Writes Emma Green, in "How a Student Group Is Politicizing a Generation on Palestine/Activists with Students for Justice in Palestine have mobilized major campus demonstrations in support of Gaza—and provided an intellectual framework for protesters watching what’s happening in the Middle East" (The New Yorker).
"Since the nineteen-sixties, Black nationalists in America have expressed support for Palestine. The sense of common cause between anti-racist and pro-Palestine advocacy was strengthened in 2014, when Palestinians in Gaza reached out to Black Lives Matter protesters in Ferguson, Missouri, and provided them with tips on dealing with tear-gas inhalation. The connection between pro-Palestine and anti-racist activism in the U.S. deepened in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd; there is a mural of Floyd on the border wall separating the West Bank from Israel.... 'Our chapter became pretty active on the scene, helping our Black comrades organize events and protests against our campus and local police'...."
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122 comments:
Tough for y’all jazzy oldsters to see it but if you’ve been watching with a critical eye it isn’t hard to see the corporate conglomerates of tech and Big Racism have had their paws in this all along.
It's always smart people having more stuff than dumb people with noticeable physical differences, resulting in the theory "They have more stuff because they're stealing it from us." Israeli vs Palestinian, white vs black, expat Chinese vs SE Asian natives.
Dumb people become pets in academia.
DEI and the related critical studies are in the process of destroying the American university.
The original purpose of the university was to pass western culture on to future generations. It is now trying to destroy western culture.
Really all you have to do is watch that 60 minutes where they laud out how easy and inexpensive it is to put one of these ops into play. It really hasn’t changed since Gulf I except they know now they will get away with absolutely anything. Saves more money for a better Malibu beach house…
"A rising generation of scholars identifies with a new subfield, settler-colonial studies, and a new journal was created to explore this framework, which posits that powerful nations resettle new peoples in conquered territories in order to permanently alter their character and make use of their resources."
So what happens when we apply that framework to Europe, Canada and the US?
People have always moved about the world, seeking personal betterment. They're not being "resettled" by powerful nations, they're doing it on their own volition, for their own personal interests.
For example, European Jews resettled in Israel after WWII, because the powerful nations they had lived within in Europe had largely decided they wanted the Jews dead. No German told a Jew to leave for Israel; the Jews figured it out on their own.
For another example, the Central Americans and Mexicans flooding across our southern border are not being resettled by powerful nations (Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua???), they are setting out North in their own personal and mainly economic interests). Likewise, North Africans crossing the Mediterranean in small boats for Italy; is Libya a powerful nation?
That's the story behind most relocated minority groups, racial or religious; they move in their own personal interest, when things get dicey in their current location. It's not a story of powerful nations being oppressive; it's the story of oppressed peoples escaping the reach of their oppressors.
So to me, it appears this entire academic movement has got the theory about the underlying cause completely wrong. Hard to imagine, of course!
You’d think DEI would have the goal of bringing people together.
You’d be wrong.
The Jews were there first. Did these so-called scholars ever look at that evidence?
How does one get a job in decolonial studies?
An actual job, I mean.
Not a suicide bomber.
I suspect they were not taught the inevitable response.
The cause barely matters. All it takes is the academic power to declare yourself oppressed and the academic power to define who are your current oppressors.
And that's all academia is these days. What a waste.
I've never read Gramschi, but apparently he coined a phrase for Marxists like conquering through the institutions, rather than by outright violence. All the schools are obvious targets.
I think of an old episode of Father Ted. Little old ladies (I know, I know) want to see and touch a TV star who is staying with the priests on a remote Irish island. Locking the doors does no good; the ladies ooze in all the windows like jam.
Today "mostly peaceful" college-educated people, barely articulate, are oozing through the windows of every institution.
The most successful colonizer in world history is Islam, and in particular Islamic Arabs. This isn’t even arguable.
Then black nationalists can hop a jet to Rafah. All of them.
If you get to kids early enough you can teach them academic concepts like one plus one is three and the cube root of nine is you’re a racist and that the definition of ‘is’ is…nuanced. They can take your concepts and run with them, sure…
I think all young scholars and students supporting Palestinian should take a field trip.
Instead, they cited these academic concepts as evidence
Well, that's a big part of the problem.
How is it a "dense" concept that conquering peoples move into conquered territory in order to use what's there? Even the Romans, who didn't leave a whole lot of their own people in conquered territory, still did leave some so that they could continue to access whatever each region had that they wanted. Why else do peoples conquer one another - for fun? Why does this "dense" concept warrant its own field instead of just being history?
I imagine what "decolonialism studies" is really out to do is to redefine some terms, notably "conquer," "colonize," "exploit," "oppress"... such that free market capitalism itself becomes The Great Satan, "conquering" by changing people's behavior as they are exposed to, say, the benefits of a different diet or a modern banking system, "colonizing" the simple minds of those who would otherwise be ready to be convinced that socialism will give them all the benefits of a market without the mess, "exploiting" these poor simple souls by paying hard currency for what they produce, and "oppressing" them by implicitly demanding that, in order to receive the benefits of modernity, they do business in the modern world and as the modern world does.
