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https://twitter.com/memrireports/status/1112977279502770176

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ShipofTheseus

@JewishSpaceLazr

Dec 18

The situation at @Columbia is even worse than you think. Joseph Massad isn't teaching a course on just Zionism. The course is on "The History of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskala) in 19th century Europe and the development of Zionism."
The infuriating facts you should know: 🧵

The Jewish Enlightenment is a 19thC Euro/Ashkenazi phenomenon. Massad has no training in Jewish history and doesn't read Yiddish. Even if he weren't a raging antisemite, he's not qualified to teach a course on history he's never studied and literature he can't read. So why is he?

From an article he published last week: "...Palestinian resistance started in the 1880s at the inception of Jewish colonisation...beginning in 1882 and continuing throughout the 1890s, Palestinian peasant resistance targeted all the Jewish colonies to the point that

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ShipofTheseus

@JewishSpaceLazr

Nov 29

What’s happening in Syria and Lebanon is actually the default setting for most of the MidEast. It’s either chaos or empire there. The imposed nation state borders of the past century will be/are carved up by local factions, militias, and religio-ethnic groups, along w/ strong 🧵

adjacent states such as Turkey, Iran, Israel.

What the Arab Spring ultimately revealed is that the post-colonial states are failures, made of factions who hate each other and don’t want to live together. Only the power of empires (Ottoman, British, French, Persian) or dictators

ever held any of it together. In that way the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is no different than any other internal conflict in the region. The only difference is, unlike its Arab neighbors, Israel lacked a ruthless dictator to suppress its conflicts. Today we see it for what it

Read 5 tweets

ShipofTheseus

@JewishSpaceLazr

Sep 12

9/11 was my 2nd week as exec dir of @RutgersHillel, at @RutgersU, the State U of NJ. The next day flyers went up all over campus inviting people to a special meeting of the Muslim Students Assoc on 9/13. Of course I went. Here is what I saw and heard. It haunts me to this day. 🧵

I thought half the campus would be there. Who wouldn't want to hear what the MSA had to say 2 days after Al-Qaeda killed 3,000 Americans? We could smell the smoke from Ground Zero on campus. But I was the only visibly non-Muslim person in a crowd of 200+. Wearing my kipah. ✡️

The first 45 minutes a prof spoke on the atrocities of the recent Algerian civil war. At first I didn't understand why. But he was making a point to the doubting Muslim students. SEE? It is possible for Muslims to do violent terrible things. It's possible Muslims had done this.

Read 10 tweets

ShipofTheseus

@JewishSpaceLazr

Jul 31

Proving there is nothing new under the sun, let's see how Dostoevsky, the brilliant Russian novelist, predicted today's world via the character Pytor Stepanovich Verkhovensky, a socialist revolutionary in his book "Demons."
Read to the end. You'll like this. 🧵

"The first thing is to lower the level of education, science, and accomplishment. A high level of science and accomplishment is accessible only to people of high ability and there’s no need for high ability! People of high ability can’t help but be despots and have always

corrupted more than they have brought benefit.. There’s no need for education, enough of science! The thirst for education is nothing but an aristocratic thirst...No sooner do we have family or love than the desire for private property arises. We will kill desire; we will foster

Read 7 tweets

ShipofTheseus

@JewishSpaceLazr

Jul 7

Great article on The Roots of Progressive Radicalism by @jonkay. I'm especially intrigued by Musa Al-Gharbi's book on how the “woke” elite use the language of social justice to gain power and status—without helping the marginalized and disadvantaged.🧵
quillette.com/2024/06/25/the…

Al-Gharbi's thesis: Patterns of elite political radicalisation are recurrent in the West esp during times of underemployment among the well-educated. So they substitute what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called "symbolic capital" for the real capital they want but lack.

"Symbolic capitalists" find alternative means to advance their social standing, often by presenting themselves as vital (and even heroic) "allies." This works in college, but eventually they have to get real jobs and pay real bills. To resolve the resulting cognitive dissonance

Read 9 tweets

ShipofTheseus

@JewishSpaceLazr

Jun 30

The fanatical attachment of so many in the West to extremist Islam’s jihadi ideology, manifested as "Palestinianism," is one of the confounding dynamics of our age. Yet it is explained clearly by the philosopher Eric Hoffer in his 1951 book The True Believer.🧵

Hoffer posits that fanatical movements (religious, social, or national) arise when large numbers of people believe their own individual lives to be worthless - or worse. So they join movements demanding radical change. But the underlying psychological cause is very different.

The real attraction for this population is not the particular cause but an escape from the self:
“A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation." Genius.

Read 12 tweets

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