RUTHFULLY YOURS

Chicago University Professor David Nirenberg’s 2013 book Anti-Judaism received rapturous reviews from most Jewish media, including by Michael Walzer at New York Review of Books (via Mosaic) and Adam Kirsch at Tablet. My review at First Things was less enthusiastic: Nirenberg, in my view, got lost in the labyrinth of error that arises when secular Jews try to judge religious matters by their own standards. Below is a draft of my review, which is due to come out from behind the paywall at First Things momentarily.

by David Nirenberg

W.W.Norton, 624 pages, $35

David P. Goldman, a former senior editor of First Things, writes the “Spengler” column for Asia Times

World history is the history of Israel, averred Franz Rosenzweig, meaning that the nations of the West so hearkened to the Jewish promise of eternal life that their subsequent history was a response to Israel, whether they emulated or abhorred it. By contrast, . By contrast, David Nirenberg contends that the West has defined itself for two thousand years by its rejection of Israel. . Both cases can be argued. The difference is that Rosenzweig propounded a clear and mainly traditional concept of Judaism, whereas Nirenberg means by “Judaism” whatever he wants it to mean at different points in time. In its better moments Nirenberg’s account of Western anti-Judaism is conventional; in its worse moments it is arbitrary. His aversion to thinking of Judaism in traditional terms gets him into repeated trouble.

Until the nineteenth century, “Judaism” meant the normative tradition embodied in Hebrew Scripture, Talmud, rabbinic responsae, and observances that had remained consistent throughout the two millennia-long Jewish diaspora. The past two hundred years have produced any number of deviant interpretations, none of which has had much staying power. Nirenberg, a professor of history and social thought at the University of Chicago, tells us that he is searching for yet another non-traditional reading: Judaism is not only the religion of specific people with specific beliefs, but also a category, a set of ideas,” he declares. The trouble is that we never are told what this, except ad hoc as the opinion of particular Jews at particular times. Nor is anti-Judaism “simply an attitude toward Jews and their religion, but a way of critically engaging the world.” Neither the Jews nor the anti-Semites have a clear idea of what they are about in his account. Nirenberg’s recourse to the postmodern idea of self-definition via the “Other” does not help, for his protean depictions of Judaism and anti-Judaism chase each other into infinite regress. It recalls Heinrich Heine’s “fog-figures that rise up out of the ground/and dance a misty reel in weird chorus.”

Our hungry, would-be censors are stealing up on Americans under the guise of protecting the public.

Three news items appeared recently, back-to-back, which is too creepily coincidental. And the creepers are wearing squeaky shoes made in George Orwell’s totalitarian state of Oceania, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, so one can hear them make their way to your computer and front door. The coincidence may only be happenstance, but when the subject is calls for censorship, it should trigger alarm bells.

On May 5th, Tim Cushing of TechDirt reported that the federal government is experimenting with mandatory “driver’s licenses” for Internet users in Michigan and Pennsylvania. On May 6th, the Washington Post ran an article in its Religion section by a fellow I’d never heard of before, Omar Sacirbey, who suggested that Sharia gags should be imposed on Internet speech to prevent “hate speech.” And, on May 7th, in a Washington Examiner article, Paul Bedard reported that the chairman of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) warned that the sentiment in the federal government is to classify “conservative” Internet sites and talk shows as Political Action Committees (PACs) and to regulate what they say and perhaps when they say it.

All three articles, of course, simply report the presence of Ninja censors in our midst. Pamela Geller of Atlas Shrugs broke the Sacirbey story that appeared in the Post, but one must read the original story to believe the brazenness of the suggestion. And not be startled by the goofy photograph of Omar Sacirbey, who looks like he’s gritting his teeth in expectation that Geller is about to deliver a roundhouse that will knock him flat on his keester, or posing for a “Big Brother is Watching You” poster. Creepy.

Tim Cushing of TechDirt wrote:

An idea the government has been kicking around since 2011 is finally making its debut. Calling this move ill-timed would be the most gracious way of putting it.

