Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: La diSLESssia politica della sinistra

Carlo Strenger � uno psicanalista e filosofo dell'Universit� di Tel
Aviv..da leggere con grande attenzione
da 
guardian.co.uk
,
The self-righteous left's simplistic world
Gal Wettstein invokes the smug left on censorship in Israel. Democracy
there is healthier than in most Middle Eastern states
There is a phenomenon, the self-righteous left, which lives in a
simple black-and-white universe, governed by what I call SLES, short
for Standard Left Explanatory System � a concoction that is ruining
the left's credibility and integrity. This system, which started to
evolve in the 1960s, says: "Always look for the underdog and then
blame the stronger party for anything the underdog does, particularly
if the stronger party belongs to the west. Never hold the underdog
(particularly when non-western) accountable for anything."
SLES, when applied to the Middle East, is remarkably simple. If
Palestinians, Muslims or Arabs say something that isn't nice (like "It
is a religious duty to kill Americans", or "Israel needs to be wiped
off the map"), or do something even less nice (like blowing up the
Twin Towers, killing entire families on the first evening of Passover
in Netanya, or attacking London's public transport system) you have a
very quick explanation for it: "There is something that the
Jews/Americans did that must have hurt him/her terribly. We must try
to understand him/her."
A good example is Gal Wettstein's recent article in which he says that
he doesn't feel that there is true freedom of expression in Israel
because, among other reasons, his superiors may re-evaluate their
views on him. He says he has even lost some dates because of his
political views. I'm sorry for his loss, but turning this into an
indictment of Israel's freedom of speech is, to put it mildly,
preposterous.
Voicing political opinions generally has consequences. I am critical
of many Israeli policies; I voice my views in several venues and I
know the price for this � even though I doubt that it is higher in
Israel than in other democracies. I do not always get accolades and
have been called anything from being "anti-Israeli" to "antisemitic"
to "Nazi" (paradoxically by those from right and left, the latter
mostly from outside Israel). A recent gem from my inbox is: "You
inside out disgusting fat, skinhead, Swiss intellectual Lilliputian
thug. Go away from Israel brownshirt Nazi excrement thug! � Raus!"
Pondering this masterpiece, I need to admit that my head is shaved. I
am originally Swiss, so that's not to be disputed. "Lilliputian" is
obviously not meant physically, since I'm 187cm tall; I don't
currently own a single brown shirt, so I'll pass over the fashion part
of the compliment. As to "thug", I haven't used physical violence
except in the dojo, since the age of 10. "Excrement" I don't quite
know how to interpret. So I am left with the embarrassing truth that I
should lose at least five kilograms.
Do I feel that this restricts my freedom of speech? Absolutely not.
Arab members of the Knesset can call Avigdor Lieberman's proposal to
outlaw commemoration of the "nakba" "racist" and "fascist" without
risking life or their parliamentary immunity. I don't have
parliamentary immunity, and I completely agree with the Arab MKs; the
law is fascist, racist, and utterly stupid to boot, because no law
will suppress consciousness of the nakba. And I can write this without
fear of retribution or persecution by the state.
Israel does a lot of reprehensible things. Nevertheless, flawed as it
is, Israel is a flourishing democracy in which people like MK Ahmad
Tibi, Wettstein and I � along with centrists and rightwingers, can
voice our views. We can argue about them � often in bitter anger � but
the state does not persecute us for it, and so far Lieberman's
anti-democratic attempts to silence us have failed to gain sufficient
support. Israel is maintaining a very noisy, often uncivilised, but
lively democracy through a history of constant threat to its security
and existence.
There is not a single state in this area where I could express my
views freely except Israel. In Gaza, the Hamas regime has just imposed
a rule requiring women to wear veils to comply with Islamic modesty
laws; in Iran gay people are hanged and critics of the recent
elections threatened with death � or actually killed. Egypt and Syria
incarcerate political opponents, and Saudi Arabia is a highly
repressive regime � and the list goes on. This is not meant to
characterise Islam: it's a description of the facts in the Middle
East.
While I feel strongly for Wettstein's lost dates, I feel even more
strongly about the disproportion between the condemnations of Israeli
policies and the silence of Europe's self-righteous left about horrors
ranging from the mass murder of members of Fatah by Hamas, to the
genocide in Darfur, to rocket attacks on Israeli civilians.
Critical though I am of Israel's policies, I have nothing but disdain
for the self-righteous left hiding behind a simplistic SLES that
enables them to spill venomous condemnation of Israel as if it were
nicely placed between the US and Canada, and for completely
unintelligible reasons behaves as if it were under threat.
The psychological mechanism behind applying SLES to Israel is rather
simple: the Middle Eastern conflicts (there are a number, of which the
Israeli-Palestinian is the most prominent) have been intractable for a
long time. The autocratic and sometimes totalitarian structure of most
of the regimes is a huge problem, and the west is stuck with its
dependence on Middle Eastern oil.
Europe is actually in a worse conundrum than the US: the population of
all European states is shrinking, and their economies depend on
immigration. So far most of these immigrants are Muslims, and Europe
doesn't have the faintest idea how to integrate them into its
societies. Meanwhile the Muslim world is choking on a huge youth bulge
along with stagnating economies and a tribal social system that almost
completely blocks modernisation.
Nobody in Europe and the Middle East knows what to do about this, but
SLES provides a wonderfully simple solution: why not say that Israel
is the culprit, and that all problems would go away if Israel were to
cease the occupation, or, even better, would disappear. I fight the
occupation day by day, because it's wrong, not because I have the
slightest illusion that this would solve Europe's geopolitical
problems or those of the Middle East.
The self-righteous left should listen to the honest voices of a left
that retains its moral and intellectual integrity, like Bernard-Henri
L�vy and Alain Finkielkraut, who refuse to live in the simplistic
world of SLES and believe that you actually need to tackle the
complexity of our situation rather than enjoy the simple pleasure of
self-righteousness that SLES shares with the right.
-- 
http://bloggoanchio.splinder.com

 da 
guardian.co.uk
,
Gossip.
-- 
Baci,
Mony

 Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut
AHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAH