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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
| 4:00 PM | 02/11/2008 |
| "Desiring Arabs: Orientalism and Sexual Rights" Joseph Massad, Professor of Modern Arab Politics & Intellectual History at Columbia Univ. | |
I arrived late. There were at least three attendees from the Boston Anti-Zionist Alliance (BAZA) while Hillel Stavis of the David Project and at least two others from various Boston area Zionist thought control groups also attended. I arrived late and cannot provide a full report.
David Rolde of BAZA commented on the talk:
Several of us went to Massad's talk yesterday. It was wonderful. He is doing important work exposing the "human rights" industry as being racist (or culturally chauvinistic) against Arabs and Muslims.
The David Project and a Boston-Newton Jew cabal are apparently in the process of regrouping their ongoing criminal conspiracy against rights of Arab and Muslims (18 USC 241) with an attempt to prevent Massad from receiving tenure at Columbia.
See
Stavis' comments on Massad's lecture appear at Solomonia: Joseph Massad at Harvard: The Professor of Desire.
I am sorry to admit that my question to Massad was somewhat incoherent as Stavis reports.
I am trying to put my thoughts together on the "collectivity of Israel lobbying and advocacy efforts." I call these combined activities Judonia on the model of Polonia, which in the past was a term used for similar activities on behalf of partitioned Poland in the nineteenth century.
Massad's talk and book, which I am reading at present is immensely useful. (See Judonia Rising: The Israel Lobby and American Society.)
Judonia like Polonia was not particularly static but developed in time. An early project of Judonia was changing how Jews (or specifically ethnic Ashkenazim and other European Jews) talked about themselves -- just as Polonia changed how Poles talked about themselves.
After WW2, Jewish communal organizations, which are heavily involved in (or parasitized by) Israel lobbying and advocacy activities, worked very hard to create a discourse of Judeo-Christianity as a unitary civilization and in opposition in particular to the Arab-Islamic world.
[In the USA marketing Judeo-Christianity predates WW2. The unitary aspect is associated in particular with the American Jewish Committee while the anti-Arab anti-Islamic aspect is associated with American Jabotinskians. Many Christians horrified by the mass murders of Jews during WW2 have contributed to the project of disseminating the idea that the USA is a Judeo-Christian nation.]
Judonia works hard to control how Westerners talk about Arabs and Muslims, and I have attended David Project, Harvard and Brandeis seminars that discuss this issue in the context of diminishing criticism of Israel.
Yet because Judonia's discourse can be and has been in conflict with Western or US orientalist discourse, driving Arabists out of the US state department was an early important project of Judonia.
Massad alludes to the discourse associated with Judonia on page 188, but the reality is more complex than he describes because the Zionist pro-gay discourse is often incorporated into the positions of Jews that are critical of Israel.
Because of my work in Arab countries, I have become acquainted with a fair number of Arabs in the entertainment and news industry. There seems to be some and perhaps increasing awareness of the split between Western and Judonia discourse about Arab sexuality.
I am not sure that a study of Western discourse about Arab sexuality and its effect on Arab self-representation can ignore the split between Western and Judonia discourse. (Massad or another scholar should probably also investigate the effect of Judonia discourse on Western discourse and self-representation).
During Massad's talk there was a brief discussion of Raphael Patai, whose book The Arab Mind was thanks to Neocon influence extremely popular in military circles in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Judonia like Polonia was not particularly static but developed in time. An early project of Judonia was changing how Jews (or specifically ethnic Ashkenazim and other European Jews) talked about themselves -- just as Polonia changed how Poles talked about themselves.
After WW2, Jewish communal organizations, which are heavily involved in (or parasitized by) Israel lobbying and advocacy activities, worked very hard to create a discourse of Judeo-Christianity as a unitary civilization and in opposition in particular to the Arab-Islamic world.
[In the USA marketing Judeo-Christianity predates WW2. The unitary aspect is associated in particular with the American Jewish Committee while the anti-Arab anti-Islamic aspect is associated with American Jabotinskians. Many Christians horrified by the mass murders of Jews during WW2 have contributed to the project of disseminating the idea that the USA is a Judeo-Christian nation.]
Judonia works hard to control how Westerners talk about Arabs and Muslims, and I have attended David Project, Harvard and Brandeis seminars that discuss this issue in the context of diminishing criticism of Israel.
Yet because Judonia's discourse can be and has been in conflict with Western or US orientalist discourse, driving Arabists out of the US state department was an early important project of Judonia.
Massad alludes to the discourse associated with Judonia on page 188, but the reality is more complex than he describes because the Zionist pro-gay discourse is often incorporated into the positions of Jews that are critical of Israel.
