Terror & Humanism

Weberian at the Gates (with “Haaretz” Interlude & Post-Bust Postscript)

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“My mind is closed,” said a protestor at one of last week’s anti-Israel rallies outside Columbia’s gates. Yet she flinched at her own words once they came out of her lips. (No doubt she’d meant to say, “My mind is made up.”) I repeated what she’d said back to her. While I wished she wouldn’t shake it off too fast, there was no gloat in my game. Maybe I had a clue I’d be playing gotcha with myself soon enough.

The Columbia building occupation on Monday night had me living in contradiction, twisted and turning. I started with a hard bias against the spectacle of Ivy guys with keffiyehs and hammers.[1] But I was slain by the occupiers’ choice to rename Hamilton Hall “Hind’s Hall” in tribute to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli tanks in the war against Hamas. Blunt force against property (not people) may be justified if the aim is to fix attention on the pain of others.

I wasn’t much more subtle than the window-breakers on the evening of the day last week when Iran’s regime sentenced rapper Toomaj Salehi to death for exposing the “filth beyond the clouds” of Islamism. It was my invocation of Toomaj’s case that provoked the respondent at the rally who copped to her closed mind.

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No Way Out (Yet)

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Early on some people talked about changing algorithms and AI, but I don’t know anything about precisely how IDF calculations and behavior have changed since October 7th. My rough impression, drawn from people who know the country much better than I do, is that the IDF was usually more scrupulous before October 7th than it has often been since, that minimizing civilian deaths is now of less concern to the military, and the details of those deaths is of less concern to other Israelis. Friends who follow Israeli politics closely say that many things do concern and for that matter enrage the electorate:  the failures of the IDF before the war, perhaps also during it, the possibility of their government’s strategic vacuity, its apparent cynicism, ultra-orthodox draft evasion and political extortion,  also many other things, above all how this war can end with what people at first called “deterrence restored”,  but Palestinian civilian casualties unintentionally inflicted while trying to destroy Hamas does not seem to make the list.

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Frau Gertrude Kugelmann and the Five Gates of Marxism

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Open one of the gates to Marxism — “The Working Day” chapter in the first volume of Capital — and you’ll find paragraphs with equations (“As the working-day is A—–B + B—–C or A—–C, it varies with the variable quantity B—–C…”) Stones in your pass-way? Yup. Yet once you’re through the gate, you’ll see a path that leads to a life in struggle. You can’t help but wonder if you’ll be worthy. Not that you’ll feel a need to be (what Karl said he wasn’t) a Marxist, but you’ll always wish to come down on the commoners’ side of class conflicts. And the older you get, the more you’ll suspect the only regard that matters comes from militants with the brains to turn tears into controlled rage as Marx does throughout his “Day”…

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Rape? What Rape? (Denial as a Tool of Liberation)

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Great philosophers can make great errors when they confront things that challenge their closely held beliefs. Theodore Adorno, a brilliant critic of classical music, wrote ignorant essays about pop and jazz. Noam Chomsky, whose work is fundamental to modern linguistics, has a naive grasp of how media operate. Michel Foucault, whose writing on discourses and authority shaped postmodern thought, regarded the Ayatollah Khomeini as a guide to liberation from Western materialism. And then there’s Judith Butler.

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Sénégal on Fire

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Macky Sall — Sénégal’s outgoing president (Inshallah) — has played one Trump card after another over the past year, as he’s tried to retain power. Sall got brazen about his contempt for his country’s democratic process a couple years ago when he started hinting broadly that he would run for a 3rd term, though that’s illegal under Sénégal’s Constitution which only allows a president two terms in office. He prepped for what he assumed would be his permanent ascendancy by defaming and jailing his main political opponent, a young firebrand named Ousmane Sonko who’s been exposing corruption among Sénégal’s political class for more than a decade.[1] When Sonko and his partisans refused to fade out quietly, Sall came out as a petty Big Man trashing the country’s (relatively) free press, unleashing violence against protestors and conflating democratic dissent with Islamist terror.

