root roughly in the 1970s. I know what some of you are thinking–philosophy is an ivory tower sort of thing that doesn’t connect to the real world, so blaming some European intellectuals from a few decades ago for anything that’s wrong in the world is nonsense. Except that philosophy pervades every corner of your thought. Just about all of us have willingly or unwillingly adopted certain philosophical ideas put forth by men from Socrates to Hegel, whether we know it or not. Ideas matter because they effect how we think. So when a group of thinkers came along and injected a dogma of anti-Western, anti-rational, relativism into the philosophy scene and it caught hold, what was in the ivory tower was sure to trickle down. These days the average person experiences trickle-down postmodernism in several ways, but firstly as a vague but palpable lack of conviction. They are hesitant to make claims about the truth on their own and if they choose to do so, experience either a deep sense of guilt, criticism from their peers, or both. This is because we are taught that our rationality, our fundamental means of knowing and solving problems–especially if it is Western–is at best flawed and at worst nothing more than a manifestation of our imperialist male-dominated past. The average person now associates judgment about the truth of the world with arrogance. I’ve got my truth, you’ve got yours, let’s not fight. Stop being judgmental. That would be the mantra, and it’s one of the most widely accepted perversions of liberalism that exists. But then again, liberalism is one of those racist, sexist things that postmoderns taught us to think derisively of. The irony is that postmodernism, while it is officially a war against dogmas, actually produces several of its own. The anti-dogmatists are, as a rule, dogmatically anti-Western. They are skeptical of any truth claim if it originates from classical rationality rather than from a person of non-Western cultural persuasion. And since just about all of the postmoderns were also self-styled leftists, the "left" now takes it’s truth a la carte, from the array of non-Western opinion. AHISTORICAL. Just what it sounds like. Postmodernism helped speed this along, as it rejected "master narratives" of history. But nobody needed Lyotard to see that as public education degenerated, and as our technological economy began rewarding those who knew how to deal with the rootless present as opposed to the rooted past, the discipline of learning any narrative of history would give way to the ability to make a Facebook profile, program your iPhone, or build a website. The Internet is immaterial, whereas history is quite material. DEPOLITICIZED. It used to be that politics was a set of values and convictions for which one fought both in the realm of ideas and in the harsher realities of the political universe. In the West, however, where we have made our politics a mere matter of purchase power ("I shop at Bath & Body Works because they donate money to the Third World") and identity adornments, politics has virtually ceased to exist. Even Barack Obama’s victory must be attributed in part to his prodigious ability to understand this new world (which was in no small part what recommended him for the job). Politics is today a brand, not a practice. It’s something you wear, something you use to designate yourself socially and culturally. For most, it’s not the art of the possible, even if they are marching in the streets. After all, that’d take vision and conviction, which they’ve forfeited, to be respectful of everyone else’s truth. Which leads us, finally, back to the protests in London over the attacks in Gaza. How come, despite the fact that Hamas openly states its violent, intolerant, anti-Semitic, theocratic values, and despite having seen its brutal ways of doing business, can a mob of (mostly) well-meaning British liberals take to the streets and declare their solidarity? It isn’t (with the exception of George Galloway) because they are actual sympathizers with Islamist killers. How is it that those concerned with social justice could possibly contort their values so that a slogan like this can cross their lips? Because that’s what happens when you perpetually doubt your own sense of truth and instead subscribe almost unconditionally to what the non-Westerner says about "their truth." It’s what happens when you’ve accepted the notion that your rationality both comes from an evil place and is capable only of yielding evil conclusions. It’s what happens when you’ve spent more hours making pop hits, riding your white horse into Studio 54, programming your iPod, designing and navigating websites in cyberspace than you’ve spent reading up on the history of the conflict. A few snippets of grotesque propaganda and a dash of worldview confirmation will do. At that point, you’ve got your marching orders. You are, after all, a person who cares about the world and about the oppressed. In order to express this, you will, like a consumer, seek out the brand that seems, in your feeble estimation, to demarcate that identity. Non-Western? Check. Claims to operate on a different regime of truth? Appears anti-imperialist? Check. Draw up the banner: WE ARE HAMAS. After all, who would you be, beneficiary of the Western empire, to quarrel with those who suffer at the hands of the oppression your flag helped create and perpetuate? Dare you call into question how many Palestinians have suffered at the hands of Arab oppressors like, say, the Jordanian kings who let starve and actively annihiliated thousands of Palestinian refugees? Is it really your place, considering how brutal IDF tactics have been in the past, to entertain the notion that Hamas might be sending Palestinians to slaughter in order to obtain electoral and P.R. victories? Or would you rather simply assert, out of guilt for past sins or out of rightful revulsion at seeing images of dead Palestinian children, that whoever is against England, the U.S. and Israel is your friend? You’re unlikely to lose any sleep over declaring solidarity with Hamas, since you don’t believe it’s your place to question the legitimacy of their political goals. You’ve got your truth, they’ve got their truth, and never the twain shall meet, much less conflict. But this was never a principle that liberals or leftists believed in until recently. Before postmodernism, the idea of the freedom of ideas and humanistic progress not merely allowed for, it required the intermingling of cultures and ideas, and the measuring of truths in a rigorous debate. The goal was to eliminate the bad ideas and keep the good. Before the banishing of truth into culturally specific enclaves, and before the death of history, the left was working toward creating a better material world. Today, under the guise of being more accepting, it has let bad ideas not only survive, but has allowed them to thrive and proliferate. With the material world an afterthought in the age of the Internet, George Galloway seems as good a fellow to stand beside as any, just as long as his is a brand that makes you feel good about who you are.
