From: Lawrence DeBivort (debivort@umd5.umd.edu)
Date: Wed 01 Oct 2003 - 12:24:49 GMT
Joe Dees continues with his anti-Muslim bigotry. Have today's Muslims and
Arabs become his 'niggers' of yesterday?
"Ibn Warraq" is an admitted pseudonym. Relying on its views on Islam is a
bit like relying on Madeline O'Hare (sp?) for commentary on Christianity,
with one difference: we know that O'Hare was a real person. "Ibn Warraq" has
all the markings of a fake personna and 'agent provocateur.' I wonder who
the real source is? Who has most to gain from bombarding the world with
anti-Muslim and anti-Arab diatribes?
Scott asked Joe to desist, and said that he wouldn't resort to asking the
moderators to intervene. Derek has warned that if these diatribes aren't
stopped, we might loose this list. Joe ignores these requests and steps up
his abuse of the list.
Should we not be appealing to the moderators to stop this, as they have
before, and before we lose the list?
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk [mailto:fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk]On Behalf
> Of joedees@bellsouth.net
> Sent: Wed, October 01, 2003 12:02 AM
> To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
> Subject: Said and Orientalism
>
>
> Said and ORIENTALISM
> Ibn Warraq in Wall Street Journal, September 29, 2003
> Late in life, Edward Said made a rare conciliatory gesture. In
> 1998, he accused the Arab world of hypocrisy for defending a
> holocaust denier on grounds of free speech. After all, free speech
> scarcely exists in our own societies. The history of the modern
> Arab world was one of political failures, human rights abuses,
> stunning military incompetences, decreasing production, [and]
> the fact that alone of all modern peoples, we have receded in
> democratic and technological and scientific development.
> Those truths aside, Mr. Said, who died last week, will go down
> in history for having practically invented the intellectual
> argument for Muslim Rage. Orientalism, his bestselling
> manifesto, introduced the Arab world to victimology. The most
> influential book of recent times for Arabs and Muslims,
> Orientalism, blamed Western history and scholarship for
> the ills of the Muslim world: Were it not for imperialists,
> racists and Zionists, the Arab world would be great once more.
> Islamic fundamentalism, too, calls the West a Satan that
> oppresses Islam by its very existence. Orientalism lifted that
> concept, and made it over into Western radical chic, giving
> vicious anti-Americanism a high literary gloss.
>
>
> In Terror and Liberalism, Paul Berman traces the absorption
> of Marxist justifications of rage by Arab intellectuals and shows
> how it became a powerful philosophical predicate for Islamist
> terrorism. Mr. Said was the most influential exponent of this
> trend. He and his followers also had the effect of cowing many
> liberal academics in the West into a politically correct silence
> about Islamic fundamentalist violence two decades prior to 9/11.
> Mr. Saids rock-star status among the left-wing literary elite put
> writers on the Middle East and Islam in constant jeopardy of
> being labeled Orientalist oppressorsa potent form of
> intellectual censorship.
> Orientalism was a polemic that masqueraded as scholarship. Its
> historical analysis was gradually debunked by scholars. It became
> clear that Mr. Said, a literary critic, used poetic license, not
> empirical inquiry. Nevertheless he would state his conclusions as
> facts, and they were taken as such by his admirers. His technique
> was to lay charges of racism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism on
> the whole of Western scholarship of the Arab worldeffectively,
> to claim the moral high ground and then to paint all who might
> disagree with him as collaborators with imperialism. Western
> writers employed a western style for dominating, restructuring,
> and having authority over the Orient. They conspired to suppress
> native voices that might give a truer account. All European
> writings masked a discourse of power. They had stereotyped the
> Other as passive, weak, or barbarian. [The Orientalists] Orient
> is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been
> Orientalized, he said.
>
> By the very act of studying the East, the West had manipulated it,
> politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically,
> and imaginatively. This conspiracy of domination, he said, had
> been going on from the Enlightenment to the present day. But
> while deploring the disparity between texts and reality, Mr. Said
> never himself tried to describe what that reality was, merely
> sighing that, To look into Orientalism for a lively sense of an
> Orientals human or even social realityis to look in vain.
>
> Mr. Said routinely twisted facts to make them fit his politics. For
> example, to him, the most important thing about Jane Austens
> Mansfield Park was that its heroine, Fanny Price, lived on blood
> money. In his writings, verbal allusion and analogy stood in for
> fact, a device to reassure the ignorant of the correctness of his
> conclusions. Of these he found many over the years in American
> universities. His works had an aesthetic appeal to a leftist bent of
> mind, but even this now can be seen as a fad of the late 20th
> century. The irony, of course, is that he was ultimately
> grandstanding for the West--for Western eyes, Western salons,
> and Western applause.
>
> (Ibn Warraq [a pseudonym used to protect himself and his family
> from Islamists] is the author of Why I am Not a Muslim and the
> editor of Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out, published by
> Prometheus Books in 1995 and 2003 respectively.)
>
>
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===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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