lördag, maj 05, 2007

Veckans nödvändiga läsning: Om Iran och antisemitism

Oxford-forskaren Arshin Adib-Moghaddam skriver i Monthly Review på nätet, under rubriken ”On the Jewish Presence in Iranian History”. Läs den! [Hittat via Paolo Pissoffi]

Man behöver inte hålla med om varenda rad för att ändå kunna konstatera att det är en mycket intressant text, som placerar den hetsdebatt som nu pågår om Iran och dess regerings förhållningssätt till Israel i ett sammanhang.

Adib-Moghaddam konstaterar, att det uppskruvade tonläget mot Israel från Ahmadinejads sida och de grumliga vatten han fiskar i på hemmaplan, är en del av ett välbekant politiskt förhållningssätt:
[...] a mixture of individual ignorance about the factual circumstances of the holocaust and, more importantly, Machiavellian expediency during a period when the Iranian state was targeted by a relentless public relations campaign in the international media. As such, his comments are quite comparable to Bush's declaration that, after 11 September 2001, the United States was on a “crusade” or Silvio Berlusconi's statement about the inherent superiority of “Western” values during the same period. Indeed, I do not think it an exaggeration to place Ahmadinejad in the same category as Bush and Berlusconi. All three represent that type of politician that adhere to a dichotomous worldview: things are either black or white, good or bad, you are either with them or against them.
Men artikelns kanske viktigaste förtjänst är att den belyser antisemitismen, den vidriga rasistiska ideologi som projicerar samhällsproblem på ”juden”, som särskiljer och nedvärderar judar som grupp, och som varit en förutsättning för några av de största massmords- och förföljelsebrotten i mänsklighetens historia. Antisemitismen är, som Adib-Moghaddam påpekar
a distinctively European invention, and projecting its ideological tenets and political agenda to the Muslim world is intellectually unrewarding and analytically flawed.
Det är i Europa – och i de politiska formationer som varit utlöpare av europeiska förhållanden – som inhemska judiska grupper i särskilda historiska skeden haft en strukturellt underordnad position och av mäktiga reaktionärer gjorts till sociala syndabockar. I Mellanöstern finns en annan historia, och en annan situation idag. Den orkestrerade hets som nu pågår mot Iran mystifierar dessa förhållanden – av lätt insedda skäl, som inte inbegriper viljan att analysera och bekämpa antisemitismen:
There is a particular interest linked to the representation of Iran as an irrational, “anti-Semitic” polity. At the least, it legitimates the demonization of the Iranian state, at most it mobilizes public opinion in support of military action.
Det är en ganska god beskrivning av vad, säg, Fredrik Malm, sysslar med.

För övrigt är det intressant att den incident som beskrivs i artikeln, om den direkta lögn som spreds om införandet av särskilda kläder för judar i Iran, och som blev en världsnyhet innan falsifikationen uppdagades, i Sverige hann leda till ett krigshetsutspel av – Fredrik Malm. (SvD gjorde en väldigt rolig intervju med Malm efter det att det framkommit att hela grejen var båg. Jag hittar inte den nu).

I sammanhanget kan det kanske också vara intressant att påminna om att Ahmadinjead aldrig sagt att Israel ska ”utplånas”.

Alltså: läs artikeln.

18 kommentarer:

Anonym sa...

"The 25.000 to 60.000 Jews of Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan, Boroujerd, and Yazd have their own cemeteries.."

Jämför med detta.

".. attend packed synagogues.."

Jämför med detta.

".. send their children to Jewish schools.."

Jämför med detta.

".. buy their meat in kosher butchers.."

Jämför med detta.

".. and are exempt from prohibitions on alcohol."

Jämför med detta.

"Their political representation in the Iranian parliament (majlis) is secured in the Iranian Constitution."

Jämför med detta.

Anonym sa...

Någorlunda balanserad artikel för att vara dig.

Forskaren definierar "antisemitism" som att den måste vara "racially motivated" men den europeiska antisemitismen fanns långt innan man började definiera den i rastermer. Den var då religiöst motiverad. Det finns två sorters antisemitism (minst) - definierad i termer av religion och ras. Åtminstone den sorten som utgår från religion har vad jag förstår funnits i den muslimska världen länge.


