Showing posts with label Academic fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Academic fraud. Show all posts

Thursday, September 07, 2023



Here is the abstract of a paper by Walaa Alqaisiya,  published in Political Geography, a peer-reviewed academic journal published by Elsevier: 

Beyond the contours of Zionist sovereignty: Decolonisation in Palestine's Unity Intifada
This article takes the May 2021 uprising in Palestine, known as the Unity Intifada, as a prism to map old and new political geographies between coloniser and freedom-fighter, whose significance extends beyond the temporal limits of the May event. The first part of the paper investigates the role of identity and cultural geographies in re-enforcing Jewish claims to sovereignty. It shows how the Zionist production of pink (sexed/gendered), red (racializing/indigenising) and green (environmental) markers, is used to draw the contours of settler legitimacy and intensifies when faced by growing indigenous rebellion. The second part addresses the decolonising possibilities engulfing the Unity Intifada. It examines the role of youth, including women and queer collectives, and how their actions invoke new political and material taxonomies beyond the liberal peace structure to which Palestine has succumbed since the Oslo agreements. Overall, the article advances the political geographies of decolonisation by challenging the maintenance of settler colonial violence within the popular, political, and intellectual imaginary of ‘Israel/Palestine.’ It does so by tracing the spatial and epistemic value of decolonisation theories that extend from interactions across indigenous, queer feminist, critical race, and eco-materialist debates.  
That is a lot of obfuscation to give a message that Palestinian violence is wonderful and must be encouraged.

As with most such academic papers, the author "talks past the sale:" she takes lies like Israel's "colonialism" or terrorists as "freedom fighters" as being so obvious that they need no proof or citations and uses them as building blocks to selectively chose whatever evidence they claim supports their propaganda. She has no need to explain how, exactly, shooting rockets into civilian population areas or ambushing and shooting drivers on the road is "freedom fighting."

In the first paragraph, Alqaisiya asserts "Nakba is a structure not an event (Wolfe, 2006)." But the Wolfe paper says "Invasion is a structure not an event." The author redefines "nakba" for her own purposes from the standard Palestinian line that it means the (fictional) expulsion of 700,000 Arabs in 1948 - now it means the arrival of Jews to the region decades earlier, framing it as an "invasion."

Her assumption is that Jews had no right to migrate to Palestine to escape persecution in Europe or the Middle East throughout the centuries. The right for persecuted minorities to seek refuge is unchallenged - unless they are Jews returning to their ancestral homeland, the exact opposite of colonialism. 

She knows what she is doing. The peer reviewers of Political Geography are not experts in the history of the region, and they are also probably reluctant to challenge a Palestinian's narrative of her "truth." She, and many other academics, take advantage of these factors, plus the general anti-Israel atmosphere in academic circles,  to spread lies and agitprop without fear of being exposed.

And just in case a reviewer might notice Alqaisiya is not exactly objective, she says in her "Methodology" section that her hatred of Israel is a strength, not a weakness: 
[G]iven the role played by social media in circulating activist online campaigns and commentary about the Uprising, a digital ethnographic component shaped the methodological approach of the article. Not only did this method help direct the selection of primary sources that ‘capture how self-identity is formed, structured and expressed on digitally based platforms,’ (Kaur-Gill and Dutta, 2017: 3) but it also aligns with the epistemic base of decolonising research (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012), recognising the author's own positionality as Palestinian. Indeed, the majority of the discussion across the two sections emerges from the author's political and scholarly engagement within decolonial feminist and activist online spaces, in Palestine and beyond, which responded to the Unity Intifada's plight. The aim of advancing the sovereignty of indigenous knowledge, therefore, is at the heart of this article's methodological approach (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012).
In English: "I am a Palestinian, therefore my anti-Israel activism and opinions are worth more than any objective source. My obvious bias is the core of this research, and I then choose my secondary sources to fit my bias. And if you object to that methodology, you are oppressing me."

Here is a key paragraph:
It was as the bombs were dropping on besieged Gaza, devastating entire families and amounting to war crimes, that Israel took part in the annual international song competition, Eurovision. Israeli participation in such events unveils a cultural site for Zionist pinkwashing, delineating a sexed/gendered self that reifies the logic of settler colonial domination. The country's 2021 representation through the figure of a Jewish Ethiopian woman, Eden Alene, reveals how race plays a defining role in settlers' (subjects and state) efforts at indigenising colonial settlement. I read Alene's 2021 Eurovision contest participation as an attempt to neutralise Zionism's mounting crisis during times of growing confrontation with the indigene's resistance via the crafting of ‘an alternate (hi)story.’ This Zionist self-indigenising narrative, which also activates forms of cultural exchange with Indigenous nations and their plight elsewhere, further intertwines redwashing and greenwashing efforts.
It hardly needs to be mentioned that Israel didn't choose the dates of Eurovision, and that the contestants were chosen way before the May mini-war in Gaza. But Alqaisiya "reads" the two events coinciding as a Zionist response to the bad publicity of defending itself from rockets. The author then doubles down and spends several paragraphs railing against previous Israeli entries in Eurovision as symbolizing "pinkwashing."

To anti-Zionist fanatics, Israel is by definition an illiberal state. Therefore, any counter-evidence - like  transsexual, gay-friendly and Black contestants for Eurovision being fully embraced by most of Israeli society - must be interpreted as a cynical attempt by Israel to hide its hate for LGBTQ and people of color. The contestants' own Zionism is further proof of Israeli illiberalism and attempts to obscure its "apartheid." In short, any facts that decisively disprove the assertion of Israeli evil are themselves further proof of Israeli evil. 

Occam's Razor is shredded in favor of conspiracy theories. 

Again, the peer reviewers might not be expected to understand the history of the scurrilous "pinkwashing" and "redwashing" and "greenwashing" accusations throughout this paper. But they should at least click on the references to see if they say what Alqaisiya claims. In this same paragraph, the link to her saying that the Gaza war in 2021 amounts to war crimes goes to an Al Jazeera article which says "The United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet has said Israel’s recent attacks on the besieged Gaza Strip that killed more than 200 Palestinians may constitute “war crimes” if they are shown to be disproportionate." This is a deliberate misquote, one of dozens, and that minor example should have been enough to raise flags for any reviewer at Political Geography. 

