James Piscatori Islamophobia Normalizer -- Re: Mike Huckabee, Christian Zionist

 

Thanks for the information. You can be certain I will not vote for Huckabee. It is scary.

Below is the announcement of my university about a speech. Do you know the person? Are his views objective?

Dr. James Piscatori: "Iraq in the Future of Political Islam"

I have not read any of his books, and I would have thought that as a researcher at Oxford he would have been not have been influenced by the ongoing Islamophobic incitement to which we are subjected in the USA.

 

Yet, he gave an interview found at The World Today - Expert says Muslim extremism increasing, and it contains the following segment:

NICK MCKENZIE: How is it that these Australian-born Muslims, very small, marginal group, are drawing so heavily on the inspiration, or so heavily from what's going on in Israel and Iraq and other places?

JAMES PISCATORI: In part it's because of the media, which make it easily able to… for people to follow what is going on around the world.

So in a sense, they're given the opportunity to know what is going on.

The knowledge base is quite… much higher than it of course was some time ago.

But you have to add something, the much more intangible part of this is why do Muslims care about the plight of other Muslims around the world? What is it about the solidarity of the faith?

And here, there isn't anything that one can say that is predictable or concrete, except that the sense of belonging to a larger community is ingrained, and this would occur in the minority situation, perhaps even more so because of a feeling that the larger society isn't welcoming in some ways.

Why do Christians care about Christians around the world? Why do Jews care about Jews around the world?

 

Why did young white men in Maine care so much about Southern slavery that they signed up to fight in the US civil war?

 

Piscatori is trying to depict a fairly normal human behavior as somehow unique, sinister, and dangerous in Muslims as part of the subtle normalization of Islamophobia.

 

He continues further.

NICK MCKENZIE: Given the threat of terrorism, do we then need to take the position that the civil liberty argument needs to be scaled back somewhat and for instance, radical preachers, radical sheikhs in Australia need really to be curtailed?

JAMES PISCATORI: I think it is within the permit of… the purview of a liberal society to in effect put some restrictions, for example, imams ought to be… their English ought to be certified, the trainings of imams could perhaps be looked at in co-operation with existing Muslim organisations and communities.

Why not look at the teachings of Christian preachers or Jewish Rabbis?

 

There is a lot of material in Hebrew and Christian scripture that can be twisted to justify hate, slaughter and aggression.

 

Bush wears his Christianity on his sleeve as he incinerates Arab and Muslim countries while Jews have sliced and diced Jewish scripture to justify plundering, expelling and murdering the native population of Palestine.

 

Given the influence and wealth of the Jewish communities in both Australia and the USA, should we not perhaps be asking ourselves whether Jewish racism, extremism and fanaticism is not the greatest threat to the human race today?

 

I took a quick look at Piscatori's publications and found Barnes & Noble.com - Books: Jewish Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective, by Laurence J. Silberstein, Hardcover

Synopsis

In recent decades, religious fundamentalism has played an increasingly significant role in Western and Middle Eastern politics and culture. In this volume, an international group of scholars from fields such as religious studies, sociology, political science, history, and anthropology explore diverse dimensions of religious fundamentalism and relate it to a range of cultural and political issues. Although the focus is on fundamentalism in its Jewish guise, the methodological and comparative emphases make it valuable to specialists in a variety of fields. Among the issues examined are: the characteristics that link fundamentalist movements within various religious traditions; the study of fundamentalist motifs as they appear specifically in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (and whether or not this is a useful approach); the relationship between religion and modernity; the impact of fundamentalism on the Arab-Israeli conflict; and the interaction of modern Jewish fundamentalist movements with traditional Judaism. The book also provides important insights into the emergence of religious fundamentalism as a powerful social and political force in Jewish life, particularly in Israel. Contributing to the volume are: Gerald Cromer (Bar-Ilan Univ.), Menachem Friedman (Bar-Ilan Univ.), Susan Harding (Univ. of California, Santa Cruz), James Davison Hunter (Univ. of Virginia), Aaron Kirschenbaum (Tel Aviv University), Hava Larazus-Yafeh (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem), Ian Lustick (Univ. of Pennsylvania), Alan Mittleman (Muhlenberg College), James Piscatori (Univ. College of Wales), Elie Rekhess (Tel Aviv Univ.), Laurence J. Silberstein (Lehigh Univ.), and Ehud Sprinzak (Hebrew Univ. of Jerusalem).

Practically all the authors are Jewish. The synopsis indicates that the article selection conforms to Jewish/Zionist prejudice by excluding discussion of ethnic fundamentalism even though Zionism is obviously an example of the class of Central and Eastern European ethnic fundamentalist ideologies to which German Nazism and Greater Serbianism belong.

I have to suspect the name Piscatori is probably a translation of name Fisher and that James Piscatori is just another Jewish academic producing biased scholarship in the service of Zionism or ethnic Ashkenazi tribalism of the sort that German Jewish and ethnic Ashkenazi scholars have been producing since the founding of movement for the Wissenschaft des Judentums in the early nineteenth century.

James Piscatori holds the Chair in Arab & Islamic Studies at the Australian National University. Most recently he was a Fellow of Wadham College and of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. and member of the Faculties of Social Studies and Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. He has taught at the University of Virginia, the University of Wales, the Australian National University and at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) of the John Hopkins University. He was Research Fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, in London, and a Senior Fellow of the Council of Foreign Relations. Professor Piscatori is the author of Islam in a World of Nation-States (Cambridge University Press, 1986) and co-author (with Dale F. Eickelman) of Muslim Politics (Princeton University Press, 1996). He is the editor of Islam in the Political Process (Cambridge University Press, 1983) and co-editor of Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination (Routledge/University of California Press, 1992). As Islam team director of the Fundamentalism Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he edited Islamic Fundamentalisms and the Gulf Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 1991). He is co-editor (with Susanne Hoeber Rudolph) of Transnational Religion and Fading States (Westview Press, 1997). His Islam, Islamists, and the Electoral Principle appeared as the first in a series of papers for the International Institute for the Study of the Modern Muslim World (ISIM) in Leiden in December 2000.

Date(s):	Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Time:	2:00 pm - 4:00 pm

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