Complex Simplicity of the Middle East Impasse
Complex Simplicity of the Middle East Impasse
Written on Sunday 1/30/2005
By some one called seehom , http://seehom.blogspot.com
But he removed it later when I commented on it!
This was my comment:
"What really amazes me your sophisticated way of choosing terms!You are right; No you are one of the so little right persons in the world; No no.. You are the only right person who can shout it out loud; keep on writing I like your blog A LOT."
Read this carefully an fully Please! , It also worth translation!
Since the collapse of the peace talks in 2000 between Palestinians and Israelis, the Israeli government and their cronies in the Bush administration have been trying to convince the world that Arafat was the obstacle to making peace in the Middle East. The vast majority of the world was struggling to understand these allegations and where the truth lays. Of course, having some understanding of how and why the peace talks were halted is the key to seeing whether there is any hope of resuming them. Well, the fact was that for Israel to allow any real independent country to take form on the land they call Judea and Samaria and which they claim to be part and parcel of their biblical promised land was never in the cards, whether it was Arafat or Mahatma Gandhi they were negotiating with. At no point Israel had any intention of giving up its dream of expanded real-estate exclusively for and under Jewish control.
For casual observers of the issues in the Middle East, who typically read headlines and a News article here and there, facts and fictions conspired to make those readers give up any interest in the subject. And if you think that was not intentional, you are as naive as a 3 year old. No, your confusion and misinformation on this issue was not because of a conspiracy -- God forbid – and it was not an orchestrated media campaign either. It was far more sinister than both. It was and still is an inept cultural disposition that plagued the American psyche since World War II and has only metastasized to all aspects of this culture ever since. This malignant, undisclosed, unrecognized, always denied overtly and covertly fear of association with any idea that can be construed from near or far as anti-Israel has paralyzed any freedom of thought that we convinced ourselves of having when it comes to the middle east. The mere insinuation that America has perpetrated massive injustice or induced bloodsheds and sufferings of Palestinians through its support for Israel has meant a career ender for many in commercial media.Any professional western reporter, news anchor, or a writer who gives a hoot about her paycheck, will consciously or unconsciously seek to find the right on the Israeli side. After all, Israel is perceived as a piece of America in the backward, tyranny infested swamp of hatred and Islamic extremism we call the Middle East, isn’t it. Where would a writer or a News reporter find mass audience in America who don’t want a slant on the facts to enforce this perception? And what ambitious, well articulated, respected ‘wanabe’ American writer would take that chance; perhaps a Jew? Maybe the labeled ‘self-hating’ kind? But definitely will never be a main stream respected one.
Well, there were some of these writers that are in remission and have started to conquer that disease. I cannot go on without tipping my hat to Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky and Clayton Swisher for introducing America to intellectual chemo therapy, for some of them; it came at a grave personal cost.
In south Florida, where a critical mass of supporters of Israel gathers, I keep reading on the Internet editorials from the local papers equating Arafat to Hitler. I am not particularly bothered with this, except for the fact that those papers do masquerade as main stream news forums. Of course, for a local news editor to make a living there, she has to cater to the local palates and evoke a memory form the disgusting bowels of history to describe the man her audience loath. This is commercial media for you; nothing but a pathetic regurgitation of reassuring preconceived notions which has a proven market value. In other words, it is covertly yellow journalism that succumbs to assertions of fiction to cheer the herd. What is it that in a so called educated open society like ours that can make prejudices and bigotry an acceptable main stream trait? Or dare I ask? The answer is simple; if you make the assumption that the society is neither educated nor is it open to start with, then all bets about accuracy, fairness, and truth in reporting are off. In other words, if you seek the truth, then tune out and go get the damn thing yourself.
It’s only been 56 years since the Jewish state was established; this is not a study in anthropology from an archeological relic, nor does it require a PhD in either science. Thousands of people who lived through these conflicts are still alive and talking. The glaring facts are there for all to see, yet denial rules the day.
