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[A survey of media commentary on the Osama assassination from Max
Ajl at Jewbonics.]<br>
<br>
<b>USA! USA! USA! USA!</b><br>
<i><br>
"If these dancing Americans, however, were to transform their
fear and fas­ci­na­tion with violence into rage and courage to
occupy the same streets in protest, against the ruling elite that
has profited from the loss and grief of 9/11 and the wars that
followed, and the unde­mo­c­ra­tic corporate interests running
their lives, they might find the arms of other ordinary working
people from around the world extended in solidarity." --Sarah
Hawas, Egyptian rev­o­lu­tion­ary (Mondoweiss)*<br>
</i><br>
That was the chant a group of delighted uni­ver­sity students were
repeating as they marched in cel­e­bra­tion past my window around 1
in the morning last night upon news that Osama bin Laden had been
assas­si­nated earlier that night in Pakistan. The students were
most likely 11 years old when the September 11 attacks occurred –
attacks that 8 months later the CIA was unable to link to bin Laden.
I don’t find much to celebrate or mourn in the “death” of an old man
on dialysis sitting in a compound in western Pakistan where
pre­sum­ably the Pakistani ISI had been conniving in harboring him.
I do find something to mourn in the mindsets of the young jingoes
popping champagne on the occasion of an American death squad
assas­si­nat­ing a suspected criminal on foreign territory.<br>
<br>
For genuinely insight­ful com­men­tary, you can start here. For my
purposes, I find the death of bin Laden a useful Rorschach test for
an intel­lec­tual culture that would rather die – or have brown
people die – than exert itself to think, a thought­less­ness that
then filters down to the jin­go­is­tic little twits parading around
my campus in the form of chants that go, USA! USA! Nation­al­ism is
cute, isn’t it? How facilely we forget that the ruling class is the
one that gets to define the National Interest. Always.<br>
<br>
So. Mirror mirror on the wall who is the dumbest of them all? In
only vaguely par­tic­u­lar order: Genocidaire-in-Chief Obama
blathers that “the world is safer” with the death of Osama. Frankly
I think the world would be safer with the death of Obama, who has
the blood of tens of thousands of Iraqis, Afghans, and Africans
running in rivers under his feet. Or it would be safer if we lived
in a world in which people were making policy and we were those
people and struc­tures weren’t selecting people to make policy. Not
this world.<br>
<br>
Next, Nicholas Kristof, forever virginal when it comes to history,
par­tic­u­larly that of American meddling in the Middle East, writes
that “Bin Laden’s ability to escape from the U.S., and his apparent
impunity, fed an image in some Islamist quarters of America as a
paper tiger — and that encour­aged extrem­ists”; “extrem­ists” of
course have never found human fodder due to ongoing US occu­pa­tions
of Muslim and Arab lands, nor succor from US black-ops as in the
case of the US-assisted Pakistani ISI that….helped to create bin
Laden. Roger Cohen, whose brain occa­sion­ally thrums at a tempo
nearing intel­li­gence, also considers history irrel­e­vant, writing
that bin Laden “came of age as the Arab world shifted from Nasserite
nation­al­ism to the discovery of identity in political Islamism,” a
deft chrono­log­i­cal sleight-of-hand that hides one of the causal
agents in the tran­si­tion from “nation­al­ism” to “Islamism”: the
forceful American-Israeli destruc­tion of Arab nation­al­ism and
Arab communism and the erasure of the Afghan Marxists with the help
of – guess! – bin Laden’s reac­tionary extremism. Never mind too
that Israel helped create Hamas, or that America’s main ally in the
region is the reac­tionary medieval despotism known as the Kingdom
of Saudi Arabia.<br>
<br>
(Cohen’s stupidity merits extended exegesis: he goes on to write
that this assas­si­na­tion occurs “as post-Islamist rev­o­lu­tions
from Tunis to Cairo topple despotism in the name of demo­c­ra­tic
values long denied Arabs”; it is the Nahda party that is poised to
take power in post-revolutionary Tunisia, while “post-Islamist” is
just a silly bene­dic­tion Cohen utters in front of his secular
fun­da­men­tal­ist read­er­ship to suggest that perhaps these
Ay-rabs are under control, unlike the filthy rabble sporting rocket
