Pope Benedict's Regensburg lecture (2006) on 'Faith, Reason and the University': a practical lesson in Islamophobia

https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/de/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regensburg_lecture

https://voegelinview.com/benedict-and-voegelin

Pope Benedict's Regensburg lecture (2006) on 'Faith, Reason and the University' - criticising both Islamic absolutism and Western scientism for their rational deficiency - was, I believe, the pope's honest and personal attempt (without any interference from the Roman Curia) to see whether a dialogue with Islam was possible. He was, of course, quickly deterred by the offended and violent reactions coming from the Islamic world, with Erdogan in the lead. 

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." 

This quote from a Byzantine emperor, when read in the context of the pope's remarks, leaves no room for misunderstanding the pope's intentions, except by malicious intent or stupendous obtuseness. Or is it both? In the sense that some stupendous obtuseness (or lack of self-awareness, i.e. inability to self-reflect) can only see malicious intent in whatever it dimly perceives as criticism, and then reacts with self-righteous outrage, which in turn can only be perceived by the other side as either stupendous obtuseness or malicious intent? 

The pope did not apologise, but only expressed regret for having been misunderstood. Which again was met with Muslim outrage for not being a full apology! 

Or is it even much simpler? And does that remark by the Byzantine emperor express a simple truth, which is also dimly perceived as such by Muslims? A simple truth which they then believe must also be shared by the pope, even when he ostensibly distances himself from the emperor's remarks, because nobody can distance himself from what is true? Is that what the outraged reactions reveal? 

Muslims' perception of Western Islamophobia is similarly sincere in that they cannot see how Islamophobia is instilled in Westerners by Muslim utterances and behaviour. Muslims obviously cannot understand for what reason Westerners find it so easy to detest them, nor that it is exactly this stupendous obtuseness wherein lies that reason! Because self-righteous obtuseness in human affairs necessarily translates into callousness, i.e. insensitive and cruel disregard for others. When Muslims do not express revulsion at the idea of avenging the Prophet's honour by murdering the entire editorial board of Charlie Hebdo, how can they be surprised at being met with the same revulsion? But surprised they are. And therefore profoundly despised. 

What if the abdication of human sovereignty by submission to God's word and the abolition of personal responsibility for the execution of God's will leads directly to the usurpation of God's place, i.e. the highest form of blasphemy? Then it is entirely possible that the ancient contest between Rome and Carthage is repeating itself in the 'clash of civilisations' between the West and Islam. 

Edward Saïd was equally incapable of understanding how Western Orientalism was a truthful reaction to oriental cultural beliefs and practices. And as a true Oriental he reacted with self-righteous outrage and wrote a book-long indictment of the West for its imperialist and culturally insensitive misunderstanding of the Orient. When in truth there was no misunderstanding at all, because cultural differences are not insurmountable obstacles to understanding, as they do not erase our common human nature, neither materially nor spiritually. All there was was Saïds own stupidity, forcefully demonstrated by his inability to see it.

Bassem Youssef: Israel-Palestine, Gaza, Hamas, Middle East, Satire & Fame | Lex Fridman Podcast #424

Bassem Youssef a 'beautiful human being'? Well, maybe to someone who uses that kind of empty language to say nothing. I really detest that guy! The self-absorbed smugness! The constant facial expression of someone very pleased with himself! And how dumb can one be? Does he know anything about the history of this conflict? Or is he just parroting all the talking points of the Palestinian Nakba victimhood narrative? And I mean all of them: he obviously has put in some real effort to store them in memory so that he can regurgitate them, ad nauseam and very proud of his own performance. I've had enough after 10 minutes. I had already seen him in his first interview with Piers Morgan, which told me all I needed to know. And am I to believe that this man is a competent heart surgeon? Well, he went into comedy, with some success apparently, although I can't imagine him making anything but lame jokes at the expense of others. With Piers Morgan he somehow got it into his head that sarcasm was called for to get the right perspective on Israel's response to the Oct 7 massacre! He has what in German we call 'ein Brett vor dem Kopf', i.e. a plank or board in front of his head, to describe what amounts to a very heavy and solid form of stupidity or idiocy. When he's not trimming his beard, I suppose he spends a lot of time at the gym, and I can totally understand that about him.

Lex Fridman with his obsession of looking at everything from a 'human angle' is obviously not the right person to discuss the politics of this conflict with anybody, let alone with a person as clueless as Bassem Youssef, who is bound to believe the most improbable conspiracy theory first. Lex thinks it is 'black humour' and praises him for it! Can you believe it?

The political immaturity of this Muslim Arab is something to behold, to be sure. The last thing I would do is look for hope in a comedian of this calibre, when the root cause of this 100-year-old war, for whomever doesn't purposefully look away, is Muslim supremacism as dictated by political Islam. I cannot resist the temptation of citing Schopenhauer's assessment of Islam: "The usefulness of Mohammedanism lies in its intrinsic vacuousness: there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet. This simple creed of the unity of God imposes no intellectual or higher spiritual demands upon the believer, but promises to satisfy all his most carnal urges, even allowing him to pursue a course of self-indulgence and extreme sensuality in the afterlife. - The Koran is a confused and disorganised literary production, an embarrassing potpourri of Talmudic fable and pre-Islamist paganism; yet despite its lack of sophisticated content, it is reputed by believers to be a miracle, for how could a book meant to be recited in such mellifluous cadences as our wonderful Koran be composed by Mohammed, an illiterate peasant, save by the inspiration of the Angel Gabriel? Thus, when recited, this demonic production seems to cast an hypnotic spell bewitching and subduing all those believers within hearing distance, which may explain the wild popularity of certain Koranic readers down throughout the ages, such as the mediaeval Hafiz. - Also, the bellicose character of this book with its repeated calls of "Raise your swords and slay the unbelievers!" is enough to inspire a savage fanaticism in even the simplest and most self-effacing of believers. This means that the Koran isn't so much a religious book as it is a fiery call to arms; as such, it is the most disgusting piece of propaganda ever written, shamelessly enlisting the disenfranchised and exploiting the emotional volatility of the young as the raw material by which it spreads its tentacles."