So many of her other footnotes link to articles that do not say what she claims. Another example: 
Predating Alene's participation was Netta Barzilai's win of the 2018 Eurovision contest with the song ‘Toy,’ whose feminist LGBTQ vibes (Cook, 2019) invoked the celebration of Israel as a place that shares the progressive liberal values of Europe. Israel has been at the core of embodying attributes of ‘European identity’ (Ayoub and Paternotte, 2014) as they link to feminist and LGBTQ issues. 
The link says that LGBT rights are emblematic of European identity, but that has nothing to do with Israel actively claiming to be European. This is Alqaisiya's way to tell readers that Israel is a foreign European outpost in the Middle East that doesn't belong, and that Jews are really European converts and not descended from the Children of Israel. 

Yet another example: A footnote about the organization StandWithUs says "The Israeli government heavily funds this US-based organisation to disseminate hasbara (public diplomacy for the Israeli government) through ‘citizen activism,’ whose goal is to mobilise young people in Israel, the US and Britain to stand up for Israel and Jewish people. (See Bazz, 2015; StandWithUs, 2022). " "Bazz" in 2015 reported that Israel planned to pay StandWithUs about $250,000 for a specific one year project, but it fell through and as far as I can tell, SWU does not get any funding from the Israeli government.

It would take a month to show the many such inaccuracies in this paper - and this is all what Political Geography should have done, and failed to do.

The entire paper is online, so you can see for yourself how Alqaisiya has little regard for truth.  Every paragraph includes lies (including the Depo-Provera slander I mentioned that are spread in multiple academic papers). 

I don't know what kind of peer review Political Geography engages in, but it is apparent that not only do they not do basic fact checking, they don't even flag a paper like this that all but brags that it is intended to be Palestinian propaganda.



Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Wednesday, February 01, 2023




There was a very revealing thread by academic fraud Noura Erakat, who calls herself a "human rights lawyer:"

Palestinians under siege, subject to killing by world’s 11th most powerful army & deputized settlers but news producers want me to come on air to comment on Palestinians celebrating the killing of 9 Israeli settlers? 
Why this pathology of Palestinians and apology for apartheid? Why exceptionalize this Palestinian expression when you know full well ANY human who lived under such devastating circumstances without an army or international protection would similarly respond to this operation
It's the combination of absolute removal of context, together with dehumanization of Palestinians that makes media more interested in examining Palestinians as hateful, blood thirsty rather than absolutely emblematic of humanity
Only in this context, are news media more concerned about sporadic Palestinian operations aimed at resistance to apartheid, than an Israeli government & society that has caged 2 mil Palestinians in Gaza, suffocates children with tear gas, shoots to kill over 1 Palestinian a day. 
I shared this with the producer who rushed off the phone. Shocking. 
We should be invited to comment on the situation and context, not to spend air time being a corrective and scrutinizing the segment itself. 
Erakat is angry that a TV producer wants to frame Palestinians as hateful and bloodthirsty - and then justifies Palestinians being hateful and bloodthirsty.

She is saying that Palestinian celebrations on the death of Jews targeted outside a synagogue is perfectly normal and "human." She claims that any human would act that way. 

Would they?

A Google search of "celebrate terror attack" finds that the overwhelming majority of examples refers to Palestinians. When they are filtered out, all the remaining hits are Muslims - and the only cases I can find of handing out sweets are Hezbollah supporters in Lebanon also celebrating a terror attack in Israel

Did Jews celebrate the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany in 1945, killing tens of thousands of civilians? No - no one did

Erakat's thesis is a lie. But it is one she clearly subscribes to herself - she is saying that she felt the same joy that other Palestinians did, and she is irritated that she has to explain to dense reporters why this bloodlust is normal and Israel targeting terrorists is the real crime. 

Notice also that she doesn't frame the Jerusalem massacre even as something distasteful. She justifies the massacre itself as a "Palestinian operation aimed at resistance to apartheid." To her, murdering Jews is not an outrage but an act of heroism, and Jewish worshippers are themselves the enemy to be killed, no different than a soldier.

This is not what a real human rights activist or human rights lawyer would ever say. Erakat is a fraud as an academic, as a lawyer and as a human being.

(And, no, the famous photos of children in Northern Israel under rocket attack in 2006 and Sderot residents watching Israeli airstrikes in 2014 are not Israelis celebrating the deaths of civilians.)




Buy the EoZ book, PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism  today at Amazon!

Or order from your favorite bookseller, using ISBN 9798985708424. 

Read all about it here!

 

 

Sunday, March 20, 2022

Twelfth-rate academic Juan Cole notes that in the latest UN World Happiness Report, Israel ranks as the ninth happiest nation in the world and the Palestinian Territories ranks 122nd out of 146 rated areas.

Of course, he must explain how this happened using his own twisted Jew-hating logic. It is, he says, "happiness apartheid."

The per capita income of Palestinians is $3751 a year. The UN estimates that the Israeli Occupation of the Palestinian territories has taken out $57 billion since 2000 from their economy that would otherwise have been there, spurring growth. The Palestinian gross domestic product would be 3 times bigger today without that interference.

Israeli per capita income is $34,185 nearly 10 times greater than that of Palestine. Some of that income is produced by usurping land and resources from the Palestinians.
There you go! Jews are stealing Palestinian happiness!

But not only that: Jews are stealing Palestinian health, too!

Palestinian life expectancy in 2019 was 74 years. Because Israel declined to vaccinate most of the people living under its military occupation against COVID-19, it has likely fallen.

Live expectancy in Israel is about 83 years. Again, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett rules both people, directly administering 60% of the West Bank and using the Palestine Authority as his policeman for the other 40%. Yet some of the population he rules drop dead 9 years before the others.

There you have it. The Jews are not only stealing Palestinian land and life expectancy and freedom and money, but they are stealing Palestinian happiness!

Don't let actual facts interfere with Juan Cole's fevered hallucinations.  

The number of deaths per million from COVID-19 for the Palestinian territories is 1004 per million. For Israel, it is higher - 1117 per million. So much for that theory.

When the entire Palestinian territories were under direct Israeli rule from 1967-2000, Palestinian life expectancy increased from 54 to over 70. It has gone up since, too. 


Cole implies that somehow Israel is fully responsible for Palestinian health. But Israeli laws do not apply to the Palestinian health sector. This is international law under the Oslo accords. 

The Lancet noted in 2020:

With respect to the West Bank, the Oslo Accords state that health is under the aegis of the Palestinian Authority. As such, it is only in cooperation with the Palestinian Authority that health professionals in Israel can provide assistance to people in the West Bank. Sadly, the Palestinian Authority has decided on a general policy wherein opposing steps, which are claimed to represent so-called normalisation with Israelis, override such cooperation by forbidding Palestinian health-care personnel from working with their Israeli colleagues. We all have Palestinian associates who have privately expressed an interest in working together, but are afraid to stand out.  

