Author Archives: Irfan Khawaja

Thinking about BDS (1): Infantilization, ‘Safe Spaces’, and Threats to Discourse

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An angry discussion has broken out about the self-infantilizing character of American university life (and beyond). The basic argument is that contemporary American universities have, in the name of an infantilizing form of pseudo-therapeutic psychobabble, come to stigmatize the very idea of discourse or debate that hurts anyone’s feelings. The criticism comes mostly from the political-academic right (in some sense, however vague) and targets the political-academic left (in the same vague sense). Here’s a piece on the subject in Intercollegiate Review. Here’s an overview from Inside Higher Ed from last year, and a much-discussed one from The New York Times this past March. Here’s a critical commentary from Salon inspired by the Times article. Here’s a more aggressive take on the same from Reason magazine. Here’s the take at the Breitbart site. Here’s the most recent take from BHL.

I basically agree with “the right” on this one, at least in a qualified sort of way. I agree that discourse at American universities is, across the board, irrationally constrained by pseudo-therapeutic rather than truth- or justice-guided norms. We care far too much about how people will feel than how they think, or how they should be thinking. We also care too much about how people will feel than we do about how good our arguments are, how much evidence supports them, or for that matter how rhetorically persuasive they would be to a person of psychologically normal sensibilities.

I don’t mean to suggest that we should be insensitive to people’s feelings or special sensitivities, or to go out of our way to offend them. There’s a balance to be struck between candor and tact. But the balance cannot involve the outright sacrifice of alethic to therapeutic concerns: “sensitivity” can’t dictate that nothing be said out loud that might be construed as insensitive or “triggering” for some person or audience.

I reached the absolute limits of my patience with the “sensitivity” phenomenon when I was obliged last year (along with the rest of the faculty and staff at my institution) to take “sensitivity training” designed to ensure compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws, as follows:

As a Catholic/Franciscan institution of higher education, Felician College unconditionally rejects all forms of discrimination and acknowledges our obligation to safeguard and enhance the dignity of every member of our College community. As part of our commitment  to create and to maintain an environment free of discrimination, intimidation, humiliation and harassment of any kind, and in compliance with both federal and state recommendations, all members of the Felician College faculty and staff are required to complete training on identifying and preventing harassment and discrimination in the workplace. …

It is a legal requirement that we provide harassment training annually.  Since it is very difficult to get everyone together for a lecture format, we have contracted with  Workplace Answers to provide online training for Felician College.  The basic module for faculty/staff should take no more than 40 minutes, the supervisory module (if required) about 20 minutes.  The FSI Corporate Compliance module is self-paced.

Feel free , incidentally, to take a look at the website of Workplace Answers to try to figure out what they’re all about. At best I think you’ll learn that online harassment training is a big and lucrative business involving the marketing of a lot of vacuous cliches.

It sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? It isn’t. If you actually endure the training, you’ll discover that the entire “compliance module” is a systematic assault on the norms of inquiry, discourse, and academic life. Here’s an actual example taken verbatim from the module: it is (we are told) unlawful harassment for a professor to hang a poster inside his office of the word “War” with a red slash through it, because the extremist anti-war message involved could be construed as “threatening” to, “discriminatory” against, or “harassing” of military veterans. (I can’t reproduce the actual graphic, because it’s protected by copyright.) The tacit reasoning seems to be: opposition to a political policy can be construed as “threatening” to those who (presumptively and stereotypically) may be thought to support the policy (e.g., veterans can be presumed to support war); meanwhile, passive acquiescence in the status quo, however unjust, is legally obligatory and “professionally appropriate” behavior.

One implication here seems to be that while combat veterans can handle combat on the battlefield, they cannot be expected to handle ideas like war in a university. Presumably, all returning military veterans suffer from a form of PTSD so intense that they will collapse into a dysfunctional heap at the mere mention of the word “war”–from which it follows that the word must never be spoken in their presence (except, I suppose, to praise it).* A second and more general implication seems to be that  “professionalism” in the “corporate” (=academic) context requires us to avoid discussing anything that might offend anyone’s sensitivities, even if doing so is central to the academic enterprise.

