Why Can't Israel Negotiate With Hamas?

What people often forget when they ask this question is the following set of considerations that I found in a great post on a blog by Izgad, a historian and a fellow autistic:

Hamas is an institution devoted to the delegitimization of the Jewish people and ultimately the violent destruction of the State of Israel. As such it is impossible for Israel to ever engage in any form of official dialogue  with Hamas. To do so would be to admit that there is some validity to their claims to the extent that these claims deserve to be placed before the forum of polite society for consideration. If such a discussion were ever to occur Israel would automatically come out the loser simply in terms of the fact that it would mean that Israel, unlike other countries, would be placed in the subservient position of having to defend its own legitimacy. This would be the case even of Israel actually were to win this debate.

Izgad and I have had passionate arguments about a variety of issues, both on my blog and on his. However, I applaud him for his lucidity when he talks about what I consider to be the central problem of our Western civilization:

I do not see either Goldstone or Bollinger as anti-Semites who wish to see Israel destroyed. I see them as simply modern liberals unable to resist granting legitimacy to radical Islam even as this means asking first Israel and eventually the rest of western civilization to write its suicide note. If we in the West, including liberals, are going to survive it will because we understand the difference between those ideas which we can respectfully disagree with and tolerate and those ideas which, by definition, are declarations of war to be fought at all costs. 

Izgad offers the same line of reasoning here as Žižek who insists that our ridiculous belief that we need to tolerate all kinds of intolerance and barbarity will end up destroying our civilization. Unless we recognize that not every opinion needs to be tolerated and not all lifestyle choices deserve equal respect, we are doomed to lose all the advances our civilization has made in terms of human rights to those who are unfettered by such inane beliefs. 

Westerners still follow the colonial model that forces them to interact with non-Westerners as if they were little children in need of paternal guidance and kind condescension on the part of the wise and all-knowing West. The West's incapacity to see representatives of other civilizations as valid human beings in their own right leads it either to drop bombs on them whenever it feels like or to patronize them through fake tolerance. Western Liberals congratulate themselves for being different from Conservatives in their attitude to the non-Westerners. In reality, though, both attitudes stem from the same profound conviction that non-Westerners are not fully human and, as a result, there is no need to hold them to the same standards and treat them in the same way as we do our fellow Westerners.

In the conflict between Israel and Hamas, Western Liberals have demonstrated clearly that, for them, Israelis belong to their own Western civilization, while Palestinians do not.

A Yale Professor Is Proud of Being a Child Abuser and a Racist

In her article titled "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior", a Yale professor Amy Chua proudly enumerates all the ways in which she abused her miserable daughters:

Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do: attend a sleepover, have a playdate, be in a school play, complain about not being in a school play, watch TV or play computer games, choose their own extracurricular activities, get any grade less than an A, not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama, play any instrument other than the piano or violin, not play the piano or violin.

Chua chirpily defends her right to call her daughters names like "fatty" or "garbage" in public and rants against people who dare not to approve of such behavior. The reason why this monstrous woman has been torturing these poor kids is because she wants them to be "successful." Successful little Mommy pleasers, that is, who are not entitled to a personality or a single desire of their own. Why the social services just sit by and allow this to happen is beyond me. Does anybody really believe that simply beating the girls would do them any less damage?

As any other abuser, Chua strives to come up with a reason why it is acceptable for her to subject her poor kids to these horrors. She blames the abuse on the Chinese culture, insulting billions of people and branding them as abusers in one fell swoop. I always knew that my alma mater attracted all kinds of weirdos, but this is getting really scary. I believe that everybody who after reading this article abstains from ostracizing Chua is a racist and a participant in her child abuse. "Oh, we're just from a different culture, so that's why we are entitled to engage in abuse (genital mutilation, beatings, rapes) of our children" should not be accepted as an excuse. If you do think that this is a valid justification of abuse, you are a racist. If you believe that when a white American male from Oklahoma calls his daughters "fatty" and "garbage" in public he is wrong, but when a Chinese woman does it it's cute, you are not only a racist but also a misogynist.

 

Gosh, I'm traumatized just by reading about this horrible monstrous freak. And when I remember that this power-obsessed, unfulfilled harpy is actually an educator, I get even more terrified of how much damage she can wreak in the course of her miserable existence. That such people would think it OK to celebrate their disgusting actions in the media is the testimony to how far our completely misunderstood idea of "tolerance" can get us. I really hope that Sophia and Louisa still have enough personality left in them by the time they grow up to abandon their toxic mother to a lonely and pathetic old age that she so richly deserves. I also hope that she gets called "a fat, stinking piece of garbage" in public at least a few times, since she believes this appellation is such a great motivational tool.