Nor that I'm saying there are no downsides to modernity. But the upsides clearly outnumber and outweigh them - and once your society is modern, you as an individual can choose the extent to which you want to "go back to your roots."
Oh, and - the "murder" of George Floyd, indeed.
Historical: powerful nations resettle new peoples in conquered territories in order to permanently alter their character and make use of their resources.
Modern: failed states resettle new peoples in end-state successful but bewildered territories in order to permanently alter their character and make use of their resources.
If you want a deep dive into the Palestine-Israel conflict, check out Darryl cooper’s martyrmade podcast series, “fear and loathing in the new Jerusalem.” A six part, exhaustive analysis. I found it riveting. I understand a lot better why the Israelis are viewed as a colonizing force….it stems from recent history…because they were Europeans who came and struck deals with the British from the 1890s on, to repatriate their homeland. On the other hand, mount zion— well, that is Jerusalem, as a matter of fact, always has been. Who’s to say the zionists weren’t “divesting” their land of the conquering Muslims? Conquest is a fact of human history since always. So how far back shall we go? Should the French return Brittany and Burgundy to the English?
Another useful study: Thomas Sewell’s book Conquests and Cultures…in which he demonstrates that the advancement of societies and civilizations depends on conquest.
It is ahistorical and ignorant, the academic version of transsexualism, or perhaps even new-age to borrow a phrase...
Who's the more foolish? The fool or the fool who follows him?” – Obi-Wan Kenobi
From the article:
Sean Eren, another steering-committee member, told me that “S.J.P. is oriented in a special way. The idea is to appeal to people who know nothing.”
This is the key to it, isn't it? Gen Z is the perfect generation to sway with nonsense.
Every time I read the word “scholar”:I know something remarkably stupid is about to follow.
They certainty hitched their wagon to a sympathetic cause.
Oh well the Nazi's had their own origin myth too. May the present day Gazans quickly find their way into the dustbin of history like the last proponents of a Final Solution. They chose war instead of peace. It's too bad that two generations after the peace-movement hippies we have war-loving anti-white supremacists raging across American campuses, but they too will grow up and learn that war is to be avoided, and the best avoidance is peaceful cooperation.
Perhaps because I'm presently reading Julien Benda's Treason of the Intellectuals ... but a cynical explanation for the rise of decolonial studies is that it fills a void in the tapestry of "the fact that X is not successful is not their fault; it's the fault of white males (who of course derive from Europe).
Jewish people do not realize that to many who admire this tapestry, they are not just white but the whitest of the white: high income, influential in government, hard-working, materialistic.
“The history the left pushes on the West is the kind of history a conqueror imposes on a vanquished nation: One devoid of heroes, and full of shame and division. It isn’t by accident that it is so.”
—- Glenn Reynolds
But these “scholars” refuse to look back in time at the previous conquests by the Arabs over the Middle Eastern area and their “oppression” of the local populations at that time. As the Copts how it worked out for them.
Oppressor myopia is more the true blind spot of their half baked “theory”
They aren't supporting Gaza. They are supporting Islamic jihad by terrorism. They are just too self absorbed and ignorant to understand that.
There was a time that I felt some generational guilt over how my Boomer generation had f'd this formerly great nation up to the extent that subsequent generations would feel that we had done them wrong.
Now I know that they don't deserve anything and will get it good and hard. I don't care that we have stolen their social security, or that we are draining the Medicare accounts faster than they can be restored. I don't care that they are aborting their babies to the extent that the generations they will rely on for support will be alien to them. I don't care that their cities and neighborhoods will be burned next summer by the savages that they have coddled.
Any resources, financial and otherwise, that I have to be contributed will be concentrated only on my immediate descendants. This great country is deteriorating into tribalism. My tribe will win, but winning is not all that it used to be.
Decolonize the Mideast! Free Constantinople!!!! Restore the Byzantine Empire!!
Rabbi Meir Kahane would have known what to do about that “rising generation of scholars” and their specious scholarship. Ancient Judea was there in the Bronze Age.
Gaza is shit-hole because of Hamas. Not Israel.
That is not being taught.
Our southern border is open 100% open - with millions of illegal entrants pouring in under Joe Biden's command. Media ignore.
all the same BS.
Tina Trent said...
"The cause barely matters. All it takes is the academic power to declare yourself oppressed and the academic power to define who are your current oppressors.
And that's all academia is these days. What a waste."
It's Marxist class struggle all the way down, but I'll assume you knew that. The actual waste is what they're doing to our nation with their destructive strategies.
What exactly do the French have to do with anything? Isn't France our polar opposite?
Don't we, as Americans, embrace assimilation and difference? The same thing can't be said for Europeans who (rightly) are p*ssed off about mass migration from Africa and the Middle East.
I almost watched Barbie last night as well. But I opted for a French film called "A Full Day's Work." The movie was about a father who avenged his child's death. It was pretty good.