Vidare har muslimer tagit över begrepp och idéer från den europeiska antisemitismen, som det antisemitiska falsariet Sions Vises Protokoll som nu publiceras i muslimska länder, bl a Iran, och presenteras som fakta.

Daniel Eriksson sa...

Terry Jones tangerar också det här ämnet i dagens Guardian.

Anonym sa...

Lite kul läsning Ali,missa inte det här, om neo/ziocons och hollywoods senaste propagandasmörja 300....



Triumph Of The Vile
Or: 300 Bottles Of Idiocy On The Screen
Gary Brecher

By Gary Brecher ( war_nerd@exile.ru
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FRESNO, CA -- Well, I did it, took one for the team, jumped on the grenade, offered my belly to the bayonets--in other words, sat through 300, the comic-book movie about Thermopylae. The only reason this thing got made is that it makes good anti-Iran propaganda, because as every war fan knows, at Thermopylae "300 brave Spartans held off the entire Persian army."

Zack Snyder's movie is the "Hoo-ah!" version of this story. Every time the Spartan king Leonidas makes a "rousing speech," his warriors yell "Hoo-ah!" like the Rangers in Mogadishu in Black Hawk Down. Actually the Spartans had a rep for silence, but we're not dealing with great historical minds here.

What had me really wanting to puke is that this movie tries to make Sparta into some kind of Land of Hallmark Card-givers. There's about an hour's worth of perfume-ad scenes where Leonidas and his lovey-dovey wife, a feisty lady in one of those bondage-lite Greek dresses, cuddle and make eyes at each other and say patriotic stuff by way of foreplay. Yeah, that's why you see those bumperstickers, "Sparta was for lovers."

Fact: Sparta was about as romantic as North Korea. Give or take a little egalitarianism, Sparta WAS North Korea. Spartan laws did everything they could to break down the family. Sparta was more anti-nuclear family than any Hollywood liberal could ever be.

Wanna know what a Spartan wedding night was really like? It's pretty hilarious, in an insane way. As soon as a Spartan girl got her first period, they grabbed her, shaved her head, dressed her as a boy, threw her down on her new husband's bed, and then, well, he had his way with her. What way was that? Since hubby had been in an all-male dorm since age seven, I'm betting that that night of lovin' was more like a skinny white boy's introduction to San Quentin after lights-out than it was like a chick flick. So when this movie shows the Spartan hero saying to his wife, "Goodbye, my love," I just had to laugh.

No Spartan ever told his wife he loved her. That would've been like treason, because the Spartan rulers wanted family ties snapped, so the only bond left was to the state. They left room for folks' natural urges by letting the women drink, which they did non-stop, and the men form what you might call close comradely bonds with their fellow soldiers.

In the ancient world, gay was a matter of who was on top. If you were a topper, that was fine; if you were the one getting in the ass, not so cool. In other words, prison rules. Sparta's leather-bar ways were a running joke to the ancient Greeks. The Spartans were stone killers - but they also preened like teenage girls before a battle. They grew their hair long, and before a fight they'd comb it, oil it, try out fetching new styles, put little baubles in their ears, anything to die young and leave a beautiful corpse.

None of that in this movie. Just the opposite. The script even has Leonidas taunt the Athenians calling them "boy-lovers." Athens, the true hero of the war against Persia, gets dissed time and again in this movie. You won't hear a word in 300 about Salamis, the real decisive battle of the war - because it was Athens, not Sparta, that destroyed the Persian fleet at Salamis. The Spartans wanted to run away from the Persian fleet and wall themselves off in the Peloponnese (you wouldn't believe how many times I've messed up the spelling on that damn word). They didn't have a clue about combined-arms operations (which the Athenians handled durn well). In fact, the Spartans, who are called "the finest soldiers in history" over and over in this movie, were a mediocre, one-dimensional, inflexible military force.

Sparta understood only one kind of fighting: land battle, the hoplite shield-wall - a Big Ten offense from the old school, "three yards and a cloud of dust." In any shield-wall vs. shield wall battle, the bigger offensive line will break the opposing team's wall, leaving them open to massed spear thrusts. Once the opposition's wall was broken, the citizen-soldiers would scatter to fight another day - a totally sensible reaction, since the alternative was annihilation. In battles like that, psycho varsity offensive-line types like the ones Sparta bred did just fine. But vary the conditions of battle in any way, and they were as helpless as Woody Hayes' Ohio State teams were against a team that could stop the run.

