Links from my del.icio.us account for September 19th through September 21st:
- Arts and Letters: Freeing the Elephants: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker – Oh, lighten up: "Babar, such interpreters have insisted, is an allegory of French colonization, as seen by the complacent colonizers: the naked African natives, represented by the “good” elephants, are brought to the imperial capital, acculturated, and then sent back to their homeland on a civilizing mission. The elephants that have assimilated to the ways of the metropolis dominate those which have not. The true condition of the animals—to be naked, on all fours, in the jungle—is made shameful to them, while to become an imitation human, dressed and upright, is to be given the right to rule. The animals that resist—the rhinoceroses—are defeated. The Europeanized elephants are, as in the colonial mechanism of indirect rule, then made trustees of the system, consuls for the colonial power. To be made French is to be made human and to be made superior. The straight lines and boulevards of Celesteville, the argument goes, are the sign of enslavement."
- Artists take cue from Egypt’s sombre tone – The National Newspaper – Egypt is getting so fucking depressing it's not even funny
- Bill and Kathleen Christison: The Making of Recent U.S. Middle East Policies – "Sniegoski’s new book demonstrates clearly how U.S. and Israeli policies and actions with respect to Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the other Gulf states, and even most recently Georgia are all tied together in a bundle of interrelated linkages, each of which affects all the others. The right wing of Israeli politics, the neoconservatives in the U.S. who strongly support Israel, and the aging Israel lobby in the United States all have worked together, and are still doing so, to bring about more wars, regime changes, and instability, specifically the fragmentation of any Middle Eastern states that might ever conceivably threaten Israel."
- Le Figaro – International : L’émir du Qatar, médiateur des crises internationales – Profile of Qatar's Sheikh Hamad al-Thani
- Pow! Take That, Old Superhero Clichés! – Forward.com” – A review, in comic form, of a new book that (poorly) revisits the theory that American superhero comics are all about immigrant Jewish issues, i.e. that Superman is actually Supermensch. Or something like that.
- Adrian’s Take on the War on Terror in The Sahara « Arabic Media Shack – Lengthy, detailed post on Algeria and counter-terrorism — good stuff!
Really? I think your blog’s fantastic and your blogrolls generally quite brilliant, but are you really going to non-ironically link to a book about the US-Israel relationship that uses the word “cabal” in its title? To quote from the review:
“One purpose of such wars and other changes is explicitly to intensify the discouragement of Palestinians as the latter’s potential allies are knocked off one by one, making it easier for Israel, over time, to finish off the Palestinians. That’s the theory.”
I read this blog precisely because its readers seem too informed to argue that Israel’s strategy is oriented around “finish[ing] off the Palestinians.” (Likewise, its readers are too informed to argue that the Palestinians strategy is oriented around “finish[ing] off the Israelis.”) You can argue very easily that America’s special relationship with Israel creates fucks up our MidEast policy (both our aims and the methods we use to attain those aims), but I think it’s ridiculous to argue that America’s policy towards Iran, Iraq and the GCC is knowingly or unknowingly part of a concerted push to give Israel Hebron.
Isn’t the point of this blog to show that it’s always more complicated than that? To show that we should be so lucky that the cause of the region’s trouble turned out to be just a bunch of Jews and Christian Zionists in DC and Jerusalem?
I actually just wrote a long response and then lost it. Can’t be bothered to re-write it all, but basically yes, really it seems to me a plausible argument that an Israeli and American right-wing (and at times centrist) elite has long pushed for a US policy that weakens Arab states in good part because of the direct threat they posed Israel and the support they gave Palestinians. This is already quite complicated, and only part of an equation that also includes oil and the domestic politics of Arab states, but it certainly seem to me to be a major equation. Tracking down the networks of people who have pushed for such goals and clearly believe in “finishing off the Palestinians” as an independent nation seems to me a worthwhile endeavor, and it’s not being monocausal to talk about them.
That being said, the quotes in these links are not necessarily endorsements, they just highlight things that caught my interest.
Thanks for the kind words