Other factors that could affect life expectancy (and happiness) that elude the distinguished idiot professor is that a higher percentage of West Bank Palestinians smoke than in Israel (27% vs. 20%), Arabs tend to have more obesity and diabetes, and in recent years, the Palestinian Authority has banned its people from being treated in Israeli hospitals.

The biggest proof that Cole is an idiot comes from looking at the happiness index of other Arab countries that border Israel. 

While the Palestinian ranking is 122, it is higher than that of Egypt (129), Jordan (134) and Lebanon(145.) (Syria isn't ranked, but it certainly would also be lower than that of the Palestinians as well.)

Why would those people be unhappier than the Palestinians? None of the factors that Cole lists applies to them - yet they are worse off than the Palestinians that Cole says are practically enslaved by Israel! Apparently, "occupation" actually enhances happiness compared to Israel's non-occupied neighbors!

Cole's hate for Israel colors everything he writes about. It is rarely as clear as it is here. 

(h/t JW)






Read all about it here!

Monday, March 07, 2022

Nadia Abu El Haj is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University's Barnard College. 

In 2002, she published "Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society." The book is meant to be a discussion of how Israel uses and misuses archaeology for its own political purposes.

But she asserts, in her own voice, something so shocking that it should disqualify her in her own field, in a section of her book that discusses Palestinian looting of Jewish artifacts at archaeological sites - something that is rampant.

Looting could well be analyzed as a form of resistance to the Israeli state and an archaeological project, understood by many Palestinians, to stand at the very heart of Zionist historical claims to the land. In James Scott's words, looting is perhaps a "weapon of the weak" [1985].
Here we have an anthropologist who is praising Palestinian looting of Jewish heritage - because it is "resistance." 

(James Scott's book, called "Weapons of the Weak," does not talk about looting of archaeological sites, and indeed does not appear to discuss the permanent destruction or loss of any major items. Abu El Haj is twisting his thesis.)

In Palestinian thought, any crime, including murder, is justifiable under the rubric of "resistance," so perhaps this shouldn't be considered too shocking. Yet this is an American-born professor of anthropology at an American university who is openly asserting that destroying Jewish culture is a good thing. (Her father is Palestinian.)

This is today's antisemitism, justified as a "principle."

(As I was researching this, I found an excellent critique of the entire book published here. )

(h/t Alex)







Read all about it here!

An Israeli neuroscientist named Gerry Leisman, who teaches at Haifa University, announced on a listserv:

Hi,
I am the guest editor of a special issue of the Journal Brain Sciences and we are producing a special issue of the journal entitled, "The Brain Goes to School, details for which can be found at the following link:
We are recruiting both reviews and results of experimental studies that relate to human learning, its difficulties, remediation strategies, models, cognitive science, cognitive neuropsychology all essentially attempting to translate 150 years of cognitive neuroscience into classroom applications.......
One of the members of the listserv, Karen Froud, decided that this announcement was way too Zionist, and threatened the tiny brains of those who are offended by anything related to Israel. 


Dear colleagues -
I urge you to consider this request in light of the Boycotts, Divestments and Sanctions Movement for freedom and justice in Palestine. Like many / most academic institutions in Israel, Haifa University is an apartheid institution. https://bdsmovement.net/tags/haifa-university
I recognize that many of you work within this institution and hope you are also doing your part for academic freedom.
Warm wishes for a peaceful and just world - which after all is where educational neuroscience as a field points us.
Karen Froud, Ph.D.
Program Director, Neuroscience & Education
Columbia University Teachers College

Apparently, Froud is asking her colleagues to boycott this issue of Brain Sciences because it had the audacity of asking an Israeli expert to edit it. And she claims that this is in the name of "academic freedom."

I was curious to see exactly what made Haifa University an "apartheid institution" according to the BDS movement. Here is their evidence: "Haifa University discriminates against Palestinian citizens of Israel through exclusionary practices."

Really? Because fully 41% of students at Haifa University are Arab - double the percentage of Arab citizens in Israel as a whole! Haifa University is twice as welcoming of Arab students than they are of Jewish students on a per capita basis!

Haifa University is far more liberal and far more progressive than Karen Froud Ph.D. is. 

Leisman wrote an excellent and detailed response to Froud as well, including these points:

It is quite audacious of you to claim that you support academic freedom by requesting others to shut down academic freedom. Before I begin, may I call your attention to the UN Declaration of Human Rights (1949) Article 19, which you obviously have not read, that states, "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression: this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers." (So much for your understanding of Human Rights and Academic Freedom).

What you want is not a boycott but rather political pressure on second parties to pressure third parties to affect policy-change by that third party (i.e. the government the State of Israel). That is not even a secondary boycott but rather just simply bullying. So much for academic discourse on your part on an issue that has nothing to do with the project in Neuroeducation. What makes your opinions valid and those of others not? Some website? Do you base your actions on an order on a website? Your actions are inconsistent with the notion of Academic Freedom, but rather with an opinionated individual ramming his/her political agenda down the throats of academics on a mailing list. 

Froud receives a lot of very bad ratings in RateMyProfessors, as she appears to pre-record her lectures and gives students the link on YouTube. She also apparently publicly humiliates students she doesn't like. 

It is not surprising that self-righteous BDS bullies are also bullies in real life.

(h/t Andrew)






Read all about it here!

Sunday, March 06, 2022



As my readers know, I like to expose the stupid things published about Israel in academic papers.

One recent publication was by Saad Amira, of the University of Basel, Switzerland, whose abstract for "The slow violence of Israeli settler-colonialism and the political ecology of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank" in "Settler Colonial Studies" includes, 
Here I focus on three aspects of the slow violence of settler colonialism and its relationship to political ecology: the unleashing of wild boars into Palestinian villages and the decimation of seasonal agriculture, the dumping of sewage waste of Israeli settlements onto Palestinian villages, and the curtailment of indigenous centered modes of production and mobility. 
When he proposed this research, he also added something about "reinforcing notions of Patriarchal development" but inexplicably that line of research did not make it into his final paper, perhaps because it would have softened his anti-Israel lies.  

But the proposal included the "wild boars" theme.

Now think about this for a second. If someone proposes a doctoral thesis based on the truth of wild and false rumors about Israel, and it gets approved by their supervisor, what are the chances that this "academic researcher" will be objective when they write the paper itself? Indeed, the proposal and the abstract are very similar. The conclusions were drawn before the research.

Which is how 99% of "social science" works.

It turns out that this isn't the only academic fraud who mindlessly repeats the most insane antisemitic conspiracy theories, that religious Jewish settlers or the IDF are raising non-kosher and untamable wild boars to release them in Palestinian Arab farms.

