Monday, April 25, 2005
Massad and Ali at Columbia:
Joseph Massad: The Israelis are out to get me!
Tariq Ali: No, the Israelis are out to get all of us!
Columbia's Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theorist
Tariq Ali then spoke and took the conspiracy mania fully over the edge. He sees “what is taking place on the campuses as part of the larger and wider project which was initiated by the Sharon government, soon before they went into Jenin [in March 2002] in the big attempt to crush the intifada.” The decision to persecute the poor academics “was made in Israel,” then “circulated” to Israeli embassies, which somehow made it happen worldwide. The Elders of Zion must be working overtime...
Yikes, you'd never know that most of the pro-Israel activists I hear speak think the Israeli Government does a crap job of PR for itself (and I pretty much agree). Maybe Joseph Massad would be less open to criticism if his scholarship were...better. Here's Massad on modern anti-Semitism. No prize for guessing who he believes its real modern victims are: Semites and anti-Semites, that is the question Hanging around and doing panels with political lunatics like Tariq Ali probably doesn't help, either.
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Solomon,
I don't even have the energy to read these propagandists anymore.
Btw, Tariq Ali was/is a favorite of Democracy Now. I used to watch him, Hitechens and others debate on Iraq.... you just hear the absolute elitist arrogance of this guy to anyone who disagrees or challenges his version or orthodoxy which of course Hitchens did.
Mike
As hard as one might try, it's difficult to discern the attraction Ali and Massad offer, other than a brute force anti-Semitism with a veneer of anti-Israel commentary, to contemporary ideologues on the Left. They come across as bottom-feeders in the wake of Foucault and that aspect of the pomo initiative, yet the "truth" they speak to power is so transparently anemic, occludes and elides and denies so much prominent material and salient truths and facts, that only an extraordinarily self-deluded and self-enamored "intellectual" can buy into this wholesale, as some seemingly do. And do they ever apply their material dialectic or pomo narratives to the Arab/Muslim world itself? Have never seen it, instead it's the virtually endless, reflexive, anti-Zionist trope. No wonder so many of their rhetorical forays amount to nothing more than offensives and defensives to help ensure against any critique of their own positions.
Also, the ever incisive Oliver Kamm again: Un. Be. Lievable.
The summary graph at the end of the second link is spot on:
There is a book to be written one day on the ideological convergence of Europe's far-Left and far-Right, symbolised in their attitudes to the Jewish state. What I trust civilised people can agree on in the meantime is that that convergence is a political fact and not a speculative hypothesis.