Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: How Liberals Arrive at "We Are Hamas"

By Josh Strawn
Created 01/08/2009 - 12:21
"WE ARE HAMAS," said protestors in London on January 3rd.  Welcome to
2009, and to the thoroughly postmodern, ahistorical, depoliticized,
world in which we live.  And if the reader will kindly forgive the
initial barrage of academic terms, and come with me on a short
journey, I'll explain why, for this avidly pro-Palestinian author and
activist, spectacles like the one in the UK are both disheartening
with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict but also in terms of the
wider culture we live in...
First, some definitions:
POSTMODERN.  A term often deployed unspecifically, and just as often
misunderstood by its adherents as by the layman.  Postmodernism was a
fad in philosophy that took root roughly in the 1970s.  I know what
some of you are thinking--philosophy is an ivory tower sort of thing
that doesn't connect to the real world, so blaming some European
intellectuals from a few decades ago for anything that's wrong in the
world is nonsense.  Except that philosophy pervades every corner of
your thought.  Just about all of us have willingly or unwillingly
adopted certain philosophical ideas put forth by men from Socrates to
Hegel, whether we know it or not.  Ideas matter because they effect
how we think.  So when a group of thinkers came along and injected a
dogma of anti-Western, anti-rational, relativism into the philosophy
scene and it caught hold, what was in the ivory tower was sure to
trickle down.
These days the average person experiences trickle-down postmodernism
in several ways, but firstly as a vague but palpable lack of
conviction.  They are hesitant to make claims about the truth on their
own and if they choose to do so, experience either a deep sense of
guilt, criticism from their peers, or both.   This is because we are
taught that our rationality, our fundamental means of knowing and
solving problems--especially if it is Western--is at best flawed and
at worst nothing more than a manifestation of our imperialist male-
dominated past.  The average person now associates judgment about the
truth of the world with arrogance.  I've got my truth, you've got
yours, let's not fight.  Stop being judgmental.  That would be the
mantra, and it's one of the most widely accepted perversions of
liberalism that exists.  But then again, liberalism is one of those
racist, sexist things that postmoderns taught us to think derisively
of.
The irony is that postmodernism, while it is officially a war against
dogmas, actually produces several of its own.  The anti-dogmatists
are, as a rule, dogmatically anti-Western.  They are skeptical of any
truth claim if it originates from classical rationality rather than
from a person of non-Western cultural persuasion.  And since just
about all of the postmoderns were also self-styled leftists, the
"left" now takes it's truth a la carte, from the array of non-Western
opinion.
AHISTORICAL.  Just what it sounds like.  Postmodernism helped speed
this along, as it rejected "master narratives" of history.  But nobody
needed Lyotard to see that as public education degenerated, and as our
technological economy began rewarding those who knew how to deal with
the rootless present as opposed to the rooted past, the discipline of
learning any narrative of history would give way to the ability to
make a Facebook profile, program your iPhone, or build a website.  The
Internet is immaterial, whereas history is quite material.
DEPOLITICIZED.  It used to be that politics was a set of values and
convictions for which one fought both in the realm of ideas and in the
harsher realities of the political universe.   In the West, however,
where we have made our politics a mere matter of purchase power ("I
shop at Bath & Body Works because they donate money to the Third
World") and identity adornments, politics has virtually ceased to
exist.  Even Barack Obama's victory must be attributed in part to his
prodigious ability to understand this new world (which was in no small
part what recommended him for the job).  Politics is today a brand,
not a practice.  It's something you wear, something you use to
designate yourself socially and culturally.  For most, it's not the
art of the possible, even if they are marching in the streets.   After
all, that'd take vision and conviction, which they've forfeited, to be
respectful of everyone else's truth.
Which leads us, finally, back to the protests in London over the
attacks in Gaza.  How come, despite the fact that Hamas openly states
its violent, intolerant, anti-Semitic, theocratic values, and despite
having seen its brutal ways of doing business, can a mob of (mostly)
well-meaning British liberals take to the streets and declare their
solidarity?  It isn't (with the exception of George Galloway)  because
they are actual sympathizers with Islamist killers.  How is it that
those concerned with social justice could possibly contort their
values so that a slogan like this can cross their lips?
Because that's what happens when you perpetually doubt your own sense
of truth and instead subscribe almost unconditionally to what the non-
Westerner says about "their truth."  It's what happens when you've