The current extremely successful campaign of aggression by Russia’s dictator-candidate Vladimir Putin illustrates two of the fundamentals of geolitical history:

A demagogue’s capability of achieving remarkable results through bluff.

How history often turns on relatively small margins only later to be disremembered.

Putin, with a home front in near crisis, has nevertheless won an important strategic victory by his covert invasion of the Crimea and wresting it, at least temporarily, from Ukraine. The disarray in Kiev after an unbelievably corrupt regime was dismembered by a popular street revolt has facilitated his pretense of superior power. That a rapidly declining Russian population, beset with all sorts of economic and social ills has embraced his new nationalist fervor, is no surprise. The old bandwagon effect of propaganda is notorious; pace Germany in the Nazi takeover after 1933 when the celebrated “good Germans” were increasingly few and far between – as long as Hitler was winning..

Putin’s victorious march from one propaganda feat to another is occasioned more by the utter collapse of a naïve U.S. policy in regard to Russia. Not least has been Washington’s inability to present a common front with the European Union. It is one of the many contradictions of the current scene that German Chancellor Angela Merkel, presumably the most exposed of the EU’s members to blackmail because of its heavy [one-third] dependence on Russian energy imports, has taken the firmest line, at least publicly. Pres. Obama’s statements, on the other hand, ring hollow as more of past “red lines” which turned out meaningless.

Putin’s success is all the more “illogical” given the fact that he appears to have no ideology – other than a vague wish to return Russia to Soviet and/or Tsarist glory. Yet he dare not maximize that nostalgia given the still unresolved issue of Stalin and his domestic terror within the living memory of at least a few Russians. Nor, one suspects, is he moving systematically from one strategic move to another, but rather improvising tactically as he goes along.

What is clear is that his aim is to reassert Moscow authority over the former “lost” areas of Soviet dominance. Ukraine with its 45 million people, great agricultural resources and ancillary industry to the old Soviet decentralized industrial networks [not the least munitions] is a special prize and first in his agenda That would suggest that rather than proceed with dismembering it – that is, repeating the process of detaching Crimea and linking it to Russia which he might be able to do in Eastern and Southern Ukraine — he may well want a weak and subservient Ukrainian central regime.

http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/05/11/egyptian-pop-star-chaaboula-to-sing-i-hate-israel-at-morocco-world-music-festival-featuring-alicia-keys-justin-timberlake/#

Egyptian singer Shaaban Abdel Rahim, known as Chaaboula, plans to sing I Hate Israel, the infamous song that ended his contract for McDonald’s in 2008, at Morocco’s Mawazine world music festival, which is also featuring international stars Alicia Keys, Justin Timberlake, Ricky Martin and Kool and the Gang.

Egypt’s Youm7 news site reported on Saturday that Rahim said he will open his concert with I Hate Israel.

Arabic entertainment news site FilFan cited Rahim as saying that he’ll be wearing a costume with the colors of the Egyptian flag and will also sing his ode to former Egyptian defense minister and now presidential candidate Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, We Love Sisi.

Rahim was cited by FilFan as saying it’s “an honor for me to be the only Egyptian singer in the festival this year, it is the first time that I have taken part in such a big event.”

The festival, which is expected to draw 2.5 million attendees over nine days and a hundred concerts in Rabat and suburb Salé, is considered to be one of the largest music festivals in the world.

According to the festival organizers, Rahim worked in a laundry mat where he sang to friends until the 1980s, when the owner of a record store offered to produce his first album. After decades of Egyptian pop, Rahim turned to political themes.

In 2008, Rahim lost a contract to be featured in a McDonald’s commercial for the McFalafel after Jewish human rights groups, including the Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee, alerted the company to his song, which they accused of inciting hate against Israel and Jews.

Rahim had another hit song, Hey Arab Leaders, in which he accused the U.S. and Israel of masterminding the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

The ADL has published the lyrics of his songs (see below) and Palestinian Media Watch flagged his music video as examples of anti-Semitism and hate speech in popular Egyptian culture.