The sad part, though, is that it’s a good thing to want to show solidarity with the oppressed, to want to work towards a world where the crimes of our more ignorant past are corrected. People like me, who are quite convinced that Galloway represents another, far more sinister breed than the well-meaning accidental fascist weekender-type outlined here, are in a difficult position. Criticize Galloway and the protest, and be accused of siding with colonialists, child-murderers and labeled a treacherous bastard. Fail to do so, and fail to defend the right of a liberal democratic state to self-defense and let thrive the growing sector of the left that openly declares support with the radical theocratic right. But would it really be too much to ask for some celebrities of conscience, musicians, movie stars, and leftists to take neither the side of heavy-handed Israeli retaliations, nor the side of terrorists who fire rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas of Southern Israel and use their own people as human shields? What if instead, in a gesture of solidarity, they took the words of a bereaved Palestinian mother whose child had been killed in an Israeli strike as their slogan? She is a female, non-Western victim of both the Israeli occupation as well as the cynical machinations of Islamic imperialists that provoked this conflict. Her cry? "May God exterminate Hamas!" Whether or not one endorses her means, this formulation captures perfectly a real vision for a political project worth undertaking. You needn’t endorse Israel’s means of accomplishing that task either, but at the very least it is the ultimate statement of solidarity with Palestinian victims of this war. A fairly potent means of examining and critiquing the postcolonial West might involve asking the following simple, jargonless question: How can a woman who lives this war and has lost her own flesh and blood to an Israeli strike be able to distinguish the guilty party even through a haze of grief that few of us can imagine, while those in the West march in support of the party that she knows brought about the death of her child?
POST A COMMENT
lbjackoff:
You demonstrate the vacuity of your "positions" by substituting insult for argument. You’re quite fortunate you are not within physical reach because I could easily demonstrate the correct response to your abuse.
I will leave this thread by pointing out (as Ismail already has) that you (or Brian for that matter) have not answered a single one of my substantive points, nor challenged any of the facts or references I presented. The implication is clear: you (and Brian) don’t have any answers so you have to resort to grade school tactics.
Farewell – oh wait, I forgot something: …and the horse you rode in on.
So well-meaning, but ultimately intellectually lazy people who subscribe to the trappings of leftist ideas are exploited by purveyors of sinister agendas like Hamas, which offers proof that leftists are enablers of horrific anti-semitism. And if only these post-modernists would get their heads out of the clouds, they might realize that they are gravitating toward a narrative of victimhood and away from a respect for the rigors of thought and deed that are the true narrative of Israeli statecraft and Palestinian self-destructiveness.
OK, so despite the rhetorical replay of the scene in Back to the Future where Marty McFly starts playing a Chuck Berry song but gets so caught up in his own playing that he abandons the song to blow a few Van Halen chops, I’d like to return to the initial premise, because Mr. Strawn makes a nice, rotatable point:
For all of the aseninity of seeing an alliance of hippy & Hamas, are we to believe that "conservative" thought is devoid of trappings? Certainly in a thread that invites such a circle jerk of erudition, we can’t be expected to believe that the most scholarly posters among us have developed their biases from facts and only facts.
To put it another way, a well-informed and strongly defensible position can still be quite, quite wrong. Scoff away, Kahaneboy!
Like all bullies, lbjack pays not a jot of attention to the specifics of aherodias’ and jer’s arguments, doesn’t even pretend to engage their substantive points, but instead undescores with every syllable the low, sloping nature of that bit of skull above his eyebrow.
He may safely be ignored.
lb…
I’m pretty sure jer wasn’t trying to be condescending. His restatement didn’t come across as pompous to me, for what it’s worth.
lbjack: "Sounds kind of like a restatement of Heisenberg". How the hell should I know if you have any knowledge of the difference between Heisenberg and Godel’s principle/theorem? Your statement sounded like you might not be sure, so I tried to help you out. I’m sorry if it turned out to be unnecessary. But you know what, do feel free to ignore me. I don’t know if I want to talk with someone who can get this worked up over something so minor and and inconsequential.
Correct me if I’m wrong
You’re wrong.
. . . contempt does not constitute argument
In your case, it does.
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I know, but still, people often try and read too much into the surface similarity of the two. I was basically making sure you understand…
Why, you pompous, condescending prick! Once again you demonstrate the difference between intellectual and intelligent. That’s why I ignore you. The foregoing was a lapse. It won’t be repeated.
lbjack:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I naturally assumed that in the following comment, which appears at the end of your post above, you were grouping Strawn with the "Left" that so annoys you (as well as post-modernists, whatever that may mean):
"… at the heart of the Left’s too-clever-by-half polemic, buried inside
its straight-out-of-the-classroom cant, is the base facticity of
terminal anti-Semitism."
If my asumption was off base I will gladly withdraw my statement regarding you, Strawn, and anti-semitism. However, I will offer in my own defense that your use of language is remarkably opaque and very resistant to clear interpretation.
I am curious, however, why you chose to focus on such a trivial point instead of challenging my statements, supported by documented facts, regarding the nature of Israel’s activities; ignoring international law, routinely violating human rights, multiple murders of innocent civilians, and so on.
The facts that I present are pretty much the same ones that Chomsky uses in his analysis of the Israel-Palestine "conflict." (I use quotes to ounderscore that Israel does not engage in wars or conflicts but rather a full-fledged, long term program of ethnic cleansing.)
Since Chomsky, unlike you, doesn’t pretend to be either a philosopher or a literary critic, your appelations of post-modernist and de-constructonist do not apply to him. If you would take the trouble to read his voluminous work on the media, international relations, imperialism, etc., you would note that he is careful to supply solid references in support of his conclusions.
Listen, lbjack, contempt does not constitute argument, frequent reference to philosopher-icons does not constitute wisdom, and distancing yourself from the hard realities of most human lives cannot help to authenticate your own political views. To my certain knowledge, Chomsky has spent his life working in the service of people, not theories (linguistics excepted, of course).
I recommend that you adopt a similar working principle.
I guess the analogies are very strong and intuitive to me as the inductive process of scientific discovery depends on it. For whatever reason that we propose an explanation for something, that something, that observation, is taken as a(n unprovable) given – for all intents and purposes, an a priori assumption – and then we devise the explanations for it that may be shown to be correct or not based on a deductive design. At that point, the observation receives… ta da! – an explanation and is no longer conferred the status of an unproved, a priori assumption. But as you can see every attempt at scientific discovery proceeds according to a process that mimics his theorem about as closely and powerfully, and regularly as any example one can find for it.
