Journal of International and Intercultural Communication: Peer-reviewed incitement against Israel

The Journal of International and Intercultural Communication (JIIC) is published by the National Communication Association. JIIC says it "publishes original scholarship that expands understanding of international, intercultural, and cross-cultural communication"  and that "articles in this journal have undergone rigorous peer review, including screening by the editor and review by at least two anonymous referees."

Its most recent issue featured the theme, "Writing occupied Palestine: Toward a field of Palestinian communication and culture studies." Of course, the articles in the issue have little to do with Palestinian culture and everything to do with demonizing Israel under the rubric of "communications studies."

Besides the introduction and forward, there are four articles in the issue on this theme. 

"Boycott eurovision singing to the song of its own tune: Global boycotts as sites of hybridity" has a classic impenetrable abstract:

Following (Kraidy, M. M., & Murphy, P. D. (2003). Media ethnography: Local, global, or translocal? In P. D. Murphy & M. M. Kraidy (Eds.), Global media studies: Ethnographic perspectives (pp. 299–307). Routledge; Kraidy, M. M., & Murphy, P. D. (2008). Shifting Geertz: Toward a theory of translocalism in global communication studies. Communication Theory, 18(3), 335–355. 10.1111/j.1468-2885.2008.00325.x) call to look at global communication through lenses of translocalism and hybridity, I find that global boycotts are hybridized sites that facilitate translocal recognition. Using Boycott Eurovision as a case study, two locales are investigated: petitions and Globalvision. By uncovering the translocal recognition in each locale, global boycotts become crucial avenues of inquiry to understand how global social movements grapple with globalization. The essay describes the importance of understanding the vulnerabilities of international boycotts’ hybridized status, calling forward analysis of structure, specific initiatives, and the enactments of hegemonic ideologies found in locales.   

The article itself should not have passed even a cursory editorial review, let alone a "rigorous peer review." It is a polemic, not analysis. It deliberately uncapitalizes "Eurovision," it refers to the IDF as the "Israeli Occupation Forces," it fully accepts as truth that Israel engages in "settler-colonialist, apartheid, and military violence against Palestinians." 

The author, Sarah Cathryn Majed Dweik, writes, "I focus on introducing vocabulary innate to Boycott Eurovision, heeding Lechuga’s (2020) call to develop praxis-driven theory within rhetoric." In other words, she can write whatever she wants because she creates her own vocabulary. 

An example is in how she calls Israel racist by defining it as "white:"  

[T]he Israeli national identity replicates the historical whiteness and settler-colonialism crafted by early Zionists and the British empire. I define whiteness as a global system of domination that reflects the logics of colonialism, racism, anti-Blackness, patriarchy, classism, ableism, and heteronormativity to recenter the white subject as that which is normal and required to attain (see Al-Saif & Ghabra, 2016; Ahmed, 2009; Ghabra, 2020a; Nakayama, 2020). In the historical moves that Israel made to establish itself as a country, Israel crafted the Jewish national subject in relation to Europeanness, whiteness, and settler-colonialism through the juridical exclusion of the Palestinian and Arab Others (Erakat, 2015) and relying on the state to guide where whiteness presents itself within the Israeli national identity (Yadgar, 2011). By utilizing whiteness as a heuristic to obscure specific meanings of Jewish-ness and Israeli-ness, material spaces are necessary to participate in this work, such as a fun singing competition.  

Why bother to mention that Israel has had Mizrahi,  Arab and Black Ethiopian contestants for Eurovision? Facts get in the way of the all-important discourse. Dweik can simply define them all as "white" for her purposes, and the reviewers are none the wiser.

Another article, "Disability as metaphor or resilience: A Palestinian poetic inquiry," parrots as fact the absurd thesis by academic fraud Jasbir Puar that Israel has an intentional policy to maim Palestinians. 

A third article is called "Structural violence and sources of resistance among Palestinian children living under military occupation and political oppression." Based on an interview with 22 Palestinian children, it makes it sound as if most of them experience direct violence from Israel for no reason. Yet the methodology of choosing the interview subjects was biased:

The participants were recruited between November and December 2020 from a pool of children who accessed a local center organizing psychosocial activities. Researchers targeted a purposive convenience sample of 22 participants across various settings (villages, cities, and refugee camps) in the West Bank....[B]oth caregivers and participants were carefully informed about the aim of the task, the purposive confidentiality procedures, and their right to refuse or discontinue their participation at any time. All participants and families provided informed consent. 

And what were the aims of the task that the caregivers had to agree to? We don't know the exact words used, but it is very clear both from the very title of the paperand the contents that they were told that this was a study meant to demonize Israel:

Thus, the present study explored the diverse everyday experiences of structural colonial oppression in children living in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Our research aimed to investigate the main antecedents and determinants of risk and violence exposure in a setting characterized by settler-colonial violence and military occupation. 

Only those who agreed to participate with that purpose in mind are included in the study! If there was ever a self-selecting group, this is it. 

There are well over a million children in the West Bank. The vast majority live in Area A, under full Palestinian control where Israeli forces only rarely enter (as they did this year when the PA did not act to restrain the "Lion's Den" terrorists.) If they don't participate in demonstrations, they would only see Israeli soldiers at checkpoints, and the vast majority pass right through. Yet the study includes a very high number of kids who supposedly experienced Israeli forces invading their schools or homes, or even shooting them. 

