Palestinian arts festival in Glasgow says the concept of linear time is a Eurocentric lie used against Palestinians

From the Jewish News (UK):

An arts group behind a controversial pro-Palestinian event in Glasgow has received more than £900,000 in public funding, sparking criticism over its use of a slogan widely condemned by Jewish groups.

Arika, which is organising a five-day event called Episode 12: From the Rivers to the Seas, was awarded £911,950 by Creative Scotland, a public arts body funded by the SNP-led Scottish Government, for the period 2025 to 2028.

The funding was revealed by the Daily Mail, which reported that the event had sparked accusations of antisemitism over its title.

I looked through the program and saw these two lectures taking place next Sunday:

Decolonising Time
Ramón Grosfoguel and Luke Devlin
2.45 - 3.45pm
Discussion | T4
Free & unticketed. First come, first served

Join world-renowned Puerto Rican decolonial thinker and activist as he unpicks the Eurocentric lie of linear time, and shares anti-colonial temporalities that arise out of, and in light of the life ways, suffering, dignity, and creative drive of oppressed communities around the world.

Access: Live Captioning

In the Time of Intifada: From Palestine to the Planetary Anticolonialism
Sherena Razek & Peter Makhlouf
4.15 - 5.30pm
Discussion | T4
Free & unticketed. First come, first served

How does Palestinian anticolonial resistance struggle against the colonization of our concept of time?

Access: Live Captioning

The idea that one thing follows another is apparently Eurocentric colonialism. 

There is so much that is so stupid about this. Ancient Mesopotamians and Egyptians kept records of their kings' succession records thousands of years before Europe emerged as a world power. Conversely, the Europeans also maintained a cyclical concept of time along with linear, with agricultural seasons, liturgical calendars, and recurring religious observances.

There is merit to the idea that Europeans imposed their ideas of calendars and 24-hour days on  indigenous peoples. But that is much different from saying that linear time is a "Eurocentric lie."

And what does this have to do with Palestinians? Glad you asked! 

 In answering the call to abolish the cultures of Nakba, how do we confront the Nakba’s planetary scale and the forms of “elemental intifada” by which the land refuses its colonial subjugation? In the wake of the World Wars, Palestine proved the epicenter of the West’s attempt to reestablish capital’s global rule by whitewashing its crimes in the colonies. The genocidal onslaught against historic Palestine and the ecocidal assault on our shared earth are inextricably bound to the same global reordering. Both are grounded in a foundational lie: that catastrophe is inevitable, irreversible, and immune from contest. In thinking with the Arabic language, to speak of ecological “disaster” is always already to have named “Nakba.”

In this conversation, Palestinian thinkers Peter Makhlouf and Sherena Razek sketch the chronic contours of Nakba as a temporal technology for securing colonial-capitalist futurity. They will probe how Palestinians militate against the imperial grammars of time that anesthetize us to the infrastructures of accumulation and dispossession that join Palestine and the planetary. Moving across poetry, film, visual culture, and collective praxis, the conversation will explore the temporal cosmologies within which the Palestinian culture of resistance refuses to allow the crimes of Nakba to be consigned to the elemental ash heap of history.

In short, the "nakba" cannot be understood merely as something that happened in 1948, but as something happening now. Which is, in fact, how it is increasingly presented. The distinction between a historical event and its present consequences is treated as a colonial imposition.

But there is a problem. If the "nakba" is defined as an ongoing condition rather than a historical event, what could ever bring it to an end? Palestinian statehood? Reparations? Peace? Or does the "nakba" necessarily continue as long as Israel exists?

The description condemns the idea that catastrophe is "inevitable, irreversible, and immune from contest." Yet by making the "nakba" an enduring feature of the political order, it risks making the catastrophe permanent by definition.