Insofar as mathematics is the language of science, Goedel’s theorem is indispensable to the process of it – even to those who don’t necessarily perceive such a symbolic expression of it.
I know, but still, people often try and read too much into the surface similarity of the two. I was basically making sure you understand that it was not just a restatement of Heisenberg, as it is a)more fundamental, and b)more general.
Isaac: While it’s certainly true that Godel’s theorem applies to the natural sciences, it’s worth being careful: only because Godel’s theorem is about mathematical formalisms, and mathematical formalisms play a role in science is this true. Godel’s theorem is not a statement about the universe; there may be facts about the universe that are analogous to it, but strictly speaking Godel is only talking about systems of logic, and it’s best to keep that straight. I love Hofstatder’s book too, but it’s important to note that when he strays into music, art, and physics, he is speaking metaphor. A powerful and beautiful metaphor, to my mind, but metaphor none the less; Godel’s theorem has nothing to say about Bach, but we can say similar things about the theorem and Bach.
Also worth noting is that many physicists believe quantum mechanics, and Heisenberg’s principle, lie somewhere in between logic and physics: they view it sort of as an operating system for the universe, a set of rules by which any empirical phenomena must play.
Didn’t mean he was talking about physics, just that the Incompleteness and Uncertainty principles are different inflections of the same geist.
For a better example, try a biological system, or something with the capacity to change from within.
Wow, was gonna say something about that but cut it for the sake of brevity. To wit:
Kierkegaard spent his life railing against Hegel over "system". He was rebelling against the excitement over the discovery of the mechanical universe. He was saying, "Wait, maybe you can talk about machines that way, but not human beings." He said that authenticity, existence, is inderlighed. It’s a Danish word that’s hard to translate, but your "biological system with the capacity to change from within" expresses it beautifully.
???? ???
Until scientists achieve their holy grail of a "theory of everything" or the accompanying point of knowledge known as consilience, then I’m pretty comfortable saying that Goedel’s theorem is alive and well and applies, as a given, to as many aspects of the material universe as there are branches of science to empirically understand it. This will continue until everything is known and the endeavor of science, therefore, ceases to exist. At that point it is no less certain that there won’t be things that have to be accepted a priori, but it is most likely that those things will be relegated to, first, a spiritual realm, and later, to a realm best described by psychology and related models of inquiry. You are of course right, jer, to separate out Heisenberg’s finding as something that relates to empiricism itself however and not necessarily to an abstract description of the principles that govern the (known) universe in a broader sense.
Wow, that’s some fancy typing on my part there. Of course, "accuract" should be "accuracy", and "it most encompass…" should properly be "it must encompass…"
Godel is referring to systems of logic: symbols and rules for manipulating those symbols. By "consistent" means that by following the rules for manipulating systems, you will never get a contradiction (of course, you have to define what it means for two sets of symbols to be contradictory, but given that the systems in discussion usually have a "not" operator, it basically means that you can never produce both "x" and "not x" by strictly following the rules from pre-approved axioms).
What Godel proved is that any such system, so long as it achieves a certain level of complexity, will always be able to yield statements such as "this proposition cannot be proven in formal system X", so if the statement is true, it cannot be proven (this is what is meant by "incomplete": there are true statements that the formal system cannot prove), and if it is false, then the statement can be proven, and so your formal system can prove untrue things as well as true things.
Basically, it’s a proof that no formal logical system can have prove every true fact that can be formulated in terms of that system without sacrificing its accuract: either there are truths it can’t get to, or it can get to all truths, but it most encompass some falsehoods as well.
While certainly there are similarities to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the latter is an empirical fact about the world, while the former is a statement about logic. One can conceive of a world without uncertainty, but it’s more or less impossible for anyone with a functioning human brain to imagine what a world where Godel’s theorem doesn’t apply would look like.
"Without rigor there’s no scholarship."
Chomsky, to my knowledge, is not a recognized expert (in either a vocational or recreational capacity) in anything other than linguistics – a field to which he contributed a single pathbreaking, if banal, insight years ago and has been remarkably, and markedly, less relevant to ever since.
I think the term I came upon upstream, "conceptual imprecision", should strike one as a sound way to describe what makes the end product of his extracurriculars so useless to so many. I challenge Ismail to defy it.
Aherodias: Where in my post do you I accuse Strawn of anti-Semitism? I did notice his "avidly pro-Palestinian" avowal, but resisted the temptation to go off on a tangent, instead focusing on, as I see it, our shared scorn for postmodernists and their spawn.
Are: As you can see, my rogues gallery isn’t restricted to postmodernists. Though my inclusion of Chomsky may be a bit facile, he is a linguist (read professional pedant) and certainly rates inclusion in the list of hucksters who use their academic creds to peddle their crackpot politics to callow, effete intellectual wannabes.
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As someone with a science background that I’d characterize as “strong”, the thematic similarity isn’t lost on me. Nor was its potential to apply to any number of other fields, as Hofstadter’s enchanting work on it (for which he won a Pulitzer) reveals.
“I mean, saying “inconsistent system” is a bit like saying kosher ham.”
Ha! You must be an engineer, man. For a better example, try a biological system, or something with the capacity to change from within.
You mean lack of rigor? Without rigor there’s no scholarship. As mentioned, this guy uses his academic cred, which presumes rigor, to peddle his signally unrigorous, i.e. flaky, socio-political notions. Which says something about the critical faculties of his fans.
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if I may…
I think what bothers me most about him is his willingness to make such liberal use of concepts so broad and poorly defined that they make everything he says meaningless. When someone like Chomsky expounds on topics such as "power" with a moralizing tone that he takes for granted, he is obligated to construct objective and detailed descriptions of his reference points that comport with a real-world understanding of what power is. Perhaps he has done such things. Perhaps he has done the same thing with caveats to power that he uses to "justify" its possession. If that is the case, however, I’d be surprised. Nothing I’ve read of his seems to do that.
So the case with Chomsky is one of conceptual imprecision, which is something I’m surprised that others - especially those who obsessively aim for a Teutonic sense of command of the English language - hadn’t either conceded or even picked up on.
