Thursday, September 23, 2010
Four Reasons Why Americans Should Oppose Zionism
By
Steven Salaita
August 23, 2010
Steven Salaita
August 23, 2010
Israel has been subject to some bad publicity recently. In 2008-09, it launched a brutal military campaign in the Gaza Strip that killed over 400 Palestinian children. In May, 2010, bumbling Israeli commandos murdered nine nonviolence activists on the relief flotilla Mavi Marmara. It only got worse for Israel when it was revealed that soldiers stole and sold personal items such as laptops from the ship. Last week, former Israeli soldier Eden Abergil posted photos onto Facebook showing her preening in front of blindfolded and despondent Palestinian prisoners, in some instances mocking those prisoners with sexual undertones. The photos were part of an album entitled “IDF—the best time of my life.”
While Abergil’s pictures may not seem as abhorrent as the Gaza and Mavi Marmara brutality—Abergil, for her part, described her behavior as nonviolent and free of contempt—all three actions are intimately connected. First of all, we must dispel the notion that Abergil’s photos are nonviolent. As with the Abu Ghraib debacle, a sexualized and coercive humiliation is being visited on the bodies of powerless, colonized, and incarcerated subjects, which by any reasonable principle is a basal form of violence; there is also the obvious physical violence of Palestinians being bound and blindfolded, presumably in or on their way to prisons nobody will confuse with the Mandarin Oriental.
More important, these recent episodes merely extend an age-old list of Israeli crimes and indignities that illuminate a depravity in the Zionist enterprise itself. What is noteworthy about Israel’s three recent escapades is that more and more people are starting to pay attention to its crimes and indignities. In so doing, more and more people are questioning the origin and meaning of Zionism—that is, the very idea of a legally ethnocentric Israel.
I would like to address this piece to those who have undertaken such questioning or to those who are prepared to initiate it. I would urge you not to limit your critique of Israel only to its errors of judgment or its perceived excesses; it is more productive to challenge the ideology and practice of Zionism itself. There is no noble origin or beautiful ideal to which the wayward Jewish state must return; such yearnings are often duplicitous mythmaking or romanticized nostalgia. Zionists always intended to ethnically cleanse Palestinians, a strategy they carried out and continue to pursue with horrifying efficiency.
Likewise, Zionism was always a colonialist movement, one that relied on the notions of divine entitlement and civilizational superiority that justified previous settlement projects in South Africa, Algeria, and North America. Zionism, by virtue of its exclusionary outlook and ethnocentric model of citizenship, is on its own a purveyor of fundamental violence. The bad PR to which Israel sometimes is subject today is a reflection of changed media dynamics, not a worsening of Israel’s behavior.
The 2008-09 Gaza invasion, the attack on the Mavi Marmara, and Abergil’s Facebook photos aren’t anomalous or extraordinary. They are the invariable result of a Zionist ideology that cannot help but view Palestinian Muslims and Christians as subhuman, no matter how ardently its liberal champions assert that Zionism is a liberation movement. Zionism has the unfortunate effect of proclaiming that one group of people should have access to certain rights from which another group of people is excluded. There is nothing defensible in this proposition.
Here, then, are four reasons why Americans (and all other humans regardless of race or religion) should oppose Zionism:
1. Zionism is unethical and immoral: Because Zionists claim access to land and legal rights that directly obviate the same access to an indigenous community, it operates from within an idea of belonging that is cruel and archaic. Israel bases its primary criterion for citizenship on religious identity. Imagine having your religion on your driver’s license. And imagine having limited access to freeways, farmland, family, education, employment, and foreign travel because the religion by which the state has chosen to identify you is legally marginalized. Such is the daily reality of the Palestinian people.
2. Zionism is racist: This claim isn’t the same as saying that all Zionists are racist. I would make a distinction between the categories of “Zionist” and “Zionism.” However, inherent in the practice of Zionism is a reliance on racialist judgments about who can fully participate in the benefits and practices of a national community. Many Zionists view themselves merely as supporting freedom and safety for Jewish people. I would suggest that people who identify themselves as Zionist look more closely at the ideology they support. Such freedom and safety, both of which are in fact mythologies, come at the direct expense of people confined to Bantustans and refugee camps.
3. Zionism contravenes the geopolitical interests of the United States: Many Americans have heard former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert boast that he once pulled George W. Bush off the dais while Bush was giving a speech, or more recently current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announcing that “America is something that can be easily moved.” Israel costs the United States billions of dollars in direct aid and in bribe money to Jordan and Egypt for their docility. Israel also is the main reason for disgruntlement about American foreign policy in the Arab and Muslim Worlds. I raise this point with some hesitation because I believe all citizens of the United States should challenge and not celebrate American geopolitical interests. I would also point out that Zionism’s narrative of salvation and redemption resonates deeply among Americans because of the United States’ origin and continued presence as a nation of settler colonists. In the end, America itself needs to be decolonized and the vast sums of money that support the imperial projects Israel so brazenly exemplifies need to be directed toward the well-being of those who pay the government its taxes.
4. Zionism is fundamentally incompatible with democracy: Israel, as a result, is undemocratic and will be as long as it uses religious identity as the operating criterion of citizenship. We hear much in the United States about Islam being incompatible with democracy, a belief that is historically untrue and that elides the massive military and monetary support the United States provides to the assortment of dictators and plutocrats that rule much of the Arab World. Neoconservative and mainstream commentators both evoke Israel in opposition to Islam as a symbol of democratic achievement, but in reality Israel performs one of the most barbaric forms of oppression today in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (and discriminates against the Palestinian citizens of Israel).