As I said before, most of the criticism of “academic infantilization” has targeted the left from the right, but one group, essentially located on the right, seems to me to have taken the infantilization of academic discourse to a generally undiscussed extreme. The group in question is the anti-BDS movement (or more pedantically, the anti-BDS counter-movement, since it opposes BDS, which precedes it).** In saying this, I don’t mean to be pronouncing on the correctness or incorrectness of BDS as a strategy for dealing with the Israeli occupation. That’s a complicated topic on which I reserve judgment, and which I’d like to think through here over the next few months. What’s clear, however, is that whether BDS is right or wrong–even if it’s entirely wrong–its critics and the movement they represent are a threat to the academy and to political discourse as such.

Two tactics are essential to the anti-BDS repertoire and particularly subversive of rational discourse: (1) gratuitous recourse to the race card, in the form of reflexive accusations of anti-Semitism as a means of discouraging debate; (2) resort to the (literal) use of force through “lawfare” in order to put BDS out of commission by force of law, and thereby put an end to debate that way. Many groups (especially ethno-religious groups) employ one or the other or both of these tactics, but few have done a “better” job of combining them in a single integrated assault on the norms of discourse. In doing so, the anti-BDS movement has, on American university campuses, become the discursive equivalent of the “price tag” movement in Israel: they’re among the vandals of our intellectual life. I find it instructive that right-wing critics of infantilized/trigger-warning discourse have almost nothing to say about this brazenly obvious example of the phenomenon they deplore. But they don’t.

One task on my agenda here in Palestine is to clarify my own views on BDS: I’ve been asking everyone I meet here in Palestine (and will ask anyone I meet in Israel) what they think about BDS. Personally, I’m in favor of divestment on the Princeton model, agnostic about sanctions, skeptical about boycotts, and generally opposed to academic boycotts. I realize that that sentence by itself will cost me friendships across the entire political spectrum. But that’s where I stand, at least for now.

In favor of BDS: I worry about anti-Semitism and about double standards within BDS, but I’m also uncompromisingly opposed to the Israeli occupation/settlement enterprise, and frankly have lost patience with views of a sort that permit opposition to the occupation but proscribe doing anything about it. That’s led to nothing but five decades of occupation, subsidized and supported by the American taxpayer. In a sense, it’s led to something worse: our acquiescence in the idea that it’s our fate or role to support the morally insupportable by insisting that it’s somehow a moral imperative to do so. We’ve become mere means to the end of the Israelis’ making the Palestinians mere means to their ends. And that has to end. BDS looks like the only viable option for hastening the end, or at least doing what’s in our power to hasten the end. So in principle, sign me up.

Skepticism about B and S: Though divestment seems relatively uncontroversial to me, non-targeted boycotts and sanctions potentially seem indiscriminate in their punitive features, and counter-productive in the sense of attacking the very parts of the Israeli public most sympathetic to Palestinian rights. So I can’t sign on the dotted line to the whole package, but am not willing to dismiss BDS out of hand, either. (I can, however, think of both American and Israeli companies and institutions that deserve to be boycotted.)

That said, one can’t even begin to think clearly about any of that in the atmosphere of hysterics generated by the anti-BDS movement. Hence the need for an initial blog-based “ground clearing” operation. In the next part of this series, I’ll talk a bit about the anti-Semitic “race card,” and its effects on discourse about Israel. In a third part, I’ll talk about the attempt to deal with BDS through “lawfare.” I don’t mean either discussion to be comprehensive; it’s a complicated topic, and I’m sure I’ll be returning to it periodically after this initial series is over (uncharitable interpretation: “Khawaja has an unhealthy obsession with that topic”). So there will be indefinitely many parts to this series as a whole.

More soon.

 *I teach at a “veteran friendly” institution, and have taught and taken classes with former combat veterans for years. They certainly do have special needs and sensitivities, but they also tend to be among the most mature and engaged students in a given classroom. I find Workplace Answers’s depiction of them frankly stupid, and I suspect that the veterans I know would, too.