To follow up on the Marxist class struggle issue, pretty much everything the left is dishing up has that struggle at its root:
- Abortion: overpopulation as too many privileged people using up resources
- LGBTQ: the need to discourage reproduction (see above) - with the extra benefit of destabilizing cultural norms, reinventing the family
- Immigration: Cloward-Piven as a means to destroy capitalism... because equity
- Education as indoctrination... the Gramscian long march
- Defund the police: replace it with a Federal police force (see FSB)
Decolonial studies is a handy place to put students who are too stupid to do any real work.
Also, I was not expecting a Father Ted reference in this thread.
@Crack: You must have missed this yesterday:
"@Crack: So what the hell are your points that we are supposed to take to heart? That Israeli Jews are usurpers and that they should load their stuff into "Jew-Haul" trucks (Bill Maher) and clear out or face the "justified" brutality of Hamas?
Or did I overstep by acknowledging the well-documented systematic brutality of Hamas?
12/17/23, 2:55 PM"
Here's your chance. Sarcasm aside Make your points. What are they? We'll wait.
These sad scholars are always a bit chubby with bad hair and a barely contained fury. A stupid idea to simply put de in front of colonizers and call it a new area of important scholarship. They should study why Gaza has three hundred miles of tunnels under it and yet no water supply or electrical source. Why piping donated for a water system is used for crude rockets instead of its intended use. In the alternative they could study the Congo where after colonization there were roads, schools, hospitals and niversities and after decolonization there are essentially none of these attributes of a civil society. There is, however, constant war. Precolonial in its barbarity. The truth is so very painful.
"A rising generation of scholars identifies with a new subfield, settler-colonial studies, and a new journal was created to explore this framework, which posits that powerful nations resettle new peoples in conquered territories in order to permanently alter their character and make use of their resources."
A new subfield, settler-colonial studies,
They will be taking on Islam, right?
Watching Islamic colonialism happening in real time, right before your eyes,
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/12/minnesota_to_get_a_new_state_flag_that_looks_nearly_identical_to_one_out_of_somalia.html
Well there’s at least the promise that they’ve moved on from climate god worship.
Decades after colonialism ended, with the withdrawal of all the European powers from their prior territories, of course the dead corpse needs to be dug up.
Meanwhile, they have been engaging in real ideological colonization, pushing their leftist progressivism on the "Third World" ever since.
I'm reluctant to add to the malaise, but it's a little sad when the contemplation of historical events sneaks up on you and hits with a fresh perspective and recognition. I'm now starting to understand why past charismatic tyrants line the intellectuals up against a wall or put them out in rice paddies, after they've gained their terrible power. Worse still, it's not as easy as it used to be, to find reasons to disagree with the principle, outright.
Intellectuals as usual are oblivious to the purpose of taking heed: It's not the brave frontier you think it is.
Some people decolonized with more success than others. South Korea versus North Korea. Hong Kong and Taiwan versus Red China. They never got the chance but I'm sure that if given time, South Vietnam would have evolved into a more successful and democratic state than its northern neighbor. These states were all demonized by the left at one time and the left was successful in convincing the American public that South Vietnam wasn't worth our support. They're now trying the same trick with Israel and--maybe it's the right that's doing this--with Ukraine......The trick to successfully decolonizing is to avoid Marxist or Islamic or, as in the case of Ireland, Catholic fundamentalism. At all cost avoid collective farms.....Collective farms have caused the starvation of some forty to sixty million people. Have academics ever studied why they were so enamored of collective farms?
There are lots of decolonized territories in the Mid and Near East: Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, Algeria, Syria. Are they the way forward for Gaza?
So the president of Harvard gets to go back and fix the plagiarism problems with her published work that never existed. As Yakov Smirnoff used to say, "What a country!"
If the American Diaspora cares about Israel and themselves they better get their shit together. The Islamists are clever to begin with the Jews. They are not the only antisemites. Jihad is well under way In Israel and American Universities. Once Israel is done, it will spill out of universities, Muslim and black neighborhoods here while Republicans gnash their teeth and Democrats go "tut tut."
Trump, OTOH, has Jewish family, including grandchildren.
After jihadis, who know a little about terrorism, finish the Jews they can start on other infidels.
Except for that one territory in Africa that they held and oppressed for maybe two generations, Germany was never a colonial power. Germans, in fact, looked upon themselves as an oppressed people. To some extent, this was true. During the Thirty Years War, some of the German cities lost as much as 80% of their population. By lost, I mean to say killed or starved. They didn't wander into the Black Forest and get lost. For many years after the Treaty of Westphalia, it suited the great powers to have the Germans inhabiting small, squabbling states... WWI didn't end with a decisive battle. It ended with an Armistice. After the Armistice, the Allies starved the German population. That's what caused the Germans to surrender....Hitler played upon these feelings. He appealed as much to racial grievance as to racial superiority. The Nazis and the Brownshirts had far more in common with BLM and Ooccupy Wall Street than they do with MAGA Republicans.
Jay said...
"Decolonize the Mideast! Free Constantinople!!!! Restore the Byzantine Empire!!"
Make the Hagia Sophia the greatest cathedral in Christendom again - like it was for the first 2/3 of its life!! Justinian nods in agreement!!
Jay said...
"Decolonize the Mideast! Free Constantinople!!!! Restore the Byzantine Empire!!"