launchers and spitting out Koranic slogans in Gaza and Lebanon,
while iron­i­cally the demo­c­ra­tic values he is pre­tend­ing to
espouse are the ones the bottom layers of the Egyptian Muslim
Broth­er­hood also embrace while the upper layers hew true to the
more important creed in Egyptian cap­i­tal­ist society – making
money. Religion “explains” nothing here. Cohen caps off this try at
playing smart with the invo­ca­tion of “West­ox­i­fi­ca­tion,”
according to him “the sense of humil­i­a­tion among Arabs at
perceived Western dominance and aggres­sion.” The term was Iranian
c. 1980 and is no longer broadly used, but perhaps not knowing the
dif­fer­ence between Persians and Arabs is what secures you a
colum­nists’ spot in the NYT ).<br>
<br>
Robert Dreyfuss, on his better days capable of real insight, offers
us the Nation magazine’s oblig­a­tory act of ritual excretion on the
Hamas gov­ern­ment, calling Ismail Haniyeh’s (dumb) comment on bin
Laden, in which Haniyeh called him a “holy warrior,” “the stupidest
and most inex­cus­able” of the froth of idiocy bubbling in the wake
of the murder. Actually I am waiting for Eric Alterman and Thomas
Friedman to hold forth before I start handing out laurels for
“stupidest,” since they are shoo-ins for first prize, always. Given
the non-existent political integrity of American lib­er­al­ism and
political impotence of the American left, Haniyeh hardly needs to
tack to the winds of decent public opinion in the United States
anyway. No excuse, but not quite as dumb as Dreyfuss wants the silly
lead­er­ship of the silly denizens to Gaza to be.<br>
<br>
Descend­ing down the food chain, Paul Woodward, a mediocre gossip
who thinks of himself as an intel­lec­tual, has nothing at all to
say, which is kind of perfectly appro­pri­ate. He likes killing
Arabs anyway. Next, Idrees Ahmad, presaged by (actually I’ll pretend
he didn’t say it, I keep on hoping he’ll change course one of these
days) fixates, eyes a-glaze, on “neo­con­ser­v­a­tives and other
elements of the Israel lobby,” who “have drawn different, if
pre­dictable, con­clu­sions,” namely that the assas­si­na­tion was
good policy and that some of the neo-cons/lobbyists think Israel
even pioneered the American policy of targeted assas­si­na­tions. So
the lobby’s organic intel­li­gentsia says the same thing as the rest
of the cap­i­tal­ist class’s organic intel­li­gentsia, while
smearing on the addi­tional claim that targeted killings, such as
the Phoenix Program, the murder of Patrice Lumumba, the slaying of
Martin Luther King Jr., and the ruinous repres­sion of the Blank
Panthers, are an Israeli export to the United States, thereby neatly
tying up cap­i­tal­ism, impe­ri­al­ism and Zionism with Judaism, a
nice service to Zionist pro­pa­ganda but now with the overt if
sleep-walking con­nivance of “dis­si­dents.” (Thanks for staying
alert, Idrees. God’s work you’re doing).<br>
<br>
Moving now up a different food chain, with com­men­tary that will be
duly ignored, Gabriel Ash comments on the “death of a master
signifier” and the exuberant joy some of the American people feel –
even, perhaps, “the people whose houses were fore­closed in the last
three years.” But nin­com­poop Ash is talking about class and power.
In this post-modern post-Marxist post-materialism world, we should
ignore him for sure for spoiling a party to which only
meta­phys­i­cal expla­na­tions were invited. In a similar vein,
Richard Estes writes of the “perverse, unac­knowl­edged alliance
between al-Qaeda, neolib­er­als and neo­con­ser­v­a­tives, as all
three groups are in agreement about the urgency asso­ci­ated with
the need to mar­gin­al­ize and impov­er­ish workers even if it is in
the service of strik­ingly different visions of the future,” neatly
tying up in a bundle what the forceful destruc­tion of the left in
the Arab world and the withering away of the left in the
Anglo-American world has left us with: various dystopias and
demagogic rabble-rousing to get us to them, as poor as possible.
Forget Osama. Do I feel safer when the louder the voice is the
stupider it is? No, not really. Neither should you.<br>
<br>
*To whom I give real thanks for the good<br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://www.maxajl.com/?p=5280"><http://www.maxajl.com/?p=5280></a><br>
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