On Sunday, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of The Simon Wiesenthal Center, told The Algemeiner that he hoped the other international musicians at the festival used their stage time to promote peace, rather than hatred.

“Remember that Alicia Keys delivered a message of peace last summer in Tel Aviv, despite the BDSers hypocritical hysteria,” Rabbi Cooper said referring to anti-Israel ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ activists who tried to pressure Keys to cancel her performance. “I hope she and the other western talent urge the organizers to make the festival a hate-free zone and that they counter the anti-Israel hate with their music.”

As for Chaaboula, Cooper said he “may want to update his tired lyrics.”

“He writes one of the reasons he hates Israel is because of the Golan,” Cooper said. “Has he checked with the steady stream of severely injured Syrians coming to the Golan to Israel’s ‘no questions asked’ hospital who hate Assad not the Israeli medics saving their lives?”

“Hate in his neighborhood is in all too abundant supply. How about trying the old Beatles ‘All you need is love’ for a change?” Cooper asked.

Read Chaaboula’s hate-filled lyrics below, as posted by the ADL:

On May 4th we posted about an article by Guardian Middle East editor Ian Black that whitewashed the radical anti-Israel agenda of the NGO, Zochrot. However, what we didn’t address at the time was Black’s characteristic whitewash of the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab lands in the following passage of the article:

Zochrot’s focus on the hyper-sensitive question of the 750,000 Palestinians who became refugees has earned it the hostility of the vast majority of Israeli Jews who flatly reject any Palestinian right of return. Allowing these refugees – now, with their descendants, numbering seven million people – to return to Jaffa, Haifa or Acre, the argument goes, would destroy the Jewish majority, the raison d’etre of the Zionist project. (Israelis often also suggest an equivalence with the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who lost homes and property after 1948 in Arab countries such as Iraq and Morocco – although their departure was encouraged and facilitated by the young state in the 1950s.)

We were going to comment on Black’s historical revisionism today when we learned that Lyn Julius – one of the more knowledgeable commentators on the issue of Jewish refugees from Arab countries – had submitted a letter to the Guardian in response which (unsurprisingly) the paper declined to publish.

Here’s her letter:

Ian Black’s article (Remembering the Nakba: Israeli group puts 1948 back on the map) promotes a fringe Israeli NGO’s sick objective: the destruction of the state of Israel through the Palestinian ‘right of return’, while virtually ignoring the ‘Jewish Nakba’ of 856,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries at the same time.

Wringing their hands about depopulated Palestinian villages, Zochrot remain ignorant, silent and unmoved by the depopulation of scores of Arab cities of their age-old Jewish communities.

There are almost no Jews living in Baghdad, Alexandria, Tripoli, Sana’a and Damascus today. While the Palestinians were the tragic by-product of a war their leadership launched and lost, a larger number of Jews became refugees through an Arab policy of scapegoating and ethnic cleansing.

Over the years I have been a friend of your works, from “Elsewhere, Perhaps” onward.

These are all first-rate. I read them as translated into the English from the Hebrew, which (the Hebrew) makes it especially precious (to me personally) as you avail yourself of the same living and restored language used by King David some 3,000 years earlier…history’s first literary stylist besides Torah itself.

You write with clarity, with brevity and with conscience.

As a man of conscience, you would be expected to wake up two in the morning in a cold sweat and mutter into a soaked pillow:

“What have I said! What have I done!”

To equate any Jew, any Israeli, with any Nazi, as you did here is astonishing and repellant. I cannot bring myself to quote you directly otherwise I too will have nightmares, so I have provided the attachment, and even to do that much is disturbing. Surely those words were not meant to increase your fame.

You already have an international reputation. When we speak of Israeli writers, most often you top the list. For good reason, as I have suggested.

