Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: Academic fraud

Showing posts with label Academic fraud. Show all posts

Monday, October 08, 2018

Crazy anti-Israel academic paper of the day: "The Transnational Palestinian Self: Toward Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Thought"

Since the "Sokal Squared" hoax of nonsensical academic papers being published in respected journals in the social sciences, I've been looking up papers about Israel and Palestinians in similar journals to see how the subject matter is treated. I wrote about one last week, but there are so, so many more.

If you think media bias is bad, academia is a hundred times worse.

Here is the abstract for a paper entitled "The Transnational Palestinian Self: Toward Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Thought," by Stephen Sheehi, the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Chair of Middle East Studies at the College of William and Mary, in the journal Psychoanalytic Perspectives.

This discussion considers Palestinian subjectivity in a perpetual state of doubleness, commuting between a number of transnational political and cultural contexts and positions. Engaging Lama Khouri’s “Through Trump’s Looking Glass into Alice’s Wonderland: On Meeting the House Palestinian,” this paper reveals how, on one hand, Zionism is intricately and inextricably linked with and haunted by a Palestinian identity, which it fundamentally works to negate; on the other hand, it also engages the ideological aspects of Palestinian Arab identity when it is transplanted to the United States, interpolating all identities through its racialized social and class hierarchy. In examining the structures of these binary identity systems, I gesture toward a decolonializing psychoanalysis that adopts psychoanalytic tools to understand how alienating two-ness can become a productive mode of confronting and dismantling Zionist objectification and radicalized othering.

No, Stephen, Zionism isn't linked to Palestinian identity. It is utterly indifferent to Palestinian identity, which didn't exist in any serious way until Zionism was at least 70 years old. It is Palestinianism that is deeply engaged in negating Jewish nationalism and to deny the right to Jewish self-determination.

But Sheehi has come up with a way to use "decolonializing psychoanalysis" to dismantle "Zionist objectification and radicalized othering," which really sounds evil - and to the readers of these journals. it clearly is.

The paper he refers to, "Through Trump’s Looking Glass into Alice’s Wonderland: On Meeting the House Palestinian," by Lama Z. Khouri, was published in the same issue, and doesn't even pretend to be scholarly:

In this article, I explore—as a woman of color, a theorist, and a clinician—what it means to be a subject with conscious and unconscious relations to power and domination. To do so, I limn a psychic space I encountered through the Trump looking glass, where my understanding of the world around me was turned on its head and where newly found sociopolitical realities and discourse feel bizarre and nonsensical. There, like Alice in Wonderland, I realized that I did not know who I was and felt my identity morphing into different shapes and sizes: Through Trump’s rhetoric I became viscerally aware of multiple interpellated selves (interpellation is described in the paper), within which a hidden traumatic narrative led me to enact such interpellations. I use earlier clinical and personal experiences to demarcate these selves and identities, which I did not know I knew, by revisiting a talk I gave at a conference on immigration 3 years prior to Trump’s inauguration. I also attempt to uncover how my identities came to be by studying those sociopolitical and cultural factors, I believe led to such interpellations. I propose that such experiences are probably universal.

I don't understand what traumatic experiences she had in the wake of Trump's election "as a woman of color, a theorist, and a clinician" but why bother doing research to see if her experiences are universal - just propose it! It saves a great deal of time to make up theories than it does to test them. Science and the scientific method is all part of the patriarchy, after all.

(Khouri also wrote a paper about how her own psychoanalysis with a therapist who is the child of Holocaust survivors didn't work out because, apparently, she was trying to equate the "Nakba" with the Holocaust and the shrink couldn't deal with someone with such a tenuous grip on reality.)

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Yes, real academic papers on Israel are just as crazy as hoax papers

I mentioned yesterday the hoax paper scandal where nonsense is accepted by what the hoaxers called "grievance study" academia and how anti-Israel "scholarship" uses the same illogic that the fake papers used.

Here's an example, from Settler Colonial Studies, by Esther Alloun (a self-described "Arab Jew") where the author is upset that Israeli animal rights activists don't relate their activities to "occupation" the way that Palestinian Arab animal rights activists properly do. The abstract:

This article examines the contemporary animal rights movement in Palestine–Israel and compares Jewish Israeli activism to Palestinian activism to illuminate the ways in which the settler colonial context shapes animal politics. The article argues that human–animal relationships constitute a significant dimension through which settler colonialism is expressed, engaged with, and resisted. As such, drawing on ethnographic material, it explores how different approaches to animal activism can obscure or reveal the racial and colonial relations they are bound up with. It considers how Jewish Israelis frame animal rights in non-intersectional ways, as a simple, single-issue movement that can be abstracted from human politics and power relations, while the Palestinian Animal League in the occupied West Bank weaves animal activism with the decolonial struggle for Palestinian self-determination in an intersectional spirit. The article hence suggests that, to a great extent, animal politics follows the patterns set up by the settler colonial regime, with the type of advocacy on behalf of animals being shaped by the sides taken within the settler state. Instances that trouble and complicate this settler/native binary are explored as well as the possibilities of coalitional politics.

What exactly animal rights has to do with "settler colonialism" is not really spelled out, but intersectional theory says it is so therefore it is.

The author is clearly frustrated that liberal Israeli animal activists are acting out their settler colonialist instincts by not including the Palestinians in their lives:

Activists embody a single-optic perspective by not acknowledging that their love and care for animals is made possible by the colonial politics (the ‘right and left issues’) they live in. The affective register of love and care is used to distance oneself from politics (a point I return to in the final section), and activists repeatedly argue that human and animal issues ‘are not the same’ and that ‘you need to separate the struggles!’ (interview with Maya, 14 February 2017). Jewish activists also justify their single optic through a universalising discourse pitted against the local human problems occurring in the region, which are trivialised as a result. Again, this does not make their feelings or concerns any less genuine, but any acknowledgment on their behalf of a multi-optic account of the problem would significantly complicate their picture of animal activism.
The single optic of Israeli animal activism, its depoliticised and selective focus, makes sense in light of the settler colonial logic at work in Palestine–Israel. Indeed, this non-intersectional approach echoes the particular modalities of Zionist settler colonialism through which animal politics operate in this context. Importantly and as Mark Rifkin posits, the settler colonial logic produces durable ‘tendencies’, ‘orientations’ and ‘momentum’ rather than ‘determining effects’. Lorenzo Veracini argues that settler colonialism works towards its self-supersession and covers its trace. Wolfe points out that it is especially the case in Israel because of the ‘ideology of return’, i.e. the idea that Jews are returning to Zion (Jerusalem), a land that they already owned. In such perspective, Jewish Israelis do not see ‘Zionism as colonialism’, and the notion of return is used to naturalise their claims to territory and the erasure and replacement of the Palestinian natives. This sets the scene for a very unreconstructed and unacknowledged form of settler colonialism.....