The alternative media engendered by new technology have allowed more people to witness the unremitting violence that has been Israel’s stock in trade for decades. Many consumers of this information and these images believe that Israel is guilty of excess when a simpler explanation exists: Israel is acting out the requisites of an exclusionary and inherently violent ideology.
These days all it takes is a little braggadocio from an ex-soldier such as Eden Abergil to so perfectly symbolize the callousness of Zionist colonization. Ten years ago, the Israeli government’s lies about the IDF killings aboard the Mavi Marmara would have been unchallenged by gruesome cell phone footage. Nobody these days could have stopped the images of white phosphorous exploding and spreading over the Gaza Strip from being aired; Israelis themselves were foolish enough to capture Jewish children writing messages on soon-to-be-launched missiles.
Americans now have all the evidence they need for a reasonable and morally-sound conclusion, that Zionism produces a cruelty and truculence that they bankroll with their taxes and legitimize with either silence or consent. As a result, I am not arguing that Americans should reassess their level of support for Israel. I am arguing that Americans should oppose Zionism altogether. Perhaps in this way we might begin the long and difficult process of redeeming our own nation of its imperial sins.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
British Svengali
PROFILE: BERNARD LEWIS
British Svengali Behind Clash Of Civilizations
Scott Thompson and Jeffrey Steinberg
This article appears in the November 30, 2001 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
On Nov. 19, octogenarian British Orientalist spook Bernard Lewis wrote an elaborate apologia for Osama bin Laden, a fervent pitch for the inevitability of the "Clash of Civilizations," in the pages of New Yorker magazine. Under the headline "The Revolt of Islam," Lewis lied that the emergence of "Islamic terrorism" in the recent decades, is completely consistent with mainstream Islam, which is committed to the subjugation of the infidels to Islamic law. He went through 14 pages of a fractured fairy-tale history of Islam, quoting bin Laden's Oct. 7, 2001 videotape, where the Saudi expatriate spoke of Islam's "humiliation and disgrace ... for more than 80 years"—a reference to the crushing of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France in 1918. Lewis invented a tradition of jihad, "bequeathed to Muslims by the Prophet":
"In principle," Lewis explained, "the world was divided into two houses: the House of Islam, in which a Muslim government ruled and Muslim law prevailed, and the House of War, the rest of the world, still inhabited and, more important, ruled by infidels. Between the two, there was to be a perpetual state of war until the entire world either embraced Islam or submitted to the rule of the Muslim state." Among all the different "infidels" ruling the House of War, Lewis asserted, Christianity was singled out as "their primary rival in the struggle for world domination." Lewis cited slogans painted on the walls of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock from the Seventh Century, assailing Christianity.
Lewis then claimed that the evolution of modern Islamic terrorism, specifically the al-Qaeda terrorism, had a long proud history within Islam, dating to the Assassins cult of the 11th-13th Centuries. (Lewis wrote a 1967 book, The Assassins, extolling the virtues of this secret society.) He also identified Saudi Arabia and Egypt as two regimes legitimately singled out by the Islamic jihadists, for their corruption by "modernism."
He concluded, ominously: "For Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the resumption of the war for the religious dominance of the world, that began in the Seventh Century.... If bin Laden can persuade the world of Islam to accept his views and his leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead, and not only for America. Sooner or later, al-Qaeda and related groups will clash with the other neighbors of Islam—Russia, China, India—who may prove less squeamish than the Americans in using their power against Muslims and their sanctities. If bin Laden is correct in his calculations and succeeds in his war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it that embraces Islam."
Bernard Lewis Plan, Take II
Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Lewis has, not surprisingly, resurfaced in numerous locations. After all, the 85-year old British Arab Bureau mandarin has been London's point-man in the United States since 1974, when he was posted to H.G. Wells' outpost at Princeton University's Center for Advanced Studies, to secure American compliance with British geopolitical manipulations in the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Caspian Basin, and Central Asia.
To put it bluntly: British intelligence senior operator Lewis is the guiding hand behind the ongoing U.S. neo-conservative drive for a new "Thirty Years War" in Eurasia. This drive is at the heart of the ongoing coup d'état attempt against the George W. Bush Administration, which began with the Sept. 11 irregular warfare attacks on New York City and Washington.
Lewis' arrival at Princeton, after serving on the faculty of the University of London's Middle East and Africa faculty (the repository of the original India House files, long officially referred to as the Colonial Department), coincided with then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger's fomenting of the civil war in Lebanon. That persists to the present day, and served as a laboratory for the later "Islamic revolution" in Iran.
Lewis is no mere British quackademic. After obtaining his doctorate in the history of Islam from the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, he joined the university faculty in 1938. From 1940-45, Lewis was, in his own understated words, "otherwise engaged," as a wartime British Military Intelligence officer, later seconded to the British Foreign Office. To this day, Lewis remains mum about his wartime "engagements."
Since arriving at Princeton, Lewis has been demonstrably responsible for every piece of strategic folly and insanity into which the United States has been suckered in Asia Minor. The Wellsian "method to his madness" has been the persistent push to eliminate the nation-state system, and launch murderous wars stretching across the Eurasian region.
