quarta-feira, 25 de dezembro de 2013

5 ataques terroristas em Israel nos últimos 8 dias, só a resposta israelense é notícia para a Globo



As vítimas:

Saleh Abu Latif - árabe israelense atingido por um sniper de Gaza enquanto trabalhava reparando uma cerca
Rami Ravid - guarda de trânsito esfaqueado pelas costas enquanto controlava o tráfego
Shlomi Cohen - soldado israelense atingindo por dois tiros disparados por um soldado libanês enquanto dirigia em Israel. Deixa esposa e uma filha pequena

ônibus explodido nos subúrbios de Tel Aviv (1 ferido)
Foguetes lançados contra população civil de Israel



Natal na Terra Santa em 1875

http://orientemedioemfotos.blogspot.com.br/2013/12/natal-na-terra-santa-em-1875.html


Peregrinos cristãos chegando na cidade de Belém em 1875 (Library of Congress)


A cidade de Belém desempenha um papel importante na fé cristã. Foi lá, os cristãos acreditam, o local onde Jesus nasceu cerca de 2.000 anos atrás, e é onde muitos deles celebram o seu nascimento no Natal.

Mas... quando é o Natal?
Belém abriga serviços de Natal para católicos e protestantes em 25 de dezembro. Já para coptas, gregos e sírios ortodoxos a celebração será na Igreja da Natividade, em 7 de janeiro. Para os  ortodoxos armênios o Natal será em 6 de janeiro.

O nome "Belém" é derivado do hebraico בית לחם -- Beith Leem/ Casa do Pão --, e seus campos de cereais são mencionados no Livro de Rute como o local onde ela conseguia trigo para a sua sogra Naomi, e onde conheceu seu futuro marido, Boaz. Ainda de acordo com a Bíblia, Daví, o bisneto de Rute, nasceu em Belém, cidade onde ele foi ungido como rei de Israel.



Igreja da Natividade foi construída no ano de 339 pelo rei Constantino e sua mãe, Helena, sobre a gruta onde acredita-se ter sido o local de nascimento de Jesus. 
Ao longo da história, a igreja foi destruída e/ou reconstruída por vários exércitos conquistadores -- samaritanos, persas, árabes, cruzados, mamelucos, otomanos e britânicos.

Até pouco tempo, Belém era considerada uma cidade tradicionalmente cristã. Construída em torno da basílica, o turismo sempre foi sua mais importante fonte de renda. Entretanto, nos últimos anos, a proporção de cristãos em Belém caiu de 75% em 1948 para 54% em 1967, e agora está em torno de apenas 15%. A cidade de Belém esteve sob controle jordaniano de 1948 até 1967 e, desde então, está sob controle da Autoridade Nacional Palestina.

Jesus, o palestino

http://orientemedioemfotos.blogspot.com.br/2013/12/jesus-o-palestino.html

Jesus retratado como um terrorista suicida palestino


Eis que o Natal se aproxima, e junto com ele vem a já tradicional falsificação da história por parte da liderança árabe muçulmana, que apresenta Jesus como um árabe-cananeu-muçulmano-palestino (!).

No início de 2013, graças a um artigo no jornal oficial da Autoridade Palestina al-Hayat al-Jadida, o mundo inteiro descobriu que a história de Jesus "reflete a narrativa palestina". A manchete "A ressurreição de Jesus, a ressurreição do Estado" deixa claro que Jesus e a Autoridade Palestina são um, e que estão unidos para sempre - uma tentativa um tanto patética de convencer os cristãos (em plena Páscoa!) de que eles na verdade são muçulmanos e que o movimento sionista moderno roubou os "palestinos" de sua história.

Segundo o artigo, na verdade a "Páscoa é um feriado para o nacionalismo palestino, porque Jesus, que descanse em paz, é um cananeu palestino". O autor substituiu o Jesus judeu por um Jesus "palestino" -- mais adequado à propaganda árabe --, reescrevendo os Evangelhos que, logo em seus primeiros capítulos, falam dos registros genealógicos de Jesus e se referem ao seu local de nascimento como "Belém da Judéia".


 Depois que Jesus nasceu em Belém da Judeia, nos dias do rei Herodes, magos vindos do oriente chegaram a Jerusalém (Mateus 2:1)
Enquanto a tradição cristã e os escritos históricos do período retratam Jesus como um judeu vivendo na terra da Judéia (um dos reinos dos judeus), a Autoridade Palestina diz que ela e seu povo são seus verdadeiros descendentes. Esta não é apenas uma distorção da história pessoal de Jesus como relatado nos escritos cristãos, é também um anacronismo: o imperador Adriano mudou o nome da Judéia/Israel para "Palestina", a fim de punir a nação judaica depois que estes se rebelaram contra os ocupantes romanos, 136 anos após o nascimento de Jesus.


al-Hayat al-Jadida e seu Jesus palestino

"A visita do Papa é uma oportunidade para a liderança palestina apresentar sua causa... para que Sua Excelência [o papa] assuma a sua responsabilidade política e religiosa para com o povo da Terra Santa, o povo árabe palestino, o povo do Messias [Jesus]."
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), 9 de maio de 2009

"Os palestinos estão acostumados ​​com mortes como esta. O sofrimento do primeiro palestino -- o Messias -- começou com a Última Ceia."
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), Abril 30, 2008

"O Cristianismo nasceu em nossos países árabes e o Messias [Jesus] é um palestino sírio, nascido em Nazaré."
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), outubro 28, 2006

"O Shahids (mártires) vão chorar: 'Nós balançamos as palmeiras ao lado de Senhora Terra e da Senhora do povo, a Virgem Maria, e com seu filho [Jesus], o primeiro shahid (mártir) palestino."
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), 17 de janeiro de 2005