As such, settlers do not necessarily perceive everyday enactments and re-enactments of Zionist settler sovereignty as political or deliberate moves. Consequently, by excluding Palestinians or politics from animal rights advocacy, Jewish activists become one more point of ‘resonance’ (to use Marcelo Svirsky’s expression) of the Zionist logic, but they do not perceive this exclusion as political. Instead, it is an expression of ‘settler common sense’, and part of the ‘ordinary, non-reflexive conditions of possibility’of living in Palestine–Israel, which translates into the exclusion of Palestinians from a shared moral horizon and understanding of justice.

Notice what the author is doing. She defines Zionism as a colonialist project as a given, and therefore all Jewish Zionists are colonialists. Their not discussing their crimes of colonialsm in every context of their lives is proof of their evil.

The Palestine Animal League, on the other hand, looks at things in the correct intersectional manner:

Jewish Israeli animal advocates primarily adopt a single-optic vision that severs animal rights from its context, whereas PAL advocates a multi-optic intersectional approach that links animal and human rights.

PAL’s director also drew on the idea of intersectionality to explain how animal advocacy cannot be viewed through a selective mono lens of animals only:

Many of the projects that we are doing, we are intersectional, we work with the humans and we work with the animals in the same project, and we don’t distinguish between the rights […] rights is rights, for the humans, for kids, for women, for men, anti-occupation, against occupation, for animal rights, rights is rights, this is what it means, this is the first step. (5 February 2017)

The a priori insistence that intersectional theory applies to animal rights makes Jewish Zionists guilty of every possible crime against all rights, human and animal, if they believe that Israel is the homeland of the Jewish people. The paper falls just short of claiming that Israeli Jewish animal rights activists are "animalwashing" the "occupation."

This is nothing less than academically approved antisemitism.

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What the "grievance study" scandal means to the Arab-Israeli conflict (UPDATE)

This story is all over today:

A trio of concerned academics has published seven intentionally absurd papers in leading scholarly journals, making bizarre recommendations including chaining up children and keeping men on leashes.

The trio say the papers, which used fabricated authors and credentials, are an attempt to expose political bias in fields that study race, gender and sexuality, which they see as being misled by biased research and poor methodology.

Their papers argued for a slew of bewildering positions, including chaining up privileged school children as an educational opportunity and a push to include “fat bodybuilding”’ in professional bodybuilding competitions as a way to nullify fat shaming.

Another paper rewrote a chapter of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, replacing parts of Hitler’s political manifesto with terms including “solidarity allyship”, “neo-liberal feminism” and “'multi-variate matrix of domination”.

Each of the papers were peer-reviewed before being published, meaning they passed the highest level of critical assessment in their fields.

The trio went public with the project after The Wall Street Journal uncovered it, saying a paper which claimed dog parks are “petri dishes for canine ‘rape culture’" was ridiculous enough to pique the publication's interest.

"We intentionally made the papers absurd and used faulty methods to see if they could pass scrutiny at the highest level of academia. Concerningly, they did," James Lindsay, one of the authors of the papers, said.
"A rambling poetic monologue of a bitter, divorced feminist written by a teenage-angst poetry generator shouldn't be accepted as a scholarly article worthy of publishing."

In US humanities departments an academic with seven papers published within seven years is awarded tenure, an indefinite academic appointment. The trio completed these seven papers within 10 months.

I once noted the difference between two sets of Columbia University faculty that signed an anti-Israel or pro-Israel petition.

The anti-Israel professors were mostly concentrated in "soft science" fields like anthropology, gender studies, sociology, history and Middle East studies.

The pro-Israel professors were concentrated in engineering, medicine and law.

The hoax papers showed that in the soft sciences like sociology, scholarship is a joke. Papers are judged based on their conclusions, not on the rigor of their arguments, which means that these papers are written with the conclusion determined first, and the "facts" cherry picked or made up to support the foregone conclusion.

We see the same thing with anti-Israel "scholarship." The conclusion comes first - Israel is an apartheid state, Israelis are racist, the IDF targets civilians, or whatever the outrage flavor of the day is. Then they find some "facts," often fictional or highly deceptive, and publicize them. Actual facts and context are to be hidden if they don't match the "narrative." In fact, any Israeli actions that contradict the narrative are spun as if they prove the narrative (i.e., "pinkwashing.") Just as in "grievance studies," the conclusion is the driver to the evidence, not the other way around.

No wonder that academics who value truth and rigor tend to be pro-Israel and academics who favor narratives and political correctness lean towards the very victim-posing Palestinians.

And no wonder that the pro-Palestinian side tries to hijack any other grievance cause - women, people of color, first peoples, the disabled - to pretend that they are fighting the same fight, when in fact Palestinians are among the least liberal people on the planet.

UPDATE: One of the journals that fell for the hoax, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, published this anti-Israel dribble in 2016. Who can tell the difference between hoax and anti-Israel "scholarship?"

Drawing upon subaltern geopolitics and feminist geography, this article explores how militarisation shapes micro-geographies of violence and occupation in Israel–Palestine. While accounts of spectacular and large-scale political violence dominate popular imaginaries and academic analyses in/of the region, a shift to the micro-scale foregrounds the relationship between power, politics and space at the level of everyday life. In the context of Israel–Palestine, micro-geographies have revealed dynamic strategies for ‘getting by’ or ‘dealing with’ the occupation, as practiced by Palestinian populations in the face of spatialised violence. However, this article considers how Jewish Israelis actively shape the spatial micro-politics of power within and along the borders of the Israeli state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem during 2010–2011, an analysis of everyday narratives illustrates how relations of violence, occupation and domination rely upon gendered dynamics of border collapse and boundary maintenance. Here, the borders between home front and battlefield break down at the same time as communal boundaries are reproduced, generating conditions of ‘total militarism’ wherein military interests and agendas are both actively and passively diffused. Through gendering the militarised micro-geographies of violence among Jewish Israelis, this article reveals how individuals construct, navigate and regulate the everyday spaces of occupation, detailing more precisely how macro political power endures.

It sounds like Jews in Israel are prone to violence. Nah, nothing problematic about that.
(h/t Irene)

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Idiot PhD claims Israel has destabilized the Middle East. Um, not quite.

Dr. Dana El Kurd, who received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Texas, responded to a tweet:

You have no understanding of history or the long-term impacts of Israel then. Assad is a monster today, but Israel's presence has destabilized the entire Middle East since its inception. Terrorism, ethnic cleansing, wiping out entire cities & camps - you name it, they've done it.
— Dr. Dana El Kurd (@danaelkurd) July 30, 2018

Let's see if Israel really has destabilized the region.

Wikipedia lists all the modern Middle East conflicts over the past century. It lumps all of the Arab Israeli wars as a single conflict, but even if you divide it up into (let's say) 10 wars.

Outside of those it lists about 90 conflicts in the Middle East that have nothing to do with Israel.

The casualty count for the Arab-Israeli conflict is about 80,000 on all sides.

The casualty count for all non-Israeli Middle East conflicts is over 7 million - nearly 100 times the number of those killed in Israel-related conflicts.

Far, far more people have been killed in conflicts involving tiny Yemen than Israel since 1948.