Simplify your aggressor and complicate your victim
When Bush launched his war against terrorism, he inadvertently stumbled across an ingenious approach to rally mass support. His approach was that terrorists are pure evil while America is pure good. The war is against ‘evil doers” who hate freedom and democracy and this war had no fog! This black and white good against evil proposition appealed to millions. What a brilliant simplicity! He most likely made an inadvertent self-reflected assumption that has proven true; that most folks are neither educated nor open minded to comprehend other explanations. People won’t bother with details such as; who started the bloodshed and how did it come to this! Now the attackers have been reduced and packaged to fit in one slogan. Bingo!! This is simplicity.
Take the reverse of this; when you are the blatant aggressor with glaring blood on your hands, such as the situation of Israelis against Palestinians, then simplicity is your worst enemy. Those millions of Palestinians made homeless refugees and deprived of their basic human rights for 56 years came about because of extremely complex geopolitical and religious circumstances that are impossible to explain. The fog is so thick here that what seems wrong doing by us is actually right. Simple explanations such as colonialist Western victors forced the creation of an executively Jewish state to collect those expelled from Europe after WWII despite a land already fully populated with indigenous people is, of course, misleading. Besides, this is not Israelis against Palestinians; it was Arab countries that attacked while the whole Muslim world gave their support to the Arab aggressors. Never to forget that there is a 3000 years of history there that has to be considered, and biblical prophecies that speak of a promised land to the Jews. As a matter of fact, expelling people from their land by force and keeping them for 3 generations in refugee camps under siege isn’t evil doing at all, it is just hard to explain. Bingo!! This is complexity.
The views are identical from the other side; simplicity is achieved in the slogan “Liberate our land from the Zionists invaders,” while Al-Qaeda supporters, in their attempt to justify the 9-11 attack, recite long tales of America’s incursions and support of oppressive regimes in the regions that cost thousands of lives. The 9-11 action was only a boil-over of years of American imperialistic and blood shedding policy that takes volumes to explain. Very complex indeed!None of the above is really new, and that is the scary part. However, the dynamics of the open modern world now made these approaches to fueling and justifying conflict feeble at best if not outright absurd. The absurdity is seemingly recognized only among the savvy and even quasi-savvy population with any political interest. On one hand, the recognition of this absurdity kept the world safe from starting a nuclear holocaust so far, on the other hand it rendered the American public complacent enough to allow the creeping of incompetent ideologues into positions of high power without vetting their rationality. Of course I am referring to Bush and his band of Neo-conservatives in the white house.
If the Enemy isn’t rational then why should we be?
Are Al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks of 9-11 and before irrational? Are suicide bombings in Haifa and Jerusalem irrational? Dare we indulge our right cerebrum long enough to answer these seemingly silly questions! Well, let’s apply this simple and rational premise accepted by militaries world wide, which is; when at war, minimize the killing of innocent lives but do what you have to do to hurt your enemy. Give Al-Qaeda a bomb that can be programmed with names and addresses of those they want killed while not injuring anyone else, and I bet they won’t use suicide bombers any more. On the other hand, in the absence of this infinitely accurate bomb, the scale will tip towards the side of hurting the enemy more than to the side of minimizing loss to the innocent. The logical conclusion, of course, is; if you desperately want to hurt your enemy and no accurate bombs are within your reach, then wrap an explosive belt around your waste and detonate it amongst them. Am I justifying the killing of innocent lives? Of course I am! The military does it all the time. No matter how sincere they are trying to avoid those killings. Am I equating the US military to the Al-Qaeda? Of course I am! Al-Qaeda is the military of the enemy, isn’t it? They must be, since Bush declared an actual military war against them. Could the answer be that those suicide bombings are indeed rational? I think so, what is horribly irrational is what led us and them to war in the first place. The simplicity here is glaring; in a war for survival, the end (survival) justifies the means (killing each other), how rational!