So it was actually fairly easy to stymie the Spartans: just put them in a situation where they had to think for themselves. Imagine a Spartan army up against a Mongol scouting force. Even if the Spartans outnumbered the Mongols by, say, 4-1, I'd have no hesitation betting on the Mongols. They were truly tough, not artificially hardened by sick PE games but by life in the saddle, on the steppes. And they were smart enough to realize that smarts count on the battlefield, that negotiation and alliance-building, scouting and propaganda are all important aspects of war. Only amateurs are dumb enough to think that being dumb, mean and inflexible like the Spartans is the route to military success.

The Thebans under a really brilliant general, Epaminondas, crushed the Spartans in the battle of Leuctra (371 B.C.) because Epaminondas just plain out-thought those lummoxes. He knew exactly how the Spartans would stack their forces in battle order, because they always did it the same way. So he tinkered with the conventional phalanx-stacking set-up and those Thebans, most of them ordinary Greek citizen-soldiers, mere amateurs by Spartan standards, kicked Spartan ass right down the line. The Helots, the locals the Spartans had enslaved and terrorized for generations, finally got a chance for payback and Sparta withered away to nothing. Game over.

Only amateur fascists admire Sparta guys; they're still pissed off because people like me dared to warn them the Iraq war was going to be a disaster. Now the neocons have gone so over the deep end of delusional thinking that they've resorted to fantasizing about Sparta, where nobody ever argued, where everyone yelled and stabbed and otherwise kept their mouths shut.

It's downright hilarious the way this movie punishes every smart character. Every time someone wants to argue with the war party in this movie, he's evil. Everybody who talks in a normal tone of voice is evil. Snyder shows two scenes where the Spartans murder Persian envoys arriving under a flag of truce. And both times, you're supposed to cheer.

Since when do Americans cheer when truce parties are murdered? Well, that's pretty easy to answer, actually: since Iraq. These diehard neocons have gone insane because there's no way they can argue for an invasion of Iran any more. But they still want it, bad. So they've taken a crash course in fascism, jumping all the way to cheering for Sparta and booing for Athens - because Athens stands for brains and flexibility and talking things out. They can't win the argument, so they want to kill anybody who tries to argue. That's why Leonidas kicks the Persian envoy down a well.

The film only approves of two things:

1. Yelling

2. Bashing.

I say "bashing" because you can't call his view of military operations "strategy" or even "tactics." It's just close-ups of Leonidas's teeth while he yells about "freedom." He talks about "freedom" non-stop. I'm serious. A Spartan! Talking about freedom! Leonidas actually says, and this is a quote, "Freedom isn't free"! I thought I was back watching Team America: "Freedom isn't free/It costs a dollar ninety-three..."

And since the ham playing Leonidas has this thick Scottish accent, and teeth like an old horse, it was like some Clydesdale doing an impression of Mel Gibson in Braveheart at the same time. Left me woozy, I tell ya.

But here's what's really interesting about Leonidas's "freedom" speeches: every one happens just after he's thrown some envoy down a well or stabbed somebody who advocates talking strategy. That's the real fantasy here: wouldn't it be great if we could just yell "Hoo-ah!" non-stop and just kill the naysayers? You can almost see the pitiful dweebs behind this movie jacking off every time his musclebound Spartan hero kills another envoy or politician. That'll shut'em up!

Well, it might be fun but it's not war, fellas. If there's one thing we shoulda learned from Iraq, it's that in asymmetrical war, the following items are totally useless, in fact worse than useless, because they get in the way:

1. muscles

2. "Hoo-ah!"

3. killing anybody who points out the flaws in your plan.

Contrary to what amateur fascists think, the really successful military elites encourage discussion, train mid-rank officers to react independently, and discourage yelling, steroid use and macho bullshit in general. Hell, even the Wehrmacht was filled with calm, polite and cultured men. We could use a few of them now.

Petraeus seems kind of like that, but by this time the situation's so awful I'm not sure how much he can do. At least maybe it'll shut up all the "Hoo-ah!" jocks, make them realize they're not fit for theater command, and get them back to their true calling: coaching high-school football. In this movie's case, Junior Varsity.