And there is a lot of evidence that this is exactly what Palestinians want to do. This is why they relate everything back to 1948, because until Israel is destroyed, they are victims of a "nakba" today. The millions of Hindus and Muslims who became displaced in the same year during India's partition are not suffering a current crisis, nor are the descendants of tens of millions of World War II refugees. But Palestinians are.  The simultaneously complain that they are  eternal victims yet they want to define themselves that way. They could complain that Lebanon and Syria and Egypt and the Gulf states do not allow them to become citizens, but that redirects the blame for their misery away from Israel: better to remain stateless and tell the world that the "nakba" is ongoing.

That's why they hate the idea of UNRWA being dismantled. An organization created by those horrible Europeans is what gives them "refugee" status today. 

It isn't colonialism that makes catastrophe inevitable and permanent. It is the Palestinians themselves. 

The further irony is that if you extend their concept of time to everyone else, then the Jews belong in Israel at least as much as they do. 2,000 years of expulsion is meaningless when linear time is a lie. We might as well invite the Romans, Greeks, Crusaders, British and Turks into the land, because the Palestinian claim is only a recent one and recency is colonialist.  

Anyway, if the concept of linear time is so colonialist, why is the earlier lecture at 2:45 PM and the later one at 4:15 PM? Everyone should be able to attend every lecture simultaneously.  I think they are imposing Eurocentric ideas on the attendees of the festival.  Burn the programs!

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Books by Elder of Ziyon

Reclaiming the Covenant Protocols He's an Anti-Zionist Too! At Ptach Lo (ebook) The Muslim Question (ebook, $8) Sarah Makes the World Better (ages 3-8)

More at: media.elderofziyon.com · Substack

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11/05 Links Pt2: Laundering Libel; After US elections, Iran knows its strategy is working — against everyone but Israel; Mr. Vice President: The Problem Was Not the Iran War. It Was the Ceasefire

From Ian:

Laundering Libel

The false characterization of Zionism as settler colonialism did not begin as neutral scholarship. It took shape as a Soviet-led campaign against Israel’s existence driven by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and was later propagated by activist academics who gave it scholarly veneer. In 1965, Fayez Sayegh, the founding director of the PLO’s Palestine Research Center in Beirut, published Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, mapping the political vocabulary of 20th-century decolonization onto Zionism. Sayegh, then a member of Kuwait’s delegation to the United Nations, was the principal author of the 1975 U.N. resolution declaring that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” The General Assembly revoked that resolution in 1991, but by then the idea had found a home in academia, where it has flourished ever since.

Maxime Rodinson’s essay “Israël, fait colonial?” (“Israel, a colonial fact?”) appeared in 1967 as the lead piece in a special issue of Les Temps Modernes, the influential journal founded and edited by Jean-Paul Sartre, France’s most celebrated philosopher at the time. The issue, running to hundreds of pages, focused on a single question: Was Israel a colonial state? Sartre’s journal lent that question the prestige of the European intellectual left. Its contributors divided on the answer, but Rodinson’s essay, later published in English as “Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?,” proved influential and helped carry the framework into Western academic discourse.

Its timing was telling. The journal issue appeared before the Six-Day War in June 1967, when Israel did not yet control the West Bank or Gaza. In other words, the colonial charge did not begin as a criticism of the occupation. It was aimed at Israel’s very existence—which is why South Africa traces Israel’s “colonization” back to 1948. Most of the writing from the communist world and the Global South that cast Israel as a colonial state came after the war. Over the following decades, versions of the claim spread through universities, activist groups, NGOs, and international institutions, and each repetition gave it another layer of apparent authority.

But repetition is not proof. The settler-colonial characterization depends on substantial historical erasures. Jews are a people whose national identity originated in the land of Israel and who maintained both a presence and a connection there through centuries of exile and persecution. Zionism had no imperial mother country directing Jewish migration for its own economic or strategic benefit. No metropole extracted colonial wealth. Jews arrived from numerous countries—often fleeing persecution in those very countries. For many Jews, Zionism represented refuge, national restoration, and self-determination in their ancestral homeland.