"A aldeia palestina da Galiléia e de Kfar Kana se orgulham do fato de que [na aldeia] o messias palestino [Jesus] conseguiu transformar água em vinho."
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), 17 de janeiro de 2005

"Eles [os cristãos] lêem no livro sagrado [a Bíblia] o nome "Palestina" e os verdadeiros nomes [árabes] de nossas aldeias e cidades ... Não devemos esquecer que o Messias [Jesus] é palestino, o filho de Maria, a Palestina."
Al-Hayat Al-Jadida (Fatah), 18 de novembro de 2005



Mufti (autoridade religiosa islâmica) diz que Jesus era um profeta muçulmano palestino

terça-feira, 24 de dezembro de 2013

Haaretz’s Holocaust Revisionism

A new level of vileness has been reached in the pages of Haaretz. It has already published work extremely critical of the State of Israel–even running columnists that support boycotting the state. But regardless of one’s opinions on the Palestinian issue, the paper has now shown that it exists in a world entirely divorced from any Jewish consensus, and cannot claim the title of loyal opposition. It has crossed all prior bounds of decency and published acriticism of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, calling it a “myth,” and accusing its heroes of being responsible for the ultimate liquidation of the Ghetto. Despite disagreements on diplomatic, territorial, and religious issues, the memory of the Holocaust–its heroes and victims–had been the great unifying porch in post-War Jewish consciousness. Now the Holocaust is fair game too.
The article’s argument is that maybe if the fighters had not been so uppity, if they had not made a fuss–then the Nazis, who had already murdered 500,000 Jews of Warsaw, might have let the remaining 50,000 live. Maybe! It is not a new argument. Rather, the author amazingly resurrects and endorses the arguments of the Judernat, the Jewish collaboration government of the Ghetto. With every new deportation, they urged restrain with increasing urgency–maybe they will let the rest of us live, and if you fight, all the past deportations would be a sacrifice in vain.
There can be no more terrible case of “blaming the victim” than laying any responsibility for the liquidation of the Ghetto at the feet of the fighters.
It is true, the Jewish “communal leadership”–and the rabbis–opposed the uprising. That is what made it brave. The Judenrat had no right to decide if residents of the Ghetto died in gas chambers or fighting for their freedom.
Of course, Haaretz wants to be “edgy,” “iconoclastic,” and debunk cherished myths. But despite the article’s headline–“The Warsaw Ghetto Myth”– it reveals no myths at all, only a lack of precision where we always knew it existed. It claims that it turns out that not many people participated in the uprising–a well-known fact. Then it attempts to introduce confusion by saying the precise figures are “murky,” and endorses the low-ball estimates based on the recollections of one person. Playing such counting games is vile. No one knows the number of participants, just as no one knows the number of Holocaust victims. And “revising” such vague numbers downward is now the standard canard of Holocaust deniers.
Again, the small numbers do not “debunk” any myths–they reinforce them. This was a small group of young people who bravely risked capture and death by slow torture, in contradiction with the collaborationist leadership that had thus far been wrong about everything.
Ultimately, the article’s target is not really the Holocaust. The author objects to the glorification of the glorified by the Zionist movement in the early years of the state. Perhaps the fighters should have awaited deportation and seen themselves as “sacrifices for peace,” to use the buzzword of the Second Intifada.
No doubt this is why Haaretz has, somewhat oddly for a newspaper, chosen to revisit the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. The newspaper has long tried to persuade Jews in Israel that they need no longer fight–they can trust someone to save them. John Kerry is coming to Jerusalem next month with just such a pitch. In order to advance their political agenda, the newspaper does not stop at besmirching one of the proudest pages of our history, nor at aligning themselves with the most shameful, the Judenrat.
The sanctified memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is not based on its military significance, its size–or its conformity to the Zionist ethos. Rather, it is the considered, consensus judgment of Jewish history that the fighters were right.

sexta-feira, 13 de dezembro de 2013

Os palestinos são um povo diferente?

Antes de 1948, o termo "palestino" era usado para descrever os judeus e era equivalente ao termo "sionista."

Martin Peretz, editor-chefe da New Republic, levantou a questão sobre se os árabes palestinos são um povo e nação distintos, e por isto ele está sendo denunciado em certos círculos. A fúria resultante criou uma cortina de fumaça sobre uma questão que merece exame em uma atmosfera de respeito e moderação. Os árabes palestinos são um povo distinto, separado dos outros árabes?
O fundador da Palestina árabe, Haj Amin al-Husseini, foi nomeado como mufti de Jerusalem e chefe do Alto Comitê Árabe pelos britânicos, durante o Mandato da Palestina, em 1921. Antes da derrota do Império Otomano na Primeira Guerra Mundial, a região, chamada de Palestina pelos britânicos, tinha sido uma parte da província otomana da Síria. Husseini era um pan-arabista que via a região como uma parte da Síria e, posteriormente, como parte da Ummah, a pátria árabe. Husseini passou os anos da Segunda Guerra Mundial em Berlim, onde, depois de se encontrar com Hitler, ele foi considerado pelos nazistas como o líder no exílio de um futuro estado árabe-nazista, a ser estabelecido no Oriente Médio depois da vitória do Terceiro Reich. Os nazistas foram detidos nos portões da Palestina pelo britânico marechal de campo Bernard Montgomery, na batalha de El Alamein, em 1942.

Antes de 1948, o termo "palestino" era usado para descrever os judeus e era equivalente ao termo "sionista." Os moradores árabes da Palestina, a maioria dos quais emigraram para lá de forma paralela à emigração judaica, e que assim fizeram a fim de aproveitar as oportunidades econômicas ampliadas que acompanhavam a imigração judaica, consideravam a si mesmos ou como parte do Estado judaico emergente ou como parte de uma estado árabe mais amplo.