In "No Sustainable Development in the Lack of Environmental Justice" by HE Salem in Environmental Justice (2019), we are told flatly:
Israel releases wild boars, pigs, stray dogs, and large rats in the OPT. According to reports issued by Israeli and Palestinian institutions, the Israeli authorities release wild boars, pigs, dogs, and large rats in the OPT, especially the West Bank. The Palestinian Authority’s President—Mahmoud Abbas—accused Israel of releasing wild boars to destroy agricultural fields in the West Bank to cause damage to produce and intimidate Palestinian farmers. Palestinians blame Israeli settlers for deliberately releasing boars in the occupied West Bank to deliberately attack villagers, as a way to keep them off their land."
Middle East Monitor (2012) quotes the head of the  Palestinian Centre for Environmental Development at Al-Quds Open University, Jamal Sabra, describing "the Israeli practice of releasing wild pigs in the vicinity of settlements – a practice which impacts on wild plants. "

In "Palestine and (Human) Nature" (2016) by Naomi Foyle (University of Chichester), she describes Israel as "a nationalist settler movement led by wealthy Europeans and bankrolled by America [that] has dispossessed the indigenous Arab population and laid waste to their remaining natural resources. " Naturally, she parrots the "wild boar" claim with little skepticism:

Currently, in a development even Orwell couldn’t have made up, the Zionist assault on Palestinian farming allegedly extends to pig warfare. Growing up, Murad never saw a wild boar, which formerly existed only in the north of Palestine. Now there are thousands of them, a genuine plague of huge ferocious beasts that hold night orgies in farmers’ fields and groves, devouring crops and trampling the fragile roots of the olive trees. ...Villagers report seeing IDF helicopters landing to release pairs of the animals...
In DA Jaber's "Settler colonialism and ecocide: case study of AlKhader, Palestine" - also in Settler Colonial Studies - we are told, "Qasim, an environmental activist, discussed the actions of settlers that cause the deterioration of agricultural lands. For example, the releasing of rabbits and gazelles, which are not native to the agricultural lands of Al-Khader, onto farmlands, ruining the crops, in particular grapevines and Armenian cucumber plants." The footnote says, ". For more on settlers releasing animals on Palestinian agriculture destroying crops and, at times, harming Palestinians, see Jared Eglan, Beasts of War: The Militarization of Animals (Morrisville, NC: Lulu Press, 2015), 99; Ma’an News Agency ‘10-year-old Palestinian Girl Attacked by Wild Boar Near Jenin’, May 2017."

Waziyatawin writes in "Malice Enough in their Hearts and Courage Enough in Ours: Reflections on US Indigenous and Palestinian Experiences under Occupation," Settler Colonial Studies (2012) that "people of Awarta described the theft of their sheep and goat herds, the confiscation, theft or destruction of their olive trees and the introduction of destructive wild boars" by settlers.

I only saw skepticism in a 2019 book, "Companions in Conflict: Animals in Occupied Palestine," by Penny Johnson, who realized immediately that the "settlers spread wild boar" story was insane:


If only most academics has any intellectual honesty as Johnson does. 

I wonder if any academic press would allow this research into the bias of academic research to be published. 







Read all about it here!

Friday, March 04, 2022



Here are parts of an abstract of an academic paper, "Vegan nationalism?: the Israeli animal rights movement in times of counter-terrorism," published in Settler Colonial Studies.

In recent years, the movement advocating animal rights and welfare (animal rights movement), in parallel with the practice of ethical veganism, has become increasingly significant in Israel. Along with this trend, several studies examine and analyze the colonial aspects of the Israeli animal rights movement and its relevance to the Palestinian issue from the perspective of Critical Animal Studies. Critically examining preceding studies on veganism and colonialism, through analysis of the political discourses of leading activists and public figures within the newly popular Israeli vegan trend, as well as interviews with a sample of Israeli vegans, this article will demonstrate how veganism in Israel is associated with a narrative of Israeli national superiority. Such discourses may well be called ‘vegan nationalism'. Vegan nationalism is a discursive and regulatory framework in which veganism is considered proof of the moral superiority of a nation in a settler colonialist context, implicitly stressing the barbarism and backwardness of the ‘terrorists’. 
The paper has way too many logical fallacies to list, but here is one particularly egregious example:

In her writings, Israeli animal rights activist, Shira Hertzanu, has highlighted the seemingly paradoxical fact that, in recent years, the animal rights movement in Israel (widely assumed to be leftist) has made great strides and gained more popularity even as Israeli society, itself, has grown increasingly rightist. Interviews I conducted mirror many of Gilboa’s statements, asserting vegans in contemporary Israeli society are not limited to leftists, but encompass the entire political spectrum, including those who identify as politically right or right-wing. As Hannah, one of my interviewees, expressed it, ‘animal rights is [sic] not something political, okay? Basically, it’s not something political. ..'

According to Esther Alloun, decoupling and denying any association with political issues such as Palestinian injustice ‘is also practised by activists from the Zionist Left who tend to be liberal and progressive on a range of issues except Palestine. As such, this reveals the culture of silencing based on the ongoing practices of denial and indifference, that sustain the single optic underpinning the AR movement.’ The intersectional leftist solidarity movement’s decoupling of animal rights from any polarizing, controversial issues (especially the Palestinian issue) not only frames the animal rights movement as non-political or political-free, but also contributes to the emergence of right-wing vegans and animal rights activists, such as Tal Gilboa and Yair Netanyahu, who view animal rights issues as evidence of Israel’s national supremacy in the context of the ongoing ‘war on terror’.
The author clearly is upset - vegans are supposed to be leftist and care about other intersectional issues. The very existence of right-wing vegans challenges that view and is therefore suspect: they don't care about animals, they just want to "vegan-wash" their racism. 

While on the one hand the author is upset that Israeli vegans are often not active animal rights activists at the same time, on the other s/he is upset that right wingers can be vegans altogether, and assumes that  their goal is to prove that Israel is more ethical than its Arab neighbors who want to see it annihilated. Instead of being happy that fewer animals are being killed, the author wants veganism to be political - as long as it is left-wing. 

Life is so much easier when you can divide people up into good and bad based on their choice of foods. 

The paper is filled with such contradictions. 