PS: I continued listening while writing and was astonished to learn that Bassem knows about the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' being plagiarised from Maurice Joly's 'Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu' (1864). But then he calls it a 'satirical play' because he read that on Wikipedia, without understanding that it was in fact a very insightful deconstruction of the plebiscitary subversion of democracy and the rule of law by Napoleon III. He's clearly one of these people who know more than is good for them.

PPS: He also repeats that talking point about the Palestinians 'paying' for the crimes against the Jews of Nazi-Germany. I wonder what he would respond to my question: what exactly were the Palestinians asked to pay by the Zionists? It is the central question. And 'Nakba' is not the correct answer. But does he even know that Zionism started much earlier than the Holocaust, and in anticipation of such a disastrous derailment in Europe? Not all Jews were Zionists, but the Zionist constituency in Eastern Europe was there, and much larger than the native Palestinian population. The real question is: was it lawful for the Palestinian and Arab leadership to callously disregard the rights and ambitions of the Zionist constituency of diaspora Jews and to reject any compromise that would at least partially satisfy the national aspirations of both peoples in Palestine? And to resort to violence from the outset to thwart the Zionist enterprise? Especially when taking into account that the Palestinian population, who was never given a vote in the matter, was much more conciliatory toward Jews and Jewish immigration than their Muslim supremacist leader Amin al Husseini and the Muslim Brotherhood? 'Nakba' in 1948 was after all an accusation hurled by the Palestinian refugees at their leadership for having led them to catastrophic defeat in a needless and unjust war against their Jewish neighbours! And looking back on it today, does it make any sense to continue that 100-year war for Muslim supremacy in Palestine with the help of the Iranian regime and its IRGC affiliates? Just imagine what bi-national Palestine could have been today, if the Palestinians had accepted to become a (large) minority in a democratic Jewish-majority state as projected by the Zionist leadership. Without forgetting that if they had accepted it at the beginning of the British Mandate, diaspora Jews could have immigrated in much greater numbers, escaping or even preventing the later Holocaust, and the British Mandate could have ended much earlier with the attainment of independence, say in 1936, when in actual history the idea of partition was first put forward by the British in response to the violence of the Arab Revolt, and when Muslim supremacist leaders were aligning themselves with Nazi-Germany and adding 'scientific' racial anti-Semitism to their homegrown Islamic variety of Jew hatred. How can one avoid the distinct impression that Muslim supremacism has been no less a force for evil in the Middle-East as White or Aryan supremacism has been in Europe? And it continues to wreak havoc till this day, apparently with the approval of large swathes of the Muslim population including Bassem Youssef, even when some Arab governments clearly wish to extricate themselves from this endless and fruitless anti-Zionist war? How to explain such stupendous political immaturity and outright idiocy? Such self-righteous superstition in the 'true believers' who cannot accept that Muslim suffering isn't automatically the result of some Western injustice, but the consequence of their own choices and actions? When it is clearly blasphemous to preempt God's judgement in the matter and to believe that God is on your side no matter what you think, say or do? Is it because there was so little surface water in the Arabian desert that the Prophet and his followers never learned how to look at themselves in the mirror? I do believe that Russell's Paradox is at work here (as when a lie is big enough to make it hard to believe it is a lie, and you'd rather believe it), and that the intractability of the conflict does not stem from its complexity, but from its simplicity: because it is difficult to believe that the root cause is so simple, endless complexification becomes credible, which then makes it impossible to see the wood from the trees! And off they go in all sorts of wrong directions, believing themselves to be very smart and knowledgeable, while overlooking completely some or all of the basic facts when looking for the lost keys under the lamppost where at least there is some light.

The Charge of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel and the Risks of Public Critique - by Judith Butler

(in: Judith Butler, Precarious Life, 2004, p. 101-127) 

"The Charge of Anti-Semitism" was published in reduced form by the London Review of Books, August 21, 2003. 

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v25/n16/judith-butler/no-it-s-not-anti-semitic 

"Profoundly anti-Israeli views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their Intent." - Lawrence Summers, President of Harvard University, September 17, 2002. 

"There were debates throughout the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, and indeed at the inception of Israel, among Jews whether Zionism was a legitimate political ideology, whether it ought to become the basis of a state, whether the Jews had any right, understood in a modern sense, to lay claim to that land - land inhabited by Palestinians for centuries - and what future lay ahead for a Jewish political project based upon the violent expropriation of the land of Palestinians, dispossession on a massive scale, slaughter, and the sustained suspension of fundamental rights for Palestinians. There were those who sought to make Zionism compatible with peaceful coexistence, and others who made use of it for military aggression, and still do. There were those who thought, and who still think, that Zionism is not a legitimate basis for a democratic state in a situation where it must be assumed that a diverse population practices different religions, and that no group, on the basis of their ethnic or religious views, ought to be excluded from any right accorded to citizens in general. And there are those who maintain that the violent appropriation of Palestinian lands, and the dislocation of 700,000 Palestinians at the time that Israel was founded has produced a violent and dehumanizing basis for this particular state formation, one which repeats its founding gesture in the containment and dehumanization of Palestinians in the occupied territories." - Judith Butler 

My view on when criticism of Israel becomes anti-Semitic. 

