When Translation Apps Attack

After covering Plato and Aristotle in my political philosophy seminar here, I assigned my students their first paper. I wrote the assignment in English. My (human) translator Amer translated it into Arabic and posted it on the class’s website–a closed group site on Facebook. Facebook then automatically had the assignment re-translated back into English via Google Translate. And that’s when all hell broke loose.

Continue reading

Safe Haven Abu Dis

In catching up on the news from back home, I find myself reflecting on the number of people who, on hearing of my plans to spend another summer in Abu Dis, Palestine, worried out loud about my safety. As we all know, the West Bank is a dangerous place. Well, I’m perfectly safe. I just regret I didn’t ask my friends the same question regarding their plans to spend the summer in the United States.

The U.S. State Department “warns” Americans about the risks of traveling in Palestine, imposing a long list of regulations on travel by U.S. government employees stationed here. It’s not an amusing topic, and yet there seems something funny about it: a warning to Americans about the risks of violence in Palestine? Shouldn’t the State Department be warning those of us in Palestine about the risks involved in going home?

The Circumstances of Justice: 3. The Significance of What Rawls Added

This is Part 3 of a four (or five) part series based on a conference-length version of a longer paper I’m currently preparing for submission to academic journals. Part 1 is just a brief introduction to the paper, but it has generated a deep and ongoing conversation about the nature of justice which is well worth reading (and joining). Part 2 is primarily exegetical, presenting and interpreting the key passages from Rawls and Hume on the “circumstances of justice.” But it too has generated a much deeper discussion of the nature of justice. You can also consult the full paper at any time.

In this section, I focus on showing how the internal consistency of Hume’s account does not survive Rawls’s attempted appropriation of that account. This is another short section, and I suspect the discussion will mostly pick up on some of the same issues that have already been raised with respect to Part 2.

Continue reading

Hussein Ibish on Elie Wiesel

Here’s an excellent piece by Hussein Ibish in Foreign Policy on the mixed legacy of Elie Wiesel. I’d be hard pressed to find a sentence in it that I disagree with. I found this paragraph particularly poignant and admirable:

Many Palestinians have allowed the conflict with Israel to embitter them to the point that not acknowledging, learning about or engaging with the history of the Holocaust becomes a social and political imperative. This was most tragically illustrated in the experience of Professor Mohammed S. Dajani, a Palestinian scholar with impeccable nationalistic credentials, who led the drive to teach Palestinian university students about the Holocaust and ultimately had to leave his university position because of the backlashagainst the simple teaching and learning of history. Many Palestinians do want to learn about and recognize the tragedy of Jewish history, but many more myopically can’t see past their own present-day suffering and recognize Jewish Israelis as anything other than their occupiers and oppressors.

Until recently, Professor Dajani taught here at Al Quds University. I regret that I won’t be able to meet him. I particularly regret why I won’t be able to meet him. Continue reading

Thoughts on the Middle East Quartet’s Report on the Israel-Palestine Conflict

Americans often wonder what the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is about, and why they should be obliged to care about it. They can’t get a clear sense of what it’s about from the mass media, but lack the time, energy, expertise, or inclination to wade through history books or specialty websites to figure it out from scratch. What to do? The situation seems one designed to induce apathy about the issue. Continue reading