Como mufti de Jerusalem, Hussein teve como papel central levantar a imagem de Jerusalém como um local de importância para o Islã. Ele levantou fundos em países árabes e islâmicos para o folheamento a ouro da Cúpula da Mesquita, conhecida hoje como a Cúpula da Rocha, alegando que havia uma conspiração dos judeus para explodi-la. Os principais locais sagrados do Islã são Meca e Medina e as poucas referências a Jerusalém e Israel no Corão na verdade exortam à criação de um estado judaico.

Em 1919, o Emir Faisal, quando líder da delegação árabe para a Conferência de Paz de Paris, reconheceu a soberania judaica na Palestina, quando assinou o Acordo Faisal-Weizmann. Em 1922, o primeiro-ministro britânico Winston Chrurchill dividiu o Mandato Britânico da Palestina ao longo do Rio Jordão em Palestina Oriental, ou Transjordânia, e Palestina Ocidental, ou Cisjordânia. A Transjordânia, que seria reconhecida pela ONU como o Reino da Jordânia, em 1947, deveria ser a Palestina exclusivamente árabe, enquanto que a Cisjordânia, ou Palestina, seria igualmente reconhecida como Israel pela ONU, em 1947.

Depois da Guerra de Independência de Israel, em 1948, até a Guerra dos Seis dias, em 1967, a região a oeste do Rio Jordão que foi ocupada pelo Reino da Jordânia era conhecida como Jordânia Ocidental e os árabes vivendo lá eram cidadãos jordanianos. Ahmad Shukari, fundador da OLP, afirmou em 1967 que "a Jordândia é a Palestina e a Palestina é a Jordânia." O membro da OLP Abu Iyad relembrou em suas memórias, "Palestino sem pátria," que ele e outros membros da OLP tinham sido aconselhados em 1973 pelos norte-vietnamitas a desenvolverem a ideia da "solução dos dois estados". Os norte-vietnamitas aconselharam Iyad a "parar de falar sobre aniquilar Israel e, ao invés disso, transformar sua guerra terrorista em uma luta por direitos humanos. Aí você vai fazer os americanos comerem na sua mão." A OLP, patrocinada pela União Soviética, continuou sua guerra contra Israel, tanto através do terrorismo quanto pela promoção do artifício diplomático que veio a ser conhecido como a "solução dos dois estados." O movimento pela soberania árabe-palestina a oeste do Rio Jordão é e nunca foi mais do que um movimento de vanguarda buscando a destruição final do Estado de Israel.


Nota do tradutor:Sobre a farsa da "questão palestina", há dois excelentes vídeos em formato de audio no YouTube (ambos em inglês), da série Idiot's Guide to IslamJudea or Palestine A e Judea or Palestine B. Sobre a farsa ainda maior do tal "processo de paz" entre os israelenses e os "palestinos" de araque, veja este segmento de uma entrevista de Kifah Radaydeh, alto membro do Fatah (um partido supostamente moderado), à TV da Autoridade Palestina, em 7 de julho de 2009, em que ela diz candidamente: "Tem sido dito que nós estamos negociando por paz (...) mas nosso objetivo nunca foi a paz. A paz é um meio; o objetivo é a Palestina." Vai ver a moça não sabe do que está falando...

Chuck Morse é um veterano do talk show e autor de "The Nazi Connection to Islamic Terrorism: Adolf Hitler and Haj Amin Al-Husseini" [A ligação Nazista com o Terrorismo Islâmico: Hitler e Haj Amin Hussein]

Tradução do blog DEXTRA
Artigo original AQUI.

quarta-feira, 11 de dezembro de 2013

Enough Said: The False Scholarship of Edward Said



Columbia University’s English Department may seem a surprising place from which to move the world, but this is what Professor Edward Said accomplished. He not only transformed the West’s perception of the Israel-Arab conflict, he also led the way toward a new, post-socialist life for leftism in which the proletariat was replaced by “people of color” as the redeemers of humankind. During the ten years that have passed since his death there have been no signs that his extraordinary influence is diminishing.
According to a 2005 search on the utility “Syllabus finder,” Said’s books were assigned as reading in eight hundred and sixty-eight courses in American colleges and universities (counting only courses whose syllabi were available online). These ranged across literary criticism, politics, anthropology, Middle East studies, and other disciplines including postcolonial studies, a field widely credited with having grown out of Said’s work. More than forty books have been published about him, including even a few critical ones, but mostly adulatory, such as The Cambridge Introduction to Edward Said, published seven years after his death of leukemia in 2003. Georgetown University, UCLA, and other schools offer courses about him. A 2001 review for the Guardian called him “arguably the most influential intellectual of our time.”
The book that made Edward Said famous was Orientalism, published in 1978 when he was forty-three. Said’s objective was to expose the worm at the core of Western civilization, namely, its inability to define itself except over and against an imagined “other.” That “other” was the Oriental, a figure “to be feared . . . or to be controlled.” Ergo, Said claimed that “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was . . . a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” Elsewhere in the text he made clear that what was true for Europeans held equally for Americans.