Written on Sunday 1/30/2005
By some one called seehom , http://seehom.blogspot.com
But he removed it later when I commented on it!
This was my comment:
"What really amazes me your sophisticated way of choosing terms!You are right; No you are one of the so little right persons in the world; No no.. You are the only right person who can shout it out loud; keep on writing I like your blog A LOT."
Read this carefully an fully Please! , It also worth translation!
Since the collapse of the peace talks in 2000 between Palestinians and Israelis, the Israeli government and their cronies in the Bush administration have been trying to convince the world that Arafat was the obstacle to making peace in the Middle East. The vast majority of the world was struggling to understand these allegations and where the truth lays. Of course, having some understanding of how and why the peace talks were halted is the key to seeing whether there is any hope of resuming them. Well, the fact was that for Israel to allow any real independent country to take form on the land they call Judea and Samaria and which they claim to be part and parcel of their biblical promised land was never in the cards, whether it was Arafat or Mahatma Gandhi they were negotiating with. At no point Israel had any intention of giving up its dream of expanded real-estate exclusively for and under Jewish control.
For casual observers of the issues in the Middle East, who typically read headlines and a News article here and there, facts and fictions conspired to make those readers give up any interest in the subject. And if you think that was not intentional, you are as naive as a 3 year old. No, your confusion and misinformation on this issue was not because of a conspiracy -- God forbid – and it was not an orchestrated media campaign either. It was far more sinister than both. It was and still is an inept cultural disposition that plagued the American psyche since World War II and has only metastasized to all aspects of this culture ever since. This malignant, undisclosed, unrecognized, always denied overtly and covertly fear of association with any idea that can be construed from near or far as anti-Israel has paralyzed any freedom of thought that we convinced ourselves of having when it comes to the middle east. The mere insinuation that America has perpetrated massive injustice or induced bloodsheds and sufferings of Palestinians through its support for Israel has meant a career ender for many in commercial media.Any professional western reporter, news anchor, or a writer who gives a hoot about her paycheck, will consciously or unconsciously seek to find the right on the Israeli side. After all, Israel is perceived as a piece of America in the backward, tyranny infested swamp of hatred and Islamic extremism we call the Middle East, isn’t it. Where would a writer or a News reporter find mass audience in America who don’t want a slant on the facts to enforce this perception? And what ambitious, well articulated, respected ‘wanabe’ American writer would take that chance; perhaps a Jew? Maybe the labeled ‘self-hating’ kind? But definitely will never be a main stream respected one.
Well, there were some of these writers that are in remission and have started to conquer that disease. I cannot go on without tipping my hat to Norman Finkelstein, Noam Chomsky and Clayton Swisher for introducing America to intellectual chemo therapy, for some of them; it came at a grave personal cost.
In south Florida, where a critical mass of supporters of Israel gathers, I keep reading on the Internet editorials from the local papers equating Arafat to Hitler. I am not particularly bothered with this, except for the fact that those papers do masquerade as main stream news forums. Of course, for a local news editor to make a living there, she has to cater to the local palates and evoke a memory form the disgusting bowels of history to describe the man her audience loath. This is commercial media for you; nothing but a pathetic regurgitation of reassuring preconceived notions which has a proven market value. In other words, it is covertly yellow journalism that succumbs to assertions of fiction to cheer the herd. What is it that in a so called educated open society like ours that can make prejudices and bigotry an acceptable main stream trait? Or dare I ask? The answer is simple; if you make the assumption that the society is neither educated nor is it open to start with, then all bets about accuracy, fairness, and truth in reporting are off. In other words, if you seek the truth, then tune out and go get the damn thing yourself.
It’s only been 56 years since the Jewish state was established; this is not a study in anthropology from an archeological relic, nor does it require a PhD in either science. Thousands of people who lived through these conflicts are still alive and talking. The glaring facts are there for all to see, yet denial rules the day.