Across the middle east, maybe every call to prayer should begin with an acknowledgement that the mosque sits on the traditional land of Eastern Christians.
Jersey Fled said...
"Every time I read the word 'scholar', I know something remarkably stupid is about to follow."
I was called a gentleman and a scholar once.
Today I should ask for restitution or demand black powder pistols at dawn.
@Jay: At the end of WWI, the Greeks tried to win back Constantinople. They failed. Millions had to leave Anatolia. I believe that they had been there longer than the Turks, but they lost their war and had to leave. They went to Greece and lived in destitution. All this happened at about the same time that the Palestinians lost their first conflict with the Jews.....I don't understand why the Anatolian Greeks or the Bohemian Germans or whoever it is that got removed from Bangladesh has to take their lumps, but the Palestinians get to carry on with generous subsidiesw. I believe that a greater number of Germans died in their forced evacuation from eastern and central Europe than the actual number of Palestinian refugees. No one cries for these Germans.....There is only a small spectrum of victimized humanity that is visible to the left. Jews only have Special Victim Status when they they victimized by Germans. It doesn't matter if they're raped or killed by Hamas. They might just as well have starved to death on a collective farm for the all the left cares.
@Jay: At the end of WWI, the Greeks tried to win back Constantinople. They failed. Millions had to leave Anatolia. I believe that they had been there longer than the Turks, but they lost their war and had to leave. They went to Greece and lived in destitution. All this happened at about the same time that the Palestinians lost their first conflict with the Jews.....I don't understand why the Anatolian Greeks or the Bohemian Germans or whoever it is that got removed from Bangladesh has to take their lumps, but the Palestinians get to carry on with generous subsidiesw. I believe that a greater number of Germans died in their forced evacuation from eastern and central Europe than the actual number of Palestinian refugees. No one cries for these Germans.....There is only a small spectrum of victimized humanity that is visible to the left. Jews only have Special Victim Status when they they victimized by Germans. It doesn't matter if they're raped or killed by Hamas. They might just as well have starved to death on a collective farm for the all the left cares.
I think it's time to ask these scholars what their definition of "indigenous" is. Does it mean that some places on Earth had populations of people that spontaneously existed there from the beginning of time and therefore have a perpetual right to ownership of those places? If not, then does it mean the people who first settled there, or people who settled there as of a particular date? But then that would mean that every place on Earth was in fact settled or colonized.
So what's the BFD about settling or colonizing? Because then you'd have to decolonize, or actually, recolonize every single place on Earth.
"A man is native where he walks."
They certainty hitched their wagon to a sympathetic cause.
Mandela's Xhosa vs Zulu with native "colonials", imperial divestment, and a land of natural resources to soothe the transition. #SomeSelect[Black]LivesMatter
That said, social justice anywhere, is injustice everywhere.
Presumably, the decolonizers do not want to receive any money or any tax favors from the hated colonizing regime and its deplorable taxpayers, nor enjoy the profits made by endowments invested in colonizing, exploitative capitalist enterprise.
Jews are native to the Palestinian Mandate. Zionists were community organizers of native Jews in the Levant, those under genocidal pressures of socialist religious bent, DEI action of communist secularism, "decolonialist" special and peculiar interests puruing redistributive change of natural resources, etc.
Caroline: "the Israelis are viewed as a colonizing force….it stems from recent history…because they were Europeans who came and struck deals with the British from the 1890s on, to repatriate their homeland."
This is quite true. But at the same time, the European Jews were enabling Jews living in dhimmitude in Arab countries to move to a state where they would be liberated. Half of Israel's Jewish population are those Jews (or their descendants) driven out of Arab lands. In fact, there was an agreement that as Israel took in those people, the ARab states would take in Muslin Palestinians who had fled during the attacks on Israel in 1948.
Meanwhile, about 20% of Israel's population is Muslim peoples descended from those who were on the land before the founding of the state of Israel.
We Homo sapiens originated about 300,000 years ago in Africa and we stayed there until about 50,000 years ago. Our closely related cousins, the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and a few others, had spread widely outside Africa before us so we killed them all. Well, not all, because we westerners have a few percent Neanderthal DNA and Asians have a few percent Denisovan DNA, so we probably captured and raped some females while we were murdering all their relatives.
Every human alive today is descended from those murderers. We are a race of settler colonialists. So what?
You’d think DEI would have the goal of bringing people together.
Diversity is a dogmatic belief of progressive sects that espouse color judgment (e.g. racism), class bigotry (e.g. feminism), class-disordered ideologies (e.g. Some, Select [Black] Lives Matter), political congruence ("="), and wicked solutions (e.g. human rites) under the nominally "secular" Pro-Choice [ethical] religion.
"A rising generation of scholars identifies with a new subfield, [democratic gerrymandering] studies, and a new journal was created to explore this framework, which posits that powerful [corporations, non-profits] resettle new peoples in conquered territories in order to permanently alter their character and make use of their resources."
Catastrophic Anthropogenic Immigration Reform (CAIR) in the woke (sic) of Spring Forward.
Saves more money for a better Malibu beach house…
Who wants to be a Hamas, Fatah, et al millionaire?