And one final point. As anyone who has ever taken a statistics course knows, there is a vast ocean of difference between accuracy and precision. Usually the former is at least as important as the latter.
Hey, Isaac . . .
If the system is consistent, it cannot be complete. (c.1931)
Sounds kind of like a restatement of Heisenberg. (c. 1927)
Also sounds like what they say about Woodstock: If you remember it, you weren’t there.
Far be it from me to argue with the great man (Godel), but seems to me that consistency is part of the defnition of system. I mean, saying "inconsistent system" is a bit like saying kosher ham.
???? ???
"I will raise him and declare that the semantic precision and lucidity of one’s prose mirrors the rigor of one’s thought."
I will raise you one more and plunk your antics, namely those which aim to reduce one’s use of the English language to a product of German engineering, squarely into the penalty box defined by Kurt Goedel’s Incompleteness Theorem. To wit:
If the system is consistent, it cannot be complete.
As for Chomsky’s ludicrous assumptions regarding power as inherently illegitimate "unless justified" – a caveat so big that one could drive a Mack Truck through it, we can get around to deconstructing the more precise and inherently incomplete statements he has uttered in furthering this view in due time.
"But your schoolboy sniggering about a notion you simply don’t understand makes you look foolish."
Which applies equally to Chomsky, as well as it does to anyone who finds his political views the least bit intellectually defensible.
Chomsky’s willingness to further a view of politics and history that is so far removed from any empirical observation and from reason, makes whatever "philosophy of knowledge" he makes use of so wildly deviant in respect of "respectable Enlightenment notions of what constitutes an adequate argument", that his scribbles should be classified as post-modernist by default. And as far as his novel "libertarian socialism" goes, the fact that such a category never gained any currency in political science (which allows for, ahem, theory) just goes to show how far his entirely theoretical – (I should say hypothetical) - and absurdly attempted neologisms are from resembling anything relevant to conventional philosophy, let alone reality. And by even attempting a defense of liberty while confusing it with an economic system ("coercive powers…now concentrated in the hands of capitalists") Ismail reveals himself to be as blinkered as Chomsky, his professed capacity for distinguishing between such things notwithstanding.
While exercising impeccably precise syntax, the grammarian is no thinker. This is just as well, as the engineer is no architect or designer, the composer is no performance artist, and the linguist is no philosopher. Of course, it’s possible to find specimens who excel at both the execution of a field of human endeavor (or two) and the creativity required to make their contributions to it evidence of a brilliant breakthrough. But unfortunately, with both Chomsky and his defender Ismail, we find that the more common scenario involves one who mistakes his own talents with those required by completely different modes of inquiry and activity. It’s therefore not surprising that they both conflate form with function. In fact, it suits their purposes to do so.
Perhaps so, but Hofstadter’s extrapolation of Godel’s idea is an illustrative and useful one.
I know this discussion is dying, but Godel’s claim applies only to formal languages, and then, only to certain classes. Incompleteness does not come close to applying to English, even if the standards of lucidity and semantic precision are met.
I doubt this thread will be shut down…
How about "If it looks like BS, smells like BS, and reads like BS, it’s probably BS"?
BS is not good for persons with colic.
My objections to Chomsky are nearly entirely with respect to his own rigor, or lack thereof. Less specifically, they take issue with his lack of empirical validation – he seems to have no use for it. This allows for a very wide proving ground. I feel pretty assured that you can pick any specific claim of his, at your leisure, and I will shred it on methodological grounds alone.
But this is getting us too far afield from the topic. My feel is that what the moderators object to is a lack of relevance combined with a lack of civility. I’ll redirect enough to quickly acknowledge that you likely know more of abstract philosophy than me (although I reject your assertion that I lack a solid understanding of Godel), and will acquiesce to acknowledging the strength of any defense of Chomsky in this regard that does in fact meet a burden that I believe I’m making quite clear and fair. But don’t assume that my objections to him are primarily grounded in ideology. I’m much more heterodox than you assume, and rue the fact that you don’t seem to have realized this by now.
You understand Godel no better than you do Chomsky, but this has gotten far afield from Strawn’s original remarks.
Until such time as this conversation is shut down at Weiss’ caprice, I’d suggest that you describe one or two specific claims of C’s that you say fail to proceed from normal methods of validation; that is, which employ an epistemology wildly at odds with conventional ones.
Remember, you are making a methodological claim, so I don’t need to know about your ideological disagreements, which I’m sure are legion. Without specifics, your philosophical claims against C are little bouts of colic, lacking substance and allowing no rebuttal.
That is, put up or shut up.
"Whether what Chomsky dabbles in could properly be called "post-modernism" is for others to debate. "
Only if the "others" you’re talking about are enrolled in pre-school or are otherwise as appallingly ignorant of these matters as you and Mr. Jack are. There is simply no debate about this at all. As Jer, who is far more polite and tolerant than I could ever hope to be, has suggested, Chomsky (and Finkelstein and similar betes noires of Zio-apologists) could not be further from post-modernism as a philosophy of knowledge. Feet firmly planted in respectable Enlightenment notions of what constitutes an adequate argument, untroubled by the pomo assault on the grounding of knowledge, these cats are epistemologically much closer to Hume than they are to Foucault. But I forget that, to overreaching types like Isaac, "postmodern" is basically a smartypants way to say, "I don’t like it"
Regarding, "If it isn’t enough to say that a guy who finds power to be an inherently illegitimate concept is full of nonsense, (to say nothing of the fact that he describes himself as a "libertarian socialist")…"
Of course, being a speaker of English, Chomsky has never and would never declare that "power is an illegitimate concept"-nor would anyone with a reasonable ear for meaning. Isaac probably means to reference Chomsky’s critique of state power or capitalist power or similar, but we may safely assume that anyone who expresses himself so sloppily has nothing interesting to say about the ideas of such an eminence as Chomsky. (The latter believes that the syntactic structure of human language reveals the structure of the mind itself. I will raise him and declare that the semantic precision and lucidity of one’s prose mirrors the rigor of one’s thought.)