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This echoed a theme of 1960s radicalism that was forged in the movements against Jim Crow and against America’s war in Vietnam, namely that the Caucasian race was the scourge of humanity. Rather than shout this accusation from a soapbox, as others had done, Said delivered it in tones that awed readers with erudition. The names of abstruse contemporary theoreticians and obscure bygone academicians rolled off pages strewn with words that sent readers scurrying to their dictionaries. Never mind that some of these words could not be found in dictionaries (“paradeutic”) or that some were misused (“eschatological” where “scatological” was the intended meaning); never mind that some of the citations were pretentious (“the names of Levi-Strauss, Gramsci, and Michel Foucault drop with a dull thud,” commented historian J. H. Plumb, reviewing the book for the New York Times”)—never mind any of this, the important point that evoked frissons of pleasure and excitement was that here was a “person of color” delivering a withering condemnation of the white man and, so to speak, beating him at his own game of intellectual elegance.
In truth, Said was an unlikely symbol of the wretched of the earth. His father, who called himself William, had emigrated from Jerusalem (a place he hated, according to Edward) to America in 1911, served in World War I, and become a US citizen. Reluctantly yielding to family pressures, he returned to the Middle East in the 1920s and settled in Cairo, where he made his fortune in business and married an Egyptian woman. Edward, their eldest after a first-born had perished in infancy, was told he was named after the Prince of Wales. He and his four sisters were reared in the Protestant church and in relative opulence, with a box at the opera, membership in country clubs, and piano lessons. They were educated at British and American primary and secondary schools in Cairo until Edward was sent to an elite New England prep school at fifteen, then to Princeton. After graduate studies at Harvard, he began to teach literary criticism, rising to the award of an endowed chair at Columbia by the time he was forty and later to the rank of university professor, Columbia’s highest faculty title.
A year after Orientalism sent his personal stock soaring, Said published The Question of Palestine. Fifteen years earlier, the Palestine Liberation Organization had been founded in the effort to consecrate a distinctive Palestinian identity, and the announcement of that identity to the world had mostly taken the form of spectacular acts of terror whose purpose was in large measure to draw attention to Palestinian grievances. Now, Columbia University’s Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature gave the Palestinian cause a dramatically different face.
He brought authenticity to this task because of his origins and authority because of his membership in the Palestinian National Council, the nominal governing body of the PLO. Assuring his readers that the PLO had, since its bombings and hijackings in the early 1970s, “avoided and condemned terror,” presenting PLO leader Yasir Arafat as “a much misunderstood and maligned political personality,” and asserting his own belief in a Palestinian state alongside—rather than in place of—Israel, Said argued in behalf of “a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.” This was so compelling as to sweep up New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who wrote: “So logically and eloquently does Professor Said make [his] case, that one momentarily forgets the many countervailing arguments posed by the Israelis.”
These two books—Orientalism and The Question of Palestine—each of which was followed by various sequels and elaborations, established the twin pillars of Said’s career as the avenging voice of the Palestinians against Israel, and more broadly of the Arabs, Muslims, and other “Orientals” against the West as a whole.
Said rolled American racism and European colonialism into one mélange of white oppression of darker-skinned peoples. He was not the only thinker to have forged this amalgam, but his unique further contribution was to represent “Orientals” as the epitome of the dark-skinned; Muslims as the modal Orientals; Arabs as the essential Muslims; and, finally, Palestinians as the ultimate Arabs. Abracadabra—Israel was transformed from a redemptive refuge from two thousand years of persecution to the very embodiment of white supremacy.
There was one final step in this progression: Edward Said as the emblematic Palestinian. From the time he came into the public eye, Said presented himself as an “exile” who had been born and raised in Jerusalem until forced from there at age twelve by the Jews. A sympathetic writer in the Guardian put it: “His evocation of his own experience of exile has led many of his readers in the west to see him as the embodiment of the Palestinian tragedy.” Indeed, he wrote and narrated a 1998 BBC documentary, In Search of Palestine, which presented his personal story as a microcosm of this ongoing Nakba (or catastrophe, as Palestinians call the birth of Israel).
But in September 1999, Commentary published an investigative article by Justus Reid Weiner presenting evidence that Said had largely falsified his background. A trove of documents showed that until he moved to the United States to attend prep school in 1951, Said had resided his entire life in Cairo, not Palestine. A few months later, Said published his autobiography, which confirmed this charge without acknowledging or making any attempt to explain the earlier contrary claims that he had made in discussing his background.
In reaction to the exposé, Said and several of his supporters unleashed a ferocious assault on Weiner. Said sneered that “because he is relatively unknown, Weiner tries to make a name for himself by attacking a better known person’s reputation.” And eleven ideological soul mates of Said’s, styling themselves “The Arab-Jewish Peace Group,” co-signed a letter to the editor that likened Weiner’s article to “deny[ing] the Holocaust.”
Much of the debate between Weiner and Said revolved around the house in which Said was born and that viewers of his BBC documentary were given to understand was the home where he had grown up. Weiner showed from tax and land registry documents that the house never belonged to Said’s father but rather to his aunt. In his rebuttal, Said had written somewhat implausibly: “The family house was indeed a family house in the Arab sense,” meaning that in the eyes of the extended family it belonged to them all even if the official records showed it to be the property only of Edward’s aunt and her offspring.
Said’s cynical modus operandi was to stop short, where possible, of telling an outright lie while deliberately leaving a false impression. Even so, he did not always avoid crossing the line or dancing so close to it that whether his words should be labeled a lie or merely a deception amounted to a difference without a distinction. “I have never claimed to have been made a refugee, but rather that my extended family . . . in fact was,” he wrote in response to Weiner. But what was a reader supposed to have inferred from his book, The Pen and the Sword, where he had spoken of his “recollections of . . . the first twelve or thirteen years of my life before I left Palestine?” Or from the article, in the London Review of Books, where he had written: “I was born in Jerusalem and spent most of my formative years there and, after 1948, when my entire family became refugees, in Egypt?”
It may be that Said, as he claimed, “scrupulously” recounted his life in his autobiography where at last the true facts of his education and residence emerge. But, as his critics continued to ask, does finally telling his story truthfully wipe away twenty years of lying about it? In the end, Said downplayed the matter. In a late interview with the New York Times he said: “I don’t think it’s that important, in any case. . . . I never have represented my case as the issue to be treated. I’ve represented the case of my people.”