What is particularly striking is the statements above make repeated, specific references in which ‘terrorists’ are equated with animals, lower and less than, not worthy of the respect and legitimacy afforded human beings. Even former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has, in recent years, spoken of his compassion for animals and appointed Tal Gilboa as his animal rights advisor, expressed sentiments similar to those detailed above responding, as follows, to the November 2014 Jerusalem synagogue attack, ‘The human animals who perpetrated this slaughter were full of hatred and incitement, deep hatred and terrible incitement against the Jewish people and its state.’ Shira Hertzanu explained the rhetoric of such statements saying, ‘in order to justify their claimed superiority, Israeli nationalists aim to lower Palestinians to an animal level,’ categorizing them as subhuman, thereby abrogating the need to accord them even the most basic treatment and consideration under the framework of (human) rights.

Calling terrorists "animals" might be offensive to animal rights activists because the term is meant to be demeaning. But the author is saying that Netanyahu called all Palestinians "terrorists" and therefore justifies treating them as less than human - which is not at all what he said or believes.  

Could it be that veganism has become more popular for other reasons and Zionist vegans are simply...vegans? Nope. 

Some might attribute the recent, very significant increase in the right-wing presence in the veganism movement to the fact that as veganism transitioned from a small movement, populated primarily by a relatively tiny group of like-minded left-wing individuals, to a huge full-fledged national movement enjoying an immense following. The surge in the number of participants was accompanied by an increase in the sociopolitical diversity of those participants resulting in the quite noticeable growth in the number of right-wing vegans. Such an explanation, however, is far too facile and fails to consider the significance of how animal friendliness in Israel discursively works in favor of the nationalist framework of moral supremacy

This is just more proof that if you look hard enough for something, you can find it.

(h/t Daled Amos)







Read all about it here!

Monday, January 03, 2022




Daily Nous, a philosophy news blog, writes:

Have Jews insinuated themselves into positions of power and influence in politics and culture because they are innately gifted with higher IQs, or is it also because they are ethnocentric and hypocritical networkers good at using non-Jews in their self-serving mission of “transforming America contrary to white interests”? Race science and/or conspiracy theory? This—pardon the editorializing—outrageous question is currently under discussion in the pages of the academic philosophy journal Philosophia.

Welcome to 2022.

January 1st saw the online publication of “The ‘Default Hypothesis’ Fails to Explain Jewish Influence” by Kevin MacDonald, who is described on Wikipedia as an “anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, white supremacist, and retired professor of evolutionary psychology.” MacDonald’s 32-page article is a response to a piece by Nathan Cofnas, “The Anti-Jewish Narrative,” that Philosophia published last February, and which is one of a series of pieces in which Cofnas critiques McDonald.

Both MacDonald and Cofnas are preoccupied with the question: “Did Jews create liberal multiculturalism to advance their ethnic interests?” (Cofnas, p.1332).
The summary may be a bit unfair to Cofnas. Let's backtrack a bit.

Kevin MacDonald is described in Wikipedia as "an American antisemitic conspiracy theorist, white supremacist,and retired professor of evolutionary psychology at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). In 2008, the CSULB academic senate voted to disassociate itself from MacDonald's work."

In one of his books, he has a chapter called " "National Socialism as an Anti-Jewish Group Evolutionary Strategy". In other words, Nazism arose as a logical counter to Jewish supremacy, and antisemitism is justified as an evolutionary counter-strategy for the supposed Jewish evolutionary strategy of dominating non-Jews.

However, MacDonald is influential among the modern alt-Right as an intellectual support for their bigotry and antisemitism. 

The abstract of a 2021 article in Antisemitism Studies titled "A New Protocols: Kevin MacDonald's Reconceptualization of Antisemitic Conspiracy Theory" says,
Kevin MacDonald is a key figure in shaping contemporary antisemitism for the Alt-Right. He repackages classic antisemitic beliefs for the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by cloaking them in a language of evolutionary psychology. His most important innovation is to reject The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as factual but retain them as a metaphor for Jewish anti-white activism. By arguing that it is Judaism itself as “a group evolutionary strategy” that leads Jews to tear down white society (European-derived Christian majority states in the Western world), he is able to present an image of the Jews akin to that of The Protocols, but one that obviates the need for any actual conspiracy. Once Jewish culture and genetics become the driving force of this effort to destroy white society, one only needs to show that individual Jews are acting on its behalf, not that they are conspiring together to do so.
Nathan Cofnas, who works with the philosophy of biology and ethics at Oxford, decided to write a full paper in Philosophia - which is an Israeli journal - last year to rebut MacDonald's arguments from within the evolutionary psychology framework that MacDonald uses. He defends his choice to treat MacDonald seriously and not dismiss him as a crackpot in an earlier 2018 article in Human Nature:

There are at least three reasons to give MacDonald a hearing.

First, some respected psychologists and evolutionary theorists have reported that they found value in MacDonald’s work. For example, David Sloan Wilson endorsed the ideas in A People That Shall Dwell Alone and strongly criticized the representatives of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society who rejected MacDonald: .... This amounts to at least some degree of prima facie evidence that MacDonald’s theory should be considered.

Second, it is an undeniable fact that, in the past few hundred years, Jews have had a disproportionate influence on politics and culture in the Western world, if not the whole world. It might be worthwhile to investigate this phenomenon from a biosocial or evolutionary perspective.... The idea that Jewish influence resulted, at least in some cases, from their pursuit of a group evolutionary strategy cannot be dismissed a priori. Since MacDonald has defended this theory, he seems to provide a starting point for anyone wishing to investigate the understudied issue of Jewish influence. If he is wrong, it may be useful to know why and how.

Third and perhaps most important, though, is that MacDonald’s work has been influential—enormously so—in a certain segment of the lay community, namely, among anti-Semites and adherents of the burgeoning movement known as the “alt-right.” It is hard to overstate his influence among this group. Some years ago Derbyshire (2003) called him “the Marx of the anti-Semites,” and with the advent of the alt-right his audience has grown substantially. Richard Spencer, whom the New York Times calls “the leading ideologue of the alt-right movement” (Goldstein 2016), introduced MacDonald at a conference with one sentence: “There is no man on the planet who has done more for the understanding of the pole around which the world revolves than Kevin MacDonald” (Spencer 2016). Andrew Anglin, who runs the most popular alt-right/neo-Nazi website, says in his “Guide to the Alt-Right” that “MacDonald’s work examining the racial nature of Jews is considered crucial to understanding what the Alt-Right is about” (Anglin 2016). ...

 Cofnas does not repeat this argument in the newer paper.

Now, Kevin MacDonald himself has written his own response to Cofnas' paper in the current issue of Philosophia. 

And now an antisemite has been mainstreamed as a respectable philosopher.

How could have this been handled better?