Simplify your aggressor and complicate your victim
When Bush launched his war against terrorism, he inadvertently stumbled across an ingenious approach to rally mass support. His approach was that terrorists are pure evil while America is pure good. The war is against ‘evil doers” who hate freedom and democracy and this war had no fog! This black and white good against evil proposition appealed to millions. What a brilliant simplicity! He most likely made an inadvertent self-reflected assumption that has proven true; that most folks are neither educated nor open minded to comprehend other explanations. People won’t bother with details such as; who started the bloodshed and how did it come to this! Now the attackers have been reduced and packaged to fit in one slogan. Bingo!! This is simplicity.
Take the reverse of this; when you are the blatant aggressor with glaring blood on your hands, such as the situation of Israelis against Palestinians, then simplicity is your worst enemy. Those millions of Palestinians made homeless refugees and deprived of their basic human rights for 56 years came about because of extremely complex geopolitical and religious circumstances that are impossible to explain. The fog is so thick here that what seems wrong doing by us is actually right. Simple explanations such as colonialist Western victors forced the creation of an executively Jewish state to collect those expelled from Europe after WWII despite a land already fully populated with indigenous people is, of course, misleading. Besides, this is not Israelis against Palestinians; it was Arab countries that attacked while the whole Muslim world gave their support to the Arab aggressors. Never to forget that there is a 3000 years of history there that has to be considered, and biblical prophecies that speak of a promised land to the Jews. As a matter of fact, expelling people from their land by force and keeping them for 3 generations in refugee camps under siege isn’t evil doing at all, it is just hard to explain. Bingo!! This is complexity.
The views are identical from the other side; simplicity is achieved in the slogan “Liberate our land from the Zionists invaders,” while Al-Qaeda supporters, in their attempt to justify the 9-11 attack, recite long tales of America’s incursions and support of oppressive regimes in the regions that cost thousands of lives. The 9-11 action was only a boil-over of years of American imperialistic and blood shedding policy that takes volumes to explain. Very complex indeed!None of the above is really new, and that is the scary part. However, the dynamics of the open modern world now made these approaches to fueling and justifying conflict feeble at best if not outright absurd. The absurdity is seemingly recognized only among the savvy and even quasi-savvy population with any political interest. On one hand, the recognition of this absurdity kept the world safe from starting a nuclear holocaust so far, on the other hand it rendered the American public complacent enough to allow the creeping of incompetent ideologues into positions of high power without vetting their rationality. Of course I am referring to Bush and his band of Neo-conservatives in the white house.
If the Enemy isn’t rational then why should we be?
Are Al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks of 9-11 and before irrational? Are suicide bombings in Haifa and Jerusalem irrational? Dare we indulge our right cerebrum long enough to answer these seemingly silly questions! Well, let’s apply this simple and rational premise accepted by militaries world wide, which is; when at war, minimize the killing of innocent lives but do what you have to do to hurt your enemy. Give Al-Qaeda a bomb that can be programmed with names and addresses of those they want killed while not injuring anyone else, and I bet they won’t use suicide bombers any more. On the other hand, in the absence of this infinitely accurate bomb, the scale will tip towards the side of hurting the enemy more than to the side of minimizing loss to the innocent. The logical conclusion, of course, is; if you desperately want to hurt your enemy and no accurate bombs are within your reach, then wrap an explosive belt around your waste and detonate it amongst them. Am I justifying the killing of innocent lives? Of course I am! The military does it all the time. No matter how sincere they are trying to avoid those killings. Am I equating the US military to the Al-Qaeda? Of course I am! Al-Qaeda is the military of the enemy, isn’t it? They must be, since Bush declared an actual military war against them. Could the answer be that those suicide bombings are indeed rational? I think so, what is horribly irrational is what led us and them to war in the first place. The simplicity here is glaring; in a war for survival, the end (survival) justifies the means (killing each other), how rational!
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