Posts
since Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:04:17.
For the record Sampo has never found a Jewish-planned or Jewish-committed mass murder, or ethnic cleansing that she did not love.
Having heard Power and spoken with her fairly frequently at Harvard, I don't put her in the category of dumb smart people like Lawrence Summers or Noah Feldman, but she is very calculating and successfully landed herself employment in the Obama administration.During the Cold War, Arendt’s text [The Origins of Totalitarianism] allowed intellectuals and officials to avoid any reckoning with the politics of Communism and its appeal. Today, it offers a similar detour. ‘If one could pierce the cloak of mystery that shrouds al-Qaida, Hamas or Islamic Jihad,’ Power writes in her introduction,
one might well find some of the qualities Arendt associated with totalitarian movements: ‘supreme disregard for immediate consequences rather than ruthlessness; rootlessness and neglect of national interests rather than nationalism; contempt for utilitarian motives rather than unconsidered pursuit of self-interest; “idealism”, i.e. their unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world, rather than lust for power’.
Power makes the occasional nod to American policies in the Middle East and to terrorism’s local causes, but she cannot resist the psychological thrust of Arendt’s analysis: ‘Arendt wrote of German and Soviet selfless devotion to the idealised collective, but what greater testament to such selflessness can there be than martyrdom of the kind that thousands of young Muslim men and women are queuing up to undertake today?’
Young-Bruehl also believes that the anti-political ‘elements of totalitarianism have continued to be with us’. Unlike Power, she finds these elements on both sides of the war on terror: in militant Islam and neo-conservatism; in 9/11 and Shock and Awe; in the ‘supranationalism’ of bin Laden and Bush; in the Republican and Islamist push to submit the private sphere to public scrutiny.
But as virtually every intelligence analysis has shown, Islamist radicals are driven by hostility to the state of Israel and repressive Arab regimes, US patronage of Israel and those regimes, and, in Europe, discrimination against Muslims and support for US policies in the Middle East. Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, recently said that British suicide bombers ‘are motivated by perceived worldwide and long-standing injustices against Muslims; an extreme and minority interpretation of Islam promoted by some preachers and people of influence; and their interpretation as anti-Muslim of UK foreign policy, in particular the UK’s involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan’. The Islamists’ grievances are local and specific. They are not the flotsam and jetsam of mass society or a globalised world; they come from and return to mosques, schools, parties and close-knit neighbourhoods. Suicide bombing is primarily a response to foreign occupation, and terrorism is, as it always has been, the weapon of choice for people with little power or no mass base.
In contrast, Martha Minow, who is neither smart nor calculating, is simply blatant in her angling for the big Washington job.
In Genocide in Darfur? Let the court decide Minow once again proves her zealousness in service to the Zionist Virtual Colonial Motherland or Judonia by parroting Darfur talking points that any competent Israel advocate can reflexively recite by memory.
I discuss Darfur and Sudan in many blog entries listed below, but in short no one outside the USA is going to take the International Criminal Court or a Jewish Zionist agent like Minow seriously until the ICC prosecutor starts inditing Israeli government and military official as well as Israel supporters for genocide and other major international crimes, which have characterized the Zionist project since the beginning of the twentieth century.
- Profiteering from humanitarianism
- Poisoning Human Rights Discourse
- Killing Muslims Under Humanitarian Cover
- Harvard Supports Incinerating Arab Countries
- Singing HaTikvah while inciting a disastrous US invasion
- The Neocon Program to Incinerate Arab and Muslim Countries
- USHMM: National Thought Control
- Bostonians Learn About Darfur
- ICC Prosecutor Ocampo Incites Genocide?