What about the claim that Israel destabilizes the Middle East? Is she really claiming that Syria, Yemen and Lebanese conflicts today have anything to do with Israel?

And Israel has been involved in only two international wars since 1973, both in Lebanon. At the same time, dozens of conflicts have broken out not involving Israel.

El Kurd's claptrap passes for sober analysis - she has written for a Washington Post blog - but she is thoroughly, completely and provably wrong.

The problem is that the media and the NGOs and the world governments indeed spend 99% of their time talking about a conflict that is only 1% as important in terms of actual victims, so El Kurd's lies don't sound quite as absurd as an actual analysis shows they are.

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Anti-Israel professor cares about pro-Israel grammar in news stories, but facts aren't important at all

Here is a great example of how anti-Israel academics can get their propaganda spread by pretending to write about something altogether different.

Annabelle Lukin is an Associate Professor in Linguistics at Macquarie University. She has decided to spread her hate under the pretext of critiquing the verb usage on stories from Gaza as not being adequately pro-Israel.

The recent killing of unarmed Palestinians by Israeli forces has sparked not only a reasonable outcry, but commentary on the language journalists use to report these events.

[O]ne of the most important but contested roles of modern journalism [is]the act of putting political violence into words.

The bad news for journalists is there is no neutral mode. If your words sound neutral, it’s likely you’ve simply avoided laying responsibility for the killings, or have imputed responsibility only indirectly.

She illustrates the story this way:

The entire article uses Gaza, and only Gaza, to make her point. Her Twitter account is littered with anti-Israel posts.

But it is ostensibly not an anti-Israel story but a critique of how journalists cover violence.

Maybe I'm just a rube, but while I agree that the wording of stories is important, accuracy should be far more important than "imputing responsibility."

Lukin's desired headline implies that those who were killed were merely protesters, the kind you might see in London or New York.

It is obvious that killing peaceful protesters is abhorrent.

But the Gazans were rioters, not protesters. Throwing firebombs, setting fields on fire with Molotov kites, gunfire and active attempts to invade another country are all military actions, not peaceful protest. Her suggested headline is deceptive, and knowingly deceptive.

Some 85% of those killed were linked to terror groups. That information is now known, and Lukin cannot claim ignorance since she clearly researched all the Gaza stories she could find. To portray them as mere "protesters" - which most media did and continues to do is irresponsible journalism.

The offensive part of the Gaza stories isn't the grammar - it is the lies of omission in not describing the actual context of the riots as being a military operation, planned and executed by a terror group, using civilians as chaff to draw fire while the terrorists attempt to mount an invasion that would include murder and kidnapping. All of this is admitted to by Hamas itself.

To Lukin, the use of passive voice is a bigger problem than the media not doing their actual job of reporting.

Lukin is not concerned with facts - if they go against her hated of Israel.

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UK-based academic blames Europe for not embracing Hamas

The European Journal of International Relations published an article called "Ritualised securitisation: The European Union’s failed response to Hamas’s success" by Catherine Charrett, of Queen Mary University of London.

She argues that the EU's failure to embrace Hamas as a democratic, liberal and legitimate leader of Palestinians was a type of ritual that was forced on them by Israel:

Here's the abstract:

Why and how do political leaders and bureaucrats miss opportunities or make mistakes? This article explores the pressures to conform and to perform that direct securitising decisions and practices. It begins with the assertion that the European Union missed an opportunity to engage with Hamas after the movement’s participation and success in transparent and democratically legitimated elections, and instead promoted a politics of increased securitisation. The securitisation of Hamas worked against the European Union’s own stated aims of state-building and democratisation, and increased the resistance image of Hamas. This article investigates the rituals that shaped this decision, arguing that punitive and conforming dynamics implicated the knowing of the event. Performance studies and anthropology observe how rituals let participants know how to behave in a given situation, and they performatively constitute a social reality through the appearance of normalcy or harmony. Hamas was reproduced as threat through the European Union’s compulsion to repeat a policy of conditionality, which was performative of Hamas’s ability to respond diplomatically to its own securitisation. First, at a discursive level, rituals simplify or reduce the complexity of an event by allowing participants to respond to new issues through existing regimes of intelligibility. Second, at a practice level, rituals impose an imperative to perform within the workplace, which limits the possibility for dissent or for challenging hierarchy within the institution. This investigation relies on elite interviews with senior Hamas representatives conducted in Gaza, and interviews with European Union representatives who were involved in monitoring the elections and enacting a response to Hamas’s success.

Yes, EU policy to not work with a terror organization is being represented in anthropological terms as a ritual of treating terrorists as terrorists. Of course, they are conforming to Israeli demands.

Here is a key passage in the paper:

Securitisation closes down the possibility of compromise or partial engagement. The structure of the securitising discourse replicates an either/or framing, whereby the Other is marked as either friend or enemy (Williams, 2003). This either/or framing is replicated in the conditions that the Quartet placed on Hamas. Solana expressed the EU’s support for the Quartet’s principles and, soon after, the conditions came to structure all EU engagement with the newly elected government. Either Hamas accept the conditions or be sanctioned. Rifkind (2006) argues that Hamas could not metamorphose overnight and simply accept the conditions set out by the Quartet. This would work against one of the principal reasons for which Hamas was elected: its maintained resistance against the occupation.

The Quartet had several preconditions before they would accept Hamas: A Palestinian state must recognize the state of Israel without prejudging what various grievances or claims are appropriate, abide by previous diplomatic agreements, and renounce violence as a means of achieving goals.

It is quite normal for a group to set conditions before agreeing to accept another group as a peace partner. None of the Quartet's conditions are unreasonable. But to this pseudo-academic, asking Hamas to renounce violence is unreasonable - because violence is what it is all about and why it was elected!

The paper argues that Hamas is much more liberal than the West portrays it, it is misunderstood, and it is flexible in its ideology. I found this section ironic:

Hamas members are aware that a discourse of terrorism reproduces a particular understanding of them, and they evoke an alternative iteration of themselves. They argue that the Europeans have received mistaken reports that Hamas is just looking for blood
(Majdi, 2012). Majdi (2012) continues: ‘They didn’t look at the other sides of Hamas,
which call for tolerance and humanity’. Hamas member and youth leader Hani Meqbel
(2012) stated that ‘[we held] too many workshops to discuss the way we should deal with
the West. We are misunderstood’. Puar and Rai address how the ‘terrorist’ is produced as
a particular monstrous subject, which is made intelligible through a performative grid
that imprints its supposed challenge to civilisational progress upon it. They state: ‘the
terrorist has become a monster to be quarantined and an individual to be corrected’ (Puar
and Rai, 2002: 121). Subjects regulated by discursive structures of securitisation are, by
virtue of being subjected to them, formed, defined and reproduced in accordance with the
requirements of those structures (Butler, 1990: 3). The exclusionary matrix by which
subjects are formed disavows other possible ways of recognising, so the reiteration of
Hamas’s terroristic illegitimacy works to foreclose other ways of seeing the movement.
The totalising framing works to know Hamas, before its members have even spoken, and
before any actual meetings have taken place. Etimad Tashawa (2012), Hamas representative, explains:
the EU does not know anyone from Hamas. They think Hamas are ogres. They think thatHamas is going to come and eat all of them and to end the European Union and to end Israel.And it is not — it is a flexible movement.