Isak BK Aasvestad sa...

Ali,

påstår du verkligen att judar (och andra icke-muslimer) aldrig haft en strukturellt underordnad position i muslimska samhällen?

Anonym sa...

Opp o ner, ner o opp, grisen gal i granens topp.

Anonym sa...

Folkmordsapologeten och sionismens vapendragare i bruna trikåer, Aasvestad med ännu en "intellektuell" fråga....

Svara för all del Ali, Christian har inte en enda aning vad han frågar om och han vill helst inte ha något svar heller...

Anonym sa...

"Vidkun Quisling" ovan, eller Mika som det egentligen är:

Varför kan du inte starta en egen blogg? Jag tycker att det skulle vara jätteintressant!

Anonym sa...

Haha, vilken total fjant Gary Brecher verkar vara. Jag menar jisses, en film är en film och det är det man bör ta den för även om den är baserad på en legend, man mäter inte en films förtjänst med hur historiskt korrekt den är. 300 är cool, Gladiator är inte heller historiskt korrekt (iaf inte avseende politiken) men den är fortfarande cool.

Anonym sa...

Alis variant på "debatt" är att effektivt radera alla kommentarer som kritiserar hans inlägg ovan, och som fördömer hans rövslickeri för den iranska regimen.

Jag tycker bara synd om dig Ali. Sådana som du har tyvärr funnits i alla tider.

Isak BK Aasvestad sa...

Mika,

du har nu börjat använda den avrättade norska fascistledaren och landförrädaren Vikdun Quislings namn som pseudonym, och sen anklagar du mig för att vara "folkmordsapologet" och använda "bruna trikåer"??!

Isak BK Aasvestad sa...

Alandalus,

din jämförelse faller på sin egen orimlighet.

Båda USA, Storbritanninen, Danmark och Sverige har moskéer, muslimska skolar, affärer som säljer halalslaktat kött och muslimska representanter i sina nationalförsamlingar.

Anonym sa...

Det iranska parlamentet är ett spel för gallerierna. De riktiga besluten fattas i mulla-rådet.

Anonym sa...

Vem är "Christian BK Aasvestad"? Egentligen?


*ärligt nyfiken*

Anonym sa...

Christian BK Aasvestad är ett samlingsbegrepp på ett tiotal anonyma eller namngivna apartheidkramare med en fanatisk övertro på sionism som gemensam nämnare.

Ursprunget till denna multipla personlighetsklyvning är Christian BK Aasvestad som under riktigt namn och tillbakahållen aggression förespråkar en något mildare form av folkmord och etnisk rensning av icke-judar i mellanöstern.

Isak BK Aasvestad sa...

Anonym 4:35 PM,

Christian BK Aasvestad är mig och ingen annan. Går man in på min blogg kan man även se bild på mitt ansikte!

Den Qusilingkramande Fremskrittspartimedlemmen "Mika" pratar strunt när han hävdar att ett tiotals personer döljer sig bakom mitt namn.

(Varför tror du inte det är mitt riktiga namn, Mika? Tycker du inte det låter tillräckligt judiskt för att vara namnet på en sionistisk apartheidkramande folkmordivrare som mig?)

Anonym sa...

Christian BK

Ja dessa rättigheter finns även i Väst, men de verkar vara mer kontroversiella här. Något att tänka på när du och dina polare anklagar Iran för antisemitism.

Apropå din första kommentar: vad tycker du om icke-judars strukturellt underordnade position i det israeliska samhället? För att citera Gideon Levy:

"Nor can anyone serious maintain that the 1.3 million Arabs who live in Israel are equal citizens."

Slutgiltigen krävs det inte mycket för att fatta att Mika väljer nick med ironi. Det Quislingkramande Fremskrittspartiet är nämligen Norges allra mest pro-israeliska parti.

Norge som en etnokrati av israelisk typ är nämligen en våt dröm för dessa rassar.

Isak BK Aasvestad sa...

Alandalus,

som svar på din fråga:

den strukturella diskrimineringen som Israels arabiska befolkning utsätts för är Israel ovärdig som demokratisk och judisk stat.

Men vad har det att göra med frågan om judar och andra icke-muslimer historiskt har varit strukturellt underordnade i muslimska samhällen?