What was important, however, was the light shed on Said’s disingenuous and misleading methods, becasue they also turn out to be the foundation of his scholarly work. The intellectual deceit was especially obvious in his most important book, Orientalism. Its central idea is that Western imperial conquest of Asia and North Africa was entwined with the study and depiction of the native societies, which inevitably entailed misrepresenting and denigrating them. Said explained: “Knowledge of subject races or Orientals is what makes their management easy and profitable; knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control.”
The archetype of those who provided this knowledge was the “Orientalist,” a formal designation for those scholars, most of them Europeans, whose specialties were the languages, culture, history, and sociology of societies of the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. However, Said explained that he used the term even more broadly to indicate a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.”
Orientalism, he said, embodied “dogmas” that “exist . . . in their purest form today in studies of the Arabs and Islam.” He identified the four “principal” ones as these:
one is the absolute and systematic difference between the West, which is rational, developed, humane, superior, and the Orient, which is aberrant, undeveloped, inferior. Another dogma is that abstractions about the Orient . . . are always preferable to direct evidence drawn from modern Oriental realities. A third dogma is that the Orient is eternal, uniform, and incapable of defining itself . . . A fourth dogma is that the Orient is at bottom something either to be feared . . . or to be controlled.
Initial reviews of the book, often by specialists, were mixed, but it appeared at a time when “multiculturalism” was becoming the new dogma of the intellectual elites and took on a life of its own, eventually being translated into more than three dozen languages and becoming one of the most influential and widely assigned texts of the latter part of the twentieth century.
Critics pointed out a variety of errors in Orientalism, starting with bloopers that suggested Said’s grasp of Middle Eastern history was shaky. Said claimed that “Britain and France dominated the Eastern Mediterranean from about the end of the seventeenth century on,” whereas for another hundred years it was the Ottomans who ruled that area. He had written that the Muslim conquest of Turkey preceded that of North Africa, but in reality it followed by about four hundred years. And he had referred to British “colonial administrators” of Pakistan whereas Pakistan was formed in the wake of decolonization.
More serious still was his lack of scruple in the use of sources. Anthropologist Daniel Martin Varisco, who actually agreed with Said on many ideological issues, observed in his book Reading Orientalismthat “one of Said’s rhetorical means for a polemical end is to partially . . . quote a phrase while judiciously neglecting words that would qualify and at times refute what the phrase alone might imply.” He offered as an example of this duplicitous method Said’s use of two quotes from the writings of Sania Hamady, an Arab-American who wrote critically of Arabs. The quotes put her in a bad light, but both times, says Varisco, they were taken from passages where Hamady is merely summarizing someone else’s view, not giving her own. In the same vein, John Rodenbeck, a professor of comparative literature at the American University of Cairo, found that Said’s “persistent misconstruction and misquotation of [the nineteenth century Orientalist Edward] Lane’s words are so clearly willful that they suggest . . . bad faith.”
Said’s misleading use of quotes shows the problem with his work in microcosm. On a broad view, Said fundamentally misrepresented his subject. In challenging Said’s first alleged “dogma” of Orientalism, which ascribes all virtue to the West and its opposite to the Orient, Varisco says that Said is describing “a stereotype that at the time of his writing would have been similarly rejected by the vast majority of those [Said] lumps together as Orientalists.” And the British writer Robert Irwin, whose bookDangerous Knowledge offers a thorough history of Orientalism and also a rebuttal of Said, notes that, historically, “there has been a marked tendency for Orientalists to be anti-imperialists, as their enthusiasm for Arab or Persian or Turkish culture often went hand in hand with a dislike of seeing those people defeated and dominated by the Italians, Russians, British, or French.” (Like Varisco, Irwin makes clear that he is no opponent of Said’s political position, but is offended by his travesty of scholarship.)
This is but a small instance of a large methodological problem that invalidates Said’s work entirely, namely, his selectivity with evidence. Said made clear that his indictment was aimed not at this or that individual but at “Orientalists” per se, which, as we have seen, was a category in which he included all Westerners who said anything about the Orient. Thus, he wrote, “all academic knowledge about India and Egypt is somehow tinged and impressed with, violated by, the gross political fact of empire.” And: “No one writing, thinking, or acting on the Orient could do so without taking account of the limitations on thought and action imposed by Orientalism.”
Why did Said choose to paint with such a broad brush? Because he knew that if he had asserted merely that some Westerners wrote pejoratively or condescendingly or misleadingly about the East while others did not, his argument would have lost much of its provocation. It would have demanded clarification about the relative numbers or influence of the two groups, about variations within the groups, about reciprocal attitudes among Easterners toward the West. Above all, it would have drawn the inevitable retort: so what? Was it news that some individuals favored their own societies over others?
The only way Said could make his generalized indictment seem plausible was to select whatever examples fit it and leave out the rest. When challenged on his omissions, Said replied with hauteur that he was under no obligation to include “every Orientalist who ever lived.” But of course the real issue was whether the ones he included made a representative sample (and whether he presented them faithfully).