* During the Carter Administration, Lewis was the architect of madman Zbigniew Brzezinski's "Arc of Crisis" policy of fomenting Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalist insurrections all along the southern tier of the Soviet Union. The planned fostering of radical Islamist war provocations was known, at the time, as "the Bernard Lewis Plan." Among the fruits of this Lewis-Brzezinski collusion: the February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini "Islamic Revolution" in Iran, which overthrew the Shah, and sent the once-proud center of the Islamic Renaissance back into a 20-year dark age; and the 1979-1988 Afghanistan War, provoked by Brzezinski's July 1979 launching of covert support for Afghan mujahideen "Contras" inside Afghanistan—six months prior to the Soviet Red Army's Christmas Eve invasion.
As early as 1960, in a book-length study he prepared for the Royal Institute for International Affairs, under the title The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Lewis polemicized against the modernizing, nation-building legacy of Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He argued instead for the revival of an Ottoman Empire that could be used as a British geopolitical battering ram against Russia and against the Arab states of the Persian Gulf—in alliance with Israel.
* It was Bernard Lewis who launched the hoax of the "Clash of Civilizations"—in a September 1990 Atlantic Monthly article on "The Roots of Muslim Rage," which appeared three years before Brzezinski clone Samuel Huntington's publication of his Foreign Affairs diatribe, "The Clash Of Civilizations." Huntington's article, and his subsequent book-length treatment of the same subject, were caricatures of Lewis' more sophisticated British Orientalist historical fraud, which painted Islam as engaged in a 14-century-long war against Christianity. Huntington acknowledged that Lewis' 1990 piece coined the term "Clash of Civilizations."
* In 1992, in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Lewis celebrated in the pages of the New York Council on Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs that the era of the nation-state in the Middle East had come to an inglorious end, and the entire region should expect to go through a prolonged period of "Lebanonization"—i.e., degeneration into fratricidal, parochialist violence and chaos.
"The eclipse of pan-Arabism," he wrote, "has left Islamic fundamentalism as the most attractive alternative to all those who feel that there has to be something better, truer, and more hopeful than the inept tyrannies of their rulers and the bankrupt ideologies foisted on them from outside." The Islamists represent "a network outside the control of the state.... The more oppressive the regime, the greater the help it gives to fundamentalists by eliminating competing oppositionists."
He concluded the Foreign Affairs piece by forecasting the "Lebanonization" of the entire region, save Israel: "Most of the states of the Middle East ... are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates—as happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties."
* In 1998, it was Lewis who catapulted Osama bin Laden into prominence with a November/December Foreign Affairs article, legitimizing the Saudi black sheep as a serious proponent of mainstream, militant Islam. Lewis' piece, "License To Kill: Osama bin Laden's Declaration Of Jihad," showered praise on bin Laden, pronouncing his "Declaration of Jihad Versus Jews and Crusaders" "a magnificent piece of eloquent, at times even poetic Arabic prose ... which reveals a version of history that most Westerners will find unfamiliar."
Caught In The Act
Osama bin Laden released his 1998 jihad call on Feb. 23, 1998, six months before the truck bombing attacks against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. The very next day, Bernard Lewis' signature appeared on a widely circulated Open Letter To President Bill Clinton, released by a previously unheard-of entity called the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, demanding that the U.S. government throw its full support behind a military campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Open Letter called for carpet bombing Iraq, and for the United States to aggressively give financial and military support for the Iraqi National Congress, yet another corrupt and inept "Contra" pseudo-gang, created by U.S. and British intelligence elements, and based in London.
In addition to Bernard Lewis, the Open Letter was endorsed by former U.S. Rep. Steven Solarz (D-N.Y.), notorious Anglo-Israeli propagandist and spy Richard Perle, convicted Iran-Contra criminal Elliott Abrams, Jonathan Pollard fellow-traveller Steven Bryen, Frank Gaffney, New Republic publisher and Al Gore mentor Martin Peretz, Paul Wolfowitz, Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) research director David Wurmser, and Dov Zakheim.
Lewis' public alliance at that time with the leading lights of the "Mega" apparatus—now waging all-out war against the Bush Administration's efforts to box in Israeli madman Ariel Sharon—is noteworthy, but not surprising. Lewis is lionized inside Israel, and by the Israeli Lobby in America as a geopolitical giant. On Feb. 19, 1996, Lewis was feted in Jerusalem, where he delivered the ninth annual B'nai B'rith World Center "Jerusalem Address" on "The Middle East Towards the Year 2000." His son, Michael Lewis, is the director of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee's super-secret "opposition research section." This is one of the most important wellsprings of propaganda and disinformation, presently saturating the U.S. Congress and American media with war-cries for precisely the Clash of Civilizations Bernard Lewis has been promoting for decades.
On Nov. 19, octogenarian British Orientalist spook Bernard Lewis wrote an elaborate apologia for Osama bin Laden, a fervent pitch for the inevitability of the "Clash of Civilizations," in the pages of New Yorker magazine. Under the headline "The Revolt of Islam," Lewis lied that the emergence of "Islamic terrorism" in the recent decades, is completely consistent with mainstream Islam, which is committed to the subjugation of the infidels to Islamic law. He went through 14 pages of a fractured fairy-tale history of Islam, quoting bin Laden's Oct. 7, 2001 videotape, where the Saudi expatriate spoke of Islam's "humiliation and disgrace ... for more than 80 years"—a reference to the crushing of the Ottoman Empire by Britain and France in 1918. Lewis invented a tradition of jihad, "bequeathed to Muslims by the Prophet":
"In principle," Lewis explained, "the world was divided into two houses: the House of Islam, in which a Muslim government ruled and Muslim law prevailed, and the House of War, the rest of the world, still inhabited and, more important, ruled by infidels. Between the two, there was to be a perpetual state of war until the entire world either embraced Islam or submitted to the rule of the Muslim state." Among all the different "infidels" ruling the House of War, Lewis asserted, Christianity was singled out as "their primary rival in the struggle for world domination." Lewis cited slogans painted on the walls of Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock from the Seventh Century, assailing Christianity.