And while "libertarian socialist" raises a guffaw from our blinkered friend, those less innocent of Chomsky’s actual writings will know that this formulation expresses Chomsky’s devotion to liberty as well as his concern that the coercive powers formerly monopolized by the monarchy and then the state are now concentrated in the hands of capitalists. Because the term "anarchist" allows multiple meanings, C prefers the more precise "libertarian socialist". (You may find, with little effort, a comment of Bakunin’s, which similarly insists on both socialism and liberty; something like "freedom without socialism produces injustice, socialism without freedom produces slavery"-but Bakunin said it better.)
Now you may perfectly well argue that C is wrong about this, that, e.g., capitalism actually produces a more flawless social freedom than socialism would, or that humanity flourishes under constraint. But your schoolboy sniggering about a notion you simply don’t understand makes you look foolish.
Tomorrow, Tuesday, January 13, 2009 at 5:30 pm, please attend a candlelight vigil at the U.S. Mission to the UN, 140 East 45th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue. Please light a candle for peace and non-violence in Gaza at an interfaith ceremony in support of Israeli and Palestinian pacifists. Sponsored by Peace Action NY, World Without War, United for Peace and Justice/NY, Code Pink NYC, The American Friends Service Committee and The Center for Cultures.
It just has to stop. Has to stop. Stop. It doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong anymore. Stop it. All of it–the killing, the violence, the destruction, the despair, the crippling, the maiming, the joylessnous, the crying, the hatred, the preujdice, the propoganda, the irrationality, the grief, the misery, the hurt, the wounding, the thieving, the lack of fairplay, the inability to get along, the stealing of the birthright, the torture, the mass incarcerations, the agony, the demonizing, the dehumanizing, the species and planetary suicide, the murders, the rapes, the assaults, the beatings, the starving, the stealing of water, the ignorance, the bombs, the missiles, the bullets, the stones, the bottles, the grenades, the fists, the fingernails, the bunkers, the blackouts, the nukes, the agony, the endless pain, the burns, the blindness, the paralysis, the amputations, the beheadings, the tasers, the knives in the back, the knives in the front, the shot to the head, the cannibalizing, the assasinations, the killing fields, the concentration camps, the detention centers, the black holes, the fully-equipped, state-of-the-art torture chambers, the horror show that has been playing every day of my life on this planet that was supposed to be an Eden, and still could be an Eden. Let me spell it for you. I want E..D..e..n.
I want love. I want peace. I want justice. I want liberty. I want healing. I want friendship. I want kindness. I want gentleness. I want singing, dancing, lovemaking, sharing, caring, touching, talking, whispering, laughing, holding, teaching, learning, growing, making, building, living, giving life, giving birth, honor, respect, appreciation, beauty, bliss, rapture, hopefulness, a reason to go on another day, another hour, another minute, another second.
Alan Sokal, lbjack’s heroic titan waging war against the post-modernists, is just as left wing as Chomsky. In fact, his co-author for one of his anti-post-modernism books is Jean Bricmont, whose views on Israel would probably cause lbjack to go around breaking things for ten minutes. Much of the strongest criticism of post-modernism, at least as a philosophy of science, has been from much farther on the left than post-modernists.
Also, I’d ask all the po-mo bashers to heed (a modified) Sturgeon’s law: ninety percent of post-modernism is crap, true. But ninety percent of everything is crap.
It’s easy to assume that Chomsky’s willingness to disassociate himself from postmodernism is a sufficiently effective repudiation. And then, of course, we have every one of his political screeds, upon which he’s built his own infamous kingdom of credibility with the cool college campus kidz and their hippie-dippy dads – a collective for whom the idea of protest is as much a part of their lifestyle as is the reality of their need to frequent the local Starbucks. From these we are apparently to assume that his works have any more intellectual respectability than the same postmodernism he describes thus:
Whether what Chomsky dabbles in could properly be called "post-modernism" is for others to debate. But what’s for certain is that it sure as hell isn’t political science. If it isn’t enough to say that a guy who finds power to be an inherently illegitimate concept is full of nonsense, (to say nothing of the fact that he describes himself as a "libertarian socialist"), then pick your descriptor. But to accurately pronounce his extensive extracurricular work as something of a mixture between gobbledy-gook and sophistry is to rightly place it smack dab within the same realm of chicanery and hucksterism into which postmodernism has typically, and usually justifiably, been relegated.
Whatever you call what he traffics in, it’s the same butt of an intellectual joke that postmodernism has largely made of itself.
"I‘m also curious at how Ibjack arrives at the conclusion that Chomsky represents or is in league with Post-Modernists."
As should be clear by now, Mr.Jack is the Sarah Palin of Jewcy. He’s gobbled up an opinion or two from Michelle Malkin or Debbie Schlussel or similar and he regurgitates these uncritically when stimulated. "Post-modern!"-"Chomsky!"-"Rachael Ray and her keffiyeh!". Each of these tropes live side-by-side in his simian paleocortex, equipotential and threatening; a troposphere of terror! (copyright 2009, Ismail, Inc.)
A tip of the hat to Aherodias for bringing some modicum of intellectual/moral honesty to the discussion. Among the rest of the content, I was glad to see someone point out the inappropriateness of referring to the referenced Palestinian mother as "girl." (Accompanied by a caution against "patronizing," no less!)
I’m also curious at how Ibjack arrives at the conclusion that Chomsky represents or is in league with Post-Modernists. Granted, "post modernist" is rarely a title voluntarily assumed but Chomsky has long been quite vocal in his criticisms of "post modern" rumination/meandering. If memory serves, he wrote the foreward to Sokal’s recent Beyond the Hoax.
Wow, that’s a really cogent response. Sokal takes advantage of the trust of a journal’s editorial board and gets some crap published. He, and lbjack, claim on the basis of this one experiment done with no control group or serious methodology, that this is definitive proof that every post-modernist philosopher is a charlatan or an idiot.
I point out that, well, no, Sokal needs to have done a lot more to prove something like that.
lbjack responds not by defending his position, but asserting it again, only louder this time. Ah, the thrill of heady academic discussion.
