My sinusitis is also still pretty bad from the Spring and I need to start irrigating my nose again. It's also blazing hot here and we only run the air conditioning 2 hours a day or so because it is so darned hot.
Anyway, just to give you some reading material to look over while I am not posting. Nell at A Lovely Promise, an interesting progressive blog I just ran across, has been doing some great work on the rape/murder of the 15-yr-old Iraqi girl in Mahmudiyah and the murder of her family to cover up the crime.
3 US soldiers have been charged with rape and murder in the case and another has been charged with dereliction of duty. Nell has been doing some great investigative and analytical reporting on the case, which is something we try to do here as well (What the heck, I do have a journalism degree).
Now, it's just fine that the vast majority of bloggers do little or no investigative reporting. At this point, even a progressive echo chamber sounds like a great idea. Let's all repeat each other's concepts and truths, and democratically (the blogosphere is nothing if not the ultimate in media democracy and punditry democracy) spread the word far and wide to masses who need to learn from us!
I'm also reading a lot of Steven Lendeman, a progressive Jewish blogger who is a fine writer and longtime activist. Lendeman's prose and research is so well-done that he is actually getting published in ZNet, one of my favorite publications. His knowledge is stunning, encyclopedic and sweeping and I love the way he "puts it all together". Like the journalistic equivalent of the epiphany we know from literature.
Steve's main theme is US imperialism, and unlike some authors (Chomsky and his acolytes at their worst) Lendeman's analysis of US imperialism is painstakingly researched and very well thought-out.
Let's say that it holds together and lights up the sky with his insight, whereas Chomsky and others overreach and try to explain far too many bad things to the US imperialist bogyman. I think he needs to work on that blog design a bit though!
If you can get your mind around it, try out Issues and Questions in the Historiography of Pre-State Zionism by Joachim Martillo, from a talk given by Martillo, a certifiable genius, to New Jersey Solidarity in October 2002, one of the most radical Palestinian solidarity organizations.
NJ Solidarity actually has a strong Leftist base, and openly supports the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). See my long post on the PFLP here for background on this interesting but very radical organization.
Regarding Martillo's piece, I do not know where to begin! It is definitely an intellectual challenge all right. For one thing, it is about 90 pages long, but it is well worth printing out. He offers a whole different take on Zionism than the standard treatment.
If you do some Internet research on Martillo, you find he is a bit of a kook, and politically he has been all over the place in the past 20 years. He has tendencies to alienate people due to his, well, fanaticism, general belligerence, and extremely opinionated nature.
Martillo is a Sephardic Jew with a deep resentment of Ashkenazi Jews that inflects much of his work. Most Gentiles don't know much about the Sephardic-Ashkenazi split amongst Jews, mostly because most US Jews (90%) are Ashkenazim.
He came from a privileged background amongst the East Coast super-elite (prep school) and then he went to Harvard as an undergrad, but apparently he dropped out. He has read more books on the subject of Zionism that the rest of us will in a lifetime, and he read many of them in their native languages!
10-15 years ago, Martillo was a belligerent neoconservative and open advocate for the recolonization by the superior West of the inferior failed states of the Third World.
Now he's gone full circle to a radical supporter of the anti-imperialist 3rd World movements. He has recently married an apparent Jewish convert to Islam, a woman who, according to the Internet, has gone off the deep end into hardline radical fundamentalist Islam.
This couple is causing titters in progressive circles in Cambridge, where he continues to be active in the Israeli divestment movement. However, after some discussions with her via email, it turns out, as far as I can tell, she is just an ordinary Muslim.
The bit about her being a fundamentalist Hamas supporter is apparently just the usual militant Jewish Zionist lies, slander and character assassination that anyone who takes these disturbed people on ends up facing.
I really don't give a damn if the guy is a fanatic. This work is fascinating (consider printing it out to read at your leisure) and is one of the most brilliant and wide-ranging attacks on Zionism I have ever read. It's not even available on the Net anymore, but I managed to snag a cached version that should be up for a while.
I spent much of my vacation dragging myself through a truly fantastic essay that has not received the publicity it should. What is Conservatism and What Is Wrong With It?, from August 2004, by Philip Agre, an Associate Professor in Information Studies (Whatever that is!) at UCLA in Los Angeles, California.
After reading this essay and thinking deeply about it, all I can say is, Wow! This essay needs to be shouted from the rooftops and run off in the 1000's of copies and distributed free all across America.