**For vehicles of the movement, see The AMCHA Initiative, the BDS section of the Anti-Defamation League’s website, BDS Cookbook, Buycott Israel, Divest This, Divestment Watch, Engage, Israel Action Network, Israel On Campus Coalition, The Israel Project, and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. See also Cary Nelson and Gabriel Noah Brahm’s The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel (2015). The title of the Nelson-Brahm book is a classic case of falsity in advertising: despite the title, the book is a wholesale critique of BDS as such, not just of academic boycotts. Despite the protests of a single author (Michael Berube), seven authors in the book go out of their way to argue that the BDS movement as a whole is anti-Semitic–a view clearly shared by the editors.

Postcards from Abu Dis (1)*

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So here I am, blogging “live” from Abu Dis. I’ve settled in a bit, the jet lag is starting to wear off, and I’m getting ready for my first class tomorrow, which I’m hoping will be a case of found rather than lost in translation: I’m speaking in English, and a translator is translating into Arabic for the students, and then back into English for me (and so on). We’re working on acquiring and distributing serviceable Arabic translations of Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Machiavelli’s Prince, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise, Mill’s “On Liberty,” Marx’s Communist Manifesto, and just maybe, Marx’s “British Rule in India.” With the possible exception of the very last reading, I’m pretty confident that translations are out there and can be found–though I suppose that  you’d want more than a vote of “pretty confident” from a professor whose class starts tomorrow morning.

That said, I do wish I had paid more attention in Arabic 101 (as well as Arabic 102 and Arabic 103) in college, but I clearly didn’t learn enough to understand or carry on an ordinary conversation, much less teach a political philosophy seminar. Let that be a lesson for all students everywhere who ask that ridiculous question, “But when will I ever use this stuff that I’m learning?” How about: “What will you do when the unforeseeable occasion arises that demands knowledge you were supposed to have gotten but didn’t?” You’ll plead ignorance, that’s what you’ll do. And you’ll look and feel like a blithering idiot. How’s that for an answer?

How this translation thing will work is anybody’s guess, but I’m game, and I hope the students are, too. I met three of my students the other day–we exchanged enthusiastic smiles at one another for lack of being able to engage in mutually comprehensible discourse–and I’m told that I’ll have a total of between 12 and 15 students in the class. (A colleague at Felician tells me that they’re running summer classes with enrollments as low as 5. Ha!) We’re scheduled for a nice seminar room with a long rectangular table. A few cups of the Arabic coffee I’ve been having lately, and I think I’ll be ready for anything.

I don’t mean to be minimizing the hardships of life under military occupation–at least for people without an American passport like mine–but you could hardly have dreamt up better conditions for philosophical contemplation than the ones I’m currently in. I’m living in a spare but comfortable dorm room on the eighth floor of a four-tower housing complex. I’m the only human occupant of any of the four buildings: it’s like living in a non-scary version of “The Shining” (if that makes any sense). The other occupants include an unending series of pigeons whom the building manager allows to roost where they will–because “they’re guests, too.” Those bloodthirsty Palestinians!

The weather has been clear everyday, with temperatures hovering in the upper 70s and low 80s during the day, and upper 60s at night. A Mediterranean breeze riffles through my open window, and my ears are caressed by the twittering of birds, and the melody of children at play (never thought you’d see me write that, did you). I’ve had nowhere to go today, and apart from a quick trip into town, nothing to do but read, write, and look idly out of my eighth-floor window. It’s like a single person’s version of that old Belinda Carlisle song (if that makes any sense).

I’ve had a whirlwind few days. Last night, Rawan Dajani, one of the many hard-working people who work at AQU’s PR office, took me–of all places–to a reception at the U.S. Consulate in West Jerusalem, where I hobnobbed with the movers and shakers of Jerusalem. The food was good (grape leaves, sushi, hors d’ouevres, Jerusalem-style pizza, Palestinian pastries), but the music was even better (a jazz group from Nazareth), and the company was better than either. We got there too late to hear the departing Consul General’s speech–all I heard was the word “terrorists” as I went through security–but here it is.

After a few unsuccessful attempts, I even managed to have a conversation with the Consul General, Michael Ratney. Mr. Ratney and I discussed the complexities of the political situation. It was a productive conversation, and we agreed to re-convene in the near future for further talks. In a highly positive development, he told me–and here I quote directly–that he was “very pleased to meet” me. So I’m happy to report that progress is being made on all fronts, and look forward to continuing conversations with him on matters of mutual concern.

