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Thursday, January 31, 2008

An ongoing embarrassment to Columbia. Have no doubt that this is a perfectly acceptable view in polite campus circles. Joseph Massad, writing in Al-Ahram: The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre

Until European intellectuals take on board the racist basis of the Jewish State, their support for the struggle of the Palestinians will always ring hollow, writes Joseph Massad

What is it about the nature of Zionism, its racism, and its colonial policies that continues to escape the understanding of many European intellectuals on the left? Why have the Palestinians received so little sympathy from prominent leftist intellectuals such as Jean- Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault or only contingent sympathy from others like Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Etienne Balibar, and Slavoj Zizek? Edward Said wrote once about his encounters with Sartre and Foucault (who were anti-Palestinian) and with Gilles Deleuze (who was anti-Zionist) in this regard. The intellectual and political commitments inaugurated by a pro-Zionist Sartre and observed by Said, however, remain emblematic of many of the attitudes of leftist and liberal European intellectuals today...

On and on, lots of jargon and psuedo-scholarly name-dropping in order to justify Massad's bizarre bigotry, including a repeat of his theory that it's actually the Zionists (and not people like him who are particularly interested in erasing Israel -- but nowhere else -- from the map) who are the real anti-Semites.

[Edit: Z-Word chimes in with some excellent commentary, also noting, for the record, that this Massad piece originally appeared in '03.]

An emailer provides the following satire which shows the absurdity of the argument...what if you substitute Turkey for Israel?

Turkey is an illegitimate Settler-Colonial State

The legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre

Until European intellectuals take on board the racist basis of the Turkish State, their support for the struggle of native peoples will always ring hollow, writes Joseph Massad

What is it about the nature of Turkish nationalism, its racism, and its colonial policies that continues to escape the understanding of many European intellectuals on the left? Why have the Greek, Armenian, Kurdish and Roma peoples of Anatolia received so little sympathy from prominent leftist intellectuals such as Jean- Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault or only contingent sympathy from others like Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Etienne Balibar, and Slavoj Zizek?

While most of these intellectuals have taken public stances against racism and white supremacy, have opposed Nazism and apartheid South Africa, seem to oppose colonialism, old and new, most of them partake of a Sartrian legacy which refuses to see a change in the status of Turks, who are still represented only as a nation deserving entry into the European Union. The status of the Turk as a colonizer who has used racist colonial violence for the last several centuries against the native peoples of Anatolia is a status they refuse to recognize and continue to resist vehemently. Although some of these intellectuals have clearly recognized Turkish violence in Anatolia, and the deliberate genocide committed against the Armenians, they continue to hold on to a pristine image of a Turkish State founded by democratic secularists rather than by armed colonial settlers.

Despite Derrida's opposition to White supremacist South Africa in the mid-1980s, he believes that Turkey, a racist Turkish state, should be recognized by all. Clearly, Derrida is attached to a certain image of Turkey that is defiled by some of its actions, like the occupation of Kurdish, Greek and Armenian land.

Sartre failed to see how Turks arrived in Anatolia as armed colonizers. Turkey's racist project of destroying Kurdish culture and language in the interest of an invented Turkish language that did not exist before Ataturk invented it is never examined by these intellectuals. Nor do they ever examine the ideological and practical centrality of racism to the inception of the Turkish national movement.

When these European intellectuals worry about the chances of the Turkish settlers' colony to join the EU, they are being blind to the ultimate achievement of Turkey: the eradication and oppression of the native peoples of Anatolia. Unless their stance is one that opposes the racist basis of the Turkish State, their support for Tukish bid to join the EU will always ring hollow. As the late Gilles Deleuze once put it, the cry of the Turks to justify their racist violence has always been "we are not a people like any other," while the Kurdish cry of resistance has always been "we are a people like all others." European intellectuals must choose which cry to heed when addressing the question of Turkey.

The writer is lecturer of political science at Columbia University, USA.

6 Comments

wow, some good reading here...happen to pass by via who knows where... i was just talking abt this the other day with my young intellectual son... thanks for giving some more meat to the topic... i'll be back!

A Kurdish Solidarity Movement - Now that you mention it, why don't we have one - with noisy campus protests.

What is it with the American left and its refusal to criticize Trukish racism?

I'm afraid I'm being pedantic again, but I don't like the premise of this spoof. While there is no real parallelism between Israel and Turkey, the spoof suggests that the two are interchangeable and the focus on Israel is antisemitic. I agree that Massad's rant is antisemitic (and quite insane in its way) but I cannot see how Turkey's mistreatment of its Kurdish and Armenian minorities is in any way comparable to Israel's treatment of its Arab minority.

First of all, the Palestinian refugee problem is not the Armenian genocide. And Palestinians are not members in the Jewish state.

Secondly, if the Turkish Kurds had the freedom to run their own educational and cultural systems in their own language, while enjoying full rights before the law, as the Arabs in Israel do, they would be content to live in harmony within the Turkish majority.

No one cares about the Kurds because the Kurds have shown that they can benefit from American intervention in Iraq, and create a civil democratic society. Pro-Americanism does not buy a severely distressed minority any pity-points from the Rococo Left. The Palestinians, on the other hand, have cornered the market of self-pity to the exclusion of all else. And I mean, all else.

I don't read it the way you do. To me, the point seems to be that Massad makes absurd accusations against Israel, i.e. that it is a settler colony. No people can be a settler colony in its homeland. To say so deprives the words of all meaning.

Meanwhile, Massad does not criticize actual settler colonies, like Turkey. Despite the fact that the Turks actually are guilty of the things Massad falsely accuses Israel of, i.e., genocide, ethnic cleansing, and brutal discrimination against an ethnic minority.

To take one small example, Israel has since its foundation provided schooling in Arabic for its Arab citizens. By contrast Turkey long made not only teaching, but broadcasting and printing in Kurdish illegal.

Go to the Joseph Massad *talk page* on Wikipedia. (His apologists have removed this stuff from Massad's main Wikipedia page, which is why they've been relegated to the talk page.) Look specifically at his hilariously idiotic quotations on the Talmud and at his use of an incendiary false quotation by Sharon claiming that "we, the Jewish people control America." Please spread the word! Should a professor of Middle East studies who uses fake quotations and displays such a horrific lack of knowledge about Jewish history be a candidate for tenure at an Ivy-league university?

Sartre was anti-Palestinian and pro-Zionist? Says who???

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