I admit I only skimmed through the papers, but at first glance it appears that Cofnas made two errors. While his 2018 paper did an admirable job in showing how MacDonald was not intellectually honest - cherry picking sources, ignoring counter-proofs or even misrepresenting them as supporting his theories - he does not "go in for the kill" in that paper and point out that MacDonald's errors are a direct result of his antisemitism. Anyone can find support for any position if they only choose to report the evidence that supports their position, or misrepresent other facts as doing so. This is propaganda. We see this all the time with anti-Israel propaganda. The reader is still left with the impression that MacDonald's theories have some merit, even if he has clear biases.

The other error is that Cofnas presented his own alternate theory as to why Jews are disproportionately influential in Western culture. This now makes his theory a target for MacDonald - who indeed attacks that theory in the new Philosophia issue - and now MacDonald looks again like he has a valid viewpoint. He gave the opening for MacDonald to attack rather than put him on the defensive, and now it looks like a "he said, she said" debate. 

Making MacDonald's antisemitism mainstream.

By not looking at and emphasizing the entire context of MacDonald's antisemitism, Cofnas let MacDonald control the framing of the debate giving him an advantage to promulgate his antisemitic theories as legitimate.

Of course, Philosophia should not have published MacDonald at all, but in this context, of the pretense of pure philosophical debate, it would have ad a hard time denying a response without giving MacDonald more ammunition about how the Jews are controlling the debate.

These people might know philosophy, but they don't understand the nature of antisemitic propaganda. And now the damage is done - an Israeli journal and an eminent academic have, without meaning to, spread an antisemitic theory.

Daily Nous adds:

Philosophia is edited by Asa Kasher (Tel Aviv). In response to questions about the publication of these articles, he wrote that the papers were refereed prior to publication, but that it was “a mistake” to publish them, explaining that he was “not aware of the general background of the debate” and that he is “sorry for treating the discussion as an ordinary philosophical debate.” He added that further comments from him may be forthcoming.

Yesterday, Moti Mizrahi (Florida Institute of Technology) who was until last night the associate editor of Philosophia, wrote on Twitter: “I had nothing to do with the publication of this [McDonald’s] paper in Philosophia. I’ve asked the EiC to reconsider its publication in Philosophia.” Later in the day, he announced his resignation from the journal.
So this is turning into a major debacle.

(h'/t Dan)








Friday, December 24, 2021

Hafez al-Barghouti is a Fatah member who is the former editor of Palestinian Authority newspaper Al Hayat al-Jadida, and a frequent op-ed contributor to various Arab media.

Writing in Jordan's Al Ghad, Barghouti has come up with a completely new example of how Zionists steal everything from Arabs.

Hebrew.

In the middle of an article about Israeli cultural appropriation, where he falsely claims that Israelis told Miss Universe contestants that Bedouin culture was Jewish, and goes through the usual litany of how Israelis steal Arab dance, music and cuisine.

Then he says:
Even the current Hebrew language is a modern invention, as it was developed by a Russian Jew who came from Russia to Palestine in 1890 and used Arabic grammar and the Canaanite Aramaic language, and added to it from the Yiddish language and European languages ​​and called it a Hebrew language and written in Aramaic letters similar to ancient Arabic, i.e. separate letters.
Yes, he is claiming that the primary influence on modern Hebrew is not...Hebrew, and that the language was stolen from Arabs.

Of course, even before Eliezer ben-Yehudah worked to standardize modern Hebrew, Hebrew was spoken and used for secular purposes. A simple Hebrew was spoken in the Old Yishuv throughout the 1800s, and there were Hebrew journals and newspapers that pre-dated Ben Yehuda. The earliest examples of periodicals written in Hebrew online at Israel's National Library are Ha-Me'Asef (Poland) from 1783  and Ha-Tzefirah (Ukraine) from 1823. Ben Yehudah based modern Hebrew grammar primarily on Mishnaic Hebrew, not Arabic, although he took some words from modern Arabic and Hebraicized them.

But to some people, Jews are thieves and therefore everything Jewish or Zionist is stolen. Other languages evolve with outside influences, but Jews steal their language. Other cuisines borrow from other cultures, Israeli cuisine steals. 

___________________

Barghouti ends off the article with an old Arab joke, although I cannot figure out how it relates to his theme:
It is said that a well-known merchant in Hebron was a friend of an Israeli merchant, and one day the Israeli merchant complained that he had bought a large amount of women's bras and could not sell them because they were too large, so he offered to sell them to the Arab merchant at a cheap price. Months later they met, and the Israeli asked him what happened to the bras?  The Hebronite replied, “They have all been sold.” The Israeli wondered, “Do your women have big breasts?” The Hebron merchant replied, “No, but your heads are big. I have prepared and embroidered them as kippot for religious Jews, and I sold them.”

I've seen variants of that joke elsewhere, but someone who doesn't know that kippot are significantly cheaper than bras is not exactly the right person to act as an expert on Jews, Israelis or Hebrew.

Indeed, Jews have gone in the other direction - to turn kippot into bras.







Thursday, December 23, 2021

In 2017, Premiere Christian News reported:
Israel's occupation of Palestine is behind the exodus of Palestinian Christians from the region, according to a new study.

Research carried out by Dar al-Kalima University in the occupied West Bank town of Beit Jala, concluded that only a small percentage of Christians had left Palestine because of concerns over Muslim religious conservatism.

Explaining the rationale behind the results of the roughly 500 Christians and 500 Muslims interviewed, the study said: "The pressure of Israeli occupation, ongoing constraints, discriminatory policies, arbitrary arrests, confiscation of lands added to the general sense of hopelessness among Palestinian Christians."

Details of the survey are not available online, so I cannot yet see the methodology. It was published in a book by Diyar Publisher, edited by Mitri Raheb, who is the founder of Diyar as well as of Dar al-Kalima College in Bethlehem.

Raheb is not exactly apolitical. He is a member of the  Palestinian National Council and the Palestinian Central Council. 

He is a founder of Kairos Palestine, the antisemitic, supersessionist organization that attempts to use Christian theology to justify the idea that Jews have no business living in Israel and which calls the Torah a "dead letter."

Raheb's own quotes prove that he is an antisemite. 

He spoke at a 2010 "Christ at the Checkpoint" conference - whose title says that if Joseph and Mary tried to go to Bethlehem today, they would be blocked as "Palestinians." (In fact, as Jews, they would be lynched in today's Bethlehem.)

At that conference, he said that "the Palestinian people ...are the continuation of the peoples of the land" but "Israel represents Rome of the Bible, not the people of the land." Meaning that Jews have no connection to the Israel of the Bible but Palestinians do.