After the reception, Rawan and I visited the controversial Mamilla Cemetary, the opulent Mamilla Mall, and the hard-to-characterize Festival of Light in the Old City of Jerusalem, but I’ll have to save serious discussion of all of that for another post.

Well, except for one thing: I gather from a report on CBS News that there was a protest and some police action in response to the Festival a few days ago, but the only disturbance I managed to encounter that night was sleep disturbance due to jet lag. Incidentally, I find the line of questioning by the interviewer in the CBS video I just linked to rather silly: “Things have been calm in Jerusalem ‘lately,’ so was there anything that precipitated these protests?” The assumption seems to be that protesters are stimulus-response machines who won’t protest unless some proximate event precipitates it. But tensions have been “simmering” here for years, and the underlying problems have gone unresolved, so there’s nothing surprising about protest in East Jerusalem when it does arise.

Anyway, as I said, I’ll save discussion of the politics (and in the case of the Festival, the aesthetics) for later posts. For now, I’ll just say that Rawan and I were there for about an hour last night; it was packed with throngs of Israelis, Arabs, and foreign tourists, but I perceived no tension at all.

So what’s it like here in the West Bank?  I’ve put a photo of my immediate surroundings in the header photos (and I’ll putting more in as I take some), so you’ll see that come round the photo carousel every now and then. I’ve already told you about the weather, and I haven’t had enough meals to tell you about the food, so about sound? What does it sound like in the West Bank?
Here, from a few days’ experience, is what the average evening sounds like in Abu Dis:
7:30 pm: preliminary call to maghrib (evening) prayer followed by call to prayer followed by prayer (VERY LOUD)
8:30 pm: celebratory machine gun fire and fireworks** followed by loud amplified music (yes, every night)
9-10 pm: dog fights and miscellaneous dog howling that echoes throughout the valley
10 pm: night time (isha) call to prayer
11 pm: eerie, reverential silence…until….
12 midnight: roosters crow midnight for half an hour
1 am: cat fights
2 am: dead silence punctuated by random horn blowing and trucks in low gear straining to get up the hill
3 am: cats, roosters, pigeons, donkeys, and occasional dog engage in high volume interspecies call-and-response communication, the cats being the loudest and sounding weirdly human
4 am: morning call to prayer (fajr)
5 am: in direct contradiction of all rooster stereotypes, roosters fail to crow for sunrise
9 am: someone operates a pneumatic drill for an hour
The strangest thing is that I actually slept rather well, and feel totally refreshed.
It’s a rather paradoxical place, this Palestine. More soon.
*I was originally going to call this series “Live from Abu Dis,” but dropped it for two reasons: (a) The blog currently has more Palestinian than American readers, and I’m not sure Palestinian readers would understand the (not all-that-funny) allusion to “Saturday Night Live”; (b) every blog post from anywhere is live, so “Live from Abu Dis” ultimately makes no sense. I almost called it “Postposts from Abu Dis,” but I think you can figure out why I didn’t. So “Postcards” it is. Wish you were here!
**I had originally written “celebratory machine gun fire,” but I discovered last night that they were fireworks. Less dramatic, I realize (June 14).
August 3, 2015: I later discovered that machine gun fire was interspersed with the fireworks (and vice versa).

Sweet Home Area B-ama

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I’m going to be traveling the next few days, and am not sure of Wifi availability at my destination, so I may be slow with blogging and comment approvals for a bit, but when I get a chance, I’ll start blogging again:

Live from Area B, it’s…Policy of Truth! With Special Guests….The Separation Wall.…Yamas…Hamas…BDS…and cameo appearances by Al Quds Political Philosophy Seminar 0409236…

Stay tuned….

Oslo_Areas_and_barrier_projection_2005.png (3789×7221)

Beyond Chutzpah: Chase, Israel, Palestine, and OFAC

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Here’s an actual conversation I had about two hours ago at my local Chase branch office.

Chase Banker: Hi, can I help you?

Irfan: Yes, I’m going abroad for two months, so I wanted to alert you to the fact that my debit and credit card transactions will be taking place in foreign countries starting June 1.

Chase: OK, where are you going, and for how long?

Irfan: Well, first to Italy, then to Israel, along with the West Bank and possibly Gaza. For the months of June and July.