Opponents of free speech have chalked up many campus victories lately as ideological conformity marches on.
There was a time when people looking for intellectual debate turned away from politics to the university. Political backrooms bred slogans and bagmen; universities fostered educated discussion. But when students in the 1960s began occupying university property like the thugs of regimes America was fighting abroad, the venues gradually reversed. Open debate is now protected only in the polity: In universities, muggers prevail.
Assaults on intellectual and political freedom have been making headlines. Pressure from faculty egged on by Muslim groups induced Brandeis University last month not to grant Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the proponent of women’s rights under Islam, an intended honorary degree at its convocation. This was a replay of 1994, when Brandeis faculty demanded that trustees rescind their decision to award an honorary degree to Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In each case, a faculty cabal joined by (let us charitably say) ignorant students promoted the value of repression over the values of America’s liberal democracy.
Opponents of free speech have lately chalked up many such victories: New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly prevented from speaking at Brown University in November; a lecture by Charles Murray canceled by Azusa Pacific University in April; Condoleezza Rice, former secretary of state and national-security adviser under the George W. Bush administration, harassed earlier this month into declining the invitation by Rutgers University to address this year’s convocation.

Hillary Clinton passed on the Sunday shows after the Benghazi attacks to preserve her White House aspirations.

The White House is covering up for political reasons why President Barack Obama wasn’t in the Situation Room as the attacks were unfolding.

And there are reasons CNN can track down the masterminds behind the 2012 ambush but the U.S. government can’t.

These are just a sampling of the doggedly held views of a die-hard cadre of Republican lawmakers about the controversial events that led to the death 20 months ago of four Americans in Benghazi — a word that is now synonymous for conservatives with cover-up and conspiracy.

Call them the Benghazi believers.

These Republicans — and there are dozens — are deeply convinced that the truth has yet to be fully aired about the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

A solid majority believe Obama and his aides have repeatedly misled Congress about the attacks, spinning a political message to promote the president’s 2012 reelection. A handful of them take as fact that then-Secretary of State Clinton obstructed the delivery of adequate security to diplomats on the front lines in Libya.

They hope that the new select committee created last week in the GOP-led House — led by loquacious former prosecutor Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) — will finally unearth the truth.

Another South Carolina GOP lawmaker, Mick Mulvaney — a Gowdy ally — contends that Congress has yet to scratch the surface of what happened in Benghazi. He says many of the unanswered questions about the attacks stem from conservatives’ deep distrust of the Obama administration.

“[The distrust] has to do with everything — whether or not the White House has fully disclosed what they know. That is the big issue,” Mulvaney said. “You can’t even start to have a discussion about what happened before, during or after until you have all the facts about who was involved and what they were doing.”

Polls show that more than 70% of the French… expect that France will become a country under submission to Islam.

Last month, between April 18-21, the Union of Islamic Organizations of France [UOIF], the French branch of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (presided over by Yusuf al Qaradawi) held its thirty-first annual conference in Le Bourget, north of Paris. As usual, jihadist and anti-Semitic books, which are banned in French bookstores but tolerated there, were offered in several booths.

As usual also, speakers were invited to deliver fiery speeches. In 2012, the keynote speaker was supposed to be Qaradawi himself, but faced with protests from the Jewish community, France denied Qaradawi a visa to enter French territory, and he was replaced by Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim Brotherhood operative who works with Qaradawi in Doha, Qatar, at the Center for Islamic Legislation and Ethics.

Tariq Ramadan was again the keynote speaker in 2013. This year, Tariq gave way to his brother, Hani, Director of the Islamic Center of Geneva, founded in 1961 by their father, Said Ramadan, son-in-law and senior disciple of Hassan al Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood.

If Tariq Ramadan knows how to hide his extremism, his brother is more explicit and direct. His speech was devoted to “global threats” facing Islam; he described them as having a single source: “the Jews and Zionist barbarism,” an octopus “hiding in the shadows,” a “power that holds the global finance and the media.” He called on young French Muslims to “fight for Islam” and to go to Syria, where several hundred French youths have already joined jihadist groups.

An American Bride in Kabul — on The Glazov Gang
Dr. Phyllis Chesler discusses her new memoir about being held hostage in Kabul after her marriage to a “Westernized” Muslim.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/an-american-bride-in-kabul-on-the-glazov-gang/