Lewis then claimed that the evolution of modern Islamic terrorism, specifically the al-Qaeda terrorism, had a long proud history within Islam, dating to the Assassins cult of the 11th-13th Centuries. (Lewis wrote a 1967 book, The Assassins, extolling the virtues of this secret society.) He also identified Saudi Arabia and Egypt as two regimes legitimately singled out by the Islamic jihadists, for their corruption by "modernism."
He concluded, ominously: "For Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the resumption of the war for the religious dominance of the world, that began in the Seventh Century.... If bin Laden can persuade the world of Islam to accept his views and his leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead, and not only for America. Sooner or later, al-Qaeda and related groups will clash with the other neighbors of Islam—Russia, China, India—who may prove less squeamish than the Americans in using their power against Muslims and their sanctities. If bin Laden is correct in his calculations and succeeds in his war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it that embraces Islam."
Bernard Lewis Plan, Take II
Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Lewis has, not surprisingly, resurfaced in numerous locations. After all, the 85-year old British Arab Bureau mandarin has been London's point-man in the United States since 1974, when he was posted to H.G. Wells' outpost at Princeton University's Center for Advanced Studies, to secure American compliance with British geopolitical manipulations in the Middle East, the Caucasus, the Caspian Basin, and Central Asia.
To put it bluntly: British intelligence senior operator Lewis is the guiding hand behind the ongoing U.S. neo-conservative drive for a new "Thirty Years War" in Eurasia. This drive is at the heart of the ongoing coup d'état attempt against the George W. Bush Administration, which began with the Sept. 11 irregular warfare attacks on New York City and Washington.
Lewis' arrival at Princeton, after serving on the faculty of the University of London's Middle East and Africa faculty (the repository of the original India House files, long officially referred to as the Colonial Department), coincided with then-Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger's fomenting of the civil war in Lebanon. That persists to the present day, and served as a laboratory for the later "Islamic revolution" in Iran.
Lewis is no mere British quackademic. After obtaining his doctorate in the history of Islam from the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, he joined the university faculty in 1938. From 1940-45, Lewis was, in his own understated words, "otherwise engaged," as a wartime British Military Intelligence officer, later seconded to the British Foreign Office. To this day, Lewis remains mum about his wartime "engagements."
Since arriving at Princeton, Lewis has been demonstrably responsible for every piece of strategic folly and insanity into which the United States has been suckered in Asia Minor. The Wellsian "method to his madness" has been the persistent push to eliminate the nation-state system, and launch murderous wars stretching across the Eurasian region.
* During the Carter Administration, Lewis was the architect of madman Zbigniew Brzezinski's "Arc of Crisis" policy of fomenting Muslim Brotherhood fundamentalist insurrections all along the southern tier of the Soviet Union. The planned fostering of radical Islamist war provocations was known, at the time, as "the Bernard Lewis Plan." Among the fruits of this Lewis-Brzezinski collusion: the February 1979 Ayatollah Khomeini "Islamic Revolution" in Iran, which overthrew the Shah, and sent the once-proud center of the Islamic Renaissance back into a 20-year dark age; and the 1979-1988 Afghanistan War, provoked by Brzezinski's July 1979 launching of covert support for Afghan mujahideen "Contras" inside Afghanistan—six months prior to the Soviet Red Army's Christmas Eve invasion.
As early as 1960, in a book-length study he prepared for the Royal Institute for International Affairs, under the title The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Lewis polemicized against the modernizing, nation-building legacy of Turkey's Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. He argued instead for the revival of an Ottoman Empire that could be used as a British geopolitical battering ram against Russia and against the Arab states of the Persian Gulf—in alliance with Israel.
* It was Bernard Lewis who launched the hoax of the "Clash of Civilizations"—in a September 1990 Atlantic Monthly article on "The Roots of Muslim Rage," which appeared three years before Brzezinski clone Samuel Huntington's publication of his Foreign Affairs diatribe, "The Clash Of Civilizations." Huntington's article, and his subsequent book-length treatment of the same subject, were caricatures of Lewis' more sophisticated British Orientalist historical fraud, which painted Islam as engaged in a 14-century-long war against Christianity. Huntington acknowledged that Lewis' 1990 piece coined the term "Clash of Civilizations."
* In 1992, in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Lewis celebrated in the pages of the New York Council on Foreign Relations' Foreign Affairs that the era of the nation-state in the Middle East had come to an inglorious end, and the entire region should expect to go through a prolonged period of "Lebanonization"—i.e., degeneration into fratricidal, parochialist violence and chaos.
"The eclipse of pan-Arabism," he wrote, "has left Islamic fundamentalism as the most attractive alternative to all those who feel that there has to be something better, truer, and more hopeful than the inept tyrannies of their rulers and the bankrupt ideologies foisted on them from outside." The Islamists represent "a network outside the control of the state.... The more oppressive the regime, the greater the help it gives to fundamentalists by eliminating competing oppositionists."
He concluded the Foreign Affairs piece by forecasting the "Lebanonization" of the entire region, save Israel: "Most of the states of the Middle East ... are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates—as happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties."