Chase (sharply): Those are all the same country. [I take it she meant Israel, the West Bank and Gaza are the same country, not that Italy is part of Israel or vice versa.]

Irfan: OK.

Chase (checking computer screen): Well, Italy is fine, but unfortunately, Israel is on the US government’s OFAC list, and we can’t guarantee the security of your transactions there. [“OFAC” stands for the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the U.S. Department of Treasury. The OFAC list is the list of countries sanctioned by the US Government. Israel is not specifically on it.]

Irfan: So my debit card won’t work in Israel?

Chase: It may or may not work. We just can’t guarantee it. Being on the OFAC list means that it’s been determined that financial transactions in that country are at high risk for fraud.

Irfan: Does it matter whether I use the card in Israel or in the West Bank?

Chase (sharply): Those are the same country. [No they fucking aren’t, but let it go.]

Irfan: Can I use my credit card there?

Chase: Yes. But there are transaction fees. Are you aware of the fees?

[Awkward puzzled WTF pause. Traffic roars by on Bloomfield Avenue. Grand Funk Railroad plays in the background on someone’s stereo, proclaiming the prima facie obvious fact that they’re an American band.]

Chase (brightly): Do you have a Traveler’s Reward credit card with us?

Irfan: No.

Chase: Well, if you get one, you can avoid all those fees. [All what fees? The ones that accrue to the transactions you supposedly can’t guarantee because Israel is supposedly on the OFAC list that it isn’t actually on?]

Irfan: Well, OK.

Chase: There’s no annual fee in the first year.

Irfan: Great!

Chase: And the annual fee is $90 in the second year.

Irfan (remembering that the same exact banker made the same same exact offer the last time I came in to inform Chase that I was traveling abroad, and that I had the presence of mind to decline it last time):

Chase: I’ve just run your information through the system and you’re approved! All you need to do is sign here.

Irfan (opening my mouth as if to engage in a speech act, but flummoxed at the unexpected silence that ensues):

Chase: Just sign here.

Irfan (sullenly): OK.

Chase: And here.

Irfan (yet more sullenly): OK.

Chase: And here.

Irfan (making lemonade out of self-made lemons): So I can use this card without any problems in Israel? [Of course, I’m not really going to Israel, but let it go.]

Chase: Yes, of course. [Apparently, Israel suddenly got off the OFAC list because I’ve decided to use the Chase Sapphire Traveler’s Reward Card with a 15.99% APR and a $90 annual fee, which I inexplicably agreed to use in order to avoid foreign ATM transaction fees that would probably be less than $90.]

Irfan (forgetting to ask: “So how the hell is the security situation of this card any different from the other ones?”): OK, thanks.

Chase: Have a safe trip!

Well, I guess it’ll be safe from transaction fees, if nothing else.

This is the first time I’ve encountered this “Israel is on the OFAC list” bullshit, despite having been to Israel/Palestine in 2013, having gone to Pakistan in 2012, and having gone to Nicaragua in 2014. But I’m not the only one who’s been fed this party line, and not the only to have complained about it. Here’s an online discussion at Trip Advisor. And here’s an article about the issue from the Times of Israel. An excerpt:

John Sullivan, a spokesman from the US Treasury Department, told the Times of Israel that “Israel is not on any OFAC lists whatsoever.”

‘We’re in the business of enforcing sanctions on rogue regimes – Iran, North Korea, and the like – and I can assure you that OFAC has nothing to do with Israel, an important US ally’

And yet: my Chase banker just told me, unequivocally, that Israel was on the OFAC list–and apparently, Chase has been telling its customers this for years.

What to make of this? If you go to the OFAC site, and put “Israel” into the search engine, you get nothing: Israel is not on the OFAC sanctions list per se. But if you look at the small print on the Sanctions List Search page, you’ll find this:

This Sanctions List Search application (“Sanctions List Search”) is designed to facilitate the use of the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons list (“SDN List”) and all other non-SDN lists, including the Foreign Sanctions Evaders List, the Non-SDN Iran Sanctions Act List, the Part 561 list, the Sectoral Sanctions Identifications List and the Non-SDN Palestinian Legislative Council List.