All of the evidence of Hamas' supposed flexibility and willingness to compromise comes from quotes by Hamas to Westerners (including the author) and from other academic papers which have the same flaws. Not once does the author of this paper look at thousands of primary Hamas sources and speeches in Arabic that clearly support the idea that it has always been a terror group hell-bent on destroying Israel and ridding the Middle East of all Jews in any political positions. The words "rocket" or "tunnel" or "bombs" or "attacks" do not appear once in this paper in relation to Hamas.

Because the point of this and so many other academic papers isn't to uncover the truth but to hide it behind a wall of polysyllabic nonsense.

The irony is that the exact same complaint that this quasi-academic has against how the world looks at Hamas so one-dimensionally applies to how her fellow academics that she quotes, like Judith Butler and Jasbir Puar, look at Israel. The very idea of "pinkwashing" is a liberal-approved method of avoiding any complexity in discussing Zionism as anything other than a wholly-evil political movement and Israel as anything other than an oppressive regime. How can Israel be liberal if it is evil? It must be hiding its evil by pretending to be liberal. Complexity and nuance when dealing with a terror group disappears when talking about a modern, liberal, law-based, democratic state.

Hamas is indeed more complex than just a simple terror movement. It is an Islamist movement, it is a political movement, it indeed engages in social service programs. But its very raison d'etre is the destruction of the Jewish state and the denial of Jewish peoplehood, and no amount of apologetics by pretend-academics can erase that fact.

No matter how hard they try.

(h/t Gerald)

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SFSU professor says that it is Islamophobic to NOT hate Zionists

I had missed this from last month.

San Francisco State University president Leslie Wong clarified his earlier position about Zionism on campus, by issuing an apology and statement that read in part:

My comments about Zionists and whether or not they are welcomed at San Francisco State University caused a lot of anguish and deeply hurt feelings. I am responsible for those words and, after study and reflection, I have come to understand how flawed my comments were.

Thus, I want to sincerely apologize for the hurt feelings and anguish my words have caused. Let me be clear: Zionists are welcome on our campus.

I know this apology alone may not be enough. But I am committed to a new course of dialogue and actions to ensure that my own awareness and learning will move this great university forward. Admitting fault and desiring a path forward based upon mutual respect motivates me. Making peace is hard work. And hard work has long inspired me. I hope you will join me.

In response Rabab Ibrahim Abdulhadi, Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies/Race and Resistance Studies, wrote what would be considered an astounding statement anywhere outside of academia:

I consider the statement below from President Wong, welcoming Zionists to campus, equating Jewishness with Zionism, and giving Hillel ownership of campus Jewishness, to be a declaration of war against Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians and all those who are committed to an indivisible sense of justice on and off campus....

I am ashamed to be affiliated with SFSU administration and demand the immediate retraction of this racist, Islamophobic and colonialist statement, and the restoration of SFSU social justice mission.

At a time when we are marking 50 years since the 1968 SFSU student strike and the quest to decolonize the curriculum, it is embarrassing to have our campus leadership cater to donor pressures and the Israeli lobby.

The dear academic is saying that the statement "Zionists are welcome on our campus" to be a declaration of war, Islamophobic, racist and colonialist.

Oh, and the only reason anyone would say that a campus can welcome pro-Israel opinions is because they are getting money from the "Israeli lobby" (wink, wink.)

A fun postscript: Leslie Wong addressed Abdulhadi's group in 2015, and described her as a "first-rate scholar, the model of the kind of person that I want around young people." (16:53 of video.) Already at that time the professor had been known to meet with real, honest to goodness terrorists.

That's what universities have become.

Amcha Initiative has issued a press release about Abdulhadi's hate.

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Irony alert: Columbia professor says women's movement being hijacked by Zionists -and urges Ahed Tamimi posters at every event

I know I shouldn't be astonished anymore by how much nonsense a person with a PhD can spew, but...I still am.

From the Facebook page of Columbia University Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature Hamid Dabashi:

The Woman’s March has now emerged as a major movement in the US and of course the Zionists have deeply infiltrated it the way they infiltrated the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and sought to twist it to the advantage of Israel —

I once posted a full page ad by the Black Americans to Support Israel Committee, which was signed by hundreds of prominent African-Americans in support of Israel from Hank Aaron to Andrew Young.

According to Dabashi, they were all duped by Zionists. Which means that Dabashi doesn't think that African Americans are smart enough to think for themselves.

Yes, that is racism.

Scarlet Johansson is a violent Zionist deeply committed to the systemic theft of Palestine and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their homeland— she appears on commercials selling Israeli products made on the stolen and occupied Palestinians lands — her appearance on Women’s March rallies deeply compromises the moral authority of the movement —

"Scarlet Johansson is a violent Zionist"?

Hate to break it to you, Hamid, but movies aren't real life.

Dabashi must have considered her Sodastream commercial to be violently funny. Or maybe she is a secret Mossad agent. We'll have to ask him.

Remember - this guy teaches college students. And gets interviewed on CNN. (And he doesn't even know how to spell Johansson's first name.)

A progressive intersectional faction of the Women’s March (far beyond its Arab and Muslim components) must immediately and categorically denounce this pernicious infiltration and appropriation of the movement and insist on raising the picture of Ahed Tamimi in EVERY AND ALL such rallies — if the movement is to have any credibility beyond its Zionist streak —

Dabashi, who is deeply against the supposed infiltration of the women's movement to Zionism, therefore urges that this very movement be redirected away from feminism to instead talk about Palestinian terror supporter Ahed Tamimi at EVERY event. Which is pretty much the definition of hijacking a movement.

I wonder how someone with zero concept of irony can teach classes on comparative literature.

Zionists are master thieves— they steal Palestinian land and culture, they steal Jewish history and heritage, and they steal every progressive movement to twist it to their advantage— beware!

Yes, more sober analysis from a scholar. Eating falafel is cultural theft if you happen to be Jewish in Israel. Giving Gaza away for free is "theft." I don't have any idea of what he means by stealing Jewish history - from whom? The Neturei Karta guy that is also on his Facebook page?

I wonder if Dabashi considers building mosques on the sites of the Jewish Temples, churches, Hindu temples and other non-Muslim places of worship to be cultural theft. Might be a good topic for his pseudo-scholarship.

(h/t Campus Reform)

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Sham "philosopher" Omri Boehm claims Jews who love Jerusalem are "idolators" - according to Jewish law!

A year ago, I critiqued a major essay in the New York Times' philosophy section by Omri Boehm, who teaches at The New School. Using arguments that wouldn't pass a first year logic course, he argued that Zionism was racism.

Now he has moved into critiquing Judaism itself.