First of all, the criticism must be invalid, unfounded, unjustified - valid criticism of Israel can never be anti-Semitic. This implies that the objection to it as 'anti-Semitic' can never stand on its own, it must always be accompanied by a demonstration invalidating the criticism. If left standing on its own, the accusation of anti-Semitism looks just as prejudiced as the anti-Semitic criticism of Israel itself, and offers the anti-Semite the well-known escape route of 'you just want to silence every criticism of Israel', an escape route that is cut off whenever the anti-Semite has to respond to a demonstration invalidating his criticism. 

Secondly, that what makes the criticism invalid, unfounded, unjustified cannot be an innocent thing, such as an honest mistake or a simple case of misinformation, as is shown by the immediate withdrawal of the criticism whenever the mistake is pointed out and recognized. No, the invalid criticism becomes anti-Semitic only when it is made wittingly as an invalid criticism because it is inspired by some negative prejudice against Israel. It is therefore never just in effect, but always also intentionally anti-Semitic, while the anti-Semite will necessarily deny that it is so. It is after all in the nature of prejudice that it is not recognized as such by the one who holds it: there exists no anti-Semite who is not fully convinced that his negative prejudice is entirely justified! 

When Jean-Paul Sartre said that 'anti-Semitism is a passion, not an opinion' he did not mean to deny that the anti-Semite typically rationalizes his hateful prejudice in the form of extensively formulated opinions he considers fully justified by imagined or invented facts. And as imagined or invented facts are notoriously difficult to disprove, the anti-Semite's position always appears at least to him impregnable. 

In the case of anti-Semitic criticism of Israel, the negative prejudice typically appears as the omission or suppression from the argument of important facts or judgements. And Judith Butler is no less guilty of it than any other anti-Semite. 

She questions the right of Jews to lay claim to a land inhabited by Palestinians for centuries, ignoring that a claim is a claim and not a right, and that everybody has the right to make claims as long as he does not expect that all the reasons he may put forward to justify his claim can unilaterally elevate that claim to the status of a proven right to the land in question. She thereby suggests without any proof that the Zionists proceeded in their enterprise in a way that completely ignored or denied any rights or claims that the Palestinians could make to their own land! How can anyone avoid the impression that she thereby exhibits a decidedly malevolent prejudice against the Zionists? 

And then there is of course the staple of Palestinian anti-Semitic prejudice, the Nakba or catastrophic injustice of which the Palestinians pretend to be the victims at the hands of the Zionists and their Western backers: dislocation of 700,000 Palestinians, violent expropriation of the land, dispossession on a massive scale, slaughter, and the sustained suspension of fundamental rights for Palestinians are all cited as facts, suggesting that the fact of victimhood is in itself a proof of innocence, and therefore renders superfluous any examination of the events that led to that catastrophic outcome, and any assessment of the responsibilities of all the actors involved, without excluding the Palestinian people, their leaders and their allies. Is it simply the result of thinking in slogans, whereby victims are never to be blamed, because the slogan originated with victims of proven innocence, such as the victims of rape or the victims of the Holocaust? Whatever it is, it is again not devoid of malevolent anti-Zionist prejudice extended to Israel as the result of that tainted Zionist enterprise. 

There are so many other specious arguments in Judith Butler's long and wordy essay that one despairs of having to answer them all. Reminding myself of the statement I began with, namely that the negative prejudice typically appears as the omission or suppression from the argument of important facts or judgements, I would argue that it isn't even necessary to answer them all, because it suffices to point out that nowhere in her essay does Judith Butler discuss the two major issues one must have with the Palestinian side of this conflict. (1) The complete disregard for the constituency of diaspora Jews in the name of which the Zionists advanced their national aspirations to sovereign statehood in Palestine. (2) The complete refusal to partake in negotiations in search of a possible compromise that would accommodate the national aspirations of both peoples, and the consequent resort to violence and outright war to thwart the Zionist enterprise. 

(ad 1) The Palestinian side much more than the Zionists proceeded as if their natural majority in Palestine in the beginning of the British Mandate elevated their claim to the land to the status of an indisputable and exclusive right to self-determination and sovereign statehood in Palestine by simply ignoring the Jewish diaspora, which not only formed the larger part of the Zionist constituency, but was also much larger than the native Palestinian population, and this at a time when the whole region formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire needed to be politically reconstituted and offered a wealth of possibilities for a negotiated compromise. 

(ad 2) One such possibility, after Transjordan was separated from Palestine to become an Arab state under a Muslim ruler, would have been to also make the Palestinians living in the remaining part of Palestine Jordanian citizens, while keeping them as 'foreign residents' with local citizenship rights in the future Israel occupying that whole territory; no transfer of population and compensation for expropriated property would have been necessary, but the Jews of Israel, even before having become a majority in the country through immigration, would have had the political control of their new democratic state. Granted, it would have been an even bigger ask of the Palestinians to live under exclusively Jewish rule than the Zionist plan to turn them into a minority with full citizenship rights in their own binational state. Maybe some confederation treaty with Transjordan could have alleviated the pain by giving Emir Abdullah some symbolic role as the head of the confederation and ruler of all the Muslims. I'm not sufficiently informed of all the dealings that took place between Zionists and Palestinian political figures under the British Mandate, so it is entirely possible that such a compromise was for some reason rejected by one or both of the parties, although the compromise would eventually have permitted to shake off the British Mandate and acquire independence much earlier, allowing for unrestricted immigration by diaspora Jews without British interference. 