accepted the notion that your rationality both comes from an evil
place and is capable only of yielding evil conclusions.  It's what
happens when you've spent more hours making pop hits, riding your
white horse into Studio 54, programming your iPod, designing and
navigating websites in cyberspace than you've spent reading up on the
history of the conflict.  A few snippets of grotesque propaganda and a
dash of worldview confirmation will do.  At that point, you've got
your marching orders.  You are, after all, a person who cares about
the world and about the oppressed.  In order to express this, you
will, like a consumer, seek out the brand that seems, in your feeble
estimation, to demarcate that identity.  Non-Western?  Check.  Claims
to operate on a different regime of truth?  Appears anti-imperialist?
Check.   Draw up the banner: WE ARE HAMAS.
After all, who would you be, beneficiary of the Western empire, to
quarrel with those who suffer at the hands of the oppression your flag
helped create and perpetuate?  Dare you call into question how many
Palestinians have suffered at the hands of Arab oppressors like, say,
the Jordanian kings who let starve and actively annihiliated thousands
of Palestinian refugees?  Is it really your place, considering how
brutal IDF tactics have been in the past, to entertain the notion that
Hamas might be sending Palestinians to slaughter in order to obtain
electoral and P.R. victories?  Or would you rather simply assert, out
of guilt for past sins or out of rightful revulsion at seeing images
of dead Palestinian children, that whoever is against England, the
U.S. and Israel is your friend?
You're unlikely to lose any sleep over declaring solidarity with
Hamas, since you don't believe it's your place to question the
legitimacy of their political goals.  You've got your truth, they've
got their truth, and never the twain shall meet, much less conflict.
But this was never a principle that liberals or leftists believed in
until recently.  Before postmodernism, the idea of the freedom of
ideas and humanistic progress not merely allowed for, it required the
intermingling of cultures and ideas, and the measuring of truths in a
rigorous debate.  The goal was to eliminate the bad ideas and keep the
good.  Before the banishing of truth into culturally specific
enclaves, and before the death of history, the left was working toward
creating a better material world.  Today, under the guise of being
more accepting, it has let bad ideas not only survive, but has allowed
them to thrive and proliferate.  With the material world an
afterthought in the age of the Internet, George Galloway seems as good
a fellow to stand beside as any, just as long as his is a brand that
makes you feel good about who you are.
The sad part, though, is that it's a good thing to want to show
solidarity with the oppressed, to want to work towards a world where
the crimes of our more ignorant past are corrected.  People like me,
who are quite convinced that Galloway represents another, far more
sinister breed than the well-meaning accidental fascist weekender-type
outlined here, are in a difficult position.  Criticize Galloway and
the protest, and be accused of siding with colonialists, child-
murderers and labeled a treacherous bastard.   Fail to do so, and fail
to defend the right of a liberal democratic state to self-defense and
let thrive the growing sector of the left that openly declares support
with the radical theocratic right.
But would it really be too much to ask for some celebrities of
conscience, musicians, movie stars, and leftists to take neither the
side of heavy-handed Israeli retaliations, nor the side of terrorists
who fire rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas of Southern
Israel and use their own people as human shields?  What if instead, in
a gesture of solidarity, they took the words of a bereaved Palestinian
mother whose child had been killed in an Israeli strike as their
slogan?  She is a female, non-Western victim of both the Israeli
occupation as well as the cynical machinations of Islamic imperialists
that provoked this conflict.  Her cry?  "May God exterminate Hamas!"
Whether or not one endorses her means, this formulation captures
perfectly a real vision for a political project worth undertaking.
You needn't endorse Israel's means of accomplishing that task either,
but at the very least it is the ultimate statement of solidarity with
Palestinian victims of this war.
A fairly potent means of examining and critiquing the postcolonial
West might involve asking the following simple, jargonless question:
How can a woman who lives this war and has lost her own flesh and
blood to an Israeli strike be able to distinguish the guilty party
even through a haze of grief that few of us can imagine, while those
in the West march in support of the party that she knows brought about
the death of her child?
 
http://www.jewcy.com/post/how_liberals_arrive_we_are_hamas
---
"E certo che sono un crimine di guerra"  (Luca Logi / rodewalder /
Golda Meir, febbraio 2008)
http://raionim.blogspot.com/2009/01/certo-che-i-qassam-sono-pericolosi_05.html

 Internet is immaterial, whereas history is quite material.
purtroppo è verissimo
F.