Are these scholars worried about the history of American Indian tribes killing each other over land, resources, or other feuds?
They were colonizing the living spaces of each others' tribes.
Is this not a concern? Why not?
the European Jews were enabling Jews living in dhimmitude in Arab countries to move to a state where they would be liberated.
Jews! I mean, Zionists! By native, purchase, and invitation to unincorporated territory and international consensus.
Oppressed, Opressor.
I'm done taking this serious. It is meaningless to take actions today for actions taken 2000 years ago.
African Americans hardest hit. They are no longer the vehicle the left is leveraging for power.
Do you know in the United States 1st generation African Americans are more successful than Whites?
There's a paper that will never get written at Harvard.
I think of Doc, that comments here has said more than once, that immigrant Blacks Perform at a level Blacks with great grand parents in the US, cant even dream of.
Guess what?
It is the content of their Character, NOT the color of their Skin.
The reason? Federal Government help.
@planetgeo - Indigenous is whoever was there when white people arrived. I wonder how many decolonialist scholars will go searching for evidence that the group was there for a long time, giving it a longer-term case for "we deserve to be here." That was actually common for Europe in the century before WW II. Politicized scholars made the case that "this land has always been German or "this land has always been Czech."
hombre said...
"Here's your chance. Sarcasm aside Make your points. What are they? We'll wait."
South Africa had an apartheid system, that also called the landowners "terrorists," and now they don't. There's nothing that says the same can't happen to Israel.
It's the standard ploy of the left to accuse their targets of exactly what they or their allies are guilty of. The Muslims were of course the colonizers--Egyptians and then Turks. Jews were there 3000 years ago, and ever since in greater or lesser numbers. Greater of course once the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the rest of the Levant was achieved in the 40s and 50s.
The Israelis have discovered that the Palestinians really, really want to kill all Israelis. After all this time, that is still the central tenet of Palestinian culture, the foundation of their existence. Why? Doesn't matter. And the Israelis are doing what every group of people since time began have done, when faced with such murderous intent. They are saying, "No."
I, for one, recall the Biafrans who as their children starved to death said to reporters, "We can make more children if we aren't all killed, send us guns, not food."
here's hoping for the unconditional surrender of all Hamas and their supporters, and a complete realignment of Palestinian culture away from murder to living.
What “resources” were the Jewish migrants to Palestine before WWII taking? Sand? Sun? Swamp water? Mosquito habitats? Why is it that the Jewish migrants to Palestine were “settlers” and the Arab migrants to Palestine were just “migrants?” The whole field of “settler colonialism” is an academic fraud and its particular application to the dispute between the Jews and the Arabs is just agitprop, nothing more or less.
It's all so stupid it amazes me. How do apparently smart students (some of them are) take this shit seriously?
“It is Terrorism”: Pope Francis Denounces Killing of Two Christian Women in Gaza
Caroline said...
"So how far back shall we go? Should the French return Brittany and Burgundy to the English?"
#FreeBrittany!
And liberate Burgundy. 750ml by 750ml. Australia might be willing to acquiesce.
"So how far back shall we go?"
My wife has always called me a Neanderthal. And now - thanks to DNA testing - I can prove it. Y'all Homp Sapiens need to decolonize and get back to Africa.
Caroline: "the Israelis are viewed as a colonizing force….it stems from recent history…because they were Europeans who came and struck deals with the British from the 1890s on, to repatriate their homeland."
This is quite true.
Only partly true. Tens of thousands of Jews migrated to the area in the 18th and early 19th century and purchased land from Arabs to settle there, drained swamps and made the desert bloom. Tens of thousands of Arabs migrated there in response to the improved economic conditions. Most of the Arabs are no more "indigenous" than the Jewish migrants.
Blackbeard said...
"Our closely related cousins, the Neanderthals, the Denisovans, and a few others, had spread widely outside Africa before us so we killed them all."
Not necessarily. One theory I came across recently was that Neanderthals did not convert food into energy as efficiently as we do. Plus, they had a lot more muscle mass, which required greater amounts of energy as well. As a result, humans simply had more kids with less food and outcompeted Neanderthals. So they ended up going extinct (minus some interbreeding).
Three Journalists brutally attacked by Zionist soldiers - one on camera
I totally get it. Civilization is the fruit of the poisonous tree. We need to empower this rising generation of young scholars to basically go down the list, chuck anything they don't like the look of and start over.
Granted, it's a big project, lotta moving parts, gonna be a little disruptive, but these bright, caring, well-intentioned kids have been crafting syllibi and designing courses. Their credentials are of the most prestigious variety and their medications are never generic. This combination results in an ambitious moral sensitivity so exquisite the only way I can describe it is with a chef's kiss. In short, they're ready.
So buckle up, people of Earth and let's get it right this time!
Meanwhile, about 20% of Israel's population is Muslim peoples descended from those who were on the land before the founding of the state of Israel.