A Ban on Mini-Skirts and Pseudo-Liberals

This sad news from Sri Lanka made me wonder how soon we will see protests against the corrupting presence of mini-skirts on the streets of North-American cities from Sri Lankan immigrant communities:

Sri Lanka was mulling a ban on miniskirts following complaints, prompting the government to set up a panel to prepare a dress code for public places in the conservative country, officials said. “There are individuals and groups representing religious and cultural interests, who have written to us raising concerns that this kind of (mini) dress would corrupt our culture,” minister T B Ekanayake was quoted as saying by the Lakbima news daily.

After a mid-schooler in Canada was allowed to carry a dagger to school because it was ruled a part of his national costume while fundamentalist Muslim and Jewish women lobbied (and almost won) for pregnant women to be prevented from bringing their husbands to secular birth preparation classes in Montreal, I will not be surprised to see any government of a Western country entertain its own ban on "corrupting" women's clothes as a gesture of appeasement to some immigrant community which considers women to be less than human.

If quasi-liberals continue with their tradition of condescending "tolerance" towards each cannibalistic and savage tradition out there, their efforts, coupled with those of our own home-grown woman-haters, will bring something like this to happen here, too. Of course, I am not disputing the right of Sri Lankan people to engage in any kind of barbarity towards the women of their country. I am, however, hoping to preserve the very small oasis of female liberation that came into existence in a very small portion of the world's territory.

In a gesture of a contemptuous dismissal of other cultures, we are schooled by certain groups of pseudo-progressives never to question any of the practices those other cultures engage in. As I said many times before, such an attitude does not signal respect for the Other. Just the opposite. A refusal to question, to judge, to pronounce opinions stems from a profound conviction that representatives of other cultures are not as human as we are. Hence, they don't deserve to be judged according to the same standards as we judge ourselves.

Nothing annoys me more than this quasi-liberal fear of expressing opinions about any group these very pseudo-liberals have labeled (offensively, too!) "disadvantaged." Of course, their self-esteem issues require that every group other than their own be considered disadvantaged. How much that view is shared by the "disadvantaged" and the "underprivileged" themselves is unimportant to such quasi-liberals. All they are interested in is to police everybody who dares to pronounce that the practice of female genital mutilation is barbaric, that a niqab is not liberating to women, and that if we are to respect the Sri Lankans' right to treat their women as less than human, we should insist that when Sri Lankans - or anybody else - come to our feminist countries, they should respect our view of gender roles just as much.

Clothing Choices and Tolerance

I was invited to a close friend's wedding a while ago. She asked me not to wear my black and white dress because those colors are not appropriate for a wedding. It turned out that I couldn't wear a red dress either because this was the color the bridesmaids were wearing. I was also asked not to wear green because the mother of the bride would be wearing it. Eventually, it turned out that the only color I could wear was blue. I didn't have a blue dress, so I had to purchase one for the occasion. At no point did I think that my friend's requests were unreasonable. It was her wedding, so she had a right to make them. If I didn't want to comply, I could decline the invitation and stay at home wearing a black and white bathrobe with red slippers and a green shawl, if I so chose.

Clothing choices are regulated in Western societies all the time. I have to attend the Dean's reception on Thursday. Do you think I can show up in my swim-suit? The Dean is Venezuelan; could I arrive wearing a T-shirt saying "Bolivar sucks dick"? The Dean's wife is from Catalonia; should I put on a blouse that says "Aquí  no se ladra, aquí se habla el idioma del Imperio" ("Here we don't bark, here we speak the language of the Spanish Empire," a sentence that was used during Franco's dictatorship to discriminate against Catalonians)? If I practice my freedom to make these clothing choices, how long do you think I will stay employed? Do you think anybody will feel compelled to tolerate me much?

We all realize that showing up for a serious job interview in a beach dress or a Bermuda shorts will mean we can say good-bye to that prospective employment. We all accept that many companies have a dress code and if we don't want to observe it, we should look for a job elsewhere. Nobody wears flip-flops to the opera nor jeans to a wedding. Everybody is comfortable putting the words "Black-tie event" on invitations. But somehow niqabs, burqas and other forms of attire that signal female subjection don't qualify for the same kind of scrutiny.

"Oh no," people start squeaking immediately when they hear this argument. "This isn't about clothing choices. It's about religion. We respect the right of people to practice their religion freely and as they see fit." Really, though? Then how about polygamy? Has that suddenly become legal in the US? How about female genital mutilation? Many people see it as part of their religious practices. Should we make it legal here, too? Unless you are in favor of legalizing these religious practices in this country, there is no logical argument you can offer for the defense of the niqab on religious grounds. Especially since there are mullahs who are declaring fatwahs against the niqab on the grounds that it has nothing to do with Islam.

