Showing posts with label Postmodernism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Postmodernism. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 05, 2023

Columbia University's Center for Palestine Studies welcomes its newest post doctoral fellow!

Ali H. Musleh will be working on his first book project, To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth? Using his dual background in design and political theory, he focuses on Israel's design, development and deployment of drones, autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence, treating them as technological processes of managing and differentiating forms of life.
Apparently, this book is a version of Musleh's 341-page PhD dissertation, with the same title. Here's the abstract:

How do weapons make the colonial worlds that Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis inhabit? My dissertation attends to this question starting from an experience shared by Palestinians: that the majority of us have never encountered an Israeli settler, whether in uniform or out of uniform, who is not attached to a weapon, be it an assault rifle, a fighter jet, or a tank, etc. Taking this experience as a philosophical provocation, I subject the settler colony to a form of insurgent study exercised everyday by Palestinians that confronts the settler as contingent and transitory human-weapon ensembles. These studies are bodying and worlding. They reveal and unravel the spatialized embodiments, sensations, affective terrains, orientations and regimes of truth that weapons generate as lived world(s) of experience. In doing so, Palestinians exercise a fleshy sociality that constantly puts into question the self-evidence of the settler and the settler state. Thinking with Palestinians and alongside peoples of struggle, my dissertation is a performance in reverse engineering that moves from micrological sites, scenes and bodies of war, to macro formations of sovereignty. My itinerary focuses primarily on encounters with remote and robotic weaponry as technologies of engineering spatial and procedural distance between the settler and weapon. My task has been to show how that distance became the abyssal site from which forms of war, apartheid, and erasure emerge that consign settlers to martial automatisms that materialize and mediate their existence. The result is a work that dissects settler colonialism as a form of life inseparable from weapon power, as I also consider Palestinian rehearsals of decolonial life in the robotic age of war.  
This abstract is a combination of gobbledygook, lies, obfuscation and antisemitism.

Gazans indeed don't have much of a chance to see Israelis., settlers or otherwise, since no Israelis live there. But it is really true that West Bank Palestinians never see "settlers" without weapons? The thousands of Palestinians that visit Rami Levy supermarkets shop alongside Israeli civilians. Well over 100,000 Palestinians work in Israel, and tens of thousands more work in settlements - and most "settlers" do not walk around their towns toting assault rifles. Those "settlers" who roam the Temple Mount, where they are seen by thousands more, don't carry weapons. Most Jews at the Mamilla Mall in Jerusalem, where many Palestinians shop, don't carry weapons. His assertion that most Palestinians never see Jews without weapons is a fabrication.

And then there are Israelis who visit Palestinian towns on their own to go shopping or get their cars repaired. Like Shay Silas Nigreker and his son Aviad Nir who went shopping in Huwara and were murdered two weeks ago because they were Israeli Jews. They weren't "attached to weapons," but they were murdered by Palestinian weapons. 

So Musleh's "philosophical provocation" that is the very basis of his paper and book is bullshit to begin with. But what thesis advisor has the knowledge or guts to dispute the falsehood that underpins the text?

To Musleh, all Jewish Israelis are "settlers."  After all, how would Palestinians know that Israelis in fighter jets or tanks are settlers or not? And in the first sentence he considers all Israeli Arabs to be "Palestinian" which means that when he says "settlers," he really means "Jews" from either side of the Green Line. Further proof from a similar article he wrote in Politics Today, where he said, "Weeks, months, if not years can go by without an inhabitant of Gaza encountering a settler, but they are more likely to encounter a faceless machine in their day to day life." 

To Musleh, every Jew is an implant, who has no business living in the land of their forefathers. If that isn't antisemitic, what is?

Beyond that, to Musleh, every Jew in Israel is not a human being. They are hybrids of humans and weapons. They are essentially cyborgs. The entire paper is meant to dehumanize every Jew who lives in the region. 

Musleh tries to sound intelligent by using words that either don't exist or in contexts that make no sense. There is no such words as "bodying" and "worlding." And does his treatise on Israeli evil really deal with "micrological sites"? 