Then he descended into the purely antisemitic and thoroughly debunked Khazar theory: "I'm sure if we were to do a DNA test between David, who was a Bethlehemite, and Jesus, born in Bethlehem, and Mitri, born just across the street from where Jesus was born, I'm sure the DNA will show that there is a trace. While, if you put King David, Jesus and Netanyahu, you will get nothing, because Netanyahu comes from an East European tribe who converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages."

The head of a college, who has published his own academic papers and books, is a clear antisemite.

Why would anyone trust his study that was obviously designed to confirm his hate?






Friday, December 10, 2021

Willem Sassen was a Dutch collaborator with the Nazis who ended up becoming a Nazi reporter and a colonel in the Waffen-SS.

He was held in a British prison camp after the war but managed to escape and hide in various places after the war. In 1947, his girlfriend gave birth to a daughter, Saskia, and later that year they escaped Europe with many other Nazis, SS members and collaborators to hide in Argentina. 

He became famous for interviewing Adolf Eichmann in 1957, before he was discovered and captured by the Israelis. He was friends with Eichmann, and the mass murderer visited Sassen weekly. Sassen had hoped to write a book of Eichmann's memoirs where Eichmann would deny the Holocaust, but Eichmann was proud of his role and the book never got written. Sassen sold the recordings to Life magazine in 1960, which claimed it did not know he was a war criminal.

Sassen was also a colleague of Klaus Barbie in Argentina.

His daughter Saskia grew up with Eichmann visiting her home, although at first she didn't know who he was. She would have political discussions with her father:
At home, Sassen didn’t hide his political views from his precocious daughter. Father and daughter discussed the war, politics, things that weren’t taught in school. Saskia Sassen proclaimed herself a Communist at age 12. “We were like two little titans having a lot of political debates,” she says. “When it came to politics, we disagreed completely. And he was part of my political education, clearly.”

Saskia became a professor of sociology at Columbia University with a very good reputation. 

At least one part of Sassen's thinking made it through to his daughter, though: a hatred of Jews.

While the elder Sassen wanted to deny the Holocaust to discredit Jewish survivors, his daughter agrees that Jews are overly powerful and evil and should be boycotted:

Sassen signed a statement, published on August 12, 2014 by “American Muslim organizations, academics, Imams, community leaders and activists" who wished to “affirm our unequivocal support for Palestinian rights to freedom and dignity while forcefully condemning the illegal and oppressive occupation structure."

Signatories of the petition wrote that “The Israeli aggression against the civilian population of Gaza has surpassed all levels of brutality and cruelty" and went on to “Support the BDS Campaign to end occupation."

In December 2010, Sassen authored an article in which she described Gaza as “a site where Israeli forces can experiment with modes of urban warfare given the fact of occupation and control over most of the means of survival of the Gaza people. In the process it terrorizes a whole population."

She went on to charge that Israel “has done just about all that is conceivable to destroy it and demoralize a people."

On November 10, 2004, Sassen appeared on a panel at the University of Chicago (U of C) titled “Examining National Identity: Nationalism, Transnationalism, and the Future of the Middle East."

In an article chronicling the event, it was reported that Sassen walked out in the middle of the panel, outraged that her co-panelist suggested that Israel is disproportionately criticized by the United Nations.
The horseshoe theory of antisemitism has a great mascot.


(h/t Martin D)







Sunday, May 10, 2020

Palestinian textbooks have always encouraged terror and extolled martyrdom. For example here is a poem from a third grade textbook about dying for the cause of annihilating the Jews in Israel:


The Land of the GenerousI vow I shall sacrifice my blood, to saturate the land of the generous
 And will eliminate the usurper from my country, and will annihilate the  remnants of the foreigners.
 Oh the land of Al-Aqsa and the Haram, oh cradle of chivalry and generosity
 Patient, be patient as victory is ours, dawn is emerging from the oppression.
(Our Beautiful Language, Grade 3, Vol. 2, 2016–17, p 64. )
A new academic paper in Settler Colonial Studies by Nadia Naser-Najjab of the University of Exeter justifies such lessons taught to children - and condemns any attempt by Europe or Israel to eliminate the incitement to terror in such textbooks as a colonialist attack on Palestinian society.

The paper, "Palestinian education and the ‘logic of elimination’", includes doubletalk like this to condone teaching terrorism (which she whitewashes as "resistance"):
I seek to make it quite clear that what is at stake is not the upholding of values of objectivity and neutrality but rather the desire – which is barely concealed – to disallow or delegitimise Palestinian resistance....
I place Israel’s attempts to control Palestinian education in historical, political and, perhaps most crucially of all, colonial, context. I argue that these interventions are part of a conscious and deliberate attempt to deny the legitimacy of resistance to occupation.... 
 I instead propose to focus upon the question of incitement, with the intention of demonstrating how this links into Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination’. I suggest that the proposition that Palestinian education should be detached from the material realities of occupation is in many respects a denial of Palestinian narratives of resistance and struggle and, by extension, a denial of the Palestinian right to exist.
Palestinians are required to distort and even disown their history and narrative in the name of ‘peace’....Under these circumstances, ‘peace’ takes on an Orwellian significance and works in the service of an unsustainable status quo.
According to Nasser-Najjab, asking that Palestinians stop teaching kids that their ultimate goal is to die trying to kill Jews is an unacceptable colonialist demand to change pure and holy Palestinian culture.

Which means, of course, that Palestinian culture is to encourage violence and death.

In the disgusting moral universe of today's Middle East studies, asking people to stop teaching kids to glorify terrorism is a worse crime than the suicide bombings themselves.

This might all sound outrageous and sickening, but the justifications for terror presented as academic research today becomes accepted narrative by politicians and journalists tomorrow.





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Friday, May 08, 2020

Published in Mediterranean Politics in April:

Rethinking justice beyond human rights. Anti-colonialism and intersectionality in the politics of the Palestinian Youth Movement

This article discusses the politics of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) – a contemporary social movement operating across a number of Arab and western countries. Unlike analysis on the Arab Uprisings which focused on the national dimension of youth activism, we explore how the PYM politics fosters and upholds an explicitly transnational anti-colonial and intersectional solidarity framework, which foregrounds a radical critique of conventional notions of self-determination based on state-framed human rights discourses and international law paradigms. The struggle becomes instead framed as an issue of justice, freedom and liberation from interlocking forms and hierarchies of oppression.
This movement sounds very intellectual and woke!

Here's one of the photos on PYM's Facebook page:


Wow, VERY woke.