But I am sufficiently informed to affirm, that in confirmation of the adage that proximity kills prejudice the Palestinian population, who were never given a vote in the matter, were in fact much more conciliatory toward the Jews and Jewish immigration than their extremist leader Amin al Husseini, who with the backing of the Muslim Brotherhood defended the principle of Muslim supremacy derived from political Islam and rejected any concession of Palestinian territory to a sovereign Jewish state. So that when the rejectionist stance of the Palestinian and Arab leadership had finally led them to war with the newly created state of Israel in 1947/48, the term 'Nakba' was meant by the Palestinian refugees as an accusation hurled at their leaders for having led them to catastrophic defeat in a needless and unjust war against their Jewish neighbors. 

By simply adopting as her own the Palestinian victimhood narrative, in which these grave responsibilities of the Palestinian and Arab leadership, for repudiating the essence of the Zionist enterprise and for resorting to violence and regular war in order to defeat it, are altogether suppressed, Judith Butler has already implicitly and unjustly blamed Israel for both the war and its regrettable consequences before she even has begun formulating her own criticism of Israel and its policies! 

Her own criticism of Israel can easily be summarized: Israel is simply not doing enough or is not well intentioned enough to remedy a situation in which the Palestinians continue to suffer the consequences of their own actions. The last part is of course not admitted so openly as I have written it here, because it would render it rather difficult for Judith Butler to continue discussing Israel's faults as if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were an entirely one-sided affair. She has in other words fallen prey again to the Palestinian victimhood narrative of the Nakba, which by omitting all Palestinian responsibility for the current deplorable state of affairs also absolves the Palestinians from making any contribution to the solution that would put an end to the so-called 'occupation'. 

It is truly amazing: in a long essay meant to counter the charge of anti-Semitism leveled at her and her left leaning colleagues in the academy, Judith Butler performs the astonishing feat of demonstrating her negative prejudice against the Jewish state of Israel for everybody to see without in the least becoming aware of it! And that is indeed the hallmark of prejudice: the total lack of self-awareness, the complete abdication of common sense in the service of a passion to see evil where one wants it to see. 

Now, Judith Butler clearly does not hate Jews in the way modern anti-Semites such as the Nazi-ideologues did, or the Muslim Brotherhood following in their footsteps, and that is probably equally true for most of the Western anti-Israel crowd, who therefore cannot recognize their prejudiced criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic. They may even be so devoid of Jew hatred that they cannot even recognize it in their Muslim Palestinian proteges and allies. It is also apparent that their negative anti-Israeli prejudice together with their positive pro-Palestinian prejudice originates from their firmly held anti-capitalist convictions and their anti-colonialist ideology, both of which they have smuggled into academic 'critical theory'. 

So one must indeed conclude that the charge of anti-Semitism has become misguided and ineffectual when the purpose is to counteract the polarizing effects of anti-Israeli and anti-Western prejudice in the public sphere. 

"No political ethics can start with the assumption that Jews monopolize the position of victim." 

Very well, now extend that same reasoning to the Palestinians and you may have understood something important about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

"The Jewish effort to criticize Israel during these times emerges, I would argue, precisely from this ethos. And though the critique is often portrayed as insensitive to Jewish suffering, in the past and in the present, its ethic is wrought precisely from that experience of suffering, so that suffering itself might stop, so that something we might reasonably call the sanctity of life might be honored equitably and truly." 

Fair enough, although it cannot have escaped you that compassion is no substitute for reason when it comes to making an objective and impartial assessment of the responsibilities of all the actors involved in this conflict. You should also remind yourself of the need to keep your feet on the ground whenever you want to strive with some chance of success for an elevated goal such as honoring equitably and truly what you not unreasonably call the sanctity of life! 

"But with what difficulty does one vigorously defend the idea that the Israeli occupation is brutal and wrong, and that Palestinian self-determination is a necessary good, if the voicing of those views calls down upon itself the horrible charge of anti-Semitism?" 

Well, it is a bit obtuse to believe that these views as such are deemed anti-Semitic and not rather the implicit assumption made by their vigorous defenders that it is all Israel's fault. 

"Now, it may be that what Summers was effectively saying is that, as a community, largely understood as the public sphere of the US, or, indeed, of a broader international community which might include parts of Europe and parts of Israel, the only way that a criticism of Israel can be heard is through a certain kind of acoustic frame, such that the criticism, whether it is of West Bank settlements, the closing of Birzeit University, the demolition of homes in Ramallah or Jenin, or the killing of numerous children and civilians, can only be taken up and interpreted as an act of hatred for Jews." 

Now, I'm sorry to say that your bad faith is showing through rather remarkably here and it surely is no minor part of your anti-Israeli prejudice! What have the acoustics got to do with anything? When the words themselves and especially the words that are missing for an accurate explanation of these things are clear enough to allow for such an interpretation? And that not only in what you so elaborately describe as the Western public sphere, but also in the Muslim public sphere, albeit with much less disapproval. 

"So whereas Summers himself introduces a distinction between intentional and effective anti-Semitism, it would seem that effective anti-Semitism can be understood only by conjuring a seamless world of listeners and readers who take certain statements critical of Israel to be tacitly or overtly intended as anti-Semitic expression. The only way to understand effective anti-Semitism would be to presuppose intentional anti-Semitism. The effective anti-Semitism of any criticism of Israel will turn out to reside in the intention of the speaker as it is retrospectively attributed by the one who receives, listens to or reads that criticism. The intention of a speech, then, does not belong to the one who speaks, but is attributed to that speaker later by the one who listens. The intention of the speech act is thus determined belatedly by the listener." 