Musleh himself characterizes the paper not as reflective of objective truth but as "a form of insurgent study" as well as "a performance" in finding links that simply do not exist in real life, which he falsely calls "reverse engineering" to make it sound quasi-scientific. 

Another form of antisemitism we see in this abstract is that it accepts libels against Israel that are not at all universally accepted, and that are provably false, as truisms. "Settler colonialism" and "apartheid" are routinely used in academia and much of the media as fact, but they aren't. By pretending that these lies are truth, the paper is nothing more than naked propaganda. 

Yet no one in Columbia University is the least bit bothered by these issues. After all, the social sciences are filled with self-serving propagandistic garbage like this, where the "feelings" of the writer are considered more factual than actual facts. 

To Columbia, this self-serving propaganda filled with lies and Jew-hatred are a feature, not a bug.




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!

 

 

Wednesday, June 15, 2022


Here's another academic paper that is purely meant to smear Israel but hides behind a pretense of objectivity:

Vaccine apartheid and settler colonial sovereign violence: from Palestine to the colonial global economy

This article examines the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine both in Palestine and globally through a decolonial lens. In dominant Euro-American discourse, the invention, production, and distribution of the vaccine is largely judged as an indicator of sophisticated and advanced health care systems and economies. The underlying premise being that the advanced, wealthy, and capable nation-states have endogenously earned the position of power and prosperity. The world’s poor nation-states are posited as the recipients of charity from these rich states only after the latter have sufficiently inoculated themselves. The entire discourse turns the question of vaccines into a series of technical questions about capabilities, facilities, infrastructure, economic purchasing power, and so on. Concealed in this discourse is a settler colonial foundation – an aspiration towards omnipresent and absolute power – which not only creates the contrast between Palestinians and Israelis, rich and poor, colonizer and colonized, but also seals a forcefully imposed settler colonial contract in which colonizing populations ensure their ability to inoculate themselves by debilitating the colonized.
Ostensibly, the paper is about the larger question of whether it is fair or acceptable for rich states to ensure that their own populations are medically safe before offering help to poorer countries. That is a reasonable question and one worth exploring. (The answer is that the supreme obligation for any state is to protect its own citizens first.)

But the abstract makes it clear that this is only an excuse for attacking Israel. The very title, "Vaccine apartheid," is meant only for Israel. It pretends that the Palestinian issue the paradigm through which the entire world is viewed, when it is nothing of the sort - an analysis of how Australia and New Zealand gave vaccines to their own citizens before providing them to small island nations that depend on them would never been called "apartheid" and yet it is the model for how the entire world acted when vaccines were scarce.

I don't quite know how the paper includes "settler colonial sovereign violence" in this topic, but I bet that the paper does not mention:

1. The Palestinian Authority never asked for vaccines from Israel except in small amounts, which Israel gave them.
2. The PA claimed throughout the process that it will procure its own vaccines.
3. Israel inoculated tens of thousands of Palestinians who work in Israel.
4. The number of deaths per million remained lower in the Palestinian territories than in Israel even during the months that Israel had the vaccine and the PA did not.


This is nothing more than anti-Israel propaganda, and modern antisemites finding new venues to spout their hate.

Either Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory doesn't realize that it is being used - or it does. Given the state of social sciences today, I'm afraid it is the latter.



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!

 

 

AddToAny

EoZ Book:"Protocols: Exposing Modern Antisemitism"

Printfriendly

EoZTV Podcast

Podcast URL

Subscribe in podnovaSubscribe with FeedlyAdd to netvibes
addtomyyahoo4Subscribe with SubToMe

search eoz

comments

Speaking

translate

E-Book

For $18 donation








Sample Text

EoZ's Most Popular Posts in recent years

Hasbys!

Elder of Ziyon - حـكـيـم صـهـيـون



This blog may be a labor of love for me, but it takes a lot of effort, time and money. For over 19 years and 40,000 articles I have been providing accurate, original news that would have remained unnoticed. I've written hundreds of scoops and sometimes my reporting ends up making a real difference. I appreciate any donations you can give to keep this blog going.

Donate!

Donate to fight for Israel!

Monthly subscription:
Payment options


One time donation:

subscribe via email

Follow EoZ on Twitter!

Interesting Blogs

Blog Archive