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since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
Re: Influencing Academic Discourse outside Jewish and Middle East Studies
In a message dated 12/12/2006 2:23:13 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, a.bale@bbk.ac.uk writes:
Dear Joachim -
Thank you for your message. I suggest you read the call for papers more carefully and refrain from jumping to conclusions about the political affiliations of the organizers, who you suggest are 'influenced or controlled by ethnic Ashkenazi racism or Zionist fanaticism'. I suggest too that you look at previous events organized under the same auspices - on the Fear of the Other in Israel-Palestine (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/activities/fearoftheother.shtml)
and on anti-Islamic stereotyping in medieval England (http://www.lecturelist.org/content/view_lecture/1500).
Of course, if you feel you have something scholarly, critical and accurate to add to the conference please do send in a paper proposal, as per the call for papers.
Yours,
Anthony Bale
Hi,
I would be very happy if the conference serves as a forum for scholarly, critical and accurate discussion, but Finkelstein makes a good case in Beyond Chutzpah that academic and public discourse about the recrudescence or inherent nature of anti-Semitism in Western society invariably increases tremendously whenever there is an upsurge in criticism of Israel for some new outrageous behavior (like cluster bombing Lebanon).
Nevertheless, there is a major difference between conferences that focus on fairly narrow time frames like the crusader time period (anti-Islamic stereotyping) or the twentieth century (Fear of the Other in Israel-Palestine) and one that apparently covers the millennium from the arrival of Gallo-Roman Jewish slavers in England shortly after the Norman Conquest right up to the ongoing manipulation of the British political system by Zionist Eastern European Ashkenazim.
At least the religious context is Medieval to Modern Rabbinic Judaism, and your conference does not fall into the fallacy of equating modern Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim with the religiously, ethnically, culturally and linguistically very different populations of Greco-Roman Palestine.
Instead of the sort of essentialist narrative that justifies the theft of Palestine by Eastern European racists as the necessary corrective to two thousand years of Western anti-Semitism, the conference can serve the purpose of discounting of any British criticism of the State of Israel or of Zionism as tainted by a millennium of English anti-Semitism.
My concern about the conference is not unreasonable. Just consider the conference Fear of the Other and the Israeli Palestinian Conflict: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/activities/fearoftheother.shtml.Yes, Daniel Dor has carried out valuable research on media gate-keeping in the Israeli press, and his analysis is directly applicable to help understand the misreporting of the Israel Palestine conflict in the UK and the USA. Yes, Brian Klug has stood up to racist ethnic Ashkenazim and extremist Zionists to state that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, but he also rejected the analogy between Zionist Israel and Apartheid South Africa. Guess what. Former US President Carter has just told us what internationals that live among Palestinians have been saying for years: Israel is an Apartheid state.
In truth, Carter is much too generous. I can provide massive social statistics to demonstrate that Israeli Palestinians live under conditions comparable to those under which German Jews lived in 1935 or 1937, that Jerusalem Palestinians live under conditions comparable to those experienced by German Jews in 1939, and that Palestinians in the rest of the Israeli Occupied Territories live under conditions comparable to those experienced by ethnic Ashkenazim in German occupied Poland during 1940.
I know that I am applying the Zionistically-incorrect analogy between Nazi German and Zionist Israel, but if we really had a scholarly, critical, and accurate discussion of ethnic Ashkenazi racism, Zionism and the State of Israel, we would long ago have seen a plethora of papers showed the unsurprising relationship between modern Israel and 1930s Germany and Poland. After all, the founders of the State of Israel came from the same intellectual milieu that gave the world the German Nazi Party and the Polish Endeks. Do we seriously believe that Central and Eastern European Jews unlike Central and Eastern European non-Jews were fundamentally incapable of developing their own form of Nazism? Would not such a belief be a form of racism that posited the innate ethical superiority of Jews to non-Jews?
I appreciate Judith Butler's and Jacqueline Rose's break with and criticism of Zionism, but there is a rational way to talk about the Holocaust, Zionism, and the State of Israel as well as the historical period from Wilhelm Marr to Adolf Hitler when racist, biological determinist, ethnic fundamentalist or social Darwinist anti-Semitism is an important political phenomenon.
One need only put these topics properly in their Central European, Eastern European, and Russian context.
Modern genocidalism starts in 19th century Russian expansionism, which involved genocide, mass murder, and ethnic cleansing of populations deemed not assimilable into the Tsarist Empire. In many regards Russian ethnic Ashkenazim were in the forefront of this wave of genocidalism that spreads westward from the Russian Empire into Eastern and then into Central Europe, for they often served as academic Orientalists in Russian Universities, where scholarship served the purposes of Russian Imperialism.
In the 20th century genocidalism in the Soviet Union becomes for all intents and purposes an assembly line phenomenon. The Holocaust and German Nazism itself are only comprehensible in terms of Central and Eastern European fear of the Soviet Union and awareness of Soviet atrocities. Careful analysis of Soviet archival data shows that the common Central and Eastern European identification of ethnic Ashkenazim with the Soviet Union was quite rational, for Soviet ethnic Ashkenazim formed the quintessential Soviet class and generally filled the leading roles in planning and executing Soviet crimes like the Great Starvation (Holodomor) in the Ukraine, collectivization, dekulakization, the mass shootings by the secret police, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. Because the mentality of Soviet Ashkenazim and Zionist Ashkenazim is so similar in many regards, it is hardly surprising that alienization, which made entire Soviet ethnic groups aliens in their own lands, has strong similarities to the Zionist process of dispossessing, murdering, ethnic cleansing and genociding the native population of historic Palestine.