Statistically, this isn't close to a random sample. But the peer reviewers don't know that.

This issue, except for the last article on how Palestinian kids use Tiktok, shines no new light on Palestinians and communications. On the contrary, it is anti-Israel propaganda that hijacks an academic discipline for promoting hate - just as Palestinian academics do with other disciplines.

It is a shame that the social sciences are so susceptible to being manipulated and taking part in incitement disguised as academic studies.

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

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Whoopi Goldberg's perverted mindset is a manifestation of the larger phenomenon of Black antisemitism

Over the weekend, the Times of London reported that actress, producer and TV commentator Whoopi Goldberg doubled down on her statements earlier this year that the Holocaust was not about race (and, incidentally, showing that her apology at the time was meaningless:)

Whoopi Goldberg doubled down on her comments that the Holocaust was "not about race," which she made before temporarily being suspended from cohosting the TV talk show "The View" in February.

In a new interview with The Times of London, Goldberg said the Holocaust was not "originally" about race.

"Remember who they were killing first. They were not killing racial; they were killing physical. They were killing people they considered to be mentally defective," she said.

She also questioned whether Jewish people were a "race" compared to herself as a Black person.

"It doesn't change the fact that you could not tell a Jew on a street," Goldberg said. "You could find me. You couldn't find them. That was the point I was making. But you would have thought that I'd taken a big old stinky dump on the table, butt naked."

When Goldberg was asked about the fact that the Nazis classified Jewish people as a race, she responded: "The oppressor is telling you what you are. Why are you believing them? They're Nazis. Why believe what they're saying?"

This is so ignorant that one does not know where to begin.

The two important facts that The View pundit gets completely wrong are:

1. For Nazis, everything was about race.

It is true that the Nazis started their extermination program with the disabled (not only mentally but physically.) But the reason for that was purely racial: to weed out what Nazis believed were undesirable genetic traits in order to breed a Master Race. It was a trial run for their genocide against Jews, targeted also because of their supposedly inferior genetic traits. (Indeed, the Jewish disabled were wiped out first.) 

2. Race is a social construct that has no bearing on biological reality.

Whoopi Goldberg's question, "Why believe what they are saying?' also applies to her. She believes that race is critically important because it is often visible, but in reality there is no "Black" gene. There are no significant genetic differences between people whose ancestors come from Europe, Asia or Africa, and the genetic variation within each group is larger than between groups. 

Goldberg says that Nazi misconceptions about race are meaningless, but anti-Black racist opinions are of the highest importance. 

It gets worse. She seems to be saying that Jews in Europe could have blended into the larger population and not have been persecuted. For religious Jews, this would mean cutting off their beards and payos, changing their clothing, language and accents, and abandoning their religion. 

That is as offensive as saying that Black people could simply bleach their skin to defeat racism. And in both cases, it wouldn't work.

In fact, Goldberg is being more offensive, because her theory appears to be that the Holocaust was partially the Jews' fault - it was white people fighting with white people, both sides responsible, and if only the Jews would have acted differently, they would still be alive today.

There is a deeper issue here, though. How does someone as intelligent and accomplished as Whoopi Goldberg believe such stupidity?

And the reason is because she is an antisemitic bigot herself. 

When you ask Caryn Elaine Johnson why she chose the stage name "Goldberg," she says, "The true story is that my family is Jewish, Buddhist, Baptist and Catholic  . . So I took the last name from a Jewish ancestor."

This is a lie. She has no Jewish ancestors that anyone could find.  But according to one account, her mother thought that her last name Johnson was "not Jewish enough" to make her a star. 

Taking a Jewish name was a career move because Jews control Hollywood.

But there is something deeper here, and it relates to the current flavor of Black antisemitism. 

As we have seen in recent years, it has become fashionable in even mainstream Black circles to claim that Blacks are the real Jews, making Jews imposters. The logic is not based on facts, but on the idea that victimhood is the coin of the realm and since Jews have been history's most prominent victims, Blacks must be the real Jews. 

When being a victim is considered desirable, and anti-Black racism is defined as the ultimate evil,  then the Holocaust becomes an ideological roadblock. The Nazi genocide, which dwarfs the evils of slavery by orders of magnitude, is a problem that must be minimized and explained away to maintain the idea that (anti-Black) racism is the alpha and omega of inhumanity. 

Goldberg needs the Holocaust to not be about racism, because that means that Jews have been much bigger, much more recent victims of racism than Blacks have been - and that waters down the effectiveness of claiming that everything is about anti-Black racism. 

Saying that Jews aren't really Jews and are just other white people also becomes a way for some Blacks to rationalize why Jews went from being a despised minority to a successful group in only one or two generations while most Black people are still at a great disadvantage. It couldn't be that Jews worked hard to transcend anti-Jewish bigotry: that implies that anti-Black racism can be overcome just as anti-Jewish racism was.  That is not an acceptable message in a society that values victimhood over accomplishments. Easier to push the lie that white people always accepted Jews as fellow whites. 

The irony is that the main purveyors of the new Black antisemitism are some of the richest, most powerful and most famous Black celebrities - the very people who managed to become successful despite racism. The Whoopi Goldbergs, Professor Griffs and Ice Cubes prefer to cut Jews down than to bring their fellow Blacks up. 

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Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon! Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424.  Read all about it here!

 

Read More