In an article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, which was translated and published by the major German newspaper Die Zeit, Boehm argues that thousands of year of Jewish attachment to Jerusalem is really bogus, and any Jew who thinks that Jews should control Jerusalem are tantamount to idolators.

The name of the article is "Jerusalem, Our Golden Calf."

Yes, a lesson in Judaism from a person who hates Judaism.

OK, this should be fun:

[T]he heart of our heart is the Torah, and Jerusalem is not mentioned in it even once. Other municipal centers play in the book significant theological roles: Hebron is strongly associated with Abraham’s figure; Shchem, more familiar today as Nablus, functions as the Promised Land’s gate; and it is in Beit El that Jacob is renamed, very symbolically, as “Israel.” Clearly, Moses has never heard of Jerusalem, and Joseph never dreamt of it in his dreams. As the Torah’s literary theology unfolds, Jerusalem remains conspicuously absent.

Because, perhaps, Jerusalem's role is only as the capital of the Jewish nation that had yet to be born? And its prominence is obvious to anyone who glances at the Hebrew Scriptures outside the Pentateuch? (Not to mention that Jerusalem's spiritual centrality is strongly hinted in the Bible as well, as the place that God will choose to place the Temple.)

Nah, this is not important.

When the city does gain prominence, its role emerges directly from the Israelites’ demand to become “like all the other nations” — to be ruled by an earthly political authority, rather than directly by God (1 Sam. 8:5). Samuel interprets this request as an idolatrous act of betrayal, and God unequivocally shares the same judgment. Comparing it to the Israelites’ “worshiping other Gods” and “forsaking” him in the desert, God explains to Samuel that the Israelites are rebelling directly against the deity: “It is not you that they have rejected; it is Me that they have rejected as their king” (1 Sam. 8:7-8). Indeed, alongside the infamous incident with the Golden Calf, the Israelites’ request to be ruled “like the nations” has become one of the Bible’s prime examples of idolatry.

One can argue as to exactly God meant when he used those words. But Boehm, knowing his readers won't bother to look up the verses, purposefully omits what God said immediately afterwards. In the very next verse, God tells Samuel "Now therefore hearken unto their voice; howbeit thou shalt earnestly forewarn them, and shalt declare unto them the manner of the king that shall reign over them."

God and Samuel definitely have a problem with the way the people request a king, but clearly they don' t have a problem with the concept of a king. After all, the Torah mentions that Israel should have a king, explicitly, in Deuteronomy 17 - even using the words that the nation will want to be like the nations around them. Choosing a king is considered one of the commandments of the Torah.

To flatly call this request "idolatry" is absurd, because this means that, according to Boehm, God is instructing the Jews to worship idols.

What does this have to do with Jerusalem? Not much. But the "philosopher" will twist the truth to pretend it is, with more absurd interpretations that fly in the face of normative Judaism:

It is from this paradigmatic idolatrous moment that Jewish politics would be subsequently centralized in Jerusalem — a king’s earthly capital — and the city’s Temple would be built, consolidating its political-theological sway. These idolatrous origins have left on Jerusalem an enduring stain: an adequately Jewish relation to it can be at most one of ambivalent love, mixed with suspicion. Not one of enthusiastic identification.

Not surprisingly, Boehm doesn't bring any verses from any prophets that describe this supposed ambivalence or suspicion.

It is common to mention that for 2000 years, Jews have recited Psalms 137 in wedding ceremonies: “If I forget you Jerusalem, my right hand forget its skill, my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” But this is misleading, because for 2000 years Jews have recited this while rejecting the establishment of Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem as an abomination. Indeed Jewish law strictly prohibits Jewish rule over Jerusalem before the Messiah’s arrival and the fulfillment of Isaiah’s aforementioned prophecy. In this light, not just Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital — but also Ben Gurion’s declaration of Israel’s independence — stand in sharp contradiction to the Jewish religion.

There is not one source in codified Jewish law that says that Jewish rule over Jerusalem is prohibited before the Messiah's arrival. Nowhere in Maimonides' Mishneh Torah, nowhere in Shulchan Aruch, nowhere. (There have been some anti-Zionist rabbis who make such an assertion, but there is no basis in Jewish law for it.)

This entire essay is complete garbage. Boehm's entire thesis is literally made up, using cherry-picked Biblical quotes and assertions that have no basis.

And, as we have seen, even Boehm doesn't pretend to have proven that attachment to Jerusalem is akin to idolatry. He makes a false assertion that desiring a king is idolatry, he associates that with Jerusalem without any proof, and voila! An essay that gets published in prestigious journals based on nothing but hot air.

You cannot call Boehm ignorant. He knows very well he is twisting the Bible and Jewish law in ways that are utterly antithetical to what anyone with any knowledge can see what they say. He knows very well that God told Samuel to listen to the people and establish a kingdom. He didn't stop reading the verses at the point that shows him to be a liar - he just stopped quoting them, because intellectual honesty is exactly what Boehm is not about.

He is a fraud.

However, you can call the Los Angeles Review of Books and Die Zeit ignorant for publishing such blatant lies by a confirmed anti-Zionist a hater of Judaism, talking about Judaism and Jerusalem without doing the least amount of fact checking.

How does this happen? How can otherwise responsible publications allow something that is literally based on easily-refuted lies to be published? It isn't hard to open up a Bible and read the context of the verses, nor is it difficult to notice the other logical fallacies in Boehm's article.

The answer, I think, is that here is another example of things that are too good to check. Jews have been wrong about the holiness of Jerusalem for thousands of years! We have a Jewish scholar who says so! And he is a philosopher, which gives him some extra special credibility, because we really don't know much about that field but it sounds really prestigious!

So I don't blame Boehm for widely spreading his anti-Israel and now anti-Jewish hate. That's what he is about. But I do blame periodicals and newspapers to blindly believe his lies without even bothering to call up a local rabbi who might know a thing or two about the Jewish scriptures to save themselves embarrassment.

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Holocaust questioning, 9/11 "Truther" professor gets his job back

From Global News (Canada):

A controversial University of Lethbridge professor returned to work on Thursday after being suspended for spreading conspiracy theories.

Dr. Anthony Hall was suspended without pay in October of 2016 following comments he made online suggesting there was a Zionist connection to the 9/11 attacks, and that the events of the Holocaust should be up for debate.

“The Board of Governors of the University of Lethbridge and the University of Lethbridge Faculty Association have agreed that the outstanding issues that have been raised concerning Dr. Anthony Hall will be addressed in the context of the faculty handbook. As a result, the suspension imposed on Dr. Hall has been lifted and he has returned back to work at the University,” the statement said. “The parties will be fully participating in the agreed upon processes in the faculty handbook to investigate and address the outstanding issues.”

Hall has spent over two and a half decades at the U of L, teaching Native American studies, liberal education and globalization.

Tony Hall is a conspiracy theory nutjob.