These methodological failings were mostly lost in the dazzle. What made the book electrifying was that Said had found a new way to condemn the West for its most grievous sins: racism and the subjugation of others. With great originality, Said even extended the indictment through the millennia, a depiction that drew a protest from Sadiq al-Azm, a Syrian philosopher of Marxist bent (and one of that country’s most admired dissidents). Wrote Azm:
Said . . . trac[es] the origins of Orientalism all the way back to Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and Dante. In other words, Orientalism is not really a thoroughly modern phenomenon, but is the natural product of an ancient and almost irresistible European bent of mind to misrepresent other . . . cultures . . . in favor of Occidental self-affirmation, domination, and ascendency.
Azm may have thought this wrong, but it was heady stuff. If we are talking about a mentality that is continuous before and after Christ then we are talking less about European culture, which is in large measure defined by Christianity, than about the European race. Thus did Orientalism fit the temper of a time when it was widely asserted that all white people were inherently bigoted, and “encounter groups” met at campuses and workplaces so that whites could discover and confront their inner racist. And nowhere was the evidence of this white evil laid out in greater depth and seeming sophistication than in Said’s pages.
In this atmosphere, wrote the New York Times in its obituary for Said, “Orientalism established Dr. Said as a figure of enormous influence in American and European universities, a hero to many, especially younger faculty and graduate students on the left for whom that book became an intellectual credo and the founding document of what came to be called postcolonial studies.”
It was not only American leftists who seized on the book. The Guardian, in its own obituary, observed that:
Orientalism appeared at an opportune time, enabling upwardly mobile academics from non-western countries (many of whom came from families who had benefited from colonialism) to take advantage of the mood of political correctness it helped to engender by associating themselves with “narratives of oppression,” creating successful careers out of transmitting, interpreting and debating representations of the non-western “other.”
Orientalism, added the Guardian, “is credited with helping to change the direction of several disciplines,” a thought echoed by supporters and detractors alike. Admiringly, Stuart Schaar, a professor emeritus of Middle East history at Brooklyn College, wrote that “the academic community has been transformed and the field of literary criticism has been revolutionized as a result of his legacy.”
Without ever relinquishing his claim to personify a “glamour-garlanded ideal of ‘outsiderdom,’” as one disillusioned reviewer of a series of lectures Said delivered in London put it, Said and his disciples took power in academia, as reflected in the astonishing number of courses that assigned his books and the frequency with which they were cited. Varisco observed that “a generation of students across disciplines has grown up with limited challenges to the polemical charge by Said that scholars who study the Middle East and Islam still do so institutionally through an interpretive sieve that divides a superior West from an inferior East.” The new Saidian orthodoxy became so utterly dominant in the Middle East Studies Association, and so unfriendly to dissenting voices, that in 2007 Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami took the lead in forming an alternative professional organization, the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa.
Said was fond of invoking the mantra of “speaking truth to power.” This was an easy boast for someone who opted to live in America, or for that matter to live anywhere, and make a career of denouncing the West and Israel. But while a daring Promethean in the West, Said was more careful closer to native ground. Habib Malik, a historian at the Lebanese American University and a cousin of Said’s, recalls hearing him deliver a talk at the American University of Beirut: “On one occasion he blasted Saddam Hussein and a number of other Arab dictators but stopped short of mentioning [then Syrian dictator] Hafez Assad for obvious reasons: the Syrian mukhabarat [secret police] in Beirut would have picked him up right after the lecture!”
Said’s career, the deviousness and posturing and ineffable vanity of it, would have been mostly an academic matter if he had not been so successful in redefining Arabs and Muslims as the moral equivalent of blacks and in casting Israel as the racist white oppressor. Four years after the UN General Assembly had declared Zionism to be a form of racism, Said gave this same idea a highbrow reiteration. Israel did not give Arabs the same right of immigration as Jews, he said mockingly, because they are “‘less developed.’”
Decades after Orientalism was published, Said explained that Israel had been its covert target all along:
I don’t think I would have written that book had I not been politically associated with a struggle. The struggle of Arab and Palestinian nationalism is very important to that book.Orientalism is not meant to be an abstract account of some historical formation but rather a part of the liberation from such stereotypes and such domination of my own people, whether they are Arabs, Muslims, or Palestinians.
Said had not acknowledged such an agenda in the pages of Orientalism or at the time of its publication, although this ideological subtext could be discerned in his ferocity toward Bernard Lewis, who, observed Irwin, “was not really attacked by Said for being a bad scholar (which he is not), but for being a supporter of Zionism (which he is).” It was also implicit in the identity of those Said exempted from his generalization about Westerners. In the concluding pages of Orientalism, he allowed that a very few “decolonializing” voices could be heard in the West, and in a footnote he offered just two American examples, Noam Chomsky and MERIP, the Middle East Research and Information Project. Chomsky of course is not a Middle East expert or someone who writes often on the Middle East, but he had already carved out a place for himself as the leading Jewish voice of vituperation against Israel. MERIP, a New Left group formed to cheer Palestinian guerrillas and other Arab revolutionaries, was so single-minded in its devotion to this cause that it praised the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics for causing “a boost in morale among Palestinians” and “halt[ing]” moves “for a ‘settlement’ between Israel and the Arab regimes.”
Although Said’s assault on the Jewish state was thus initially camouflaged, it was devastatingly effective, as his stance on Arab/Israel questions came to dominate Middle East studies. The UCLA historian of the Middle East Nikki Keddie, whose sympathetic work on revolutionary Iran had won Said’s praise in his book Covering Islam, commented:
There has been a tendency in the Middle East field to adopt the word “Orientalism” as a generalized swear-word essentially referring to people who take the “wrong” position on the Arab-Israeli dispute or to people who are judged too “conservative.” It has nothing to do with whether they are good or not good in their disciplines.