“Colonizer” and “colonized” cannot simply be assigned as self-proving identities and then substituted for historical analysis. Yet that is the framework South Africa brought to the International Court of Justice. Once again, a false narrative about Jews, developed outside of law, had entered an official legal proceeding.

South Africa did not ask the ICJ to examine the Gaza war solely as a conflict following Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre. Its application asked the judges to view the allegations within a much longer history. At the January 2024 hearing, South Africa’s ambassador invoked an “ongoing Nakba” produced through “Israel’s colonization since 1948.”

Why 1948, when the relevant narrative should begin on Oct. 7, 2023? The settler-colonial framework is designed to perform substantial legal work before one even reaches the alleged elements of genocide. It attempts to fix the parties’ identities as colonizer and colonized and to stretch the timeline back to Israel’s establishment in 1948. It also attempts to thread a revisionist continuity through the Jewish national project from the establishment of Israel, to subsequent wars, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the present war.

The point of the imposed narrative through-line is to supply an asserted criminal motive that is integral to Israel’s very existence: Israel’s military conduct can be understood not primarily as conduct in a war initiated by Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, but as the latest stage of an allegedly eliminatory colonial enterprise.

Settler colonialism, however, is not a crime under the Genocide Convention. Nor is it an element of genocide. Its importance to South Africa’s argument is subtler. It is the narrative through which South Africa asks the ICJ to interpret the evidence of genocide.

That is particularly consequential because genocide requires specific intent: the intent to destroy a protected national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part, as such.

The ICJ has imposed a demanding standard when genocidal intent is inferred from a pattern of conduct. In Croatia v. Serbia, the ICJ held that the inference of genocidal intent must be the only reasonable inference available from the conduct alleged. Alternative explanations therefore matter. Israel has maintained that its military objectives included defeating Hamas, preventing another Oct. 7, dismantling Hamas’ military infrastructure, and recovering the hostages Hamas had taken. These objectives matter enormously to a legal inquiry asking whether genocidal intent is the only reasonable inference from Israel’s conduct.

The settler-colonial narrative short-circuits that inquiry. Once Israel is defined as an eliminatory project since 1948, there is no need to weigh why Israel acted as it did after Oct. 7; the premise has already supplied the answer. Conduct that the war itself could explain is instead read as evidence of an eliminatory purpose supposedly built into Zionism since 1948. The false narrative ends up doing the work that proof of specific intent is supposed to do.

Then comes the second stage of laundering. The accusation acquires a case name, a docket number, written pleadings from sovereign states, hearings broadcast live from the Peace Palace, judicial orders, and a permanent place in the international legal record. None of those things proves the accusation. But each institutional layer increases the distance between the narrative, along with its ideological origins, and evidentiary defects.

The provisional-measures stage marked a particularly significant transformation. In January 2024, the ICJ was not deciding whether Israel had committed genocide. It was deciding whether interim measures were warranted as the litigation proceeded.

Among other requirements, the ICJ considered whether it had prima facie jurisdiction, whether at least some of the rights asserted under the Genocide Convention were plausible, whether those rights were linked to the requested measures, and whether there was a real and imminent risk of irreparable prejudice.

The ICJ found plausible the right of Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from acts of genocide and related prohibited acts, and South Africa’s right to seek Israel’s compliance with the Genocide Convention. That was not a finding that genocide had occurred. It was not a finding that genocidal intent had been proved. And it was not a ruling on, much less an acceptance of, the settler-colonial narrative through which South Africa had framed its case.

But outside the courtroom, South Africa called the order a “decisive victory” and said it established that Israel’s actions were “plausibly genocidal.” Plausible rights became a plausible case, a plausible case became plausible genocide, and plausible genocide became apparent judicial confirmation. The legal proceeding added another layer. And then came integration. The provisional order began to be invoked in arguments that third states were now “on notice” of a danger of genocide and therefore faced obligations concerning their relationships with Israel.

The ICJ proceedings became part of disputes over arms transfers and military assistance. Civil-society organizations invoked the litigation in challenges to arms exports.