My hypothesis is that the Non-SDN Palestinian Legislative Council List consists of Palestinian entities that are blocked by OFAC. Taking advantage of the fact that the Palestinian entities or persons are blocked, and conveniently equating Palestinian entities with Israeli ones (on the grounds that the West Bank and Gaza just are Israel), Chase has taken to claiming that Israel is on the OFAC list, and used that as its basis for making whatever other claims it wants to make and adopting whatever other policies it wants to adopt. That, I take it, is the explanation for the otherwise puzzling (and pedantic) mantra I got from my Chase banker to the effect that Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza are “the same country,” when they obviously are not the same country by anyone’s reckoning–whether Israeli, Palestinian, American, European,  non-Palestinian Arab, or otherwise.

Since a bank is not the place–or is typically not thought to be the place–for a discussion about Final Status Negotiations and the fate of Oslo II, this set of bankerly mantras gets sloughed over by customers who want to get things over with and move on. But the technique in question is known as “deceiving one’s customers with double talk,” and there is some irony in the fact that Chase has the chutzpah to use the technique on its customers while claiming to keep those customers safe from fraud.

Extraordinary contexts aside, I don’t think that deception benefits anyone, and don’t think it should be tolerated in anyone, even if it’s supposedly well-intentioned, and even if no identifiable entity or person is harmed by it in some egregious or obvious way. If Chase has good reasons for singling out ATM transactions in Israel, it should be able to state what those reasons actually are without having to resort to deception. If the reasons have something to do with Palestinian entities, let’s hear that, and hear why. But there really can’t be a justification for claiming that Israel is on the OFAC list when it obviously is not, or claiming that the West Bank and Gaza (!) are “the same country” as Israel, a preposterous view that, perversely enough, puts Chase in the company of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Gush Emunim. Even the Likud Party recognizes the need to annex the West Bank. It doesn’t (yet) have the nerve to claim that the West Bank is Israel. I guess it reserves that sort of thing for American bankers.

Libertarians have long argued that commercial transactions should be regarded as essentially amoral and apolitical transactions, narrowly pecuniary in scope, subject only to the requirements of mutual consent, mutual monetary gain, and nearly unlimited toleration for ignorance and vice. Socrates knew better: honesty, justice, and self-respect demand more of us, and more of those with whom we deal in any kind of transaction, be it for money, sex, power, fame, or anything else. If Zionists and anti-Zionists can agree on anything, we should be able agree not to be bullshitted by a bunch of bankers about the political issues that divide us.

I regret my own pusillanimity on this score, and hereby opt for a different soundtrack for next time:

Nothing in the street–any street, from Cleveland to Al Quds–is going to look any different than it does right now if we put up with everything that’s served up by slick BS artists who exploit the amoral sanctuary they get from commerce as conventionally conceived. As Gandhi came close to saying, we have to become the change we want to see in the world–one transaction at a time, until the change comes. It may not suit everyone’s conception of “civility,” but as Barry Goldwater came close to saying, incivility in the pursuit of justice is no vice.

Postscript, June 15, 2015: In a monumental irony, a week after I posted this, someone somehow managed to use one of my Chase cards to run up eleven unauthorized purchases totaling $1700. No, not in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, or Ramallah, but in Brooklyn, NY, a godforsaken place that should obviously be put on the OFAC list.

Incidentally, re my Chase Sapphire Traveler’s Reward Card? No one around here accepts credit cards.

Check Your Suburban Privilege

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Perhaps I’m being petty, but I’m convinced that there is a distinctive ethos endemic to the suburban American northeast which might be called the suburban entitlement mentality. (I’m sure it ranges beyond that, but that’s the version I know best. I didn’t encounter it when I lived in the midwest–though I encountered other unsavory things.) I’m not a Kantian, but there are days when I think that some of the essential elements of Kant’s moral philosophy–action from the motive of duty, universalizability–were formulated in (over)reaction to a version of the mentality I have in mind. Continue reading →

Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, Total Madness (Jerusalem Day Edition)

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I know it’s a little morbid, and possibly a little mean-spirited, but this being “Jerusalem Day,” I couldn’t resist juxtaposing the opening passage of a touristy photo album of Jerusalem I own with some You Tube videos of Jerusalem today.