His reputation made by the success of Orientalism, Said devoted much of the rest of his career to more direct advocacy of the Arab/Muslim/Palestinian cause, starting with the publication ofThe Question of Palestine in 1979, by which time he was already a member of the PLO’s top official body, the Palestinian National Council. The book was a full-throated polemic. The Jews were the aggressors; and the Palestinians their victims—on all counts and with little nuance. Even on the matter of terrorism, Said asserted, “There is nothing in Palestinian history, absolutely nothing at all to rival the record of Zionist terror.”
Said proclaimed himself “horrified” by the terrorist acts that “Palestinian men and women . . . were driven to do.” But all blame ultimately rested with Israel, which had “literally produced, manufactured . . . the ‘terrorist.’”
He wrote, with what even a New York Times reviewer called “stunning disingenuousness,” that “at least since the early seventies, the PLO had avoided and condemned terror.” These words appeared just one year after the organization’s bloodiest attack on Israeli civilians, the March 1978 “coastal road massacre,” in which thirty-eight civilians, thirteen of them children, were randomly gunned down, with scores of others injured—and not by any “renegade” faction but by the PLO’s mainstream group, Fatah. (Said himself was already a member of the PLO’s governing body when this “action” was carried out.)
Said worked hard to solidify the myth that for years Arafat had tried to make peace and been rebuffed: “On occasion after occasion the PLO stated its willingness to accept a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza,” citing resolutions of the Palestinian National Council in 1974 and 1977. This was true, but these resolutions did not convey, as Said went on disingenuously to claim, “an implicit recognition of Israel.” Rather, they envisioned a strategy in which Palestinians would form a government in the West Bank and Gaza, in the event that international diplomacy afforded them this opportunity, not as a step toward peace but with the declared intent of using this territory as a base to fight on to “liberate” the rest of Palestine, i.e., Israel proper. As the PNC’s 1974 resolution stated: “The PLO will struggle against any plan for the establishment of a Palestinian entity the price of which is recognition [of Israel], conciliation, secure borders, and renunciation of the national rights of our people, its right to return, and self-determination on its national soil.”
In 1988, a decade after Said’s book appeared, the PLO did renounce terror and imply its willingness to acquiesce in Israel’s existence, albeit equivocally. These two pivotal concessions were clearly avowed only in the 1993 Oslo Accords. When Arafat finally took this indispensable step toward peace, one might have expected Said, who had been claiming that this had happened avant la lettre, to praise him. Instead, Said denounced his hero. Arafat, he complained, had “sold his people into enslavement,” and he called Oslo—in which Israel and the PLO recognized each other and pledged to hammer out a two-state settlement—an “instrument of Palestinian surrender.” Back in Arafat’s terrorist days, Said had seen him as “a man of genius” and said that “his people . . . loved him.” (Indeed, “Arafat and the Palestinian will . . . were in a sense interchangeable,” he once gushed.) But signing this agreement with Israel had, at a stroke, transformed Arafat, in Said’s eyes, into “a strutting dictator.” Arafat and his circle had become a bunch of “losers and has-beens” who “should step aside.”
Said himself adopted a new position on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. No longer did he envision a two-state solution, as he had professed to do back when the idea was theoretical, since the main Palestinian organization (on whose board he sat) was not prepared to suffer the existence of Israel in any shape or form. Now, however, he sought instead “to devise a means where the two peoples can live together in one nation as equals.”
This was not a proposal to be taken seriously. In Israel, large numbers of Arabs did live freely but not in complete equality, a fact over which Said often protested. In the Arab states, many Jews had once lived but nearly all had been expelled. In other words, Said’s new formula was nothing more than a fancy way of opposing the only genuine possibility of peace.
This bitter ender’s position was, of course, phrased in terms chosen to sound idealistic. In that sense it was characteristic of Said’s oeuvre and of the movement of which he was such a critical part. Leftism is the stance of those who aspire to make the world a better place, according to their own view, through political action. For roughly a century its modal idea was Marxism, which identified the proletariat as the engine of redemption, a choice that resonated with the age-old Christian belief that the meek shall inherit the earth. As the twentieth century wore on, however, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela displaced Joe Hill, Mother Bloor, and Henry Wallace as objects of veneration. People of color and strugglers against colonial oppression stirred the hearts of idealists more than leaders of strikes and fighters for a fair day’s pay. Once, Zionism had tapped into that older leftism, seeing itself as a workers’ movement. But instead in the latter twentieth century—and in considerable part thanks to the impact of Edward Said—it became redefined as a movement of white people competing for land with people of color. This transformation meant that from then on the left would be aligned overwhelmingly and ardently against Israel.
Joshua Muravchik, a fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a frequent contributor to World Affairs, is completing a book on the anti-Israel lobby, from which this article is adapted.

segunda-feira, 9 de dezembro de 2013

Ibn Khaldun II: A Palestina é a Síria e os judeus são os israelitas

http://orientemedioemfotos.blogspot.com.br/2013/11/ibn-khaldun-ii-palestina-e-siria-e-os.html
A placa da esquerda diz: "Nós resistimos a imigração judaica", já a placa à direita diz: "A Palestina é parte da Síria" 


Ainda em seu Muqqadimah, Ibn Khaldun escreve:

Os israelitas são um bom exemplo. Moisés os exortou a ir para que se tornassem governantes da Síria. Ele lhes informou que Deus tinha feito este o seu destino. Mas os israelitas eram muito fracos para isso. Eles disseram: há gigantes naquele país, e não iremos até que os gigantes se vão.
Isto é, até que Deus os tire de lá manifestando Seu poder, sem a aplicação de nosso 'sentimento de grupo', e este será um de teus milagres, ó Moisés. E quando Moisés os exortou, eles persistiram e com rebeldia disseram: "Vá você mesmo e seu Senhor e lutem.
Além disso, eles realmente não acreditaram no que Moisés lhes disse, ou seja,que a Síria seria deles e que os amalequitas que estavam em Jericó seriam derrotados por eles, em virtude do decreto divino que Deus tinha feita em favor dos israelitas.
Capítulo 1 - Meekness and docility to outsiders that may come to be found in a tribe are obstacles on the way toward royal authority.


