[Peace-discuss] The louder the voice is the stupider it is

[C. G. Estabrook]

[A survey of media commentary on the Osama assassination from Max Ajl at Jewbonics.]

*USA! USA! USA! USA!*
/
    "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)*
/
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.

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.

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.

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.

(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 ).

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.

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).

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.

*To whom I give real thanks for the good

<http://www.maxajl.com/?p=5280>


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