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From the River to the BBC: Carnage and Complexity in Gaza

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CNN fired a photojournalist who was embraced by the leader of Hamas.

Like many Jews, I’ve read things about the bombing of Gaza, seen things on TV, and heard things shrieked in the streets that have horrified me in starkly contradictory ways. The truth about this awful sequence of events is as hard to come by as it is complex, but the slogans mask as much as they proclaim, and the coverage does something even more ominous: it simplifies. Every day I’m glued to my TV, gripped not just by the unbearable images that the carnage has produced, but also by the stimulation of my senses, the spectacle of mass death. It’s what I’d call visceral news, which compels me to watch, and it’s all true. But it’s not the truth. That requires context, which isn’t a visual.

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Julia Sebutinde

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As soon as I heard the verdict of the International Court of Justice last week and heard the vote of 15-2 against Israel, I knew it had to be a woman. Who else could stand up to 15 men and vote with the old Israeli man?

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Triplicate (Poems On Domination & Consequences)

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Fate

If the Fates come to take
those I love, bear witness to this —
………………………..they will not be victims
………………………..of what the ignorant, or,
………………………..perhaps, the grieving,
………………………..call terror.
……………….
Rockets fly into neighbors’ homes —
………………………..tonight? Tomorrow?
……………………….My own home?

If the Fates come for those I love,
I will not wrap them in white sheets,
lay them at the door of the man
who forced this war. He will not see us.

And if the Fates come for me, well,
there is no wrong in dying. But
bear witness, bear witness to this —
……………………………………I am not killed
……………………………………by a foreign hand.
……………….

Israel. Gaza. May 2021.

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Aaronovitch Mash-up: (“My Gaza Demands” & “A tug on the thread”)

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What follows is the opening swatch of David Aaronovitch’s latest Substack post, along with his December 6th piece—a “story about modern left antisemitism.”

My Gaza Demands

The hashtag era having replaced the age of conference resolutions and since wishes and the most earnest desires are to be expressed as demands, here are my #gazademands. I don’t expect them to be met but I want them to be. If they were realised then the appalling suffering of the people of Gaza would be ended, the minimum security needs of the people of Israel would be safeguarded and some hope for the future would be established (for currently there is none).

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Mass Rape (& Obliviousness)

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It’s been almost two months since the slaughtering of party-goers and farmers in the Gaza corridor, and I am just beginning to collect myself from the shock long enough to wonder why the rest of the world hasn’t noticed that there were mass rapes here. And then it hit me – we haven’t said how many women were raped and murdered, how many were mutilated, how many were just raped, and so forth. So I began to look for information, for specific facts. As a woman who has undergone rape, I found it a more focused subject than the general slaughter. Throughout this time, for instance, there have been testimonies and films – often go-pros of the terrorists themselves. Women gang-raped, women killed in the middle of gang rapes, women mutilated and murdered and raped in front of their children, little girls as well as teen-agers raped.

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A Palestinian Gandhi (Redux)

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Back in 2002, First published this interview with Mubarak Awad who’s long made the case to Palestinians for nonviolent resistance to Israeli oppression. He remains committed to his ethic and his NGO, “Nonviolence International,” is still engaged (though the Israelis exiled him to America in the course of the first intifada). Awad may not be an ace prophet – his prescriptions for elections in Gaza seem almost quaint now but his moral imagination is undeniable. Let’s hope he and his kind help write the future of Palestine…

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The Revenging Angels of Our Nature

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I have difficulties with Sherman, Wm. Tecumseh Sherman. Despite his clear-sighted warnings that a war with the Northern states would be “folly, madness, a crime against civilization!” Despite his soft affinities for southern culture, having spent time in Charleston, the cradle of rebellion, it was Sherman who materialized his prophecy that the south would be “drenched in blood.” His march from Atlanta to the sea, brought the Civil War’s terrors to the home front, a wide swath of pillage and fire, a wild escapade intended to blind the ante bellum and “make Georgia howl.”

