Sunday, November 6, 2005
How has it taken me so long to realize this? The Left is driven by an Honor-Shame paradigm, while the Center and Right are more Guilt oriented -- at least as far as the "I didn't do it" choice goes. That's why so many of us on the Right get so exasperated arguing the facts with the Left, while they spend what seems like such an otherwise inexplicable amount of time and energy caring what other people (Europeans, the Arab Street) think of us (and why they're so sympathetic to Arab "humiliation").
OK, perhaps a bit overstated, but that's what reading this review (note the ending) of Jaqueline Rose's new anti-Zionist book, The Question of Zion, brought to mind. The book is drawing rave reviews in Britain (surprise!), but not in The Weekly Standard.
What Zionism Is Not - The many ways the Jewish state is misunderstood by Benjamin Balint
On the surface, The Question of Zion -- the title is a tribute to Edward Said's The Question of Palestine (1979) -- is a scholarly attempt to trace Zionism's strange power to command "passionate and seemingly intractable allegiance" to two forces in the Jewish unconscious: messianism and the psychopathology of the Holocaust.
Rose, a professor of English at Queen Mary, University of London, has made several previous skirmishes from her work in psychoanalytic and literary theory into this contentious subject. In a debate in London last January, she argued for the proposition that "Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews." And in a piece published three days after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed three people and wounded 32 last year in Tel Aviv's open-air market, Rose urged us to understand suicide bombers "without condescension," and referred to the
unbearable intimacy shared in their final moments by the suicide bomber and her or his victims. Suicide bombing is an act of passionate identification--you take the enemy with you in a deadly embrace. As Israel becomes a fortress state and the Palestinians are shut into their enclaves, and there is less and less possibility of contact between the two sides, suicide bombing might be the closest they can get.
Good lord. Spare us too much intimacy.
So, she's another self-hating Jew. Put her in the same class as Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, et al. They can have a WONDERFUL discussion..........
"Suicide bombing is an act of passionate identification--you take the enemy with you in a deadly embrace."
A lot of the early suicide bombers were to some degree "bombed" out of their minds and one lucky bus driver near the town of Bet Shean was able to shove the guy out and drive off.
Some took on the task because of peer pressure and fear of their handlers. Others were somewhat mentally inept to appreciate the consequeces of the proposed act.
So the above quote in many instances was theatrical hyperbole.
In some instances where the bomber came out alive he/she did not display that 'passionate identification'.
Theorising is dangerous if taken seriously. Last Friday night Clinton was interviewed on Israel's Channel Two and he said that had Rabin not been murdered there would now be comprehensive peace in the region and that the Second Intifada would not have come about.
Ms. Rose is another one of these deluded fools who uncritically swallow the occidentalist line.
Actually, the really sad fact is that it is the Palestinians who have no legal right to be squatting on the West Bank. All the laws favour Israel.
Until these people are able to face up to the fact that it is their own "family" -Egypt, Jordan, and Syria that has put them in this mess, life and their future future will remain bleak for them.
Also, I must insist that grown adults cease and desist with Edward Said. Are you people serious? I can't believe that you would accept the hopelessly ignorant and serial liar Edward Said as an authority on these matters!
It really saddens me that so many people, particularly western middle-class university types who treat "Orientalism" as though it were unassailable holy scripture, the second law of thermodynamics or DNA code!
Said was a crank and an intellectual crook. True historians see him for what he was: a lying opportunistic whinger who simply could not admit that the Arab muslim world started to die in the 15th century, and that they haven't had the balls to admit ever since.
Enough already! What is wrong with these people? If it's not the Mongols, the Turks, the Persians, it's the British, the French, the Americans and "the Jews.
Time for them to grow up, shut up, and stop boring the shit out of the rest of us.