Very interesting article, Dominic, & your comments too. I note the
author also made this point (clearly writing before the invasion of
Iraq): 'Nor of finding that given the specific nature of the conflict
(which is no longer a conflict between states, the American response,
legitimate in itself, did not take the most appropriate form (the
bombing of Afghanistan).' Perhaps this is, as you suggest, along the
lines that Cole argues.
Of course, radical terrorism must be fought, & the dead remembered &
mourned. But a 'war' on terrorism, which may (& can?) go on forever,
with about as much likelihood of success as the one against drugs? And
particularly this one, which seems to have created so many more of the
very terrorists it supposedly is meant to defeat?
And of course, Israel must stay, & the Arab states must recognize it,
or there will never be any kind of peace in the region, but as a state
given to the destructive relation to whatever 'Palestine' might be?
Many there as well as elsewhere think this just isn't going to work.
Not that any simple answers seem to be appearing these days...
Doug
On 8-Jul-05, at 3:55 PM, Dominic Fox wrote:
> My attention was drawn today to an extract from La Nouvelle
> judéophobie, by Pierre-Andre Taguieff, a book written between the
> invasion of Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq:
>
> http://watch.windsofchange.net/themes_43.htm
>
> The author takes a basically Schmidtian line: "Not knowing how to
> recognize the enemy, not being able to distinguish him, not daring to
> mobilize against him... this is the absolute zero politics. It is also
> the absolute zero of geopolitics." He observes that the project of one
> wing of the pacifist movement has been to criminalize the response of
> the victims of terror, to refuse all legitimacy to any mobilization
> against the totalitarian enemy. This perspective makes both moral and
> strategic criticism of that response irrelevant, since no better
> alternative can be acknowledged: the only acceptable response is no
> response at all, beyond perhaps a protracted spate of self-criticism
> and penitent alms-giving.
>
> The only thing Israel, for instance, could possibly do that would
> satisfy the extreme anti-Zionists is simply to *go away*: to fuse
> itself into a multi-national entity with no distinctly Jewish
> character, and thus repudiate the Jewish nationalism (recast as
> "racism") that is the unique moral blemish from which all its criminal
> behaviour is alleged to derive. It is thus the extreme anti-Zionists,
> rather than the Zionists, who truly obstruct all criticism of the
> policies of the state of Israel, since they does not acknowledge the
> legitimacy of the object of criticism itself.
>
> I was pleased by the Juan Cole article because it seemed to me to
> refuse the temptation of demonizing the US and UK (and, by what seems
> to have become an inevitable extension, Israel) and instead outlined a
> moral and strategic criticism of their actions - which implies that
> there are standard to which those powers could meaningfully be held.
> Cole is under no illusions about the nature of the jihadist threat; he
> quite rightly concentrates on the inadequacies of our response to it,
> not in order to paralyse our resistance but in the hope of seeing it
> mobilized more effectively.
>
> Dominic
>
>
Douglas Barbour
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Edmonton Ab T6G 0B9
(780) 436 3320
-- bring lust into the library
or it is hell.
Lisa Robertson
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