* In 1998, it was Lewis who catapulted Osama bin Laden into prominence with a November/December Foreign Affairs article, legitimizing the Saudi black sheep as a serious proponent of mainstream, militant Islam. Lewis' piece, "License To Kill: Osama bin Laden's Declaration Of Jihad," showered praise on bin Laden, pronouncing his "Declaration of Jihad Versus Jews and Crusaders" "a magnificent piece of eloquent, at times even poetic Arabic prose ... which reveals a version of history that most Westerners will find unfamiliar."
Caught In The Act
Osama bin Laden released his 1998 jihad call on Feb. 23, 1998, six months before the truck bombing attacks against the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. The very next day, Bernard Lewis' signature appeared on a widely circulated Open Letter To President Bill Clinton, released by a previously unheard-of entity called the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, demanding that the U.S. government throw its full support behind a military campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein. The Open Letter called for carpet bombing Iraq, and for the United States to aggressively give financial and military support for the Iraqi National Congress, yet another corrupt and inept "Contra" pseudo-gang, created by U.S. and British intelligence elements, and based in London.
In addition to Bernard Lewis, the Open Letter was endorsed by former U.S. Rep. Steven Solarz (D-N.Y.), notorious Anglo-Israeli propagandist and spy Richard Perle, convicted Iran-Contra criminal Elliott Abrams, Jonathan Pollard fellow-traveller Steven Bryen, Frank Gaffney, New Republic publisher and Al Gore mentor Martin Peretz, Paul Wolfowitz, Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) research director David Wurmser, and Dov Zakheim.
Lewis' public alliance at that time with the leading lights of the "Mega" apparatus—now waging all-out war against the Bush Administration's efforts to box in Israeli madman Ariel Sharon—is noteworthy, but not surprising. Lewis is lionized inside Israel, and by the Israeli Lobby in America as a geopolitical giant. On Feb. 19, 1996, Lewis was feted in Jerusalem, where he delivered the ninth annual B'nai B'rith World Center "Jerusalem Address" on "The Middle East Towards the Year 2000." His son, Michael Lewis, is the director of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee's super-secret "opposition research section." This is one of the most important wellsprings of propaganda and disinformation, presently saturating the U.S. Congress and American media with war-cries for precisely the Clash of Civilizations Bernard Lewis has been promoting for decades.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan
The Holy Land in Transit:
Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan
Steven Salaita
Steven Salaita's ambitious and thought-provoking work compares the dynamics of settler colonialism in the United States related to Native Americans with the circumstances in Israel related to the Palestinians, revealing the way in which politics influences literary production.
The author's original approach is based not on similarities between the two disparate settler regions but rather on similarities between the rhetoric employed by early colonialists in North America and that employed by Zionist immigrants in Palestine.
Meticulously examining histories, theories, and literary depictions of colonialism and interethnic dialects, Salaita identifies the commonalities in the myths employed by both groups as well as the "counter-discourse" cultivated in the literature of resistance by native peoples. He complements his analysis with personal observations of Palestinians in Lebanese refuge camps, where he encountered a sympathetic perception of American Indians.
"The Holy Land in Transit" presents one of the first intercommunal studies to assess the ways in which indigenous authors react to analogous colonial dynamics. With great energy and perception the author offers a fresh contribution to an emerging frame of reference for historical, political, literary, and cultural investigation.
www.tower.com
Preview;
books.google.com
ALSO:
Demystifying the Quest for Canaan:
Observations on Mimesis in the New World and Holy Land
By
STEVEN SALAITA
Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies (Fall 2002), 11(2), 129–150.
www.informaworld.com
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Roots - 2
God's New Israel:
Religious Interpretations of American Destiny
Conrad Cherry (ed.)
The belief that America has been providentially chosen for a special destiny has deep roots in the country's past. As both a stimulus of creative American energy and a source of American self-righteousness, this notion has long served as a motivating national mythology.
"God's New Israel" is a collection of thirty-one readings that trace the theme of American destiny under God through major developments in U.S. history. First published in 1971 and now thoroughly updated to reflect contemporary events, it features the words of such prominent and diverse Americans as Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, Brigham Young, Chief Seattle, Abraham Lincoln, Frances Willard, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Ralph Reed, and Rosemary Radford Ruether.
Neither a history of American religious denominations nor a history of American theology, this book is instead an illuminating look at how religion has helped shape Americans' understanding of themselves as a people.
Preview;
books.google.com/book
Promised Land and Land Theft
Excerpt from
Joshua and the Promised Land
by
Roy H. May, Jr.
by
Roy H. May, Jr.
We can begin with the Crusades. During the Middle Ages, European Christians launched military campaigns to take the Holy Land from the Muslims. Early on the Crusaders took Jericho. Following the example of Joshua 6, they marched around the city led by clergy carrying sacred banners and pictures of Christian saints. When the walls did not fall down as expected, they attacked and overran the city. Then they massacred the inhabitants. Jews were locked in their synagogue and burned alive. Even some of the Crusaders were horrified by the slaughter. (10)
The Crusaders could have argued that the Bible was on their side. After all, Joshua commanded that "the city and all that is in it shall be devoted to the Lord for destruction" (6:17). The writer reports that they did just that -- killing "by the edge of the sword all in the city, both men and women, young and old, oxen, sheep, and donkey" (6:21). "They burned down the city, and everything in it" (6:24). For the Crusaders, the Book of Joshua was a blueprint for their military campaigns.
The Crusades occurred a long time ago [read more about the crusades]. We can find stories closer to our own times: the colonial enterprise in the Americas, the establishment of apartheid in South Africa, and the creation of modern Israel.