Because of my work in Arab countries, I have become acquainted with a fair number of Arabs in the entertainment and news industry. There seems to be some and perhaps increasing awareness of the split between Western and Judonia discourse about Arab sexuality.
I am not sure that a study of Western discourse about Arab sexuality and its effect on Arab self-representation can ignore the split between Western and Judonia discourse. (Massad or another scholar should probably also investigate the effect of Judonia discourse on Western discourse and self-representation).
During Massad's talk there was a brief discussion of Raphael Patai, whose book The Arab Mind was thanks to Neocon influence extremely popular in military circles in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Patai belongs much more to Judonia Orientalist discourse than to Western Orientalist discourse, and he was just as much if not more involved in the effort to control how Jews talk about themselves than in the effort to control how Westerners talk about Arabs. (S. D. Goitein is probably the pre-eminent Judonia scholar.)
Patai's primary book aimed at changing Jewish discourse about themselves is The Jewish Mind, which from the standpoint of Jewish studies can only be considered at best misleading. I read another book by Patai on Arabs and Muslims. It was entitled Society, Culture and Change in the Middle East.
Patai's primary book aimed at changing Jewish discourse about themselves is The Jewish Mind, which from the standpoint of Jewish studies can only be considered at best misleading. I read another book by Patai on Arabs and Muslims. It was entitled Society, Culture and Change in the Middle East.
Before Neocons became ascendant in Bush foreign policy, I doubt any non-Jewish US government officials read them. Before Amazon, one would probably have to be a visitor at a Jewish book store to have any awareness of Patai.
BTW, I use to term regendering to translate Umgeschlechtung, which I have occasionally seen in German literature discussing Jewish sexuality in the early 20th century. I believe it is modeled on Umvolkung or refolking, which was the term for displacing one population with another. In Zionist Hebrew discourse refolking becomes nishul (or eviction).
BTW, I use to term regendering to translate Umgeschlechtung, which I have occasionally seen in German literature discussing Jewish sexuality in the early 20th century. I believe it is modeled on Umvolkung or refolking, which was the term for displacing one population with another. In Zionist Hebrew discourse refolking becomes nishul (or eviction).
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5 comments:
have you seen any reports that ny city council sought to withhold approval of columbia's expansion project pending denial of massad's tenure. but that in the end the approval went thru without a decision re massad from bollinger?
Clarify one thing for me, please: on several occasions you speak of American Jabotinskians. Inasmuch as Jabotinsky advocated the overwhelming domination of Palestinians as the route to living with them, I suspect you mean the neo-con approach of diplomacy by overwhelming force. But, for this simple student, please clarify.
Here is a negative review of Massad's new book by a liberal-imperialist that makes the book sound really good. Apparently Massad challenges Soros's phony "human rights" organizations.
When I was active in and a chapter president in NOW, the campaign to extend "women's rights" began to focus on becoming internationalized. I did not work on other issues at the time and focused on feminism but I certainly could feel prejudice and ethnocentrism on NOW's part when they began adding this focus. I felt that it was a dilution of the struggle for women's rights of all colors in the US and that I as a white woman was and am still suffering from discrimination especially since we couldn't get the Equal rights Amendment passed and gave up the effort to revive it. I felt then as I do now that we as Americans need to address our role in exploiting the vulnerable in this country and the rest of the world and that I had to change the direction of my activism and put my quest for women's equality on the back burner. I believe in respecting other cultures and when some of their basic human needs are fullfilled that then and only then can they begin to work on whatever inequities there are in their own societies. I still feel this way and also realize how the lesbian rights movement began to co-opt and guilt trip straight women in the organization. At least I felt that way as a straight woman. I have parted ways with NOW regretfully since I still feel that I and other women suffer discrimination and inequality with white men in the US (sorry,guys but most of you,my current male friends are more egalitarian than almost all of the men that I have encountered in the past. I believe that NOW has endorsed Clinton and they had a love affair with bill clinton that made me gag. I knew then that I had to move on and stretch my efforts toward working for men,women and children in this country and around the world who are oppressed by those in power and the silent majority who allow such unspeakable cruelty and exploitation to continue. Hope that I have stated my message clearly.
I saw http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/2034.
It is one of the modi operandi of wealthy Zionist real estate interests, but Columbia and also Harvard are economic giants with lots of legal muscle.
I suspect more threat than reality because the last people that Newton or Manhattan Jews should piss off if they a reasonably intelligent are the Houghtons and the other mostly non-Jewish families, who would be concerned if "their" universities became viewed by the world as Zionist institutions.
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