Wow, you're not making this easy for any of us, this game of smoke and mirrors! I suspect that you are misunderstanding Larry Summers quite intentionally so that you can insurge yourself against those arrogant listeners who dare doubt your good intentions when you unfairly criticize Israel. Whereas Larry Summers meant to say, with some approval from us arrogant listeners, that so much of the effectively unfair and anti-Semitic criticism of Israel is proffered by left leaning intellectuals who have become so prejudiced against Israel that they see the mote in Israel's eye but not the beam in their own. In other words, their unfair criticism of Israel is effectively as well as intentionally anti-Semitic, although their anti-Israeli prejudice prevents them from understanding how their good intentions can become effectively anti-Semitic! 

"One reason, then, to oppose the use of the charge of anti-Semitism as a threat and as a means to quell political critique is that the charge must be kept alive as a crucial and effective instrument to combat existing and future anti-Semitism." 

Knocking down straw men now? Without even noticing they're made out of straw after you have convinced yourself in so many words that Larry Summers effectively if not intentionally (or was it the other way around?) has come out to quell political critique. I know, it's hard to keep thinking straight when your prejudice has made you abandon all common sense. 

"Of course, one could argue that criticism is essential to any democratic polity, and that those polities that safeguard criticism stand a better chance of surviving than those that do not. Let us imagine, for the sake of argument, that one set of criticisms do challenge the basic presuppositions of the Israeli state, ones that produce differential forms of citizenship, ones that secure the Right to Return for Jews, but not Palestinians, ones that maintain a religious basis for the state itself. For a criticism of Israel to be taken as a challenge to the survival of the Jews or Jewishness itself, we would have to assume not only that 'Israel' cannot change in response to legitimate criticisms, but that a more radically democratic Israel would be bad for Jews or for Jewishness. According to this latter belief, criticism itself is not a Jewish value, and this clearly flies in the face not only of long traditions of Talmudic disputation, but of all the religious and cultural sources for openly objecting to injustice and illegitimate violence that have been part of Jewish life for centuries, prior to the formation of the contemporary state of Israel, and alongside it." 

Elliptical formulations such as 'Israel's right to exist' lend themselves perfectly to sophistry of the kind with which you're entertaining us here, namely that criticism challenging Israel's right to exist as the Jewish state it is now is what is needed to help Israel survive as a state at all. For someone who has obliterated from historical memory the role played by Palestinian and Arab leaders as instigators of the various violent phases of the conflict and replaced that history with the Palestinian victimhood narrative, it may well be possible to imagine that simply 'ending the occupation' and granting citizenship to all Palestinians including all returnees will end all violence and result in a radically democratic binational polity that continues to work as well for the Jewish minority and the Muslim Palestinian majority as Israel has worked hitherto for its Jewish majority. For someone less prejudiced however it would seem more natural to expect from the Palestinians some solid and tangible proof of their peaceful intentions before even thinking about making such a fateful leap of faith. Maybe we should at least agree that sophistry is no basis for statecraft. 

My conclusion. 

Judith Butler has written a 27-page essay to counter the charge of anti-Semitism leveled at her and her left leaning academic colleagues with all sorts of arguments: some of them are childish, others confusing, and all are formulated in a far too complicated manner to be correctly understood. But she seems never to have grasped where the charge was actually coming from and why her position was so exposed to it, which is the only explanation I can think of for her rather directionless counter-argument, and which is also direct proof of her anti-Semitic, or more exactly, anti-Israeli prejudice, of which she cannot become aware because it precedes and secretly motivates all her thinking about Israel and Palestine. 

The somewhat esoteric, sometimes bombastic, but always imprecise and suggestive language she uses (e.g. 'radically democratic') reminds one of Jürgen Habermas, whose books also never become clearer after a second reading, in the way good books containing complex thoughts always should, according to Schopenhauer, whose opinion in the matter seems entirely reasonable, as one can only start to grasp all the internal relationships between complex thoughts contained in a good book after one has reached the end of it and starts reading it again from the beginning (and even then it takes a very good memory that retains all the bits one hasn't well understood on the first reading, so that even a third and a fourth reading will be rewarding). 

It is also disappointing to see how far 'critical theory' has moved away from its original purpose of what the Frankfurters called 'Ideologiekritik' as a means to overcome the alienated human condition in modern Western society, to become something of a cottage industry for the manufacture of leftist ideologies tailored to the most improbable causes and contributing in no small measure to another layer of false consciousness of that same alienated condition. In other words, 'critical theory' has become indistinguishable from a nonsensical and inimical ideology that clearly undermines our capacity to rationally think and argue about the human condition and the state of society. 

However, if one reminds oneself that Larry Summers's warning dates back to 2002, one is forced to concede that today Judith Butler and her colleagues have largely won the contest. Or so at least it seems. 

I'll end with a quote from Vasily Grossman, whose reverence for the sanctity of life comes much closer in spirit to Teddy Adorno than Judith Butler's bombast ever will. 

"Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness." - Vasily Grossman 

Judith Butler - Notes on writing, common sense, gender

A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back

By JUDITH BUTLER

BERKELEY, Calif. -- In the last few years, a small, culturally conservative academic journal has gained public attention by showcasing difficult sentences written by intellectuals in the academy. The journal, Philosophy and Literature, has offered itself as the arbiter of good prose and accused some of us of bad writing by awarding us "prizes." (I'm still waiting for my check!)

The targets, however, have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism -- a point the news media ignored. Still, the whole exercise hints at a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?

No doubt, scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.

Many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense. For decades of American history, it was "common sense" in some quarters for white people to own slaves and for women not to vote. Common sense, moreover, is not always "common" -- the idea that lesbians and gay men should be protected against discrimination and violence strikes some people as common-sensical, but for others it threatens the foundations of ordinary life.