Hopefully, we will be discussing this seminal essay in future posts, but for now, let us just look a few earthshaking lines at the beginning:
Q: What is conservatism?This article completely, with deft and class and dignity, transcends the name-calling rage that so much of the Left Blogosphere degenerates into when confronting the conservatism, pseudo-fascism and outright fascism of George Bush and his supporters.
A: Conservatism is the domination of society by an aristocracy.
Q: What is wrong with conservatism?
A: Conservatism is incompatible with democracy, prosperity, and civilization in general. It is a destructive system of inequality and prejudice that is founded on deception and has no place in the modern world.
In Agre's brilliant formulation, we can formulate a mass movement that cleaves into two factions, supporters of aristocratic rule (conservatives) and supporters of democratic rule (liberals or the rest of us).
In doing so, there is deep liberation and a lot of anxiety. Hopefully, in our pro-democratic rule faction we can include social conservatives of all stripes, the vast small business sector (which Agre perceptively calls "the democratization of entrepreneurship), and even the progressive Super-Rich like George Soros.
Like the odd coalitions of gun owners, the Christian Coalition, internet corporations and progressives uniting to fight to retain network neutrality and prevent the censorship of the Internet, we too can make an eclectic coalition including those who would in many cases not be on our side.
In fighting the many-headed hydra of modern-day industrial strength public relations-driven conservatism, it is reasonable to attack one head of the beast at a time.
Let's throw down the gauntlet to the entire nation and force folks to take sides: Who do you want to rule this nation? A tiny aristocracy on top of a rigid, stratified, hierarchical class-based system where each class defers to the one above it? You call that American? Sounds like Old Europe to me? Or, do you support the American Way, democratic rule by the people themselves?
Hopefully, I will have much more to say about this profound work in the future.
I also dipped into a fascinating essay by Dr. Kaveh Farrokh, an Iranian academic, Pan-Arabism's Legacy of Confrontation With Iran. Hopefully, I will discuss this excellent but obscure work - which to be honest, needs to be much more fleshed out and deeply researched - more later on. But as a start, it is very nice.
This subject seems obscure to most folks nowadays.
But with Sunnis and Shias slaughtering each other right and left, the US and Israel threatening to attack Iran over a nuclear program it is fully within its rights to have, with the specters of Al Qaeda, Salafism, Takfirism, the Taliban, and Zarqawi's ghost haunting our world, this essay helps to light up this murky region by explaining the roots of Sunni Arab, and Sunni Muslim, rage towards Shia Arabs and Shia Muslims.
It also helps explain such anomalous situations as Saddam's persecution of the Shia, the Iran-Iraq War, the fact that the Gulf Arab states are working with the US and Israel and promote military attack on Iran. This piece is mandatory for understanding the current Hellish chaos in Iran.
Those wanting to dip further into the arcana of intra-Islamic debate may wish to check out this difficult piece, The Poverty of Fanaticism, by Abdal Hakim-Murad. It's probable not that accessible unless you have some knowledge of Islam. The very well-written and beautiful piece is coming from a Sufi point of view and the author is not a liberal at all (he supports an Islamic state).
However, he brilliantly destroys the incoherent, insipid and ultimately un-Islamic philosophy of the Muslim Takfiri and Salafist terrorist pricks who are running around blowing up so much stuff nowadays.
Among other things, he shows how Sufism, one of the finest and most beautiful and worthwhile aspects of the problematic Muslim religion, has been a part of Islam from the very start, smashing the ignorant anti-Sufi nonsense of the Salafists and Wahhabis with a few deft strokes of the pen. It isn't necessarily a choice between Irshan Manji (whom many Muslims find too liberal) and Al Qaeda.
There is also the way of the purification of the heart, that being Sufism. On this page there are some other articles by Murshad, including Recapturing Islam From the Terrorists and Bin Laden's Violence is a Heresy Against Islam. Please note that this man is a conservative Muslim and a brilliant Muslim scholar with a vast knowledge of Muslim scholarship and history. I may discuss these 2 articles a bit more in later posts.
For the infectious pustule called variously Salafism, Wahhabism or Takfirism, this angry boil flaring in Dar al Islam, there is a lance for this pus-filled blight - a lance called Sufism. Does it stand a chance against the baying hounds and serial killers of the modern-day Islamic Kharajites? I have doubts, but it's nice to know that at least some Muslims are taking a strong stand alongside us in our fight against these Muslim barbarians.
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