Any, since I am going to try to argue in good faith, I’ll try and make my point again.
Imagine Stephen Hawking publishes a new book about the universe. And let’s say some major newspaper gets a physicist to review it. Let’s say, in the course of his/her review, the physicist makes a claim about a basic physical fact that every physicist should know. Now, upon reading this review, the newspaper’s editorial board is faced with a few possibilities:
1. The physicist, despite being an eminent physicist, has somehow gotten an elementary fact wront
2. The physicist, who does this stuff for a living, obviously knows his/her physics, and so editors should only pay attention to the quality of the review qua review: it’s grammar, spelling, clarity, etc.
3. The physicist understands perfectly well, but has chosen, for some obscure purpose, to lie in his/her review.
What seems most likely?
To make the point another way, the only way a review process at Social Text would have been looking for the sorts of mistakes Sokal made is if they assumed that submitting authors might intentionally mislead in their submissions. You can argue that Social Text should have made this assumption; that’s certainly not unreasonable. But all you’ve proven then is that Social Text’s editorial process is not rigorous at screening for deliberately misleading assumptions. Not that they’ll happily print any crap about science, only that they’ll trust any professional scientist not to deliberate submit any crap about their subject matter.
Ordinarily I would not take the time to respond to readers who a) do not actually read what I have to say, b) flagrantly misinterpret what I actually did say, and 3) are in such haste to state their own opinions that they cannot take the time to examine the set of facts surrounding their premises.
However, I will make an exception this time only, in the dim hope that perhaps someone’s ears and possibly heart will be opened by my attempt at dialogue.
Shriber, I beg you to listen and to avoid knee-jerk responses, even internally. To begin with, my statement about Ho Chi Minh was intended exactly to suggest that the protesters I observed probably would have been Stalin supporters. Your reply indicates that you did not take the time to read my words in their context. Secondly, for you to say “These people lionized Stalin” is badly mistaken from a historical point of view. Many of the people I referred to, protesting in 1971 for example, had not yet been born when Stalin died. Rather they worshipped Mao – which is another story. I venture that my knowledge of the history of Communism excels yours by many degrees (no pun intended).
You believe that my analysis of the bereaved mother (not girl, as you inappropriately name her) and her cry of despair over Hamas is a “fanciful and wishful interpretation.” On the contrary, since she has been living under Israeli oppression for probably twenty or more years, it is quite reasonable to assume that she shares the views of other Palestinians regarding the State of Israel. That she hates Hamas is no surprise; they are not the sort of people you would want ruling your government, and their recklessness in militarily opposing Israel has no doubt caused more immediate suffering than is necessary. On the other hand, the oppressed always bring vindictive punishment on their heads from the oppressor any time they decide to show resistance. Do you remember the Jews of Warsaw?
She doesn’t like Hamas, you don’t like Hamas, I don’t like Hamas. But do you know the history of the formation and rise of Hamas as a political force in Palestine? It might surprise you to learn that Israel offered them strong support, desiring to create a foil for Fattah, which was making the unfortunate move of actually negotiating for peace. We also know that the Fatah government under Arafat turned out to be quite corrupt, incompetent, and no help in the Palestinian’s struggle for peace and independence, which explains why Hamas became the democratically elected representatives of the Palestinian people in Gaza (although the Israeli government is even lying about that, based on a letter I had from the Prime Minister’s office today).
In any case, you are right that Hamas is not universally popular in Palestine, but I never said or even implied they were.
Does that answer you question?
Your next question was “How do you know the writer is anti-Israel?” Well, Shiber1, had you read his first paragraph you might have noticed that he described himself as “this avidly pro-Palestinian author and activist.” Now, this does NOT mean he is anti-Israel, nor did I imply that. However, that he claims to be pro-Palestinian is unquestionable.
Secondly, you define my statement about “injustices and crimes committed every day by the Israeli government” as propagandistic. Would you like me to back up my propaganda with facts? First, I recommend that you go to the web sites of B’Tselem (you know who they are, an Israeli human rights organization), Human Rights Watch, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Amnesty International, the United Nations, etc. There you will find ample evidence to document that Israel has:
• Killed nearly five times as many Palestinian civilians than the reverse. I am not excusing the killing of Israeli civilians, just pointing out a fact that, in historical context, demonstrates the continual, ongoing nature of Israeli oppression.
• Killed at least nine times the number of Palestinian children, through routine IDF operations, than Palestinians have killed Israeli kids through suicide bombings and rockets.
• Held to this day nearly 11,000 Palestinians in Israeli prisons, while Palestinians (Hamas, to be specific) hold exactly ONE Israeli prisoner. Still, I suppose that one IDF soldier was enough to justify the deaths of thousands of Lebanese citizens?
• Demolished more than 18,000 Palestinians homes since 1967. How many Israeli homes have been destroyed by Palestinians? Bravo if you guessed zero! (Excepting the rare lucky hit by rockets)
• Built 202 settlements and about 100 “outposts” on land illegally confiscated since 1967. How many Palestinian settlements are there in Israel? Bravo again!
• Imported more than 462,000 “settlers” to live on these settlements. I would call them “invaders”, but you know how biased I am. Oh yes, how many Palestinian settlers, etc…
Perhaps this is not in your consciousness, but the Palestinians did not put up any organized resistance (Intifada I) to the military occupation for TWENTY YEARS. During that time, in which thousands of human rights violations were perpetrated by Israel and Palestinians had no civil rights whatever, Israel severely restricted trade with the outside world and through their “checkpoints” frustrated most attempts to leave or enter the Occupied Territories. Twenty years to me shows a lot of restraint.
I certainly agree that “acts of terror against Israeli civilians” are to be condemned as human rights violations, and any nation has the right to try to stop them. But remember, between January 2001, when the rocket fire began, and April 2008 – the latest date for which I have reliable information – a total of 13 Israelis were killed by rocket attacks. In the past two weeks alone, the IDF has killed more than 800 Palestinians, of which more than half were civilians and probably 25 percent were children. Do you want me to post the pictures of the dead babies? Of course not. Only today, the IDF killed 30 civilians who were taking refuge in a residential house in Gaza, and in the past week another 30 or so were killed in United Nations schoolhouses and aid vehicles.