The ICJ was not necessarily the cause of each subsequent governmental decision, lawsuit, boycott, divestment demand, or diplomatic condemnation. But the mere existence of the proceeding supplied a powerful new source of institutional authority. The result is a loop: The narrative enters a legal proceeding; the proceeding generates consequences; and those consequences are then invoked to authenticate the narrative. That is the recursive structure of juridical narrative laundering, and it explains why the process does not require a final judgment.

Money laundering succeeds when dirty money can circulate as legitimate wealth. Juridical narrative laundering succeeds when an unproved accusation can circulate as legally validated fact. By that measure, the merits judgment may come almost too late. The accusation can accomplish much of its diplomatic, legal, economic, and reputational work years before a court decides whether it is true.

Melanie Phillips: Not waving but drowning

For Muslims, hatred of Israel is the obsession that drives out all other concerns. Now this unhinged tunnel vision is being promoted by Vance too.

Unforgivably, he has now undermined the war against Iran by all but urging immediate surrender.

But the reason Iran was a losing electoral issue was that Trump had not won the war. Instead, he abandoned it at a crucial juncture, declaring victory when Iran remained undefeated and able to push up the price of oil as a weapon of its war against America.

And a major force behind America’s policy of preemptive surrender was reportedly Vance.

Now Vance blames voter anger against Israel for the Republican rout. He fails to observe that this anger was fueled by the lies and distortions about Israel and the war that have been allowed to spread unchecked—not least by him.

The scene is now set for a titanic struggle on both sides of the American political divide. In the Democratic Party, centrists will struggle with anti-West, anti-Israel Muslims and leftists. In the Republican Party, conservatives will struggle with radical Jew-haters, white supremacists and conspiracy nuts.

The momentum is with the hard-left, the Jew-haters and the Islamists because the centrists on both sides of the aisle lack a moral and intellectual spine.

The outlook for America’s alliance with Israel is therefore ominous. That’s the real menace in the sudden ending of America’s $4 billion in military aid to Israel.

This is not in itself the blow that many have taken it to be. The suggestion came from Israel itself and is absolutely the right decision. That’s because, by transitioning to joint U.S.-Israel military projects, it transforms the Jewish state from being viewed as a demeaning supplicant into a partner.

This will free Israel, which is now urgently developing its own huge arms industry, from the stranglehold of dependency by which successive U.S. administrations have lethally curtailed Israel’s ability to defend itself.

The reason Israel wanted this was that it saw the catastrophic erosion of support for it among the American public. And that’s the ominous point.

The red-green alliance is destroying Britain and Europe because there’s now a critical mass of their public that has been left ignorant and unable to think because of an education system that’s gone Marxist and nihilist.

America has been afflicted by the same instruments of chaos for years. Now those forces have conquered the citadel.

Most people don’t like extremes. That’s why Trump was elected: to defeat the lunatics of the intersectional left.

The best argument for Trump was that the alternative was unconscionable. Now the unconscionable have captured Congress and much of America’s governing class.

Blue wave? America isn’t waving but drowning.

NYPost Editorial: Philly’s Nazi-laden boycott proves it was never actually about Palestine — just the Jews

A despicable Nov. 8 protest against Jewish-owned restaurants in Philadelphia proves that the alleged bright line between antizionism and antisemitism is a dirty lie.

Philly bicycle activism group On Your Left is launching a bike-by protest in support of Boycott CookNSolo drive to shut down six restaurants in the tony Rittenhouse Square neighborhood, all owned by Jews.

“These Zionist establishments must go! Not in our city!” On Your Left demands.

These eateries, it says, must “die,” along with the “political ideology of Zionism.”

Zionists? Of the four restaurant owners called out by name for death or expulsion, one is Israeli-American; the other three are American Jews, but that’s all boycotters need to know.

One target, Marti Lieberman, who runs a popular mac’n’cheese spot, explains that her business has nothing to do with Jews, Israel or Zionism — except that she sometimes wears a Star of David necklace.