If common sense sometimes preserves the social status quo, and that status quo sometimes treats unjust social hierarchies as natural, it makes good sense on such occasions to find ways of challenging common sense. Language that takes up this challenge can help point the way to a more socially just world. The contemporary tradition of critical theory in the academy, derived in part from the Frankfurt School of German anti-fascist philosophers and social critics, has shown how language plays an important role in shaping and altering our common or "natural" understanding of social and political realities.

The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who maintained that nothing radical could come of common sense, wrote sentences that made his readers pause and reflect on the power of language to shape the world. A sentence of his such as "Man is the ideology of dehumanization" is hardly transparent in its meaning. Adorno maintained that the way the word "man" was used by some of his contemporaries was dehumanizing.

Taken out of context, the sentence may seem vainly paradoxical. But it becomes clear when we recognize that in Adorno's time the word "man" was used by humanists to regard the individual in isolation from his or her social context. For Adorno, to be deprived of one's social context was precisely to suffer dehumanization. Thus, "man" is the ideology of dehumanization.

Herbert Marcuse once described the way philosophers who champion common sense scold those who propagate a more radical perspective: "The intellectual is called on the carpet. . . . Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you."

The accused then responds that "if what he says could be said in terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place." Understanding what the critical intellectual has to say, Marcuse goes on, "presupposes the collapse and invalidation of precisely that universe of discourse and behavior into which you want to translate it."

Of course, translations are sometimes crucial, especially when scholars teach. A student for whom a word such as "hegemony" appears strange might find that it denotes a dominance so entrenched that we take it for granted, and even appear to consent to it -- a power that's strengthened by its invisibility.

One may have doubts that "hegemony" is needed to describe how power haunts the common-sense world, or one may believe that students have nothing to learn from European social theory in the present academy. But then we are no longer debating the question of good and bad writing, or of whether "hegemony" is an unlovely word. Rather, we have an intellectual disagreement about what kind of world we want to live in, and what intellectual resources we must preserve as we make our way toward the politically new.

Judith Butler is a professor of rhetoric and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley.

https://web.archive.org/web/20111008194554/https:/pantherfile.uwm.edu/wash/www/butler.htm 

My Comment 

It probably started with Theodor W. Adorno, this confusion of 'common sense' with 'common ideology'. And although the confusion does not diminish the validity of common sense philosophy, also called 'Scottish common sense realism', it does give the impression at least that the child (common sense) can be thrown away with the bathwater (common ideology). So I would maintain that a critical theory dismantling a common ideology can be expressed in ordinary, common sense language. It's just more difficult than expressing it in a newfangled intellectual language that may appear nonsensical. With nonsense being the opposite of common sense, there is a real danger that critical theory expressed in apparently nonsensical language is not well understood and becomes a nonsensical ideology no less harmful or wrong than any other common ideology. The idea that "power haunts the common-sense world" and that abolishing common sense therefore opens a "way to a more socially just world" seems to me a clear expression of a nonsensical ideology that has the power to destroy critical theory as an emancipatory endeavor. 

"Gendered language can be harmful when it does not match the gender of the person it is applied to." 

The whole idea of combating supposedly harmful gendered language by regulating and changing the common sense language is a prime example of what such a nonsensical ideology can lead to. Because the ideology ignores that there is only one speech rule that is acceptable, and it is not even a rule but a simple fact. The fact that I am responsible for what I say, while you are responsible for what you hear or understand. From which it follows that your misunderstanding of what I say can never give you the right to tell me what I should say or how I should say it. 

An 'ought' does not follow from an 'is'? "If it were not for the fact that we ought to be reasonable, it would not be unreasonable to deny that something ought to be believed because it is a fact." - Frank van Dun

Speech rules for pronouns? Let me start by pointing out that your gender is just one of your properties out of many and therefore not the same as your identity. Which means that by using a pronoun that does not match your chosen gender I'm only doing injustice to one of your properties but not to you as a person. You may not like it, and you are indeed free to ask me to use the pronoun you deem appropriate. But I am also free to not grant you that wish for reasons that are my own, such as my instinctive refusal to use language that does not feel natural to me. You may in turn conclude that I am not being nice to you, and you may even be right, but that still doesn't give you the right to order me what language to use. You are certainly free then to decide that you don't want to have anything further to do with me, and there is nothing I can do about that. Except maybe to cave in and start using your preferred pronoun, which I may very well do if my relationship with you matters enough to me. It's called 'to each his own' or the natural order of human conviviality. I'm free to exercise my right in whatever way I wish as long as I respect your and other people's right to do the same. 

J.K. Rowling defending women's and girl's rights

Women's and girl's rights are of course no different from everybody else's rights and are to be protected against all those who want to violate them irrespective of their motives - you don't need a scientific study on anyone's patterns of criminality to justify upholding the law! 

Trans-women are men who identify as trans-women; they can ask you to accept and love them as trans-women, but you are equally free not to grant them their wish. When they ask you to consider and treat them as biological women, their demand is obviously nonsensical, as they cannot prove the fact they ask you to treat as fact. 

Restroom business: Isn't the obvious solution to that nonexistent problem to create a third category of restrooms 'for all those who want to enter'? Or if the men have no objection, to change men's restrooms into that third category? 

Same for sports competitions: a third category 'for all those who want to compete'. Or if the men have no objection, to open the men's competition to all those who want to compete with the men? 

Who's Afraid of Gender? Judith Butler's public lecture at University of Cambridge 2023

"As we know, we live in times in which we see the Earth destroyed by powers that seek to maximize profits and to expand state control. We also see attacks on women, gay, lesbian people, trans people, migrants, attacks which are focused on sexuality, gender and race, all operating in various parts of the world to support authoritarian structures, if not neo-fascist passions and politics ..."

