Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Peace thru Psycho-Babble
square. With oodles of forged ballots, especially among Israeli Arabs.
Gosh, I wonder why so many Israelis Arabs voted for him.
(http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/122735)
As noted in an earlier posting, having Barak at head of the Labor Party is
a great advantage for Israel. The reason is that every Israeli knows that
Barak personally dropped 4000 katyusha rockets onto northern Israel this
past summer, so under him the Labor Party should drop to about the same
electoral strength as the pro-hashish Green Leaf Party.
2. Michael Oren "outs" the "New Historians":
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/07/AR2007060701872.html
3. From the Wall Street Journal:
June 13, 2007
An Overdue Memorial
June 13, 2007; Page A18
Considering the enormity of what it commemorates, the Memorial to the
Victims of Communism, dedicated by President Bush yesterday, is striking
for its modest proportions: a 10-foot female figure raising a torch at a
busy intersection in Washington, D.C. That's a fitting rebuke to an
ideology that made a fetish of statuary, and murder, on a monumental
scale.
The numbers are almost beyond reckoning. Mao Zedong was responsible for 70
million peacetime murders, according to his biographer Jung Chang. The
middle estimate of Stalin's victims is 40 million. Pol Pot slaughtered
nearly three million fellow Cambodians in only four years. Ethiopia's
Mengistu killed some 1.5 million opponents in the late 1970s, and
contributed to the death by starvation of a million others in the 1980s.
Throughout these and other horrors, Communists always managed to find
high-profile apologists among the bourgeois intellectuals: Jean-Paul
Sartre for Stalin, Noam Chomsky for Pol Pot, and so on. Some, like Sidney
Hook, Arthur Koestler and Whittaker Chambers, repented, but most did not.
They may not have been witting accomplices to the butchery, quite. But
they are the reason why the West was almost fatally late in recognizing
the depth of evil it faced in its communist enemy.
Not by coincidence, yesterday's dedication took place on the 20th
anniversary of Ronald Reagan's speech at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate,
calling on the Soviets to "tear down this wall." Back then, the smart set
(and some of his own advisers) said he was a fool for seeking to bring the
communist nightmare to an end. Inasmuch as he led the free world in doing
so, the memorial is also, inescapably, a tribute to him.
URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118169689793733304.html
4. About two thirds the way down this page is listed an Arabic book by
Norman Finkelstein in which he claims that the Jews "artifically
invented" the Holocaust:
http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/html/final/sp/3_05/prot_sy.htm
5. Peace through Psycho-babble:
(from Middle East Quarterly)
Fratricide in the Holy Land. By Avner Falk. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2004. 271 pp. $35.
A biblical commandment tells Jews to remember what the Amalek desert tribe
did to the Israelites, when Amalek attacked them for no rational reason -
the Jews held no territory and Amalek had no real grievances against them.
The rabbis explain this biblical commandment on the grounds that it
reminds us all how blind hatred needs no rationale. In modern terms, it is
pointless to seek "root causes." The world contains pure evil, and not
just misunderstood people whose feelings and self-esteem have been
pricked.
In recent years a small but growing literature has attempted to analyze
the Middle East conflict and derive new approaches to settling it based on
psychoanalysis, including Ofer Grosbard.s Israel on the Couch: The
Psychology of the Peace Process.[1] Falk returns to the same well. Would
that such people recalled the commandment about Amalek. Falk and other
post-modernists have a problem understanding that conflicts like the
Arab-Israeli one generally are rooted in real differences, and have little
or nothing at all to do with personal psychology.
Falk calls himself a "political psychologist" and "psychohistorian," and
has been associated with the Hebrew University School of Medicine.[2]
Although he has written serious articles about the psychology of racism
and anti-Semitism,[3] his attempt to offer a psychological analysis of
Osama bin Laden, a patient we assume never graced Falk.s sofa,[4] is less
serious, as are his "psycho-biographies" of Theodore Herzl, Napoleon, and
Moshe Dayan.[5] Evidently Falk has no need actually to meet a subject of
his analysis. He continues in the same vein in Fratricide in the Holy
Land, with its pop-psychology evaluations of Ariel Sharon and Yasir
Arafat.
Falk.s fundamental assumption is that there could not possibly be any
rational basis for the violence in the Middle East conflict, and so one
needs to go hunting for understanding by applying pop psychology to it. In
some places, he attributes the conflict to the individual psychic
disorders of political leaders such as Menachem Begin's supposed
obsessions with
security and the Holocaust. The psychic roots of the conflict began in
World War I, insists Falk.
The book also has a political agenda. Falk sympathizes with the
post-Zionist outlook, with references aplenty to Uri Avnery, Ilan Pappe,
Baruch Kimmerling, Michael Lerner, and Benny Morris, whom he praises as
"more open-minded." In this spirit, Falk offers moral relativism in which
suicide bombers are only murderers in the Israeli view - otherwise they
are martyrs. Israel's very creation was more a naqba (Arabic: catastrophe)
than a reason for celebration. Falk reduces the entire conflict to a
Semitic rashomon (his term for the conflict). Suicide bombing he
innocuously deems is an "unconscious fusion with one's mother." The
conflict stems from pathological psychic need to have enemies.
While everything is relative, the two things Falk is quite sure about is
that the whole mess stems from: 1) the fact that the Jews .denied the
existence of Arabs in Palestine. (although Falk does not name any Jew who
ever did this); and 2) the Zionists were and are so insensitive to
delicate Arab feelings. Falk sees Zionism itself as a great anachronism, a
form of group narcissism, trying to reverse the course of history.
Evidence collecting is not Falk.s strong card. He opines at length on
supposed anti-Oriental snootiness in Israel, never offering a single
datum. Numbers and empiricism do not interest him.
Steven Plaut
University of Haifa
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] .Brief Reviews,. Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2004, pp. 87-8.
[2] Avner Falk's Home Page, accessed Nov. 2, 2006.
[3] See, for example, Avner Falk, .Collective Psychological Processes in
Anti-Semitism,. Jewish Political Studies Review, Spring 2006.
[4] Avner Falk, .Osama bin Laden: A Psychobiographical Study,. Mind and
Human Interaction, vol. 12, 2001, p. 161-72.
[5] Moshe Dayan, haIsh vehaAgadah: Biographia Psychoanalytit (Jerusalem:
Ma.ariv Library, 1985); Herzl, King of the Jews: A Psychoanalytic
Biography of Theodor Herzl (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America,
1993).
6. The continuing battle against judicial tyranny in Israel:
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3411656,00.html
7. Indoctrination U:
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56066
8. Wanna know which "Jews" are members of "Jewish Voice for Peace"? Read
this:
http://chronicle.com/temp/email2.php?id=HNzbpnwyTBzSMt8MjxchgGhqcdr2cQfb
Jews Two, Moonbats Zero.