So, for the boycotters, simply being Jews is enough to make these people “disgusting humans” who should be driven out of business.

More damning still: The protest date, Nov. 8, coincides closely with the 88th anniversary of Kristallnacht — the “Night of Broken Glass,” when Nazi thugs burned more than 1,400 synagogues and destroyed thousands of Jewish businesses.

The organizers admit they knew this, but excuse themselves their event is the day before Kristallnacht.

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11/05 Links Pt1: Danny Danon: Do Not Mistake Israeli Democracy for Weakness; Will Congress Constrain Trump on Iran?; NPR Mimics UNIFIL Who Shields Hezbollah

From Ian:

Amb. Danny Danon: Do Not Mistake Israeli Democracy for Weakness

The turnout in the Israeli Knesset election on Oct. 27 was 77.7% of eligible voters, the highest in Israel's history.

Most importantly, the election results should daunt our enemies. Since Oct. 7, Israel has fought valiantly against the threats that surround us: Hamas in Gaza, Hizbullah in Lebanon, and the Iranian regime itself.

All the major Israeli parties share the same philosophy: that Israel must address these threats and ensure they can never attack Israel again.

Israeli citizens have proven that in a region of extremism, our democracy remains a beacon of hope to the rest of the world, and that we will fight to protect it.

Eight months after devastating joint U.S.-Israeli strikes, Iran is rebuilding its nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

An IRGC spokesperson this month threatened to turn Israel into "scorched earth," and displace our residents to the Sinai Desert. So long as Iran can deliver on these threats, we take them seriously.

Hizbullah itself admitted that it is preparing for confrontation with Israel. Iranian weapons and funds continue to arm radical extremists that seek Israel's destruction.

In the first election since Oct. 7, Israelis demonstrated that a secure and prosperous Middle East remains a top priority, and that we will defend our country from those who threaten to destroy it.

Our message to the Iranian regime is clear. We will not stand by as Iran doubles down on its radical agenda. We will protect our people.

After the U.S. Midterm Elections

Years ago, a Palestinian journalist argued to me that without America, Israel would have lost every war. I reminded him of the War of Independence and the Six-Day War, in which we won almost entirely on our own. It would be harder, I told him, but we would win every military campaign.

After the U.S. midterm elections, one pro-Israel stronghold remains, the White House, and it too will probably fall in the next election or the one after. Quite a few pro-Israel senators and House members remain. But what was once the lunatic fringe of Congress has become the mainstream.

The cause was a years-long, dollar-rich campaign, antisemitic in essence. It held that Israel is to blame for nearly every trouble Americans have, has no right to exist, and is a state of European colonialists that stole the land of the poor Palestinians.

President Trump's hasty declaration on Election Day about a full halt of aid to Israel only seemed to prove the claim that American aid does come at the expense of budgets meant for the American citizen. And try explaining to them that the $3.8 billion a year brought several times that amount into America every year, in jobs, arms sales, and joint developments.

Congress is expected to complicate the war effort in Iran. It will not truly be able to halt the moves, at least not for several months, but it will try, despite the complete contradiction to American interests and to those of every U.S.-friendly state in the region.

A new era is beginning. Israel will have to reach independent military capabilities sooner than expected and, at the same time, reposition itself diplomatically against a hostile Europe and a confused America.

Ending U.S. Military Aid to Israel

On Tuesday, President Trump announced that the U.S. would stop providing nearly $4 billion in annual military aid to Israel by the end of 2026. President Trump just did Israel an enormous favor with an important step toward completing the promise of Israeli independence. For nearly 80 years, the Jewish state has been building toward a moment when it could finally say something that Jews, for most of their history, were rarely in a position to say to anyone: Thank you. We can take care of ourselves.

The foreign military financing is overwhelmingly directed toward purchasing American-made military equipment. It supports American manufacturers, American workers, American military production, and American technological capabilities. Yet, Israel finds itself portrayed as a helpless foreign dependent draining the American treasury. That perception is not only misleading. It has become strategically and politically damaging.

