Professor Saree Makdisi : Of "Racist" Ideologies and Nuclear Weapons -- The Tempest Over the Hamas Charter
Saree Makdisi is a Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UCLA and author of the weblog Speaking Truth to Power. CounterPunch February 10, 2006 The Hamas charter has been the subject of fairly extensive media coverage in recent weeks. A number of newspaper pieces have argued that the charter is unapologetically racist; some have gone even further. A piece by Daniel Goldhagen in last Sunday's Los Angeles Times argues, for example, that the charter expresses Hamas' intent to embark on a genocidal program against Israeli Jews. Of course, in literally comparing Hamas to the Nazis, Goldhagen makes it sound as though there's some titanic military-industrial power standing behind Hamas's sloganeering, and as though Palestine's awesome military might-its legions of soldiers, armored and mechanized infantry divisions, flotillas of bombers, and perhaps even a fleet of some kind-stands ready to rain ruin and devastation down on an innocent and practically defenseless Israel. It's difficult to determine whether to read a piece like Goldhagen's as ruthlessly cynical or naïvely childlike (does he really think that Hamas or the Palestinians in general are in a position to embark on a genocidal campaign against the Israelis, even if that's what they really want, which is at best a doubtful proposition?). Perhaps it's some strange combination of the two. In any event, it's certainly an expression of gross ignorance and greatly exaggerated overstatement-and there's plenty of both around in the US these days when it comes to Hamas, which is why, although Goldhagen's piece may be particularly lurid in its depiction of Hamas, it's not entirely unrepresentative of a larger set of trends. Now, there can be no doubt that the Hamas charter is not only xenophobic, sectarian, and racist, but also ill-conceived, inaccurate, retrograde, and intellectually vacuous. Nevertheless, the obsessive attention being paid to this document in the US in recent weeks forces one to ask not merely what purposes such an obsession serves, but also what equally (or even more) important issues it elides or covers up. First, one has to marvel at the interest being paid to the racism of the Hamas charter, given the extraordinary lack of interest here in Israel's own racism, which is executed not merely on paper and in theory but actually, practically, materially. Israel's Basic Laws, for example, discriminate between Jews and non-Jews in ways that many of those Americans who object most loudly to the mixture of religion and politics strangely don't seem to find objectionable. And Israel's unique existence as a country that expressly claims to be not the state of its actual citizens but rather of a globally dispersed people manifestly privileges the (non-Israeli) Jews of New York and Chicago over Israel's actually existing non-Jewish citizens. Although they amount to some twenty percent of the state's population, the latter are literally written into second class status by virtue of their non-Jewishness in what loudly proclaims itself to be the Jewish state. Members of this Palestinian minority are stigmatized for their non-Jewishness not because they willfully chose to live in a Jewish state that pre-existed them. Rather, they are the remnant of the bulk of Palestine's original non-Jewish population, which was terrorized from its land and homes before, during and after the creation of Israel in 1948. Their expulsion was expressly called for as early as the 1930s by Israel's founding fathers precisely in order for Israel to become a Jewish state in the first place. "A Jewish state would not have come into being without the uprooting of 700,000 Palestinians," the Israeli historian Benny Morris points out, echoing the logic of David Ben Gurion; "therefore it was necessary to uproot them. There was no choice but to expel that population. It was necessary to cleanse the hinterland and cleanse the border areas and cleanse the main roads." Israeli planning in the territories that it forcibly occupied in 1967 includes ethnically-defined forms of control that have generated, among other things, the current grotesque situation in Hebron, whose population of some 400 Jewish settlers-nestled in Hebron illegally-absolutely dominates a city of 130,000 indigenous Palestinians. Palestinian Hebron has been driven to the edge of destruction-shops sealed shut, whole neighborhoods evacuated, commerce crippled, families forcibly evicted-in order that a tiny group of fanatics can live out its private religious fantasy. Moreover, Israeli policy seeks to maintain the population of Jerusalem in a ratio of 72 percent Jews to 28 percent "non-Jews" (i.e., Palestinians). Again, this startlingly racist objective exists not merely on a scrap of paper, but as the actual foundation for policies affecting literally hundreds of thousands of people on a daily basis. It is the foundation for issuing (or denying) building permits and residency documents; for implanting illegal colonies and settlements; for harassing an entire community; for breaking up families; for denying human beings access to the city in which they were born, which happens every time a Palestinian Jerusalemite is barred from entering Jerusalem-in other words, every single day. How come we hear so much about the toothless Hamas charter (no matter how vile it is), and so little about Israel's planning in Jerusalem? What do all those people who have so sanctimoniously seized the moral high ground in denouncing the nominal racism of Hamas have to say about the actual racism of Israel? Where are the voices clamoring for withholding US support for Israel because of its relentless violence against an entire people simply because it is not Jewish? Surely