Nope. Considering Mohammed came along seven centuries after Jesus (i.e. time of Roman occupation of Judea) there obviously were no "Muslims" living in "Palestine" before the Israelites lived there. It's an impossibility. Again I would refer people with their newfangled social-justice "history" to apply a little archeological enlightenment while contemplating exactly why the Al Aqsa Mosque is built atop the ruins of Solomon's second temple, which came along about 1000 years after the first one had been sacked by the Babylonians. Then the reason it is called the Temple Mount to this day should be apparent.
/history
"I don't understand why the Anatolian Greeks or the Bohemian Germans or whoever it is that got removed from Bangladesh has to take their lumps, but the Palestinians get to carry on with generous subsidies."
Well, the Palestinians were oppressed by the Jews, so that's different.
Indigenous is whoever was there when white people arrived.
Although Sweeney said this in jest IMO, I'd like to use this as a jumping off point for another thinking exercise. Consider that both the Jordanians (i.e. "Palestinians") and Israelites are considered Semitic tribes, being as they are descended from a common ancestor Abraham according to the Koran, the Torah and the Christian Bible (one of the few points of absolute agreement among these three holy texts). This shared ethnic heritage is also why they and several other regional tribes (Syrian, Lebanese, Persian) are not considered "Arab."
How can these relatives, both Semitic in ethnicity, be separated now into "white" and "indigenous" categories? One has to reject both science and history to do so.
I keep hearing two century old gripes about the Russians from Ukrainian nazis. I figure we have our own two century old land issues to resolve, though. If we are going to spend hundreds of billions on such matters as what Catherine the Great did, maybe we should look at the issues around Queen Catherine Montour.
If I recall correctly, the Romans came up with the term "Palestine" referring to a land in which Jews and Arabs lived. That was several Centuries before the Warrior God Muhammed was born.
The true colonizers of the land were the Romans, Byzantines, British and a host of other empires that are no longer empires.
Rocco @6:49 asked: So what happens when we apply that framework to Europe, Canada and the US?
A classic paper in economics by
Acemoglu and Robinson argued fairly persuasively that "settler colonies" developed into more successful independent countries than former "extractive colonies" did. The reason is that the colonizing countries imposed better economic (and cultural?) institutions where their own people settled.
Apparently the entire field of "colonial studies" is ignorant of, or in denial about, one of the key findings in the field.
The Denisovans had dogs.
The Neanderthals weren't even cat persons.
There are as many Palestinians as Jews today in Greater Israel. Demographic studies indicate that Palestinians will pretty soon become the majority, unless suddenly lots more Jews from the diaspora move there. And the demographic trend for Jews tends towards ultra-Orthodox, which has its own serious problems. The prevailing attitude to Palestinians in the comments seems to be little more than, fuck 'em. Yet the academic treatment sympathetic to Palestinians is moronic?
The UK descendants of the Welsh, Picts, and Celts should start demanding that the descendants of the Saxon, Viking and Norman invaders among them give up their land and property, and bugger off to the Continent they came from.
It's only fair..
Just in time for them to discover that no one really cares about the Palestinians anymore. That ship sailed almost 30 years ago.
apply that framework to Europe, Canada and the US?
And China, India, Libya, Nigeria, South Africa, Ukraine, Mexico, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Anatolian Greeks
I had an Anatolian shepherd, RIP, a beautiful dog, who was thrifty, brave, and reverent, made in Turkey, by way of his American mother and father.
@ Readering:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel
"As of March 2023, Israel's population stands at approximately 9.73 million. Jews make up the majority at 73.5% (about 7.145 million individuals).[2] The Arab community, spanning various religions excluding Judaism, accounts for 21% (around 2.048 million). An additional 5.5% (roughly 534,000 individuals) are classified as "others". This diverse group comprises those with Jewish ancestry but not recognized as Jewish by religious law, non-Jewish family members of Jewish immigrants, Christian non-Arabs, Muslim non-Arabs, and residents without a distinct ethnic or religious categorization.[3]"
The immigrants... colonials who interrupted the cycle of Hutu/Tutsi genocidal progress, disrupted the Xhosa/Zulu tribal conflict, made the dark continent green and hospitable, the natives of the South African [legal] jurisdiction that made the land productive, etc.
#BabyLivesMatter
Why do the terrorist sympathizers conflate civilians with militants? Is that to excuse murder, rape, torture, and abduction as tools of the social justice trade? Hey ho, hey ho, Hamas has got to go.
Decolonization is a good thing on campus. So why do they have a problem decolonizing Judea of insane muslems.
"The prevailing attitude to Palestinians in the comments seems to be little more than, fuck 'em."
At this point, my attitude is "They've screwed themselves over for decades. They let themselves be used as cannon fodder, they've essentially completely abdicated any responsibility for maintaining their own lands and systems preferring to rip out their water and sewer piping to make missiles. Hamas got elected - and that was it. Now? They're dependent on Israel for food, medical help and electricity. The other nations in the area don't want a damned thing to do with them.
They could - if they could get past the hate they've got for Israel, turn their lands into a productive areas. But they're holy victims, and the people who've been funding them for decades aren't going to go for that.
I thought when Arafat died they'd have a chance for peace. That didn't happen. I thought when they got the Gaza Strip they'd take care of the farms and infrastructure on it - but that didn't happen.