The Holy Land has always exerted a fascination for people from almost every part of the world. It is, of course, a land like any other, but made holy by its association with three of the world’s great religions, those of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. …

The jewel of the Holy Land is, of course, Jerusalem. It is doubtful if any other place on earth can have been more revered, reviled, destroyed, rebuilt and built over than Jerusalem, but despite this, its magic still comes through to captivate new generations.

“Its magic.” I first read that passage at age 9, and used it as the opening of the sunny, well-received presentation I did as the only Muslim kid in Jewish day camp at the YM-YWHA of Metro New Jersey (now the JCC of Metro West). “Jerusalem, Home of Three Faiths,” is what it was called. Everyone clapped. Then, in celebration of God’s creation and the brilliance of my presentation, we had shabbos: we went downstairs, ate some challah, drank Manischewitz grape juice, and went outside to sing Don McLean’s “Waters of Babylon” by a babbling brook in a grove of weeping willow trees by Northfield Avenue. (I’m really not making any of that up.) Jimmy Carter was President. Sadat had just gone to Jerusalem. The Camp David Peace Talks were taking place. Peace seemed possible. Did I mention that I was 9, and very impressionable?

So here’s Jerusalem today–The March of the Flags on Jerusalem Day 2014, celebrating Israel’s conquest of East Jerusalem in the 1967 War. It’s in today’s news as well.

If the Nazis have the right to march through Skokie, should anti-Arab Jews have the right to march like this through Arab East Jerusalem? Sure–assuming that Arabs can do the same thing in the Jewish Quarter.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that the Nazis never did march through Skokie. The ACLU argued that the Nazis had the right to march through Skokie–and the Supreme Court agreed–but ultimately, the Nazis held their rally in the Federal Plaza in Chicago. I’m inclined to think that rallies like the Nazis-in-Skokie or anti-Arab-Israelis-in-Arab-East-Jerusalem ought to be held at places that involve a buffer between the potentially warring parties. Actually, it’s an interesting question whether a rally that will predictably induce violence–rather than explicitly incite it–ought legally to be required to take place in a location that facilitates more effective policing in anticipation of violence. The antics of the Westboro Baptist Church provide a similar (though not identical) case in point.

In any case, the Jerusalem Day video gives new meaning to the old Offspring song, “Come Out and Play (Keep ’em Separated).”

It goes down the same as the thousand before
No one’s getting any smarter, no one’s learning the score
Your never ending spree of death and violence and hate
Is gonna tie your own rope, tie your own rope, tie your own…

Here’s a rally by the Islamic group Hizb ut Tahrir in the Al Aqsa Mosque compound. The compound is just a few hundred yards (if that) from Damascus Gate, depicted in the previous video.

You have to wonder whether Hizb ut Tahrir really wants to drag the Pakistani military into this. I guess they’ve forgotten that during Black September in 1970, the Pakistanis sided with King Hussein against the PLO,  drove them out of Amman by brute force, and killed thousands of Palestinians in the process (ironically, that’s the video that queues up immediately after this one on You Tube). They also seem to have forgotten that so far, the Pakistani military has started every war that it’s fought, and lost every war that it’s started–including a genocide of its “Muslim brothers” in Bangladesh. I’m assuming that if Hizb ut Tahrir really thinks that the Pakistani military is killing “its brothers” in its fight against the Pakistani Taliban, they’re suggesting by implication that they regard the Taliban as the rightful rulers of Pakistan. Which I guess makes the rest of Pakistan almost literally chopped liver.

I’ve saved the best for Christianity. I was going to insert a video of a speech by Glenn Beck from 2011, but I decided on this gem instead. Incidentally, this video ends at 3:22, not at 5:39, so persevere for three minutes and watch it until the end. The long blank spot that follows the presentation is merely symbolic.

Well, that clarified everything. “For those who are led by the Spirit are the children of God” (Romans 8:14). I guess St. Paul wasn’t kidding about “children.”

What was it Don McLean sang? “We lay down and wept”?

Happy Jerusalem Day!

Postscript, May 18, 2015: Here’s the New York Times’s coverage of Jerusalem Day. You’ll have to read it to the end to understand this mordant passage:

The noise of the marchers thickened, along with the sound of stun grenades outside.