He co-hosts a weekly video show with antisemite Kevin Barrett (who is a regular on Iran's PressTV) called False Flag Weekly News. Literally every episode mentions Jews prominently - how we control the media, how the Holocaust is exaggerated, and so forth. Hall isn't as completely crazy at Barrett but he adds his two cents on the Jewish conspiracies as well.

If nothing else, Hall's partnership with a true antisemite like Barrett should be no different than an alt-right professor who partners with neo-Nazis. If one should lose their job, so should the other.

Hall also is the editor of a conspiracy news website, American Herald Tribune. Some headlines:

The funny thing about conspiracy theorists is that they pretend to exercise critical thinking skills that other less enlightened people don't have. But the truth is the opposite - they have zero ability to think rationally; they latch onto bizarre and insane ideas and defend them no matter how much evidence shows them to be idiots.

In other words, anyone who is a conspiracy theorist - right or left-wing - is supremely unqualified to be a university professor where one needs to actually think.

And here's the unbelievable part: Anthony Hall teaches 9/11 conspiracy theories to his students!

From RateMyProfessors - from the students who like him:

Hall is makes the whole poli sci department look like court jesters for those in power. He has written peer-reviewed critiques of the official story of 9/11. Meanwhile the poli sci crew presuppose the nebulous and unproven official story. Take Hall's classes and feel privileged that at least one prof cares about truth and justice not just $$$

Professor Hall opened my eyes about many current events that have brought the USA to wars, such as the concept of False Flags.

And from students who don't:

This lecturer has no structure. Uses sensational, biased views to draw attention but does not substantialize any of them. He does not encourage your free thinking or a balanced presentation of opinions/facts he basically abuses the stage he receives as a "teacher".

Tony is extremely biased. I think it is OK to have your own beliefs, and to even teach different theories, but you cannot tell people that they are wrong just because they disagree with you. This class has no structure, and isn't designed to help the students. It is designed to feed Tony's ego.

Absolutely horrible. Anyone who follows politics should not take this class. Anyone who doesnt believe in the 9/11 conspiracy should not take this class. If you're not on the radical left, you will not enjoy this class at all.

There isn't even a free speech argument here. Tony Hall is an incompetent teacher.

But apparently, the University of Lethbridge is not concerned with actual academic integrity and standards for its professors.

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Academic fraud Joseph Massad claims Ashkenazic Jews are really European

Joseph Massad, of Columbia University, has an article (based on a recent speech he made) in Electronic Intifada that claims - like many antisemites do - that Ashkenazic Jews aren't really Jews. But I'm not sure if he is espousing the discredited Khazar theory, or something different:

It is true that both Judaism and Christianity are Palestinian religions. It is also an established historical fact that the inhabitants of what came to be called “Europe” later, whether Christians or Jews, had converted to these Palestinian religions centuries after the Palestinians had.

It is also true that these new Christians of what would become Europe never thought of themselves as direct descendants of the ancient Palestinian Christians who spoke Aramaic, but saw themselves correctly as more recent converts to this Palestinian religion.

Yet these same Christian converts often insisted that converts to Judaism in what would become Europe were somehow descendants of the ancient Palestinian Hebrews who also spoke Aramaic at the time of the so-called Roman expulsion of the first century.

This was important because these converts to Christianity accused the converts to Judaism of killing the Palestinian Christ.

There is a lot of nonsense here, like calling Judaism and Christianity "Palestinian religions." That is an obvious attempt to claim some sort of special status for Palestinians today who have no relationship whatsoever with the biblical Land of Israel that is indeed the origin of both religions (and of course Islam is also modeled in no small part on Judaism.)

Mossad's flat assertion that Jews in Europe were converts is not footnoted so I cannot be sure which nonsense he is pushing. Outside the Khazar theory, there was a genetic study in 2013 that claimed that the matrilineal line of most Ashkenazic Jews came from women who converted to Judaism in Europe.

However, even that study was controversial and a more recent study shows that the women actually were from the Near East. And genetic studies of the patrilineal line have been almost unanimous in showing that Ashkenazic Jewish men also have origins in the Near East. Beyond that, a genetic linkage study of all Jews, Ashkenazic and Mizrahi, found them to be related and concluded "the most parsimonious explanation for these observations is a common genetic origin, which is consistent with an historical formulation of the Jewish people as descending from ancient Hebrew and Israelite residents of the Levant." Wikipedia has a fine roundup of the studies.

So Massad is a liar. His calling his lies an "established historical fact" is a bullying tactic to make anyone who disagrees pause - thinking that certainly a professor at Columbia wouldn't lie so blatantly. This is only one part of his writing where he is "thinking past the sale" - he wants to make it look like his assumptions for his hateful theories are "established facts" so that while you are thinking about his theories, he has already made you subconsciously believe that his assumptions are accurate.

Massad's lies are not innocent. He chooses his lies to be consistent with his anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian political beliefs (hence characterizing Judaism as a "Palestinian" religion.) And he couches them as "facts" in such a way that it takes time and effort to dissect his words to show how hollow his actual argument is.

I don't even have the time or the energy to refute Massad's other claims. (He circles back to his claim that the original Zionists were antisemites, for example.)

When the foundation of his argument is a lie, and one that is so easily disproven yet he insists is true without providing an iota of evidence, then he has already proven once again that he isn't interested in the academic pursuit of knowledge but in anti-Israel propaganda.

Columbia is right to allow all opinions to flourish on campus. It is not right to allow its professors to spout lies in a larger effort to radicalize students against Jews who believe in their right of self determination.

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Jasbir Puar's intersectional anti-Israel academic gibberish

Jasbir K. Puar of Rutgers University is publishing a book called The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability.

The blurb:

In The Right to Maim Jasbir K. Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of “debility”—bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors—to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar's analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital.

It is, as always, an amazing coincidence that such a high percentage of so-called "academics" somehow manage to find Israel to be the paradigm of whatever evil they identify - "settler-colonialism" is a classic example, but even campus rape and racism have been linked to Israel through the magic of the new intersectionality where any two concepts can be linked as long as the author hates both of them - and one of them is Israel.

We looked at the hate that animated a speech of Puar's last year, when she attempted to link Israel to pretty much everything evil at a conference on gender and ecological issues:

In centering in human entities and temporalities how Palestine matters resituates the geopolitical that has been oddly alighted in the resurrection of the ecological and the geographical and emergent fields of new materialisms and Anthropocene studies. Many scholars have rapidly noted that much of the Anthropocene talk has been enabled through a rather bald-faced appropriation of long-standing native and indigenous cosmologies. So the book attempts to offer a counter genealogy to the surge of theories of object-oriented ontology and theories of post-humanism by putting them into direct relation to the fields of post-colonial theory, questions of imperial occupation and settler colonialism and disability studies.

This is the germ of her idea for this new book.

