The moral relativity game. Couch in the grand majesterial gesures of the European Liberal enlightenment. Apply a generous dose of moral relativity, bake until the “other” acts as a colonialized and parasitic caricature, then preach from the perch of moral superiority about how context and situationals have created this entity that needs to be cared and coddled as long as their tendency to be uppity is defined, structured and planned. The doling out of foreign aid, permitting government to sop and mop unemployment through the military or bureaucratic desk work is a throwback to the old British protectorate leaving still no doubt to who is the colonized and the colonizer. In many respects the psychology is closely akin to the racist views of Voltaire and Kant than to a new paradigm….
(see link at end)…Recently, the American administration decided it wouldn’t give Samira Ibrahim the “Woman of Courage” award she was supposed to get. The reason for the change of heart was a series of tweets which demonstrated hatred, intolerance and dangerously ignorant thinking. This has caused much controversy and stirred up a lot of debate that deserves some analysis.
—When Josefa died in 1812, Goya was painting The Charge of the Mamelukes and The Third of May 1808, and preparing the series of prints known as The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra).
—click image for source…
Samira appeared in the spotlights last year when she claimed she had been subjected to so-called “Virginity Tests” by the army. In a society where victims of sexual harassment are often blamed for the abuse they had to endure, it takes a lot of nerve to stand up and admit one has been the victim of such harassment.
In her tweets, Samira had wished for America to burn and this on the anniversary of 9/11. Furthermore, she expressed her joy at a terrorist attack which killed several (Israeli – does that matter?) civilians in Bulgaria. She also positively quoted Hitler as saying that the Jews are behind all the world’s problems. With regards to the anti-Islam film which has caused a lot of anger when it appeared last year, she said that the diaspora Copts are not the only ones to blame, but the entire West.
Peter Beinart:The far left doesn’t have that problem. Anti-Zionists rarely discuss Gaza without foregrounding Israel’s partial blockade or what they often call “the siege.” But in so doing, they give Hamas an almost total pass. On March 6, the anti-Zionist website Mondoweiss linked, without comment, to an article about the marathon as the 33rd story in its daily rundown of Israel-Palestine news. …
…Still, Mondoweiss devotes far more attention to Israel and America’s policies toward Hamas than to Hamas’ policies toward the people of Gaza. And it devotes far more attention to the way American and Israeli hawks exaggerate Hamas’ misdeeds than to those misdeeds themselves.
The Gaza marathon ban is not an isolated event. It’s one more example of Hamas’ frighteningly misogynistic policies. The group has banned women from riding on the back of motorcycles and smoking hookah pipes. …It has tried to ban books deemed “salacious” and cracked down on film that doesn’t meet its reactionary norms. Hamas has prevented students who received scholarships to study in the United States from traveling there for what the group calls “social and cultural reasons,” in other words to protect them from Western influence….click image for source…
…My aim is to discuss the responses to Samira’s tweets and the reactions they got. According to some, Samira was wrong in saying what she said, but shouldn’t have been deprived of the award regardless of that fact. In their view, the award was supposed to be for her courage in her ordeal with the army and shouldn’t be dependent on views she expressed in public. Ironically, Samira’s first reaction after people became aware of her tweets was to claim that her account had been hacked and that all racist or hateful tweets weren’t hers. Courage, as apparently some don’t know, is also about taking responsibility for one’s opinions and admitting the mistakes one makes. When it was clear she wouldn’t be getting any award, Samira made the claim that she had been pressured to apologize to the Zionist lobby for her tweets, claiming the Zionist lobby was the only problem. According to that theory, the U.S. would have gladly and readily rewarded a woman who wished for them to burn if only the “Zionist Lobby” hadn’t intervened.