At some point you've got to look at the situation and go "Okay - how much of this is deliberate self-sabotage? How much of this is because they can't even comprehend no longer fighting Israel? How much of this is a culture that's determined to drag Israel down, even if it destroys themselves in the process?"
And then the big question: "How much of this should the world finance?" Hamas has made out like bandits with all the money flowing to 'destroy Israel' in the guise of 'helping' the poor, pitiful Palestinian victims.
I have no sympathy for them. At every step, at every choice they've gone "How can this hurt Israel?" with no regard for how much it hurt them.
So - yeah. No fucks to give. The Palestinians have a chance - but they'll blow it like they've done before.
Alastair Cooke: Hamas is a liberation movement. NOT an Islamic movement. "Christians can join it. Jews can join it. I can join it."
Will all of the left-wing organizations who have 'We recognize that our institution stands of the land of the XYZ tribe...' just give back the goddamn land they stole?
Until then, fuck off about 'colonization.'
Jerry,
Saying things like "Hamas got elected - and that was it," while leaving out the little fact that (immediately following the election) we retaliated against the Palestinians for voting "the wrong way" - after we forced that election on them - is the kind of dishonesty that explains why this crisis has continued for three quarters of a century. Getting supporters of Zionism to simply tell the truth is like pulling teeth, but they're the ones complaining about how tired THEY are of it all, as they shamelessly rain bombs down on innocent civilians, mostly made up of women and children.
I’ll give Crack the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is just very stupid. It’s my re charitable than the alternative.
Alastair Cooke: Hamas intended to govern until 2006, "but the was really overturned by Condaleezza Rice and Blair."
"#FreeBrittany!"
Leave Brittany alone!
On the other hand, Anatolia should be returned to the Hittites.
From the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea Hittitia shall be free!
My chant might need some work.
Crack: (Link) "Hamas is a liberation movement NOT an Islamic movement...."
Okay Alastair and Crack. We can just forget the Hamas 1988 Charter citing and quoting Islamist holy books and those guys yelling "Allahu Akbar" as they gun down Jews.
Meanwhile, Crack, I'll ask again, what are your points? That the Israeli Jews stole the land and they should pack up and leave and if they don't, Hamas' terrorism is justified?
Still waiting.
Decolonization means sending the Arabs back to Arabia. Rising Scholars reveal themselves as ideologues. Again.
Greater Israel.
@ Mike (MJB Wolf) - "Indigenous is whoever was there when white people arrived."
I was completely serious when I said that's the criteria in decolonialist theory.
To repeat myself from earlier in the comments:
"Perhaps because I'm presently reading Julien Benda's Treason of the Intellectuals ... but a cynical explanation for the rise of decolonial studies is that it fills a void in the tapestry of "the fact that X is not successful is not their fault; it's the fault of white males (who of course derive from Europe).
"Jewish people do not realize that to many who admire this tapestry, they are not just white but the whitest of the white: high income, influential in government, hard-working, materialistic."
Benda's book (written 1923-27) is a lament that intellectuals who should be about truth and beauty and what makes us all human, have been corrupted by politics. "Our age is the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds."
The oldest GenZ people are 23 years old. They just graduated from college and have made exactly zero impact on any academic field. Except for one extremely questionable poll, all the ignorant and revolting statements and actions that are being attributed to GenZ are in fact the product of the miserable youngest millennials, whose self-righteousness knows no bounds.
And yet Boomer and GenX commenters (the latter of whom should know better) seem happy to jump on the 'avocado toast' bandwagon and crap all over those spoiled GenZ kids they've never met. This is self-defeating and stupid. The people who suck are 28 and older, not 23 and younger (and all the young Millennials don't suck, either, just the loudest ones).
The GenZ students I know recognize that their education has been wrecked by the covid response, that they've been cheated out of a chunk of their childhood / young adulthood thanks to selfish old people, and that the people currently running the country are both evil and incompetent, and the the "decolonization" and "land acknowledgment stuff" is bullshit.
Give them an alternative path, and they'll explore it. Or keep ignorantly trashing them based on one-off things you read in the media so you can alienate them not only from the current regime, but from any potential alternative.
Mike (MJB Wolf)Meanwhile, about 20% of Israel's population is Muslim peoples descended from those who were on the land before the founding of the state of Israel.
"Nope. Considering Mohammed came along seven centuries after Jesus (i.e. time of Roman occupation of Judea) there obviously were no "Muslims" living in "Palestine" before the Israelites lived there."
Just to clarify, I'm talking about the state of Israel, not the kingdom of Israel.
And yes, Israel has about 20% Muslin Arabs whose forebears were already settled on the land when Israel became a state.
Go join ‘em, crackers! That’d be a fitting end…
Granted, [decolonization]'s a big project, lotta moving parts, gonna be a little disruptive
Gotta break some eggs, right?
(But not the brown eggs - those are the good kind.)
Too much? I denounce myself again.
These are not scholars. They exhibit no traits of being researchers or investigators. They just make up ideas to "publish" as "research".