America, the New Israel
"We shall be as a City upon a Hill, they eyes of all people are upon us...," the Puritan John Winthrop wrote. The Puritans who disembarked in Massachusetts in 1620 believed they were establishing the New Israel. Indeed, the whole colonial enterprise was believed to have been guided by God. "God has opened this passage unto us," Alexander Whitaker preached from Virginia in 1613, "and led us by the hand unto this work."
Promised Land imagery figured prominently in shaping English colonial thought. The Pilgrims identified themselves with the ancient Hebrews. They viewed the New World and the New Canaan. They were God's chosen people headed for the Promised Land. Other colonists believed they, too, had been divinely called. The settlers in Virginia were, John Rolf said, "a peculiar people, marked and chosen by the finger of God."
This self-image of being God's Chosen People called to establish the New Israel became an integral theme in America's self-interpretation. During the revolutionary period, it emerged with new force. "We cannot but acknowledge that God hath graciously patronized our cause and taken us under his special care, as he did his ancient covenant people," Samuel Langdon preached at Concord, New Hampshire in 1788. George Washington was the &American Joshua," and "Never was the possession of arms used with more glory, or in a better cause, since the days of Joshua and the son of Nun," Ezra Stiles urged in Connecticut in 1783.
In 1776, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson wanted Promised Land images for the new nation's Great Seal. Franklin proposed Moses dividing the Red (Reed) Sea with Pharaoh's army being overwhelmed by the closing waters. Jefferson urged a representation of the Israelites being led in the wilderness by the pillar of fire by night and the cloud by day. Later, in his second inaugural address (1805), Jefferson again recalled the Promised Land. "I shall need...the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessities and comforts of life." (11)
The sense of divine election and the identification of the Americas with ancient Canaan were used to justify expelling America's Indigenous Peoples from their land. The colonists saw themselves as confronting "satanic forces" in the Native Americans. They were Canaanites to be destroyed or thrown out.
Since the Europeans arrived in North America, Indigenous Peoples have lost millions of acres of land. Theft, murder and warfare, forced removal, deception, and official government land programs have deprived them of their territories. Land rights of Native Americans were never taken seriously. Rather, they were seen as obstacles to the colonists' need for land. The Puritans did not respect the farms of Native Americans. They sought "legal" ways to get their land. If a Native American broke one of the rigid Puritan religious laws, the fine was paid by giving up land. In this manner, some Puritans were able to amass large landholdings through the Massachusetts courts. John Winthrop, for example, obtained some 1,260 acres along the Concord River. (12)
Native Americans had a very different idea about land. "Originally there were no lands owned by individual Indians. All land was held in tribal status, and its tribal governing body, the council, or headmen would allot pieces of land for each family to use," two Native-American scholars explain. (13) The Pilgrim idea of land was based on individual, private holdings. How ironic for a people who modeled themselves on ancient Israel! As we saw in chapter 3, ancient Israel's understanding of the land and its distribution was more like the Native-American idea of land than their own. That was overlooked by the Pilgrims!
Most land was taken violently. First of all, Europeans brought diseases that killed several million Native Americans within a few years. These great killings left land "vacant" and "available" to the colonists. Then there was war. When the 1600s ended, most Native Americans in New England had been killed or driven away.
In England, John Wesley, Methodism's founder, was appalled by the atrocities Europeans committed against Native Americans. He poured out his moral outrage on European Christians, including the English colonists. In his sermon "A Caution Against Bigotry," Wesley doesn't gloss over anything:
Even in cruelty and bloodshed, how little have the Christians come behind them! And not the Spaniards or the Portuguese alone, butchering thousands in South America; not the Dutch only in the East Indies, or the French in North America, following the Spaniards step by step: our own countrymen, too, have wantoned in blood, and exterminated whole nations; plainly proving thereby what spirit it is that dwells and works in the children of disobedience. (14)Tragically few listened to Wesley.
Warfare against Native Americans continued until the end of the nineteenth century as the United States moved westward. This expansion was inspired by the nation's "manifest destiny." Manifest destiny was the belief that the United States was destined or chosen to occupy all the geographical territory between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. This idea was very popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Native Americans were viewed as obstacles to "manifest destiny."
The wars removed Native Americans from their homelands. For example, from the 1820s until the 1840s the Cherokees, Choctaws and other members of the Five Civilized Tribes were expelled from the Deep South to Oklahoma. These forced marches to Oklahoma are known as the "Trail of Tears" because of the disease, suffering, and massive number of deaths the tribes experienced, and the grief they felt in leaving their homes. Some years later (1864) in the far southwest, 8,500 citizens of the Navajo Nation were forced out of their homelands. Their removal to a confinement camp in New Mexico is remembered bitterly as "The Long Walk." Throughout the nineteenth century there were countless military clashes between Native Americans and the United States Army supporting white settlers.
After 1854, the United States government adopted a general policy that undermined Native-American culture by replacing traditional forms of land ownership. Now land was allotted or given to individual Native Americans. Land not parceled out to Native Americans became government property. This land was then passed on to European Americans for railroads, homesteading, mining, and other purposes. The General Allotment Act passed in 1887 pushed this policy even harder. Native Americans were forced to conform to white culture. This Act was finally rescinded in 1934. The result was that through allotment, Native Americans lost millions of acres of their original territories. (15)
Access to land, water, minerals, and timber are still key issues. During the 1970s and 1980s, a bitter conflict over these rights exploded on the Hopi and Navajo Reservation at Four Corners, where Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico meet. This is the land the Navajo Nation received when released from the confinement camp following "The Long Walk." Rich deposits of coal, uranium and other valuable minerals were located in the Black Mesa and Big Mountain area. These lands, however, are sacred to the Navajo people. They are integral to their religious traditions. Strip mining for coal had already been allowed by the United States government. Uranium mines were operating in nearby areas.
