Saturday, January 1, 2011
[By Ben Cohen, crossposted from The Propagandist.]
I normally don't respond to my critics because if I did, I'd scarcely have the time to do anything else. But, as I'll explain, I have to make an exception in the case of As'ad Abu Khalil, a Political Science Professor at California State University and the author of a rather sordid little blog called the Angry Arab News Service.Abu Khalil, seen here in a picture which may serve as a warning about the misuse of hair restoration products, berates me for my latest piece - published here in The Propagandist and on The Huffington Post - about Al Akhbar, a Lebanese newspaper with a Strasserite editorial line: anti-American, anti-capitalist and viciously antisemitic.
Abu Khalil, whom I have never met and never corresponded with, wants his readers to believe that I have no knowledge of Marx's oeuvre (dude, don't get into that with me - I really do.) And he's also spitting rage that a "Zionist hoodlum" like me - don't you just love that deliciously retro, Soviet term of abuse? - should criticize an Arab newspaper when I don't read Arabic.
It's that last point which has triggered my decision to respond. Abu Khalil is right. I don't read Arabic and I'd like to explain why. In 1941, my father's family was ethnically cleansed from Iraq in the wake of the farhud, a pogrom against Baghdad's Jewish community instigated by similarly "angry Arabs," allied with the Nazis and spurred on by the notorious Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, which resulted in hundreds of deaths and injuries and destroyed homes. Had it not been for that event - painstakingly documented in Edwin Black's superb book on the subject - my mother tongue would have been Arabic.
Hence my desire to set the record straight. And now I'll move on.
OK, Cohen's point is well taken. But, on an unrelated subject, why would anyone name his or her site "Propagandist"? The term is an insult.