Number of times the paper mentions Palestinian violence: Zero
Number of times the paper mentions Palestinian terror: Zero
Number of times the paper mentions "struggle:" 24






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Wednesday, May 06, 2020



If you can make heads or tails out of this abstract, my hat's off to you:

Palestine and the Will to Theorise Decolonial QueeringWalaa Alqaisiya

AbstractThis article posits a theorisation of decolonisation in relation to queer as it emerges from the settler-colonial context of Palestine, what I call decolonial queering. The first part provides a new reading of Zionist settler-colonialism, which I define as hetero-conquest. Its novelty lies in refocusing the question of colonialism in native grounded knowledge of queering, while showing the limitations of those existing studies whose frames emanate mainly from American and/or global north contexts of racism and homo-nationalism. By tracing the contemporary continuity of hetero-conquest in Palestine, the second part unpacks the need for a radical theory of liberation that weaves decolonization into queer. Bringing Sara Ahmed and Frantz Fanon into dialogue, such a theory emanates from the amalgam of histories, geographies and bodies, whose restoration beyond the strictures of hetero-conquest opens the way for a radical multi-scalar politics of liberation.
The paper itself isn't much more understandable, but one part that was almost in English was interesting.

In May 2016, Israel held its first ever beauty pageant for transgender people and the winner was Talleen Abu Hanna, an ‘Arab citizen of Israel,’ who became Israel’s transgender beauty queen. Abu Hanna’s victory marked a significant historic moment, signalling the undeniable progressiveness of Israel as an LGBT haven. The circulating facts about Israel as a beacon of LGBT emancipation, however, are part of a very carefully engineered array of narratives that aim to frame and sponsor the country as a liberal democracy via its record on gender and sexuality rights. In so doing, those narratives also are engrained into a chrono-geographical scheme that is reminiscent of what has been presented so far. Israel’s record of LGBT tolerance, in fact, is measured in relation to its Arab neighbours, who happen to lack such values....

The success story of Israel’s Arab transgender queen is not simply a historic moment showcasing Israel’s progress on transgender rights, but it sits within the discursive economies of Zionist rightful [settler-colonial] presence over Palestine by virtue of emancipating the ‘oriental’ ‘woman-land.’ Being a woman and Arab, in fact, are constituting elements in this victory, as they permit readers to zoom on the necessity of her ‘triumph’ over her Arab closed-minded background, which rejected her and did not accept her transitioning....

Abu Hannah’s case and the narratives mobilised around her allows us to map the historical continuity of Zionist hetero-conquest. Similar to the oriental woman-land, whose emancipation awaited halutz desiring project -fusing Zionist spatio-temporal constitutive (modern ploughing techniques birthing a Zionist geography)- Abu Hanna’s ability to transition successfully as a woman owes to Israel’s presence as a place of modern sexual values. Read within the sphere of Halutz desiring logic, Abu Hanna is the perfect embodiment of a sexed and gendered other, whose racialised [oriental] essence makes it possible to demarcate the necessity of Zionist conquest, with its moral modern and civilizational attributes. Through Abu Hanna, Israel’s unprecedented celebration of transgender rights can be fathomed only in relation to its antithesis: a Palestine to which Abu Hanna is grateful not to belong to. The latter lacks in cultural and moral values that Israel has – [Palestine] would have killed Abu Hanna- while Israel is the one that nurtures and permits the unfolding of her True sexed/gendered self. With this triumph, Abu Hanna is not only said to reveal and fulfil her true gendered self, but is also caught within the discursive promotion of Israel: As a place of peace and a culture of sexual tolerance as opposed to Palestine and rest of the Arab region. The birthing of an Arab transgender queen of Israel, therefore, corresponds to a Zionist settler colonial teleology, generating - once again - the legitimizing grounds for de-legitimising Arabness/Palestine.
Alqaisiya cannot deny that Israel is a liberal state. She cannot deny that transgender rights exist in Israel and are non-existent in the Palestinian areas. She cannot deny that Talleen Abu Hanna is a proud Israeli who would be killed if she lived under Palestinian rule.

But pointing out those facts is immoral, because it helps legitimate Israel and it delegitimizes Palestine.

In other words, pointing out that Israel is a more moral and a more liberal society than any in the Arab world is worse than the gay-bashing, misogynist Arab culture itself. There is no greater crime than legitimizing Israel, and its liberalism and morality do exactly that, so they must not be discussed.  And when Israel shows pride in its own accomplishments and its humanity, that is all a means to legitimize itself, and therefore immoral.

The next paragraph of gibberish mostly confirms what I wrote, but it ends with an astonishing statement for a supposed liberal to make:

Conceptual frames approaching queerness as a liberal critique would interpret the case of Israel’s first Arab beauty queen as the emergence of (queer) homo-normative/ nationalist subjectivity, thus serving a liberal/nationalist status quo that is nevertheless racist. Drawing on decolonial queering, however, I capture the historical continuity of hetero-conquest and the embedded violence on a native self from without and from within. This lens invites the reader to reflect on the case of Abu Hannah - and the narratives around her – as part and parcel of the history of Zionist conquest, whose constitutive gendering and racializing elements cohere with a structural settler-colonial politics of Time, Space and Desire. More importantly, decolonial queering situates queerness in relation to hetero-conquest generated from within Arab-native self-struggle and adopted taxonomies for emancipation. In other words, the story of the first Arab transgender queen in Israel is not simply a moment of queer liberal time, where the racialized Arab emerges as ‘the most salient and dangerous other at the moment the homosexual, once the nation’s sexual other, gains increasing acceptability.’ This would be a reductive analysis that divorces the event from a wider historical continuity of settler-colonial conquest and its generative production of the conquerable other. This triumph explains how those same dynamics of hetero-conquest – mapped above – perpetuate, whereby the colonising saviour self-legitimises its presence over the woman/land by virtue of extending those progressive values and tools the native is presumed to lack. What is important in Abu Hannah’s case is that she as an Arab who  is said to reify this narrative of Israel’s legitimate presence by virtue of promoting herself as Israeli and mobilising international support for Israel. She, therefore, confirms the Zionist colonial fantasy of having to endow conquest, as Neumann would perceive it in its moral liberating terms vis-a-vis the woman-native who is yearning for her conqueror.
The Arab winner of a beauty contest is a person to be loathed because she said nice things about Israel. According to Alqaisiya, this cannot possibly be because she actually likes her country. No, she is "yearning for her conqueror" and is therefore worthy of contempt.

The only possible way that a leftist can insult a trans woman without the risk of being labeled "transphobic," is if that trans woman praises Israel, the ultimate evil. 

This is academia in the social sciences today - pseudo-academic texts with multi-syllabic (and invented) words all meant to justify the basest of hatreds.




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