The next important response is the one in which it is claimed that her statements should be put in context. The argument goes that since many Arabs use that kind of rhetoric, what Samira did “isn’t really that bad”. This reasoning is flawed on many levels. Firstly, there is the assumption that this kind of anti-Western, anti-Jewish, anti-Coptic rhetoric is a natural thing to Arabs and therefore excusable in some way. It’s as if the proponents of this view believe that “Arabs just can’t help it”. Needless to say, those who adhere to this idea insult Arab individuals in a very profound way. Secondly, the pseudo-logic of justifying a mistake “because someone else did it” might be expected of children aged 5-7, but surely not of anyone who wishes to be taken seriously in a grown-up world.
—This tolerance for certain brands of thuggery is an old story on the left. At its core is the belief that anyone who battles “imperialism” can’t be that bad. Fatah, which controls the West Bank, and Hamas, which controls Gaza, are both repressive. So why does Electronic Intifada direct so much more bile toward the former than the latter? Because Hamas is unequivocally hostile to Israel, the “imperialist” power, while Abbas and Israel are—from Electronic Intifada’s perspective—in cahoots. The yardstick, in other words, is not how a Palestinian group treats its own people but how it treats Israel. If it exhibits sufficient hatred of the Jewish state, Electronic Intifada overlooks its flaws. —Beinart. click image for source…
Finally, some people rushed to the defence of Samira Ibrahim claiming she is a poor, uneducated girl who simply didn’t know better. Apparently, one needs to go to Harvard to learn that revelling in the death of innocent civilians is wrong. Also clear from this reasoning is the very nasty habit which many (mostly leftist) pundits have adopted in which poverty is used to justify unacceptable behaviour. Again, in the assumption that “poor people just can’t help being bigoted, intolerant and inhumane individuals”. Surprisingly (well, not real
those who claim to defend the interests of the poor by speaking on their behalf, are insulting them in a very paternalistic way.
The reality is that it will only perpetuate the problem.Read More:http://tabulasara.blogspot.ca/2013/03/perverse-paternalism.html?spref=tw
The reality here is a very tight loop guided by an instinct of auto perpetuation where entire social and political industries retain vested interests in maintaining and perpetuating problems. Of course, the concept of race and the conquered “other” was not accidentally born with the Enlightenment and its later manifestation in liberal democracy, but technology, economics and finance have been welded onto this belief structure and provided ammunition for a race based ideology which would have been not feasible without the Kants,Voltaires and Humes among others which pried open a Pandora’s box of conceptual heresies where race, culture and color coded hierarchies of races became a dominant leitmotif of the Western, principally Christian narrative that are willing to push to the ege in order to maintain status on the pecking order…
ADDENDUM:
(see link at end)…Since the Cold War, some in the anti-globalization movement have excused Hugo Chavez for the same reason. In each case, the character of the people fighting Western imperialism didn’t really matter; what mattered was that they were waging the fight. Similarly, many on the global left overlook the misdeeds of Hamas, which is, after all, Palestine’s version of the religious right, not because it has the correct values but because it has the correct enemies.
Morally, the problem is that even when political movements are battling far stronger enemies, they can still abuse the people under their control and poison the societies they purport to liberate. Hamas may not govern a sovereign state, as some American and Israeli hawks claim. But it still decides whether to torture prisoners, execute “collaborators” and allow women the basic freedoms every Mondoweiss contributor would demand in the United States. Moreover, the decisions Hamas makes now will shape how it behaves when Palestinians more fully govern themselves, as they one day surely will. To imagine, as leftists often have, that you can ignore the moral character of a national liberation movement until it achieves liberation is naïve. By then it will be too late.
Palestinians and their supporters, I suspect, don’t want to publicly air dirty linen that they fear will be exploited by people fundamentally hostile to them. (Where have I heard that before?) But the people who want Palestinians to remain stateless will broadcast Hamas’ misdeeds anyway. Less important than what the pro-Palestinian left says to the Zionist right is what it says to itself about the true nature of its struggle. Is the goal merely an end to Israeli control over Palestinian lives or is it individual liberty and accountable government. If it’s the latter, websites like Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss must start acknowledging that Israel is not the only abuser of Palestinian human rights. Read More:http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/08/the-pro-palestinian-left-s-hamas-blindspot.html
COMMENTS
