qunfuz: The Gulf Between Us

Robin Yassin-Kassab has provided an interesting anecdote about literary life in the Gulf in his review of Geraldine Bedell's book entitled The Gulf Between Us:

Given the new level of official Arab tolerance, it was surprising to hear that Geraldine Bedell’s “The Gulf Between Us”, a romantic comedy narrated by a middle-aged Englishwoman, had been banned from the International Festival of Literature in Dubai, and this because the novel contains a ‘gay shaikh’. Both author and publisher cried censorship, plunging the festival – Dubai’s first – into a swamp of bad publicity. Margaret Atwood cancelled her appearance.

A few days after the damage had been done, the truth came out: the book hadn’t been banned. Like many others, it was not selected in the first place. Maragaret Atwood regretted her cancellation.

Robin states, "[Bidell's] treatment of attitudes to gays is balanced and accurate."

In Participating in an Obsolete Discourse I wrote:

Sexual identities represent social constructs. Western "gay-ness" does not really exist in Middle Eastern cultures except within Israel, which is really a transplanted mixed Central and Eastern European Jewish society.

As a fundamentally alien entity in the ME, the Zionist state hosts sexual identities that were already well-developed among German Jews and Eastern European ethnic Ashkenazim by the early 20^th century.

Both groups have been active proselytizers for regendering Western society according to Yiddish models for at least the last 90 years.

As Columbia Professor Joseph Massad points out in Desiring Arabs, non-Westernized (and many Westernized) Arabs that engage in homoeroticism have no interest in the Yiddish regenderization program and generally reject Western homosexual identity, which Massad calls the Gay International [and which I can the Regenderization Movement].

Does [Bidell's] book reflect Massad's dichotomy between Arab views of eroticism or sexuality and today's Western (but historically ostjüdische) erotic or sexual proclivities.

[Note that Massad's book does not address the historic political conflict between Eastern European Yiddish sexual norms and the Central European (especially German) non-Jewish sense of propriety or Christian morality.]

Modern Regenderization politics and its predecessor make me think of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx wrote:

Hegel says somewhere that all great historical facts and personages recur twice. He forgot to add: "Once as tragedy and again as farce."

In the cases of ethnic Ashkenazi radicalism and ethnic Ashkenazi Zionism, it might have been better to add: "Once as sociopathy and once as psychopathy" with the qualification that in the case of Jewish politics the original story and its rerun seem to be overlapping.

When I look at today's events I always have the impression of a nastier and more insane version of violence, financial corruption or ideological development from the 1930s or the 1870s or sometime in-between:

1. Zionism, Penisism, and Joseph Massad
2. Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation
3. Nineteenth Century Madoff: Bethel Strousberg
   
4. Islamobolshevism: Zionist Copies Nazi Propaganda
5. The Pattern of Ethnic Ashkenazi Genocidalism: The Jewish Century by Yuri Slezkine

Even the Hollywood Crowd had its nineteenth century counterparts, and Wagner's criticism of Kunstjuden in Das Judenthum in der Musik sometimes seems very contemporary as long as one understands the 19th century German music scene.

Despite the early German Nazi affection for Wagner's music, Wagner's personal life makes it difficult to call him an anti-Semite. Even though Theodor Herzl loved Wagner's music and was inspired by the operas, the Zionist leader Max Nordau accused Wagner of degeneracy, and the German Nazis appear to have eventually come to agree with Nordau's assessment as Na`ama Sheffi discusses in The Ring of Myths, The Israelis, Wagner and the Nazis.

Just as the Germans did and we Americans do today, the Soviet Union also experienced a culture struggle over Jewish artistic influence even if the Soviets often framed the conflict as an opposition between bourgeois and revolutionary values.

If I return to the original observation of Hegel or Marx, the Red Jewish Century (das rote Judenjahrhundert) lasted from 1891 (the beginning of the collapse of Czarism) through 1991 (the collapse of the Soviet Union) while the Blue Stripe Jewish Century (das Blaustreifenjudenjahrhundert) will probably go from 1917 (Balfour Declaration) through approximately 2017 (when demography utterly overwhelms Zionism). Sphere: Related Content