Beginning early in the twentieth century, non-Native Americans and mining and energy companies wanted access to this vast mineral wealth. The Navajo resisted. Pressure intensified by the 1970s. However, not only was the land sacred, but the area was also disputed between Hopi and Navajo Nations because the reservations assigned them included overlapping lands. There was also conflict between Navajo who wished to conserve their traditional religion and way of life, and others who wanted modern development to occur. Mineral developers and the United States government manipulated and exploited the conflict to their own benefit.
Congress, backing the private U.S. companies, passed the Hopi-Navajo Land Settlement Act in 1974. It divided 1.8 million jointly-owned acres between the Hopi and Navajo Nations. For nearly a hundred years the two people had shared the land. The Act also required the relocation of between 10-15,000 Navajo and about 100 Hopi.
The cost to the Hopi and Navajo peoples has been high. It has left divisions between the two nations, conflict over the meaning of the land, severe hardship for those forced to move, and serious environmental contamination. Above all, it has meant the loss of sacred sites that cannot be replaced. (16)
Even when mineral rights are not the issue, Whites have access to Native American lands. By 1985, for instance, over half of the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation in South Dakota was being used by non-Native Americans. (17) As noted in chapter 2, disputes with Whites continue through lawsuits brought by Native Americans to recover or defend traditional lands. Today Native Americans are the most poverty-stricken of all United States citizens. (18). Land continues to be a critical issue.
While the English were building the New Israel in North America, Spain and Portugal were conquering Central and South America. The conquest of Canaan was the model for their invasion of America. Mexican biblical scholar Elsa Támez explains:
The story of the conquest of Canaan is the most often used biblical foundation for the conquest of this continent. Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda [a prominent and influential Spanish philosopher of the 16th century] used this biblical theme to legitimate the war against its inhabitants...He justified the conquest in order to punish blasphemy, but also because the continent was a special donation by God, as the promised land (The Pope as Christ's vicar had the authority to give the lands). God chose the Spanish to carry out this divine judgment against the infidels, and to conquer their lands. From this Sepúlveda affirmed that such a war besides being licit, was necessary because of the gravity of the people's concerns. (19)There were voices to the contrary. The loudest belonged to Bartolomé de las Casas (1474-1566). For many years he bravely defended Indigenous Peoples against the conquistadores. Most Spaniards, however, believed in the righteousness of their cause. They also believed that Native Americans were "naturally wicked." "God condemned the whole race of Indians to perish, for the horrible sins committed in their paganism," a priest declared. A popular saying said it: "Just as Joshua was willed by God to destroy the people of Canaan because they were idolaters, thus God willed Spain to destroy the Indians." (20)
No wonder some Native Americans reject Promised Land theology! As pointed out in the introduction, Robert Allen Warrior reads the Exodus and Promised Land stories "with Canaanite eyes." A member of the Osage Nation, he says:
Thus, the narrative tells us that the Canaanites have status only as the people of Yahweh removes from the land in order to bring the chosen people in. They are not to be trusted, nor are they to be allowed to enter into social relationships with the people of Israel. They are wicked, and their religion is to be avoided at all costs. The laws put forth regarding strangers and sojourners may have stopped the people of Yahweh from wanton oppression, but presumably only after the land was safely in the hands of Israel. The covenant of Yahweh depends on this." (21)From this viewpoint, the biblical texts are hardly saving messages! Rather, they are excuses for conquest and genocide.
Israel in Palestine
Today's Jews are quickly associated with the Promised Land of Joshua's time. However, the establishment of the State of Israel by the United Nations in 1948 raises many questions about that relationship. Palestine already was populated by over a half million people. Most were poor Arab farmers and artisans living in villages. Jewish settlers had been arriving for many years. They had purchased large sections of the land (usually from the few, big Palestinian landowners). By 1948, Palestine was a patchwork of Jews and Palestinians, most of whom were Arabs. That changed dramatically after Israel became a nation state.
War broke out immediately between the new country and surrounding Arab nations. Over 725,000 Palestinians sought refuge in nearby lands, mainly in Lebanon. Following the war, the Israeli government began forcibly removing Palestinians from their lands. It also severely restricted Palestinian civil liberties and participation in the national economy. Between 1948 and 1967, nearly 400 Palestinian villages were completely razed. Almost all farmland owned by Palestinians was confiscated. Palestinian farmers were left with only small parcels of poor land. By the 1970s, more than half of it was in the Negeb desert region. (30)
Religious beliefs about the Promised Land were not the bases of the Zionist movements that called for Israel's creation. What moved early Zionists were concerns for the political and cultural security of Jews. Most of the leading voices and founders of Israel, such as David Ben-Gurion, were secular Jews. Still, an historian points out that most Jewish settlers undoubtedly believed "that they had in some way been chosen to 'redeem the Land' and to displace the modern equivalent of the Philistines and Canaanites." (31) For that reason, secular political leaders drew on Promised Land imagery to justify their politics.