the intelligent approach to the discussion of the Hamas charter is to say that racism is racism, and that both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict-not just, and not always, the Palestinians, should be pressured to move beyond racist archaisms that are unworthy of the twenty-first century, and to do so not merely in terms of their rhetoric, but in their actual policies, regulations, politics, and laws. In the meantime, we would do well to recognize the difference between a racist ideology backed up by little more than thin air, and one backed up by the full force of a nuclear-armed state with the tanks, the planes, and the soldiers to impose its will on another people-as it has chosen to do for decades on end. Saree Makdisi Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** http://select.nytimes.com/2006/02/13/opinion/13krugman.html?th&emc=th Debt and Denial By PAUL KRUGMAN NY Times Op-Ed: February 13, 2006 Last year America spent 57 percent more than it earned on world markets. That is, our imports were 57 percent larger than our exports. How did we manage to live so far beyond our means? By running up debts to Japan, China and Middle Eastern oil producers. We're as addicted to imported money as we are to imported oil. Sometimes large-scale foreign borrowing makes sense. In the 19th century the United States borrowed vast sums from Europe, using the funds to build railroads and other industrial infrastructure. That debt-financed wave of investment left America stronger, not weaker. But this time our overseas borrowing isn't financing an investment boom: adjusted for the size of the economy, business investment is actually low by historical standards. Instead, we're using borrowed money to build houses, buy consumer goods and, of course, finance the federal budget deficit. In 2005 spending on home construction as a percentage of G.D.P. reached its highest level in more than 50 years. People who already own houses are treating them like A.T.M.'s, converting home equity into spending money: last year the personal savings rate fell below zero for the first time since 1933. And it's a sign of our degraded fiscal state that the Bush administration actually boasted about a 2005 budget deficit of more than $300 billion, because it was a bit lower than the 2004 deficit. It all sounds unsustainable. And it is. Some people insist that the U.S. economy has hidden savings that official statistics fail to capture. I won't go into the technical debate about these claims, some of which resemble arguments used not long ago to justify dot-com stock prices, except to say that the more closely one looks at the facts, the less plausible the "don't worry, be happy" hypothesis looks. Denial takes a more systematic form within the federal government, where Dick Cheney is doing to budget analysis what he did to intelligence on Iraq. Last week Mr. Cheney announced that a newly created division within the Treasury Department would show that tax cuts increase, not reduce, federal revenue. That's the Bush-Cheney way: decide on your conclusions first, then demand that analysts produce evidence supporting those conclusions. But serious analysts know that America's borrowing binge is unsustainable. Sooner or later the trade deficit will have to come down, the housing boom will have to end, and both American consumers and the U.S. government will have to start living within their means. So how bad will it be? It depends on how the binge ends. If it tapers off gradually, the U.S. economy will be able to shift workers out of sectors that have benefited from the housing boom and the consumption spree into sectors that produce exports or replace imports. Given time, we could bring the trade deficit down and bring housing back to earth without a net loss in jobs. In practice, however, a "soft landing" looks unlikely, because too many economic players have unrealistic expectations. This is true of international investors, who are still snapping up U.S. bonds at low interest rates, seemingly oblivious both to the budget deficit and to the consensus view among trade experts that the dollar will eventually have to fall 30 percent or more to eliminate the trade deficit. It's equally true of American home buyers. Most Americans live in regions where housing remains affordable. But a detailed new study by HSBC, a multinational bank, confirms what I and others have been saying: most of the rise in housing values has taken place in a "bubble zone" along the coasts, where housing prices have risen far more than the economic fundamentals warrant. According to HSBC's estimates, houses in the bubble zone are overvalued by between 35 and 40 percent, creating trillions of dollars of illusory wealth. So it seems all too likely that America's borrowing binge will end with a bang, not a whimper, that spending will suddenly drop off as both the bond market and the housing market experience rude awakenings. If that happens, the economic consequences will be ugly. All in all, Alan Greenspan, who helped create this situation, can consider himself lucky that he's safely out of office, giving briefings to hedge fund managers at $250,000 a pop. And his successor may be in for a rough ride. Best wishes and good luck, Ben; you may need it. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- LAAMN: Los Angeles Alternative Media Network --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Digest: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Help: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Post: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive1: <http://www.egroups.com/messages/laamn> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Archive2: <http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yahoo! 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