Foxman truly is larger than life and he has grown to fill the role. He is portly, and breathes heavily, and has obviously said his stock lines so many times that he verges on self parody. I’ve never really seen the performance in a big hall and I was struck by how loose the thinking was – Gaza was a model of restraint, Israel didn’t kill 44 at the school, it only killed 14, Zionism is Judaism and Jewish identity. I was also struck by the Holocaust worldview. When Rudavsky said a mild word about Gaza, Foxman angrily defended Gaza as a situation where Jews finally stood up and defended Jews, as if it was the Warsaw ghetto.This segment of Foxman's speech has me flummoxed:
"Can you be anti-Zionist and not be an anti-Semite? Almost never. Unless you can prove to me you're against nationalism. If you're one of those unique individuals in this world that's opposed to American nationalism, French nationalism, Palestinian nationalism, then you can be opposed to Jewish nationalism. Is it racist? You bet it is. Every nationalism is racist. It sets its laws of citizenship, it sets its own capital... It sets its songs, it sets its values. It is, if you will, exclusive, and you can even call it racist. But if the only nationalism in the world that is racist is Jewish nationalism, then you're an anti-Semite.. I don't want to make any apologies for it."Such epic sophistry -- as desperate as it is arrogant -- makes any attempt at a reply difficult.
There's such a thing as an "American" race? Perhaps Foxman may want to ask our current President to define Americanism in racial terms.
Apparently, if I do not concede Israel's right to bomb the innocent in Lebanon, I must also argue that no Frenchman has a right to sing "La Marseillaise" on Bastille Day. I mean, that's only logical, n'est-ce pas?
Strange, though, that Foxman says nothing about German nationalism. If we argue that Israel has no right to murder Gazans, we may next have to argue that the Wehrmacht had no right to march into Leningrad. And to do that would just be silly.
10 comments:
Just because there's no such thing as an American race, doesn't mean that America's 'Manifest Destiny' wasn't America's nationalistic (and 'racist') paradigm. There used to be an English race, according to the English, and so on. In another sense, the English-speaking peoples constitute a race (as Churchill saw things). Gibbon wrote about (we would say) ethnic groups, including large tribes, as races. There really can't be any doubt that the rise and spread of so-called nationalism (political unifying of tribes and city-states) led to racist politics and genocidal policies.
The "American race" would be the people that occupied North and South America prior to the arrival of the Europeans.
How come we can condemn what was done to Native Americans in this country but not what happens to Palestinians on the other side of the world?
"There really can't be any doubt that the rise and spread of so-called nationalism (political unifying of tribes and city-states) led to racist politics and genocidal policies."
NONSENSE! (And there is likely a nice latin name for the fallacy of presenting a proposition with "There really can't be any doubt that...")
Anonymous's whole paragraph is sophistic tripe; tempts me to lapse into vile invectives.
Gary: you might be looking for Ignoratio Elenchi or Ad Populum
Really though, it is Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Gary McGowan: If you want to verify, say, the proposition that all fish (as we call them) have gills, you probably have to sit in your rowboat and keep pulling up fishes, hopefully many different kinds, and after you never get a result contrary to your proposition - but could, hypothetically maybe - you just have to conclude, or infer if you're constitutionally skeptical, that Nature implies that all her fish have gills. In Aristotle's terms, it's a tautology, like many good definitions. I don't know what the Latin term is, reductio whatever, but here, that's called induction, and the exasperating conclusion is called an inference. We're stuck with calling a fish without gills a mutant or something 'new'.
Another version, or inversion really, of the nation-state = nationalism = uberalles would be Dr. Albert Schweitzer's meditation sometimes called "The Evolution of Ethics", a rhetorical masterpiece even in translation.
Wikipedia's entry for 'Manifest Destiny' ain't pleasant reading; its hyperlink (and separate wiki entry) to 'Romantic nationalism' ain't pleasant either. If you're not a Yahoo, maybe you might try to refute some of the more unpleasant assertions in the articles. There's no wiki entry for 'reductio ad eugenics', but it was valid and verifiable science once, depending on who was funding it.
"There really can't be any doubt that the rise and spread of so-called nationalism (political unifying of tribes and city-states) led to racist politics and genocidal policies."
Really the reverse. As soon as mankind became collected in cities that created the ability to amass resources and manpower, which immediately led to vast amounts of tribally based genocidal violence.
Nationalism made for still greater destructive potential. But those root causes predate nationalism by millenia.
Even taking Foxman's talking point arguendo, he forgets the critical difference for Israel's case. Israel has full citizens who are Arab who suffer a reduced citizenship, and occupation of several millions of Arabs not given citizenship. This models the apartheid situation, except that the South African government did not unleash a full array of modern military weaponry against those they oppressed.
XI
bluelyon, thanks for your efforts.
The philosophy prof. I had for Logic 101 (or somesuch) used the entirety of each class period to READ the textbook (which he had not written) to his students. Of course this tended to make for rather low attendance, but he had an answer to that--unannounced spot quizzes, which accounted for half the students' grade for the course. I didn't go, and aced the multiple-choice announced exams. Got a "C" for the course. Just cramming; I remember almost nothing of it.
"'There really can't be any doubt that the rise and spread of so-called nationalism (political unifying of tribes and city-states) led to racist politics and genocidal policies'."
"Really the reverse."
Right, except that 'racism' and 'genocide' are terms belonging to modernity, and to suggest anything like cause-effect in either conception would be foolish. Tribes and cities are factual and real, races are intellectual constructs like lawyer tricks, or like consonants, which are necessary for literacy but don't occur in nature. So called post-hoc (fallacious) reasoning is God's way, mythology's way, the primitive superstition, and the notion that sub-prime lending brought us epiphanies.
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