As dinner ended, the younger children raced to the balcony to see what was going on. “Come back!” the women shouted, to no avail.

Sighing, Umm Nidal, in a long head scarf and skirt, joined them. They were the only Palestinians leaning out to watch the marchers; nearby, soldiers stood on a roof.

Seeing the teenager’s rude gesture, the 3-year-old twins Razan and Raghad thought it was a friendly gesture and waved back. “Bye-bye!” they called.

Obligatory End-of-the-Semester Idiocy

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Last semester, it was Taylor Swift. This semester, it’s Scary Psycho Telekinetic Girl.

Honestly, by the end of the semester, I feel like the protagonist of this video and wouldn’t mind having her powers to use on my classes.

The reactions of the customers in the video are classic. I’m inclined to think that you can infer (or at least hypothesize) quite a lot about the nature of their reactions just from the looks on their faces.

The initial reactions are surprise and shock.

The second set of reactions is a warring mixture of fear and curiosity: “get me out of here,” with a bit of “but I’ve got to stay and see this.”

The woman at 1:33 has a look on her face that looks to me like a cross between disbelief and schadenfreude.

Around 1:44, when Telekinetic Girl pushes the chairs away from her (after discovering or re-discovering her newfound telekinetic powers), people start to panic and flee. My favorites are the ones around 1:47. One woman exclaims, “Oh my God, holy fucking shit!” but the emotion she exhibits is a bizarre (but totally understandable and familiar) mixture of panic and amusement. The woman pictured just after her is obviously frightened out of her mind, but insists on whipping out her phone to take a picture of the scene. These bizarre emotional combinations wouldn’t even seem possible if we didn’t see them exemplified right there on video.

Watching these conflicted people, I couldn’t help thinking of a passage in Plato’s Republic describing Leontius’s struggle with a similar-and-yet-differently alluring scene:

For a time he struggled with himself and covered his face, but finally, overpowered by his appetite, he pushed his eyes wide open and rushed toward the corpses, saying, “Look for yourselves, your evil wretches, take  your fill of the beautiful sight!” (Republic, 439c-440a)

Leontius is drawn to the scene because he’s sexually aroused by what he sees–yet knows he shouldn’t be. He knows that the sight of the corpses will trigger the arousal, and therefore both wants to, and doesn’t want to, trigger them. So he dissociates by blaming the desire on his eyes, as though his eyes were agents of their own.

The people in the cafe are drawn to the scene out of a sheer (Aristotelian) desire to understand the scene unfolding before them. I think it’s clear that they can’t take the scene at face value, but also can’t (in the moment) rule out the face value reading. At one level, common sense tells them that they cannot be witnessing a real-life version of a Stephen King film. But fear of the unknown tells them–tells all New Yorkers–“if you see something, don’t say anything; just run away.”

The woman at 1:52 has a facial expression that says: “At this point, I honestly don’t want to untangle what’s going on here; my curiosity is far less important to me than my safety, so I’m getting the hell out of here. Whatever has happened here is so not my problem!”

The scream at the end is totally gratuitous, but exactly how I feel after I get final papers at the end of the term (and start to grade them).

It’s a terrible confession to make, but I really wish I could enact this scene in my classes.

Postscript, May 17, 2015: I don’t know if he’s in on the joke or not, but at 2:00 there’s a guy toward the back of the cafe (white T shirt) who briefly looks up at the commotion, then goes back to his conversation as though the whole thing were an everyday occurrence. Another amusing reaction is the construction worker who stands frightened but transfixed, as though he were on the job and not allowed to leave.

B.B King is Gone: RIP

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Though I’ve been to B.B. King’s Bar & Grill maybe a half dozen times, I regret to say that I never managed to see B.B. King perform there. I don’t even own a single album of his (embarrassingly, I’ve spent years borrowing B.B. King CDs from the public library). But no one can pick up an electric guitar wanting to play the blues (or blues-oriented rock) without somehow doing so in B.B. King’s shadow. I think I can say from first-hand experience that his style was much imitated, but never quite equaled (or in my case, approximated).

He died last night in his sleep at the age of 89. I’ll put more obits in this space as I get the chance. Here’s a nice tribute, with links, via Chris Sciabarra’s “Notablog.”