But first, let's look at the first paragraph of Puar's new book's preface, before she completely descends into pseudo-academic gobbledygook:

The intensification of the writing of this book, and the formulation of “the right to maim,” its most urgent political theoretical contribution, began the summer of 2014. This was the summer police shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the summer of Operation Protective Edge, the fifty one-day Israeli siege of Gaza. Organizers protesting these seemingly disparate events began drawing connections, tracing the material relationships between the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the militarization of police in Ferguson, from the training of U.S. law enforcement by the Israeli state to the tweeting of advice from Palestinians on how to alleviate tear gas exposure. Descriptions of the militarized containment of civilians in Ferguson
echoed those of the settler colonial occupation of Palestine. It was not long before the “Ferguson to Gaza” frame starting taking hold as an organizing rubric. Ferguson-to-Gaza forums sought to correlate the production of settler space, the vulnerability and degradation of black and brown bodies, the demands for justice through transnational solidarities, and the entangled workings of settler colonialism in the United States and Israel. The comparisons, linkages, and affective resonances between Ferguson and Gaza were not perfectly aligned, and they did not always yield immediate alliances. But these efforts were convivial in their mutual resistance to the violent control of populations via targeted bodily assaults, and reflected desires for reciprocating, intersectional, and co-constituted assemblages of solidarity.

Puar accidentally highlights the sequence of events that contradicts her entire academic career. Israel-hating activists (like Puar herself) decided to tenuously attempt to link protests against US police practices to Israel which even Puar admits is "disparate" and that the connections between the two are not obvious. The desire to link the two completely disconnected issues precedes the actual supposed linkage. Puar the quasi-academic is willing to embrace and fabricate these linkages not because there is any truth to them but because they fit her politics. Facts are merely props for foregone conclusions where context is the enemy.

As a thought experiment, decide: Which is closer linked to each other, Israeli practices with US police brutality, or Palestinianism and Nazism? The links between Palestinianism and Nazism are direct: the founder of the Palestinian national movement was an open antisemite who proudly supported the Nazi aims of genocide against Jews; Palestinianism aims to remove Jews from positions of political power as the Nazis did in the 1930s, Palestinian media today continues to publish articles that are antisemitic and which include the blood libel and Holocaust denial just as Nazi media did, the Palestinian leadership violently suppresses any dissent within their own areas of power. Yet can one even imagine an academic paper pointing out these links ever getting published, let alone an entire book by an academic press?

The linkages that Puar and her ilk claim where Israel is the personification of whatever is fashionably evil at the moment are not only tenuous - they are fictional. One can literally choose any topic and any nation and find linkages that are at least as believable. All one needs is the desire and the links come by themselves. It isn't research - it is dumpster diving.

In fact, the next two paragraphs of Puar's preface highlight exactly that. She claims that US police (as if all the police departments in the US are magically linked to each other in what she calls the "US security state") have a seeming default "shoot to kill" policy against blacks, but Israel's policy not to kill Palestinians is framed instead as a "shoot to maim" policy: They are, obviously, opposite.

One striking aspect of the connective tissue between Ferguson and Gaza involved security practices mining the relationship between disability and death. Police brutality in the United States toward black men and women in particular showed a definitive tendency to aim for death, often shooting numerous bullets into an unarmed, subjugated, and yet supposedly threatening body—overkill, some might call it. Why were there seemingly so few attempts to minimize the loss of life? The U.S. security state enacted powerful sovereign entitlements even as it simultaneously claimed tremendous vulnerability. ....

The might of Israel’s military—one of the most powerful in the world—is built upon the claim of an unchanging ontological vulnerability and precarity, driven by history, geopolitics, and geography. Alongside the “right to kill,” I noted a complementary logic long present in Israeli tactical calculations of settler colonial rule—that of creating injury and maintaining Palestinian populations as perpetually debilitated, and yet alive, in order to control them. The Israeli Defense Forces (idf) have shown a demonstrable pattern over decades of sparing life, of shooting to maim rather than to kill.This is ostensibly a humanitarian practice...

The ostensible "US security state" policy of shooting to kill is linked to the IDF policy of trying to avoid death.

Yet, sure enough, Puar finds a linkage between the two in the next paragraph - because anyone can find any linkage to anything when they look hard enough.

Indeed, immediately after that she describes the egotism that caused her to try to link the movement for the rights of the disabled with Black Lives Matter and therefore Israel:

On this particular day [July 10, 2016] the main Black Lives Matter protest in New York City was happening in Times Square. Not far from this location, the Second Annual Disability Pride parade, marketed as a festival and celebration, was marching on Broadway from Union Square to Madison Square Park. International in scope, the parade included veterans and actors involved in the development of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I was in a part of Manhattan equidistant from both activities, one being an action and the other being an event. The relationship between the two confounded me.

Why does there have to be a relationship between two completely different marches in Manhattan on a single day? Because Puar wants there to be one. After all, she was equidistant from both - that must have some sort of divine (sorry, intersectional) meaning, right?

And, of course, Puar succeeds in finding that link, which is the basis for this entire book!

This isn't research. This isn't innovation. This is simply hate dressed up in academic clothing, and the hate that Puar has is just as toxic and noxious as the racism she pretends to oppose.

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Palestinian academic: "Zionism is the most insidiously powerful force on the planet"

Rima Najjar is a retired professor of English literature at Al-Quds University who was educated in the US. She often writes for sites like Electronic Intifada, because, you know, she's an intellectual.

Writing at the site "Global Research," Najjar says:

Palestine is the only and last active act of settler colonialism. Since the creation of the UN, “more than 80 former colonies [including several in the Arab world] comprising some 750 million people have gained independence since the creation of the United Nations.”
Why the exception in the case of Palestine? Because the ideological driving force behind the process, Zionism, is the most virulently and insidiously powerful force on the planet.

There you have it. Love isn't the most powerful force on Earth. Neither is gravity or electromagnetism. Not hurricanes or earthquakes. Nor the desire for food or sex or fame. There is no political or ideological or biological or physical force today more powerful than Zionism.

We rock!

Yet somehow Israel still takes up less than 0.004% of the world's surface area. Somehow Israel can't just annex the territories it supposedly controls and expel the Arabs, which people like Najjar know is what Zionism is all about. The most powerful and insidious force on the planet can't do what countless nations have done to far more people in the most barbaric ways without an ounce of guilt.

What is wrong with us Zionists? By now you would have thought we'd have taken over Asia at least, and killed a couple of million Arabs. Especially since we're so immoral and intent on expansionism and colonialism, addicted to destroying other peoples and (probably) poisoning wells and killing prophets and killing gentile children to drink their blood.

Najjar also calls Zionism a "Jewish supremacist ideology that is dismissive of the human rights of non-Jews." This coming from someone whose entire article is dismissive of the human rights of Jews to self-determination.

These Israel haters are unhinged. The question is why they get any respect whatsoever by the world at large. Why are Najjar's rants (such as saying that Jewish nationalism is akin to white nationalism) considered reasoned discourse and not on par with those of David Duke or Richard Spencer?

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"Scholar" Steven Salaita says the phrase "Israeli hummus" is a "promise to genocide"

Sometimes you just can't parody these idiots.