Israelis should be asking: What exactly are we sacrificing in exchange for that money? A country that has developed some of the most sophisticated military technology on Earth has been operating under a system that increasingly directs its military purchasing power toward foreign manufacturers rather than its own. Military assistance gives Washington considerable leverage over Israeli decision-making that may involve a delayed shipment, a threatened restriction, or a disagreement over how Israel conducts a military operation.

There is an enormous difference between listening to a friend and being dependent on that friend's approval. A country responsible for the survival of its own people cannot afford to confuse the two. The lesson of Jewish history is that a people who cannot ultimately provide for their own security are always vulnerable to the decisions of others.

Ending military aid should not be confused with abandoning the American-Israeli alliance. The U.S. has compelling reasons to maintain that alliance. Israel provides intelligence, technological innovation, military expertise, and a capable regional partner in one of the most strategically important parts of the world. Replacing military assistance with a more conventional commercial and strategic partnership could make the relationship healthier.

America has been an extraordinary friend to Israel, and American military support has contributed meaningfully to Israel's security. Gratitude, however, is not the same as permanent dependence. The greatest compliment Israel can pay the U.S. is to demonstrate that decades of partnership helped create a country strong enough to stand increasingly on its own.

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Intruder Filmed At Iran Nuke Facility Described As 'Scruffy-Looking Nerf-Herder' (PreOccupied Territory)

Our weekly column from the humor site PreOccupied Territory.

Check out their Facebook and Substack pages.

Tehran, November 5 — Iranian security personnel released closed-circuit footage Tuesday of an unidentified male who breached the outer perimeter of the Natanz uranium enrichment complex shortly after 0300 local time. Facility officials described the individual, later estimated to be in his mid-thirties, as “a scruffy-looking nerf-herder” who displayed “an irritatingly confident posture” while moving through restricted zones near the centrifuge halls.

Footage shows the man, of medium build and apparent Corellian extraction, wearing a white collared shirt under a dark vest, with a holstered energy sidearm on his right hip. He made no attempt to disable cameras and at one point paused to adjust a pair of fingerless gloves while glancing upward, an action security analysts later characterized as “looking for an exit vector or simply checking whether anyone was impressed.”

Plant personnel found explosive devices or sampling equipment. A single coarse strand of long brown hair recovered near an access hatch has been sent for genetic sequencing; preliminary results indicate it may come from a Wookie - though a spokesman denied any such creature appeared on the cameras or life form readings.

Colonel Reza Mohammadi of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force told state media the intruder’s gait and “smirk-to-blaster ratio” matched no known opposition profile, not any Mossad operative. “We have dealt with many foreign saboteurs,” Mohammadi said. “This one walked like he already knew which corridor would not set off the motion sensors. He also appeared to be talking to himself about having ‘made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs,’ which our technical staff is treating as either a coded threat or an unusually specific boast about reaction time. Isn't a parsec a unit of distance, not time? It makes no sense in itself.”

The facility’s independent power systems registered a brief surge consistent with a large freighter-class vessel performing a low-altitude pass roughly forty minutes after the breach; radar returns showed only transient clutter that operators dismissed as atmospheric interference, insisting that no ship that small has a cloaking device.

Iranian officials have increased patrol density and issued a standing instruction, despite assurances that nothing serious appears to have occurred during the breach. “Never tell me the odds," insisted Colonel Mohammadi.

A joint statement from the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran and the Ministry of Intelligence emphasized that the incident does not indicate a loss of nuclear material and that “all centrifuge cascades remain under full national control.” The statement added that any further unauthorized entries by individuals claiming prior experience with asteroid fields or carbon-freezing chambers will be met with “force.”

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Books by Elder of Ziyon

Reclaiming the Covenant Protocols He's an Anti-Zionist Too! At Ptach Lo (ebook) The Muslim Question (ebook, $8) Sarah Makes the World Better (ages 3-8)

More at: media.elderofziyon.com · Substack

Read More