Claim 1: "Fascist passions are intensified and accelerated by attacks on women, LGBTQIA+ people, migrants, black and brown people, and the poor." 

Claim 2: "These attacks appeal to the fear of destruction with which many people now live, not only workers who fear the loss of their jobs and the stability of their lives, but people forced into migration by the ongoing climate catastrophe." 

Claim 3: "These attacks, whether they take the form of physical attacks, murder, or legal disenfranchisement, also redirect the fear of destruction. If gender or migration are identified by the right as the cause of the destruction of society, then they themselves become eligible targets of destruction. If a nation can get rid of them or hold them in states of indefinite subordination or detention, then apparently the fear of destruction can come to an end. Or at least that is one of the false promises of fascism, or perhaps not a promise at all, but rather a fantasy collective in nature and lethal in its effects." 

"My argument today is that the anti-gender ideology movement should be considered a neo-fascist phenomenon. (...) Anti-gender is one of the vectors through which fascist passions are stoked and circulated, and those are passions that support increasingly authoritarian regimes that justify their wars and their acts of destruction by appearing as if they are putting an end to what threatens society with destruction." 

I find it very difficult to argue with that kind of 'suggestive thinking', i.e. thinking that suggests more than it spells out, while only mentioning as an aside very contestable ideas as if they were indisputable axioms or self evident truths, and that in general tends to make a great mess of things, as when it puts on the same plane gender and migration. Aren't we allowed to question anymore that the Earth is being destroyed by powers that seek to maximize profits and to expand state control? Or that people are forced into migration by an ongoing climate catastrophe? I mean, where do you start to untangle this mess? If that is what critical theory has become, then how is it to be distinguished from a nonsensical and inimical ideology that is effectively undermining our capacity to argue rationally about the human condition and the state of society?

Then there is the inescapable logic of polarization: You start by scaring yourself with a depiction as black as you can imagine of your opponent's malevolence, only to see your worst fears validated by your opponent's reaction to what was in effect your own deliberate but unintended provocation!

Israel-Palestine Debate: Finkelstein, Destiny, M. Rabbani & Benny Morris | Lex Fridman Podcast #418

 

It was a debate (to score points with the audience) not a discussion (to learn from the other side's arguments), and as a debate it was as boring and confusing as it was long.

A discussion with Palestinian advocates is intrinsically impossible anyway, because of what they are: inherently bad faith actors, who know that their position is indefensible, and who use all their deceptive skills to run circles around their opponents, who in turn look naive and foolish simply by trying to argue in good faith with a bad faith counterpart. With the main deceptive skill of the Palestinian side being the lie of omission, the Israeli side finds itself additionally burdened by the impossible workload of pointing out those omissions in lengthy explanations, a predicament also known as Brandolini's Law or the 'bullshit asymmetry principle'. In order to approach a minimum of fairness in such a debate, allotted speaking times would have to be very unequal. 

The outcome of any debate, as opposed to a discussion, depends as much on the audience as on the debating partners. And here too the distinction between open minded (good faith) and prejudiced (bad faith) listeners is what counts. Prejudiced listeners will go with their side no matter how the debate went. Open minded listeners in all likelihood (1) will detect the bad faith on display in the debating style of the Palestinian advocates, and (2) will share the frustration felt by the Israeli advocates in their hopeless task, augmented by their own frustration from not learning anything definitive from the debate. 

The noisy anti-Israel crowds marching in US/EU streets, who have intoxicated themselves to the point that they believe they're speaking for the 'World' and on the way to 'Victory', cannot be taken as evidence against the presumption that the large majority of US/EU electorates remain open minded and non-partisan. The real problem are the US/EU governments, who act as if they were no less impressionable than the anti-Israel crowd when exposed to the inflated civilian casualty figures and false accusations of 'genocide' spread around by Hamas's propaganda operation. To cure them of their islamophobia (i.e. fear of confronting Islamist immigrants as well as the Iranian government and its IRGC affiliates), debating bad faith Palestinian advocates is a useless distraction, and Israeli advocates must instead argue their case as straightforwardly as they can. And this not only to the US/EU governments, but also to the Palestinian people and the Palestinian political opposition, which is brutally suppressed by their self-righteous and nefarious leaders. For a political solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be found without the Palestinians. And for it to be the foundation of a just and lasting peace, it cannot be found without an entirely new political representation of the Palestinian people that is willing to admit defeat in this 100-year unjust war for Muslim supremacy in Palestine, and is also prepared to accept the consequences of that defeat, before entering into good faith negotiations on a peace agreement. 

For any Palestinian opposition party to have a chance of success, the Palestinian Nakba victimhood narrative must be completely demolished. As long as the 'Nakba belief' of being the victims of a Zionist and Western injustice survives in the population, the thugs with guns will always bypass the opposition in the 'struggle for justice'. The term 'Nakba' must revert to its initial meaning: an accusation directed by the Palestinian refugees at their Arab and Palestinian leaders for having dragged them into a needless, unjust and disastrous war against their Jewish neighbours. Only by confronting that false victimhood narrative head-on and erasing it to the ground can the opposition impose a new and valid victimhood narrative that calls for revolt against the nefarious leaders and propagandists of the anti-Zionist 'resistance'. 

