Sunday, October 03, 2010

Comment Trail October 3 - 10

@ TNR: David Grossman's novel: To the end of the land


@ TNR, Jonathan Chait asks: Why Don't Palestinians Adopt Nonviolence?

@ TNR: A discussion about "The Social Network" (A movie I have yet to see...)

@ The Spine - the condition of the Arab/Israel Peace process


@ Robert Malley on the settlement issue

@ Friedman's doom and gloom scenarios

@ It's complicated: Irish Nobel Laureate Shills for Hamas

Saintliness does not inoculate against antisemitism. Saints are usually people who are willing to die for a very narrow cause or belief usually having to do with pure ethnicity or religion. Just consider who the Catholic saints were/are and for what they sacrificed their lives, or the Muslim shaheeds. So saintliness is hardly a quality I admire in anyone, especially when it's done in the service of so-called suffering of Palestinians. The kind of saintly motivation is so narrow and lopsided that in order to keep itself going it is absolutely necessary to know nothing about contexts, records, history and common sense. Corrigan-Maguire cannot afford to pay attention and learn about the factors that have brought about the current situation in Gaza nor is she capable of exerting herself on behalf of Kurds, who are being hunted down and killed by Turks in Iraq (something that should have bothered her, concerned as she is about international law and such).

I tend to see it as a sort of an acquired autism. Autism's main symptoms are impairments in social interaction, impairments in communication; restricted interests and repetitive behavior.

If you consider the way Corrigan-Maguire is incapable of meeting a question and answering it to the point, in considering a wider context for the Gaza blockade, in repeating the tired excuses for singling out Israel, for ignoring Israelis' suffering, for the need to pretend that there is a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, it is pretty obvious that what observe is an autistic behaviour which cannot be explained but as willingly and deliberately acquired.

Update: A Peace Nobel Laureate for Hate / Ben Dror Yemini

3 Comments:

At 6:52 PM EDT, Blogger EscapeVelocity said...

Great posts Noga.

That same theory of evolution is in play in Europe and the Anglo Nations.

Excepting American Jews are advocating the "stable secular state" evolution in one case, and see the looming total disaster in the other.

 
At 6:03 PM EDT, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I was not following the Franzen-Freedom thread at TNR, but thought you would like to read this smackdown from The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/10/smaller-than-life/8212/

I had not realized that Franzen used some of "Freedom" in this short story, which I read at the time and thought 'what was the point?', but, since I am not into post-modern (or modern) fiction, thought it was just me. I did enjoy the cynical peek into New York politics in "Agreeable". http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/05/31/100531fi_fiction_franzen?currentPage=all
Agreeable
by Jonathan Franzen May 31, 2010

There is something increasingly Shakespearean, in a bad, incestual fashion, about the editorial cross-breeding spawned by Peretz that now afflicts The Atlantic and The New Yorker, two of the remaining magazines I actually enjoy reading.

K2K

 
At 12:21 AM EDT, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Have so far failed to enter the TNR thread on The Social Network, perhaps because this brilliant critique prepares my mind for what will surely be a worthy film-paying experience. I am a huge fan of anything Andrew Sorkin, but admit to low interest in the topic - not least due to unusual lifelong disdain for anything Harvard - until I read this:
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2010/10/04/101004crat_atlarge_denby?currentPage=all

K2K

 

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