From Steven Salaita, the professor who keeps losing his teaching positions, at The New Arab, referring to a NYT column by Bari Weiss where she says that cultural appropriation is a good thing:

Weiss knows, or should know, that the controversy about Israel's appropriation of Palestinian food - most infamously its claim to hummus, a lucrative product in Europe and North America - has nothing to do with Jews eating Arabic food. In fact, it has nothing to do with Jews at all. That ludicrous idea is possible only because Zionists aggressively conflate Jewishness with Israel.

Instead, it has everything to do with a deliberate, decades-old programme to disappear Palestinians. Referencing Arab defensiveness about traditional dishes without mentioning colonisation or ethnic cleansing is a whitewash.

Weiss provides a textbook example of liberal Zionist disdain presenting as multicultural devotion. Palestinians are well familiar with that hustle.

When Zionists (or their oblivious collaborators) claim Arabic food as Israeli, it's not a paragon of intercultural harmony but the studious destruction of Palestinian culture. We can mitigate ambiguity by avoiding the word "appropriation," which doesn't adequately capture the dynamics of Israel's voracious appetite for anything that can be marked "Indigenous," which it needs to shore up an ever-tenuous sense of legitimacy.

"Theft" is more accurate. It is also rhetorically superior. Discourses of modernity exalt cultural interchange, but no good liberal supports piracy.

We should remember that while chefs, shopkeepers, and propagandists validate the theft, the main culprit is the Israeli government, which brands falafel the "national snack" and advertises a plethora of Levantine dishes as authentically Israeli in tacky Brand Israel campaigns.

State involvement in the pilfer of Palestinian food illustrates that we shouldn't reduce the issue to individual consumption. It's a systematic effort to validate settler colonisation.

It's no shock, then, that Palestinians and their neighbours get salty whenever hearing the phrase "Israeli hummus." Using Arabic food as a symbol of Zionist identity hands over the day-to-day victuals of the native to the coloniser. It's a project of erasure, a portent of nonexistence, a promise of genocide.
...
Such is to be expected of an ideology defined by a rapacious appetite for other people's possessions. "Israeli" couscous, hummus, falafel, shawarma, fattoush, mjuddera, and knafeh, like the state forever aggregating glory from deception, is merely a rawboned fantasy nourished by a gluttonous diet of empty calories.

Calm down, Steven. Count to ten and breathe.

You are an idiot.

Israelis aren't trying to erase Palestinian history - because there is no history to erase. Hummus and falafel are no more "Palestinian" than they are Israeli.

And, yes, no Israeli who matters claims that these are originally Israeli foods! Salaita builds his entire bizarre rant on the idea that Israelis are claiming that these Levantine foods are less than 70 years old, and no one says that.

Saying that falafel is Israel's national dish does not imply that Israelis claim to have invented it (although the falafel sandwich in pita with salad actually was invented in Israel by Yemenite immigrants.) It doesn't mean that Israelis want to steal Arab cuisine. It only means that Israelis like falafel a great deal. It really isn't that difficult to understand.

And yes, Israeli chefs (like all good chefs) take foods from other cultures - and often change them so much as to make them their own.

In this essay, Salaita shows how poor an academic he is. Salaita thinks of Israelis as thieves first, as his last paragraph shows, and then he writes this entire crazed article so he can twist the facts into that slander.

Moreover, saying that the phrase "Israeli hummus" is a "promise to genocide" should be, in a sane world, a guarantee that no university will ever hire Salaita - on the grounds of sheer stupidity.

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Good news! Juan Cole says Iran is peaceful as a pussycat!

Every once in a while someone sends me a link to a post by ninth-rate academic Juan Cole, and I can't resist showing what a shill for Iran he is.

Here's today's, where he pretends to debunk Netanyahus' warningd of Iran using Syria and Lebanon as springboards to attack Israel. :

First of all, Iran has not vowed to wipe Israel off the face of the map. Rather, Iran has a no first strike policy that has been repeatedly underlined by Ayatollah Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani.

Second of all, Iran has not turned Damascus into a fortress or Syria into an army base. Iran sent Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps officers to Syria to train and advise the Syrian Arab Army. They are the equivalent of special ops. It is likely that there aren’t more than a couple of thousand Iranian military personnel in the country. Iranian officers have died at such a rate that they must have been in the field leading Hizbullah and Iraqi Shiite militias rather than only in the barracks doing training. There are estimated to have been as few as 500 Iranian personnel killed in Syria despite the big battles at places like Aleppo, and so there just can’t be very many Iranian troops fighting there.

Only 500 Iranian killed in Syria! What more proof do you need that Iran isn't fighting in Syria?

Except that Cole is lying. Iranian officials themselves admitted that over 1000 Iranian soldiers had been killed in Syria as of last November.

And Cole conveniently forgets to include Iran's proxy army Hezbollah, which is wholly under Iranian control. Over 1000 Hezbollah fighters have been killed in Syria as well. And that's what they admit, the number may be much higher.

According to some reports Iran controls more soldiers (although most not Iranian) than Syria does in Syria - some 70,000 troops that report to Iran.

Cole knows this, but his blog isn't about truth, but propaganda. I wonder if Iran pays him as well.

He goes on:

This tiny rag tag force helped make a difference for the al-Assad regime in fighting Sunni rebels who have only light to medium weaponry. But it isn’t the kind of force that offers a significant threat, or a threat at all, to Israel.

Israel isn't concerned about the current army, but Iran's ability to use Syria as a launching pad for rockets and missiles - like Lebanon has become.

Third, Iran is very unlikely to be building missile factories in Syria and Lebanon, and Netanyahu just asserts these things rather than giving any evidence for them. He is a one man walking fake news. Israel has several hundred atomic bombs and the means to deliver them, and Iran is not so crazy as to send a missile against Israel.

Likewise, Hizbullah, of which Netanyahu is so afraid, is just a regional militia. It has no armor to speak of and no air force.
The only reason for Netanyahu to be afraid of Hizbullah is if he wanted to invade Lebanon and/or Syria. It would put up a good guerrilla defense, as in 2006. But it isn’t capable of offensive action against the Israeli army, the best-equipped military in the Middle East.

Multiple sources, Arab and French, have discussed two of Iran's underground missile manufacturing plants in Lebanon. Oops.

Iran has sent thousands of missiles into Israel. They just used their proxies in Iran and Gaza so Israel wouldn't retaliate against them directly.

And, why worry about 100,000 accurate rockets that are aimed at Israeli chemical and nuclear facilities, according to Hassan Nasrallah himself.There is no real threat from Hezbollah because they don't have an air force. What possible damage can 100,000 rockets do?

Juan Cole says not to be concerned! And he's like, a professor! And he knows Farsi! So he must be truthful, right?

Cole knows every single thing I have written here. He doesn't want his fans to know those facts, though. His twisting of facts and deception is clear to anyone who bothers to look.

But I haven't heard anyone important quoting him for a couple of years, so chances are - everyone knows what a fraud he is by now. And if you don't, just look through the many posts where I proved him a liar and a fraud.

(h/t Dan)

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