. Just the kind we all now love; young, brown, female, hip, and cool. The bottom line of her book is that the only way to achieve world justice is the destruction of Jewish sovereignty. /1
I'm used to reading this kind of propaganda and delusional fantasies but what really got on my nerves in this book is how at the end she is very benevolently and selflessly extending a branch of peace to the "Zionist settlers" saying they will be allowed to live but they are /2
only asked to "relinquish their desire to rule" and just let them be part of a Palestinian context. The obnoxious delusional, yet gentle sounding, paternalism is just maddening. The supposed "academics" who do such gaslighting and psychological abuse as if it was some profound /3
knowledge and kindness belong to a mental asylum. With all my heart I do believe we are dealing with serious pathology here. Other than that, the book is just your usual propaganda, no context, half-truths, obfuscating reality, cheering terrorism, etc. I'm reading the book as 4
part of a Middle East class at GWU. Erekat works at Rutgers and the book was printed by Princeton. This is American now! /5
The social history of the Middle East is much more interesting than most people think. In the 1960s, during a period of state-led westernization, the Arab feminist movement that led the effort for the liberalization of women took the lead in producing feminist antisemitism /1
in various literary forms. The Iraqi female poet Nazik AlMala'eka produced a poem decrying miniskirts as a "Jewish innovation." The Lebanese radical feminist Leila AlBalabaki authored the novel "I live" in which she juxtaposed herself against a pregnant Jewish woman /2
whom she described as "the Jewess carrying an enemy, a butcher, while I'm carrying in my head the tragedies of a nation.. she is preparing the future of a despised people and I prepare in my head the fantasies of a meeting. Every day, she drops poison from her blood into /3
The mainstream Islam I grew up with in the post 9/11 era in Egypt was very ugly. It was increasingly anti-women, antisemitic, xenophobic, hateful, supremacist and violent. Like millions of other Muslims and non-Muslims I thought thats truly what Islam was. I first accepted it /1
uncritically, then I came to resent it and fear it. I now believe that this was a cultural wave that was long time in the making and already reached its peak and may now be subsiding. Many Muslim societies are currently on the move towards new unknown destinations. /2
Not everyone is happy about this state of flux, including ironically some immigrant Muslim communities whom they are like any immigrant community hold to a static frozen in time image of the societies they came from. There is also a the challenge of the breakdown of communal /3
Zionism in its origin, as a romanticist national project, was distinct among many all similar movements in more than one way: while other projects were options from among other options, Zionism was progressively compulsory given the rise of predatory mass antisemitism in /1
early 20th century Europe. Second, Zionism was a defensive nationalism as opposed to the prevalent mode of offensive nationalism in Europe and later in the Middle East. That is, Zionism was romanticist for survival purposes not for self-aggrandizement purposes. Third, the /2
historical circumstances of Zionism forced immediate real political beginnings, envisioned by a literary class, and only much later did the necessary nationalist militancy was established long after the ideological and theoretical foundations were already set. This resulted in /3
A difficult Muslim predicament:
Throughout the latter half of the 20th century and till today, there were many major ambitious Arab intellectual projects of religious reforms that sought to build from the ground up a whole new foundation of Quranic hermanutics that can open /1
the sealed gates of Muslim reason and humanism. The best and brightest minds of the Muslim ME, Mohamed Arkoun from Algeria, Nasr Hamed Abou Zaid from Egypt, Mohamed Shahrour from Lebanon, and many more, spent their lives toiling in linguistics, philosophy, theology, etc. /2
trying to achieve this noblest and most urgent of causes. All those amazing minds were seeking to do is to start a Muslim version of the reformation to liberate Muslim thinking from the chains of dogmatism, superstition, and literalism, and it's exactly here that their problem /3
Relatively unknown fact: Israel is by far the only country in the Middle East that has the intellectual, cultural, and technical capacity to ideologically combat Aljazeera, the destructive ideologies, and offer an alternative in the ME. Israel only lacks imagination and will. /1
I know many may disagree with me, but given that I have a unique position between cultures, I can say also that many don't know what they are talking about.
I don't want to be unfair, it was Arab intellectuals who forcefully shut Israeli out to begin with and saw in Israel nothing but a satan to be destroyed. And this resulted in mental habits that need to be undone on both sides.
20 years later, we may, indeed we must ask ourselves; what did Bin Laden achieve? Did he succeed in defeating the United States? Annihilating Israel? Establishing a thousand-year caliphate? The answer to these questions is a decisive no, but we should not indulge ourselves in /1
a delusional sense of victory that hides our true defeat. When the great terrorist entrepreneur sat on his way through the establishment of his organization, “The Global Islamic Front for Jihad against the Jews and the Crusaders,” the medium was the message. He was seeking to /2
re-wrap our world with the political mysticism of the symbols of the 10th century. Like the good heroes of a good Greek tragedy, the stars were aligned for a perfect tale of the folly of the gods behind which human autonomy recedes into non-being. In Muslim societies in the /3