There are 2 angles to this demolition enterprise: (1) Factual (easy): 'Who started the war (for Muslim supremacy in Palestine)?' Who was the first to resort to violence? It clearly wasn't the Zionists, who never broke off negotiations in search of a compromise solution that would accommodate the national aspirations of both peoples. (2) Factual and judgemental (less easy): The democratic argument of the Palestinian natural majority in the country vs the equally large or even larger constituency of diaspora Jews of the Zionists. Was it lawful for the Palestinians and Arabs to completely discount their ambitions and rights to national self-determination in Palestine? Which ties to the Jabotinsky asymmetry-argument in favour of a democratic Jewish-majority state in the whole of Palestine: the Jews had no other Jewish-majority state to which they could have emigrated, unlike the Palestinian Muslims who had a large choice of neighbouring Muslim-majority states (if they absolutely didn't wish to live under Jewish democratic rule). 

How can we prove that Palestinian advocates are bad faith actors, who know that their position is indefensible? By the strenuous efforts they make on the factual angle (1) not to deny, but to effectively hide their overwhelming responsibility for the war that led to the Nakba. If confronted in a way that forced them to explicitly deny their responsibility, they would already have lost: because the facts are overwhelmingly against them. By the equally strenuous efforts they make on the factual and judgemental angle (2) not to deny, but to effectively dissimulate their disregard for the Jewish diaspora constituency of the Zionists when insisting on the democratic argument of their natural majority in Palestine at the time of the British Mandate. If confronted in a way that forced them to explicitly explain their disregard for Jewish diaspora rights and to defend their refusal to become a (large) minority in a democratic Jewish-majority state, a refusal so principled that in their eyes it justified war against the Zionist enterprise, they would already have lost: because they would be forced to acknowledge that the only reason for rejecting a Muslim minority situation under democratic Jewish rule, while accepting a Jewish minority situation under Muslim rule, is their ideology of Muslim supremacism as it is dictated by the religion of political Islam. 

In conclusion one can say: a Palestinian partner in good faith negotiations for peace can only be a Palestinian counterpart who renounces Muslim political supremacism; a Palestinian or Arab counterpart who does not renounce Muslim political supremacism cannot be a partner in good faith negotiations for peace. 

This conclusion should have been already glaringly obvious to everyone during the entire history of the conflict since the British Mandate. That it was not acknowledged as such for all that time by the US/EU governments can only be explained either by antisemitism, i.e. a blinding prejudice against the Zionist cause, or by Islamophobia, i.e. a blinding fear of confronting Muslim prejudice. If 'never again is now' Oct 7 should be the end of that. Israel's main political effort, after defending herself militarily and making her case to the US/EU governments, should be her support for a Palestinian political opposition party that wants to become a good faith partner for peace, and thereby would pull the rug out from under the Islamist anti-Zionist cause pursued relentlessly and aggressively by the Iranian regime and its IRGC affiliates in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. 

The prerequisites for negotiating a 1SS or 2SS are the same 

[It should go without saying that these are my opinions and that I do not expect to have a vote in the matter.] 

(1) Palestinians admit defeat in this 100-year holy war for Muslim supremacy in Palestine, for which they also accept full responsibility. 

(2) Palestinians are willing to prove their good faith: (i) by acknowledging that it was an unlawful war from the outset and by accepting the consequences of their defeat, such as the forfeiture of the 'right of return'; (ii) by surrendering into captivity the political and military leadership that is compromised by the unlawful war (support for terrorism and 'armed resistance') and by disarming all terrorists and 'resistance fighters'; (iii) by accepting that negotiations on return or compensation of refugees must include both groups of refugees, the Palestinian refugees and the Jewish refugees from other Arab countries; (iv) by accepting that the Jewish state is a democratic Jewish-majority state, either in the whole of Palestine (1SS) or in Israel (2SS): because there is no other Jewish-majority state to which Jews can emigrate if they do not wish to live under Muslim-majority rule, while there is a large choice of neighbouring Muslim-majority states to which Muslims can emigrate if they do not wish to live under democratic Jewish-majority rule. 

The 1SS has 2 advantages: (a) it corresponds to the wish of both peoples to settle in the whole of Palestine, which in a 2SS can only be satisfied if the 2 independent states welcome as foreign residents citizens of the other state; (b) it offers better security guarantees because there will only be one defence and police force that remains under the ultimate control of the Jewish majority. It has 1 disadvantage: under the Jewish-majority constraint it offers less possibilities for the return of Palestinian diaspora refugees than a separate independent Palestinian state. 

The good-faith guarantees are essential for achieving a just and lasting peace, and can only be offered by a new Palestinian political representation that has broad popular support, while the whole old leadership will have to be disarmed, imprisoned or exiled. As the war in Gaza shows, this may well be the hardest part, if Fatah and the other armed groups do not surrender. 

Settlements are composed of real estate and residents: a 2SS in which both states do not welcome foreign residents of the other state is off to a bad start. 

Jordan and Egypt: a 1SS will need agreements with both peace partners either to grant Jordanian or Egyptian citizenship to Palestinian diaspora refugees before welcoming them as foreign residents with local citizenship rights into Israel/Palestine; or to resettle Palestinian diaspora refugees that cannot return to the new binational state with full citizenship rights because of the Jewish-majority constraint (unless some other failsafe constitutional mechanism is found that guarantees what the Jewish majority is designed to guarantee in a democratic state - openness to unrestricted Jewish immigration (Law of Return) and Jewish control of the defence and security forces). 

Lebanon: a Palestinian withdrawal from the anti-Zionist war will pull the rug out from under the islamist cause of the Iranian regime and its IRGC affiliates, and possibly encourage Lebanese Muslims and Christians to oust Hezbollah with Israel/Palestine as its ally. 

Normalising Arab governments: although reluctant to say so openly, they already wish to extricate themselves from the anti-Zionist war, and may be of help when settling the Palestinian diaspora refugee problem.