Os israelitas são os que mais se apegam a esta ilusão. Eles originalmente tiveram uma das maiores 'casas' do mundo, em primeiro lugar, por causa do grande número de profetas e mensageiros nascidos entre os seus antepassados, que se estendem desde Abraão até Moisés, o fundador do seu grupo e lei religiosa, e também por causa de seu sentimento de grupo e por causa da autoridade real que Deus lhes havia prometido e concedido através deste sentimento de grupo. Em seguida, foram despojados de tudo isso e sofreram humilhação e indigência. Eles estavam destinados a viver como exilados na terra. Por milhares de anos, eles só conheceram escravidão e incredulidade. Ainda assim, a ilusão [de nobreza] não os deixou. Eles ainda podem ser encontrados dizendo: "Ele é um Cohen (descendente de Arão)", "Ele é um descendente de Josué "," Ele é um dos descendentes de Calebe "," Ele é da tribo de Judá." Isto, apesar do fato de que a sua 'sensação de grupo' desapareceu e que, por muitos e longos anos, foram expostos a humilhação. 
Capítulo 1 - Only those who share in the group feeling (of a group) can have a "house" and nobility in the basic sense and in reality, while others have it only in a metaphorical and figurative sense.


As duas afirmações de Ibn Khaldun vão de encontro ao que diz a Autoridade Nacional Palestina e todos os países árabes...

Muqaddimah: Ibn Khaldun e Israel como a terra dos judeus

http://orientemedioemfotos.blogspot.com.br/2013/11/muqaddimah-ibn-khaldun-e-israel-como.html
    Estátua de Ibn Khaldun em Túnis, na Tunísia



Abū Zayd 'Abdu r-Raḥmān bin Muḥammad bin Khaldūn Al-Ḥaḍrami (1332 - 1406) foi um historiador árabe-muçulmano e é considerado um dos pais da historiografia.

Ele é mais conhecido graças ao livro al-Muqaddimah (Prolegomena em grego), que serve como introdução ao primeiro livro de seu Kitab al-'Ibar ("a História do Mundo").
Nesse livro, além de simplesmente mencionar e descrever acontecimentos, ele tenta oferecer explicaçoes racionais -- os "comos" e os "por quês" envolvidos nos acontecimentos históricos por ele descritos. Ele também costumava fazer uso de fatos históricos para tentar provar suas idéias. E é aqui que este estudioso muçulmano, que morreu há quase 600 anos, tem algumas coisas importantes a dizer sobre os judeus e Israel.


Por exemplo, ao criticar o historiador e geógrafo shiíta al-Mas'udi na introdução de seu livro -- uma crítica onde o próprio Ibn Khaldun escorrega na matemática -- ele comenta:

... o território dos persas era muito maior do que o dos israelitas. Este fato é atestado pela vitória de Nabucodonosor sobre eles. Ele engoliu o seu país e ganhou controle completo sobre ele. Nabucodonosor também destruiuJerusalém, sua capital política e religiosa.
E ele continua:
Agora, é sabido que o território [dos israelitas] não correspondia a uma área maior do que as províncias da Jordânia e da Palestina na Síria e do que a região de Medina e Khaybar em Hijaz.
No primeiro trecho ele confirma um fato histórico inegável: Israel era o território dos judeus e Jerusalém sua capital política e religiosa.
Já no segundo, ele afirma o mesmo que todos os árabes -- ao menos até a criação de Israel: Jordânia e Palestina eram apenas províncias da Síria, e não países com uma população compretensões nacionalistas ou em busca de soberania e auto-determinação -- com exceção dos judeus.


No capítulo 3 ("On dynasties, royal authority, the caliphate, government ranks, and
all that goes with these things"):
É por isso que os israelitas, depois [dos tempos] de Moisés e Josué, permaneceram desinteressados quanto a uma autoridade real por cerca de 400 anos. Sua única preocupação era estabelecer sua religião.
... Os israelitas desapossaram os cananeus da terra que Deus havia lhes dado como seu patrimônio em Jerusalém e nos arredores da região, como havia sido explicado a eles por meio de Moisés.
... As nações dos filisteus, cananeus, armênios[!], edomitas, amonitas e moabitas lutaram contra eles. Durante esse [tempo], a liderança política era confiada aos anciãos que estavam entre eles. Os israelitas permaneceram nessa condição por cerca de 400 anos.

Ele [Saul] derrotou as nações estrangeiras e matou Golias, o governante dos filisteus. Depois de Saul, Davi tornou-se rei, e, em seguida, Salomão. Seu reino floresceu e se estendeu para as fronteiras de Hijaz e para além das fronteiras do Iêmen e da terra dos romanos (bizantinos). Depois de Salomão, as tribos se dividiram em duas dinastias... Um das dinastias era a das dez tribos na região de Nablus, a capital da Samaria** e a outra era a dos filhos de Judá e Benjamin em Jerusalém. Então, Nabucodonosor, rei da Babilônia, os privou de sua autoridade real. Ele primeiro [lidou com] as dez tribos em Samaria, e, em seguida, com os filhos de Judá em Jerusalém. Sua [dos israelitas] autoridade real teve uma duração ininterrupta de mil anos.
** depois da ocupação jordaniana (1948-1967) a Samaria biblica foi renomeada como Cisjordânia pelos árabes.

De acordo com Ibn Khaldun, a soberania judaica na Terra de Israel se estendeu por 1400 anos. Em nenhum momento, neste  ou em outros livros, o historiador árabe menciona um povo palestino ou nação palestina. Já Muqaddasi, outro historiador árabe (nascido na Palestina no século X)afirmava que os judeus eram mais numerosos em Jerusalém e que não havia congregação muçulmana na cidade.

Ibn Khaldun, obviamente, se baseia na narrativa corânica. Por esse motivo há várias afirmações que vão de encontro a narrativa bíblica -- como no caso de Golias como governante dos filisteus e não apenas como um guerreiro. Ele tende a usar a Bíblia como fonte apenas quando o Corão não relata casos similares -- caso da unção de Saul como rei. O Corão simplesmente diz que ele foi ungido por um profeta, então ele se baseia na Bíblia para afirmar que o rei de Israel foi ungido pelo profeta Samuel. 

Livro completo (em inglês)