Can you not recognize that Israel’s actions against Palestine have constituted terror for more than twenty years and illegal occupation for more than 40?
Now, to respond briefly to lbjack: You profess to find anti-semitism in Josh Strawn’s piece. My only reply is that your attitude is representative of so many pro-Israelis whose reaction to any criticism of Israeli action, however gentle, is a violent, often hysterical counterattack. The spectre of anti-semitism has long taken the place of reason in Zionist discourse, and it becomes impossible for one to even criticize those “liberals” who adopt Hamas as their pet without being subjected to the old ‘anti-semite” smear.
I’m not labeling you, lbjack, as a Zionist, just noting that the glib use of anti-semitism as an apology for all kinds of violent behavior is typical.
I did read the somewhat vacuous discussion around Jeffrey Goldberg’s letter to an Israeli soldier, and it strikes me that too many pro-Israeli/anti-Palestinians advocates have chosen to ignore a number of important facts.
Of course it is the soldier’s responsibility to avoid harming innocents, as you noted yourself. How is this consistent with the dropping of cluster bombs in a residential neighborhood? Are you aware of the number of the bomblets that were used in the late Lebanon “war”? Millions. How is this consistent with shelling a UN aid truck and killing its driver, when the vehicle was clearly marked and the details of its delivery know to the IDF? How about the killing of 25 or more civilians taking refuge in a UN school, with the Israeli government now claiming that enemy fire was coming from “somewhere nearby”?
The question of “human shields” is another topic that has been manipulated to great advantage by Israeli propaganda. I suppose it’s easy to accuse someone of using human shields when they are operating in one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with no opportunity to go elsewhere. What do we say to the Israeli military command centers in large cities like Tel Aviv? Are they using the local population as shields, knowing full well that Hamas lacks the scruples to pay attention?
By the way, the only authenticated cases in this conflict of the use of human shields were those committed by IDF soldiers. You can refer to reports by B’Tselem and various other human rights groups for this information. And it was not a solitary instance, either.
You speak of the “tragic necessity of war”, on behalf of a country whose military might exceeds that of its adversaries by orders of magnitude, and whose military rule has made the inhabitants of Palestine live in misery for decades. What about the tragic necessity of peace? Israel has had more than 40 years to pursue peace “without remorse” and has somehow failed to acquire the necessary diplomatic skills to achieve that often professed goal. In fact, at every historical opportunity for peace, Israel has somehow managed to find an excuse to make war instead.
I recommend that you read my abbreviated list of offenses above in an attempt to clear the palate of your conscience for a real taste of just and peaceful behavior.
Yeah, yeah, it was all a misunderstanding.
Sokal turned over the wet rock. Now, watch them scurry about. Of course they’re "pissed off" at the lèse majesté of being exposed for what they are – academic charlatans, engaged in an enormous circle jerk, paid for by the taxpayers.
???? ???
I know this isn’t the main point or anything, but it pisses me off when I see people claim that the Sokal hoax proves definitively that post-modernists are "tenured phonies". If the Sokal hoax proved anything, it proved that journal editors are too quick to assume good faith on the part of authors who submit. Sokal was a phycisist submitting a cultural essay to a journal on culture studies. While certainly Social Text should have reviewed the cultural studies component of the essay, it is not equipped to pass judgement on mathematical or physical claims. They were entirely justified in assuming that the physicist would have taken care of his physics, especially since the paper, not trying to prove anything about physics, did not depend on the perfect accuracy of Sokal’s physics claims. For his essay to be meaningful, all that was necessary was for the physics and math to be remotely accurate. And the only reason to assume that a physicist might not even be in the ballpark when making mathematical/physical claims, is if you assume he’s deliberately misleading. Imagine if Einstein had submitted a paper to a philosophy journal about the philosophical implications of relativity. Would you seriously expect the journal to hire a physicist to review Einstein’s (very basic) overview of relativity to make sure it is what he says it is? Hardly. Sokal took advantage of the good faith of journal reviewers, and not much else.
Sorry for the somewhat stream-of-consciousness "narrative" (ugh, there’s that word!). As a synthesis, it will hopefully make sense.
I forget which James said it: The purpose of a college education is more effectively to justify your prejudices.
Shriber, you hit it square, when you say that buried beneath the compost heap of abstruse post-modernist, comp-lit-crit jargon lies the simple fact of anti-Semitism.
_____________
As Weber said, you can’t look at the components of history in isolation. Just as you can’t see the Reformation and the rise of capitalism separately, so you can’t see the degeneration of philosophy, from the dialectic of ideas to the endless parenthesis over words, and the rise of mass media separately.
It’s all about words, because words are the stock-in-trade of mass media, which rules the world. Thus, characters like Russell, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Foucault, Barthes, Chomsky and their fellow brigade of linguistic/analytic, deconstructionist, post-modernist, post-post-modernist nihilists, have achieved totally undeserved cachet. The mischief started with the notion that instead of language serving meaning, it’s the other way around.
Of course, this is great news to media — the primacy of words, as validated and certified by the academy.
Post-modernist. Does anybody recall the Sokal Hoax? It pretty much put paid to the post-modernist claim to be anything more than a home for tenured phonies and a playground for pedants.
Speaking of playground for pedants, let’s look at Wikipedia, the apotheosis of the ahistorical. At Wikipedia, there is no "master narrative" to history. Hey, history, like all knowledge, is what the consensus says it is. Like that AI game 20q, which "learns" by polling the answers.
Synthesis, the product of the dialectic, has been replaced by analysis which, though a neat way to show off one’s cleverness, contributes nothing to the discourse. And let’s face it, showing off is the signal manifestation of this age of narcissism.