Certainly there was a lot of completely neglected material that should have been addressed in the conference Fear of the Other and the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, but, as far as I can tell, none of the speakers had the necessary expertise. Instead the conference appears to make a bizarre equivalence between the Zionist Israeli population and the native Palestinian population.
I know that I am about to enter once again the forbidden realm of comparing Zionist Israel with Nazi Germany, but anyone that like me is familiar with both 1930s Nazi Germany and today's Zionist Israel and that understands Modern Israeli Hebrew cannot help but be struck by similarity of the language and the ethnic fundamentalist mentality of German Nazis and Israeli Zionists with the qualification that Israeli Zionists are far more extreme.
If it were the 1930s, would Birbeck College have hosted a conference on Fear of the Other and the Nazi Jewish Conflict? From looking over the program, I have the impression that it was crafted in order to demonstrate that it had the stamp of approval from at least some group of Jews, and it is fairly clear that it conforms to the model that no discussion of the conditions of Palestinians is permissible without reference to Jewish suffering or the Holocaust. It looks like some sort of mechanism to put international academics through a form of Pavlovian conditioning that is probably far more effective in manipulating or in controlling academic discourse than the less circumspect methods that the organized Zionist/Jewish communist community uses here in Boston and that consist of bribery via large contributions, threats to withhold contributions, FLAC* attacks on university administrators, and the establishment of pseudoscholarly "research" or "interfaith" institutes at local universities to disseminate the narratives with which the organized Jewish community wishes to indoctrinate the American academic public.
The requirement of Jewish approbation or conformance to some approved formulation of Jewish history taints a tremendous amount of scholarship in the US and the UK. It reminds me to some extent of the official Communist party version of history that used to be written in the Soviet Union.
If I am in London in July 2007, I will definitely attend the conference -- at the very least it may provide me with data for my research project in the Zionist manipulation or control of academic discourse. Here in Cambridge (USA) thanks to Professors Walt and Mearsheimer some of the obstacles to honest discussion of Zionism, the State of Israel and Jewish history are disappearing. I hope that within a year or two a conference like Antisemitism and English Culture will be outmoded or overtaken by events. In the near future I expect academic institutions to sponsor conferences with more relevant much more manageable topics like The Impact of ethnic Ashkenazi Racism and Zionist Ethnic Fundamentalism on Modern English Culture.
Sincerely yours,
Joachim Martillo
* FAXes, letters, and calls.
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2 comments:
Apart from the inaccurate and ignorant tone and content of your email - you didn't attend the conference and you are in no position to draw conclusions about its content - it is totally inappropriate to publish on your blog an email that was sent to you personally without asking the permission of the sender.
For your information (although your tone suggests that you neither listen to advice nor have a regard for accuracy) the conference was about English culture and history. As such it included papers from scholars in many disciplines and a spectrum of critical viewpoints on antisemitism. The conference, on the whole, critiqued the very term antisemitism and the prevalent narratives of antisemitism. Much of your rant simply falls outside the remit of the conference and is irrelevant to the terms of the call for papers and conference theme.
Academic institutions such as Birkbeck sponsor critical investigation into both the history of Zionism and diaspora history, and the links between them.
Your 'impression' that the conference programme 'was crafted in order to demonstrate that it had the stamp of approval from at least some group of Jews' is repulsive.
Did you see this? From Slate...I found it interesting that folks that are Jewish, in general, have the lowest "outbreeding" of any ethnic group in the world (0.5%). My aunt converted to Judiasm and she met several Jewish men who wouldn't date her because she was a convert, not a "real" jew. I'm not suggesting that it was racist of these men, but it certainly reflects a cultural pressure to not reproduce with non-ethnically jewish women.
Take a look at the following article.
Jewgenics
Jewish intelligence, Jewish genes, and Jewish values.
By William Saletan
Posted Thursday, Nov. 1, 2007, at 7:54 AM ET
Are Jews a race? Is Jewish intelligence genetic?
If these notions make you cringe, you're not alone. Many non-Jews find them offensive. Actually, scratch that. I have no idea whether non-Jews find them offensive. But I imagine that they do, which is why Jews like me wince at any suggestion of Jewish genetic superiority. We don't even want to talk about it.
Actually, a bunch of us did talk about it, three days ago at a forum at the American Enterprise Institute. The main speaker was Jon Entine, an AEI fellow and author of a new book, Abraham's Children: Race, Identity, and the DNA of the Chosen People. He was joined by fellow AEI scholar Charles Murray and by Laurie Zoloth, a bioethicist at Northwestern University. Entine and Zoloth are Jewish. Murray isn't
but talks as though he wishes he were. "One of my thesis advisers at MIT was a Sephardic Jew," he announced proudly, turning the "some of my best friends" cliché upside down.
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