The Spinning Head

Thanks to the ‘self-hating asshole’ (as one protestor calls him) Max Blumenthal from from Feeling The Hate In New York

And in opposition, an unarmed people continue to resist with nothing but their voices, their bodies and their courage. Even the otherwise reluctant Christian Science Moniter had to confront this reality in a piece by Josh Mitnick called Borrowing From Gandhi? Palestinian Passive Resistance Gains Followers, where of course the writer refused to acknowledge that it has been predominantly non-violent resistance that the Palestinians have been engaged in for decades, and that the activities are Bilin are not the anomaly, which is what this piece makes it sound, or a revolution, but the result of a people, unarmed and abandoned, who have been engaged in such actions out of desperation. I quote from the piece:

“It’s not a war between two armies. By using non-violence, we take away the security excuse from the Israelis,” says Mohammed Khatib, a Bilin businessman active in the local popular committee organizing the weekly non-violent protest. “It shows the power of the Palestinian people, which is the right to live in this land.”

And it has always been so; not a war, but an unarmed civilian population brutally occupied by a racist and xenophobic nationalism that uses its sense of being ‘chosen’ to deny others their rights, humanity and justice. The hideousness of religious faith that contorts itself into racism, hatred and a purely venal interpretation of scriptures to justify murder and pillage is perhaps what dismays me most about Abrahamic monotheisms. The sufferings inflicted on man because of that thread of humanity that claims to have emerged from this seed is truly unbelievable to face and can perhaps remain as the one real argument against the Abrahamic idea of God – it just can’t be his/her manuscript if it can be so easily bloodied!

Choose yours sides. Its about to become clearer than it has ever been before. Israel’s reality, a reality that has for decades been veiled behind euphemisms and outright lies (‘the middle east’s only democracy’, ‘peace loving’, etc. etc.) is thankfully now coming out in full light. It is about to get even uglier as the nation completely looses its mooring, trips over itself in these days of increasingly moral isolation, and lashes out more and more violently against a Palestinian generation (young and old) that is finding its voice, articulating its arguments, and refusing to bend to the jack boots of the occupiers.

On a side not, the Christian Science monitor article carried a small slide show of images, and this one caught my eye:

And it looked very family, very similar to something I had seen earlier. And then it came to me…..

All these memorials to a self-righteous, exclusive morality and sense of outrage. The lessons of the holocaust are not to be universally understood, but cheaply exploited to browbeat those who speak out against the policies of Israel and her treatment of the hapless Palestinians. A genuinely European hypocrisy indeed, mired deep in the trenches of her ‘Enlightenment’ thinking.

As for example, Renan a man frequently celebrated as representing the ‘progressive’ spirit of Europe, and who could still in fact hold ideas such as:

The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races by the superior races is part of the providential order of things for humanity…Regere imperio populos, that is our vocation. Pour forth this all-consuming activity onto countries which, like China, are crying aloud for foreign conquest. Turn the adventurers who disturb European society into a ver sacrum, a horde like those of the Franks, the Lombards, or the Normans, and every man will be in his right role. Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honor; govern them with justice, levying from them, in return for the blessing of such a government, an ample allowance for the conquering race, and they will be satisfied; a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro; treat him with kindness and humanity, and all will be as it should; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race…Let each do what he is made for, and all will be well.

Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, page 16 (emphasis are Cesaire’s)

I think back to Fanon’s call to stop looking for this Europe that speaks repeatedly of humanity, and yet inflicts such horrors upon it. On the streets of Manhattan, in the neighborhoods of Brooklyn, and in the land that was once imagined as a new homeland for a persecuted people with justice and rights for all, we are witnessing the complete and absolute degradation and desecration of all that our modern world holds as moral and human. And it ties it threads to European colonial attitudes, prejudices and arrogance.

The Palestinians will prevail. There is no other place for this to end.

We only then have to remember that anything that takes billions of dollars of aid, millions of dollars spent on propaganda, thousands of soldiers, and tanks, and F-16s and miles of concrete walls and tens of thousands of voices to scream and shout at others, can’t be very strong.

I know for a fact that these demonstrations in New York repulse and dismay many, including the Jews. Israel is destroying not only itself, but the dream of the very nation that it could once have been. Her people have ignored her finest voices, from Yeshayahu Leibowitz to Deutscher, or Judt to Pappe who repeatedly warned her of the consequences of her policies and greed.

Deaf ears.