Following the "Six Day War" in 1967, religious arguments for Israel's occupation of the land were central. Israel's quick, military victory stimulated a series of highly visible and influential religious movements aimed at "redeeming the land." (32) For Israel, the question of land was a matter neither of economics nor of national security. The reason for taking and keeping the "occupied territories" was religious obligation. These territories rightfully belonged to the Jews and should not be returned, as one leader said, "because wars of conquest were mandatory in Jewish tradition in order to redeem the Holy Land." (33) An historian explains what happened when religion and politics were joined:
By going back to the earliest scriptural texts, the parts of the Bible that defined the Promised Land and told the people to conquer it, the religious purpose of the Israeli people was declared to be the same as the purpose of the state, so long as it kept and colonized the "occupied territories." Thus, twentieth-century Israeli nationalism and some of the most ancient parts of the original Hebrew covenant were joined. (34)The old stories of Exodus and Promised Land became justifications for expelling thousands of Palestinians who had lived in the land for generations. As might be expected, many Palestinian Christians find little value in these biblical accounts. Naim S. Ateek, an Anglican priest in Jerusalem, explains:
The God of the Bible, hitherto the God who saves and liberates, has come to be viewed by Palestinians as partial and discriminating. Before the creation of the State [of Israel], the Old Testament was considered to be an essential part of Christian Scripture, pointing and witnessing to Jesus. Since the creation of the State, some Jewish and Christian interpreters have read the Old Testament largely as a Zionist text to such an extent that it has become almost repugnant to Palestinian Christians... The fundamental question of many Christians, whether uttered or not, is: How can the Old Testament be the Word of God in light of the Palestinian Christians' experience with its use to support Zionism? (35)http://gbgm-umc.org/umw/joshua/may7180.stm
Roots
Bible and Sword
England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour
From early times, the British have been drawn to the Holy Land through two major influences: the translation of the Bible into English, and later, the imperial need to control the road to India and access to the oil of the Middle East. Under these influences, one cultural and the other political-military, countless Englishmen have made their way to the land of the ancient Hebrews.
With lucidity and vivid writing, Barbara Tuchman brings to life the development of these twin motives–the Bible and the sword–in the consciousness of the British people, until they were finally brought together at the end of WWI. Tuchman demonstrates that the seeds of today’s troubles were planted long before the first efforts at founding a modern state of Israel were implemented.
www.randomhouse.com
Anglo-Saxons: Lost Tribe of Israel? ... ? ... ? ...
British Israelism (also called Anglo-Israelism) is the belief that people of Western European descent, particularly those in Great Britain, are the direct lineal descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
The concept often includes the belief that the British Royal Family is directly descended from the line of King David.[1][2] There has never been a single head or an organisational structure to the movement. Adherents may hold a diverse set of beliefs and claims that are ancillary to the core genealogical theory.
The concept and theory details have been thoroughly criticized. ...
en.wikipedia.org
"Christian" Zionism
Biblical Prophecy and Christian Zionism, Gary Leupp
http://www.counterpunch.com/leupp05072005.html
Birth Pangs of a New Christian Zionism
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060814/new_christian_zionism
Christian Zionism: Terror in Jesus’ Name
http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/christian_zionism_terror_in_jesus_name1/
Christian Zionists: Mixing Prophecy and Politics
http://csmonitor.com/2004/0707/p15s01-lire.html
Christian Zionists, Israel and the ‘ second coming’, Donald Wagner
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4930.htm
JOHN HAGEE Evangelist leads millions seeking ‘war with Islam’, Alec Russell
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/06/08/06/10058027.html -
Hagee’s Armageddon Politics, Chip Berlet
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chip-berlet/pastor-hagees-armageddon_b_103161.html -
Hagee’s apocalyptic support of Israel, Ben Smith
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10375.html
Holy Land churches condemn Christian Zionism
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14789.htm
The Jerusalem Statement on Christian Zionism
http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=94029
Jerusalem Countdown: Christian Zionists and the New Israeli Government, Bill Berkowitz
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/1204/
Extremism in Israel Is Fueled By Growing Ultra-Orthodox Movement in the U.S. , Allan C. Brownfield
http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/010201/0101071.html
Understanding Christian Zionism Resource Page
http://www.publiceye.org/christian_right/zionism/coalition.html
http://www.counterpunch.com/leupp05072005.html
Birth Pangs of a New Christian Zionism
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060814/new_christian_zionism
Christian Zionism: Terror in Jesus’ Name
http://theamericanmuslim.org/tam.php/features/articles/christian_zionism_terror_in_jesus_name1/
Christian Zionists: Mixing Prophecy and Politics
http://csmonitor.com/2004/0707/p15s01-lire.html
Christian Zionists, Israel and the ‘ second coming’, Donald Wagner
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article4930.htm
JOHN HAGEE Evangelist leads millions seeking ‘war with Islam’, Alec Russell
http://archive.gulfnews.com/articles/06/08/06/10058027.html -
Hagee’s Armageddon Politics, Chip Berlet
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chip-berlet/pastor-hagees-armageddon_b_103161.html -
Hagee’s apocalyptic support of Israel, Ben Smith
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0508/10375.html
Holy Land churches condemn Christian Zionism
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14789.htm
The Jerusalem Statement on Christian Zionism
http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?sid=94029
Jerusalem Countdown: Christian Zionists and the New Israeli Government, Bill Berkowitz
http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/1204/
Extremism in Israel Is Fueled By Growing Ultra-Orthodox Movement in the U.S. , Allan C. Brownfield
http://www.wrmea.com/backissues/010201/0101071.html
Understanding Christian Zionism Resource Page
http://www.publiceye.org/christian_right/zionism/coalition.html
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