And there’s the rub: the current academy’s refusal to take stands. In the grip of the left, the academy is no longer about critical thinking but about making everybody feel good (thus, group studies). Thus, everybody’s right. Moral, i.e., normative statements are meaningless. Why? Because we can all go back to the Euthyphro, to the first post-modernist, Socrates, who proved that all assertions are circular, i.e., that we can deconstruct anything authoritative. Assertion ~ authority ~ power structures ~ et voilà! Post-modernism. Hey, plus ça change…
Speaking of circular, this takes us back to the main point, to wit, that at the heart of the Left’s too-clever-by-half polemic, buried inside its straight-out-of-the-classroom cant, is the base facticity of terminal anti-Semitism.
[Ah, dinner's ready!]
"So while I agree with your mockery of the Hamas identifiers, I would ask why you are expending any energy on them when your audience really needs to hear, from a pro-Palestinian like yourself, about the injustices and crimes committed every day by the Israeli government and the IDF against the Palestinian people."
This is propagandistic.
How do you know the writer is anti-Israel?
And then there is this:
"injustices and crimes committed every day by the Israeli government and the IDF against the Palestinian people."
Do you mean the attempt to stop acts of terror against Israeli civilians and to stop the hurling of rockets into Israeli towns and cities?
How these people reveal themselves.
Julius: “Mind you, I have no quarrels with Mr. Ho personally, but would these people in a somewhat earlier time have lionized Joe Stalin?”
The fact that you can ask such a naïve question shows how little you know of the history of Communism.
Of course, “these people” lionized Stalin. They stood by him when he signed a pact with Hitler in 1939.
I also disagree with your fanciful and wishful interpretation of the girls comment about Hamas. You shouldn’t patronize people you know nothing about.
Had she wanted to condemn Israel she would have done so.
It seemed to me that she was echoing a sentiment she had heard in her home even before the bombing. In spite of the pro Hamas propaganda, Hamas isn’t universally liked among the Palestinian Arabs.
A very good piece, but I would say that you can easily go further back from postmodernism. During the Hitler-Stalin pact, for example, Communists – and the Left in general – tied themselves in even worse intellectual knots in order to make sense of it all.
For a good account of how many ‘ordinary’ demonstrators felt about the Hamas and god stuff, see Sunny Hundai’s Guardian blog -
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/05/israel-palestine-gaza-demo-london
When I say ‘ordinary’ I would include many British Muslims in that category. I live in Glasgow, Scotland, and I know several Muslims, who – while no friends of Israel – are deeply uncomfortable with such rhetoric. I believe this is just as true, if not even more true, of London. Given the number of Muslims that live in London, and that quantities of people were bussed in, well, people better than me at maths and estimates can work out an approximation of the figures, but I think that the demo was not actually that popular or representative.
Thanks for a provocative and insightful piece. Of course there would be no cause for a critique from you if the signs read "We are Gaza" – or would there? The conflation of Hamas with the oppressed Palestinian people reminds me of those who, during the Vietnam war protests, identified with Ho Chi Minh. Mind you, I have no quarrels with Mr. Ho personally, but would these people in a somewhat earlier time have lionized Joe Stalin?
I would like to comment briefly on your closing paragraph, in which you asked "How can a woman who lives this war and has
lost her own flesh and blood to an Israeli strike be able to
distinguish the guilty party even through a haze of grief…?"
My answer is: she can’t. She can easily distinguish the proximal cause of her loss, i.e. the choice of some Hamas "militants" to challenge a hugely superior force with home-made rockets, yielding predictable results of death and dstruction for their own people. However, I would guess that behind her condemnation of Hamas lies an even more wholehearted condemnation of Israel – for their 40-year military occupation, their theft of Palestinian land, destruction of civilian homes, extrajudicial assassinations, a brutal siege causing unimaginable suffering, and so on.
So while I agree with your mockery of the Hamas identifiers, I would ask why you are expending any energy on them when your audience really needs to hear, from a pro-Palestinian like yourself, about the injustices and crimes committed every day by the Israeli government and the IDF against the Palestinian people.
It strikes me that you are are elevating the importance of Hamas nearly as much as the "We are Hamas" folks. I caution you to rethink the situation. Hamas is not the issue. They will pass through the curtain of history, but Israel and its inhuman and racist policies will not until they can be forced to end the occupation.
Respectfully,
Julius
However, there is one motive Josh Srawn leaves out when discussing the identification of some leftist liberals with Hamas: antisemtism.
This is a European hatred which is deeply embedded in the fabric of those societies. It also transcends political and cultural points of view:
There are rightist antisemites, and leftists and yes liberal and socialist ones too.
This is one reason they jumbed on the Hamas bandwagon.
I recommend people read Bernard Henri Levy’s new book "Left in Dark Times: A Stand Against the New Barbarism by Bernard-Henri Levy which among other topics describes the tenacity of Jew hatred in the world over the ages.
"These idiots represent liberals about as much as Anne Coulter represent conservatism. It’s so easy to throw up some radicals in London and imply that they represent liberals everywhere."
Which is precisely why it’s so important to repudiate them. Look at how much damage Coulter and Company did to the right. It was only a matter of time before this led to rabble-rousing nativists voicing threats of harm toward Obama at McCain rallies.
Although Strawn cites events in London, the more we can do to get the left to separate themselves from the politics of these decerebrated European lefties (I disagree that their views are representative of "radicals"), the better. Of course, this being a two-party system, the pressure to tack to the center is omnipresent, and will likely be heeded by Obama. But the Democrats should do more work to better marginalize these types anyway – even within their own party.
Politics, along with everything else, are becoming more globalized. There is a time for co-optation, a time for consigning something to irrelevance or the mere acknowledgment that is afforded to loyal opposition, a time for marginalization and a time for abject repudiation. Palestinian sympathizers can be treated to the first category. Hamas sympathizers, the last. Divide et impera. Well, sorta.
These idiots represent liberals about as much as Anne Coulter represent conservatism. It’s so easy to throw up some radicals in London and imply that they represent liberals everywhere.
"The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism" _Karl Marx 1848
I would also say that Foucault’s bizarre fascination with the Iranian revolution predicted and hastened these types of over-simplified, singular narratives. In many ways I also reject some notions of master-narratives, because they are often faulted, biased, etc…And yet the post-modern critique has come full circle in its inability to understand nuances, specificity and pure-and-simple fascism in any of its forms.
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