As for Palestine, quite interesting none of these "scholars" investigate the Hashemite colonizers of what is now Jordan. No ties to the area, except that Great Britain owed the first king a favor and so offered him 80% of Palestine after he was pushed out of Mecca.
But history doesn't interest them
There's plenty of stupid pale people you can quote but that isn't even approaching an argument and it's not in the least convincing. Knowhatimean?
Old and slow: "I’ll give Crack the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is just very stupid."
That about sums it up...along with racist.
Its not complicated
Caroline said...
If you want a deep dive into the Palestine-Israel conflict, check out Darryl cooper’s martyrmade podcast series, “fear and loathing in the new Jerusalem.”
I came here to post this. Dave Smith "comedian" recommended it. It is exhaustive, yet compelling. It also gives sympathetic views from both sides.
Colonization? Perhaps, but the West gave them no where else to go.
Lol. Now Butt-Crack is musing about joining Hamas. Nice.
They haven’t even liberated the land that they control. But by liberation I mean running anything other than an oppressive theocratic autocracy. But some people can’t even Google “Hamas policies in Gaza.” How stupendous.
And how fascinating that the jihadis are now trying to max out the colonization angle. BTW you know that all of this crap in the universities is funded by Qatar, right? Anyway, I’m fully supportive of learning about the history of colonization, starting with how the first and every other caliphate since a certain messenger swept out from an area of a desert peninsula to take over the whole Middle East. They prescribed offensive holy war, taxing and subjugating the other religious communities (if they were Jewish or Christian “dhimmis”) or killing them outright (if they were not), killing anyone who would apostate themselves from this warlord faith and proclaim the violent message undergirding all this to be the final, unalterable word of an infallible deity who rarely mentions forgiveness. The result: A homogenized Middle East nearly wiped clean of every non-Arab/Muslim community and benighted economic and civic backwardness throughout.
So let’s learn about this form of colonization. It started even before the Vikings, let alone the European age of discovery that connected with the Americas. And it seems to want to take over Europe as well.
Anyone can be dumb, but it requires intelligence to be truly stupid.
To be fair, this is pretty much the only form of employment that they are qualified. If you are going to get a useless degree, you need to milk it for all it is worth. They keep this up, businesses are going to have to decide if having a college degree is an automatic disqualifier. These people will be nothing but trouble in any possible role.
I suppose I should point out, not that it would matter for such stupid people, that the Arabs are not native to Palestine. They are also not native to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan (except perhaps on the fringes), Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, etc. The only reason they are there is they came barreling out of the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century in a religious fervor. They found the Romans and Sassanids had exhausted themselves fighting each other and were in no condition to deal with this new threat. The Romans were driven back Anatolia to desperately try to hold on as the Arabs raided them annually dragging off large number of slaves as well as spoils, while the Sassanids collapsed completely.
I appreciate the feedback from Sweeney and Laughing Fox. Yours and the comments criticizing the term “scholar” as applied to the Studies at issue provoked thought. In fact calling decolonization theorizing as a study gives it more credibility than it deserves. It’s more like political strategizing with a veneer of cherry picked facts that is completely indifferent to hard science and historical context. For quite some time my mind has been turning over the concept of Studies being a signifier of agitprop masquerading as scholarship.
Being a boomer of a certain age I thought back to the fields of Womens Studies and Chicano Studies, both of which were just getting a foothold in universities when I started at UC Riverside. By foothold I mean that my freshman and sophomore groups were forced to choose from among the new Studies curricula to meet our breadth requirements. I purposely chose a Womens Studies course analyzing fiction and feminism because it fit easily into my double major track of English and Creative Writing. At the time I appreciated how lightweight the scholarship was because I wanted an easy class in that quarter and in fact I turned in a paper for my final exam that essentially was a satirical take on the premise of the course. I took all the loaded terms and jargon the visiting professors used in class and ironically applied it to the core texts (Sylvia Plath, the Brontes etc). They missed the ironic tone completely, praised it effusively and submitted it to a scholarly journal. It was published in fact.
That episode way back in the early ‘80s was the seed for my theory about all Studies and I believe it can even be applied to the original sin of Social Studies, which was just starting to edge out History as a core course when I entered grade school. Maybe later. This has gone way longer than I expected to spend on yesterday’s post.
How many of you fellow Althousians go through prior days to check for new comments or like I started here, to see cogent responses to earlier exchanges?
" resettle new peoples in conquered territories in order to permanently alter their character and make use of their resources."
Yeah, I know somewhere where jut that is happening.
" resettle new peoples in conquered territories in order to permanently alter their character and make use of their resources."
Yeah, I know somewhere where jut that is happening.
Mike MJB, you're going to have to stop making so much sense. Great explanation.
JaimeRoberto said...
"On the other hand, Anatolia should be returned to the Hittites.
'From the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea Hittitia shall be free!'
My chant might need some work."
Humble suggestion: "From the (Euphrates) River to the (Mediterranean) Sea, Hittitia shall be free"
"I suppose I should point out, not that it would matter for such stupid people, that the Arabs are not native to Palestine."
Well, if you go back long enough, no one is native to Palestine. We all originated in Africa and spread out from there. Everywhere but Africa is someplace we moved to.
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