Perhaps Arthur Harris — Sir Arthur Harris, 1st Baronet — was a more successful angel of the apocalypse.  As the architect of Britian’s bombing campaign of German cities, Harris sought a righteous revenge against the aggression, actually the existence, of the Nazi regime.  “They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

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Narcissus in Gaza

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A view from one of London’s wisest …

The other day, arriving early to do some filming in the London Library, I sat in the small park in St James’s Square by the statue of William III. A tall, lugubrious looking white man in his fifties walked past talking on his phone. He had, he said, been on the Palestine demonstration at the weekend. I didn’t hear the rest. ‘Ah”, I thought, “he must be one of those failures of multiculturalism I keep reading about on Twitter”.

In the aftermath of the October 7th massacres of Israelis by Hamas the vociferous New Right in Britain took to retweeting pictures of demonstrators with Palestinian flags and decrying this as a failure of multiculturalism and a vindication of their demands for reduced immigration. In the Green Room after my recent debate with Matthew Goodwin he characterised North London to me as a kind of sink of support for terrorism and told me – contemptuously – that because I didn’t see it that way I was not “living in reality”. When later it turned out that he had not been invited to dinner with the organisers I reflected on what we were all missing. We could have enjoyed another 90 minutes of that.

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The Witnesses (Formerly “Black Dialectics”)

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This post originally had a second half, which I’ve now restored since I got a “hard yes” from my final witness who agreed to join the conversation (anonymously)…

Ta-Nehisi Coates opened this Q&A by denouncing what he regards as cant about the complexity of the conflict between Israelis and Arabs. His argument had force. How can Americans — particularly those who identify with black people’s struggles for civil rights — support a country that’s waging war to sustain a status quo founded on “segregation”? There’s something fine and (small d) democratic in Coates’ determination to dump the idea that only PhDs in Middle Eastern Studies have the wit to comment on the horrors Over There. His will to keep it simple seemed admirable. Yet there was an odd avoidant turn in Coates’ testimony when he addressed Martin Luther King’s legacy.

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Heroes Are Gang Leaders

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Robert’s Chametzky’s thoughts on Adorno’s famous line (here) reminded your editor that it was past time to post Baraka’s unassimilable story (first published in the 60s), which seems more punctual than ever…B.D.

My concerns are not centered on people. But in reflection, people cause the ironic tone they take. If I think through theories of government or prose, the words are sound, the feelings real, but useless unless people can carry them. At­tack them, or celebrate them. Useless in the world, at least. Though to my own way of moving, it makes no ultimate difference. I’ll do pretty much what I would have done. Even though people change me: sometimes bring me out of myself, to confront them, or embrace them. I spit in a man’s face once in a bar who had just taught me some­thing very significant about the socio-cultural structure of America, and the West. But the act of teaching is usually casual. That is, you can pick up God knows what from God knows who.

Sitting in a hospital bed on First Avenue trying to read, and being fanned by stifling breezes off the dirty river. Ford Madox Ford was telling me something, and this a formal act of· teaching. The didactic tone of No More Parades. Teaching. Telling. Pointing out. And very fine and real in its delineations, but causing finally a kind of super-sophisticated hero worship. So we move from Tarzan to Christopher Tietjens, but the concerns are still heroism.

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Barbarism and Culture

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The author responded to recent poems in First and then went further with his thoughts…

“I’m on the side   . . .
[of] the ones used as messages . . .
of those whose deaths are part of an estimated number . . . ”

Oh my, oh my — what to do with (lines from) poems such as this, and those by Alison Stone…Such good lines/poems — are we allowed to admire them, as well as being moved, being led to reflect, to sympathize, to cry? Might there not be something just a bit off in such admiration? But if so, then why have poems at all?  Which, inevitably (for some) leads to . . . Adorno:

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