So if the defense of burqas and niqabs both as a clothing choice and as a religious practice is gone, then what's left? Why do some people start screaming tolerance the moment these clothing choices are mentioned? I'll tell you what's left: contempt and the desire for self-aggrandisement.

Historically, the main argument used to prevent women from voting, working and being self-sufficient was that it would be too much of a burden for these feeble, little things. Men didn't see women as valid human beings, so they couldn't imagine women having the same rights and bearing the same responsibilities as the only real humans, i.e. men. This is exactly how some Western liberals view Muslims. "Poor things, how can they be expected to understand such complex and lofty things as tolerance and women's rights," they think. This allows these liberals to feel good about their own "tolerance" while condescending to the poor, burqa-wearing savages. Slavoj Zizek, one of the greatest philosophers of our times, wrote beautifully about this:

We white Leftist men and women [should] leave behind the politically correct process of endless self-torturing guilt . . . [Western] politically correct self-flagellation is an inverted form of clinging to one's superiority. . . The positive form of the White Man's Burden (his responsibility for civilizing the colonized barbarians) is thus merely replaced by its negative form (the burden of the white man's guilt): if we can no longer be the benevolent masters of the Third World, we can at least be the privileged source of evil, patronizingly depriving others of responsibility for their fate (when a Third World country engages in terrible crimes, it is never fully its own responsibility, but always an after effect of colonization).

So here how it happens that a white Christian woman Clarissa is held to a much higher standard in her clothing choices than a brown Muslim woman Fatima. I, however, believe that both Fatima and I are equally and fully human. We should both be held to the same kind of standards. If I can control my desire to wear clothing other people find offensive or even simply inappropriate, so can Fatima. And as for tolerance, I can never say it better than Zizek:

What lurks at the horizon. . . is the nightmarish prospect of a society regulated by a perverse pact between religious fundamentalists and the politically correct preachers of tolerance and respect for the other's beliefs: a society immobilised by the concern for not hurting the other, no matter how cruel and superstitious this other is.

Burqa

According to an article in the Associated Press, the French government is considering banning the burqas in public. A parliamentary commission will be set to investigate whether such a measure would make sense.

I know that it's considered very illiberal to support anything like this, but I can't help but feel that I understand what this is about. I wouldn't dream of going to Mianwali, for example, and run around in a mini-skirt and a deep cleavage. I would respect the sensibilities of the population that practices exclusive burqa-observance and so I would most definitely wear one myself.

In Montreal, I saw men who were leading women around on leashes. This offends my sensibilities. Why should my feelings not be respected? How is what a woman in Mianwali feels more respectable than what a woman from Montreal feels?

For those who after reading this post will feel the overwhelming desire to scream "intolerance", please read my opinions on the concept of tolerance first:

http://clarissasbox.blogspot.com/2009/05/slavoj-zizeks-violence-part-ii.html

http://clarissasbox.blogspot.com/2009/06/quashing-dissent.html

http://clarissasbox.blogspot.com/2009/06/castrating-our-language.html

P.S. For those who read Portuguese, here is an interesting post on the same topic:

http://sexismoemisoginia.blogspot.com/

The main idea is: let's not tolerate ourselves into self-destruction.

Asexuality

A recent post at Feministing illustrates the point I was trying to make about tolerance that sometimes turns into a parody of itself.

The post responds to a message from somebody who feels asexual and finds anybody's touch "absolutely repulsive. The thought of sex makes me gag a bit." The response that the author of the message gets to her post takes the idea of political correctnes to the extreme that is even a little scary. The main idea of the response is "Asexual people of the world, unite!" Don't worry about beinng asexual, it says. You can always get together with other asexual people, date them, and form yet another neat identity group.

This attitude does not come exclusively out of the desire to show the world how tolerant and accepting one is. It is also the result of a deeply Puritanical view of sex, which refuses to see human sexuality on terms of a physiological process. If anybody found the idea of eating or sleeping (also physiological processes) "absolutely repulsive", we wouldn't be as likely to dismiss this problem with a lot of well-meaning but ultimately empty words. Nobody would (at least for now, I think) suggest to form an identity group around this problem.

Another problem that the response to this post brings to light, is the deep-seated fear that many Americans feel towards psychology as a field of knowledge. While several people suggested that the author of the post look for hormonal causes of her asexuality, nobody mentioned that it might be helpful for her to search for psychological causes.

Slavoj Žižek's Violence, Part II

The best part of Žižek's Violence is his brilliant analysis of the concept of tolerance. He shows us the scary possibilities implied in the blind worship of unconditional and unthinking tolerance:

"What lurks at the horizon. . . is the nightmarish prospect of a society regulated by a perverse pact between religious fundamentalists and the politically correct preachers of tolerance and respect for the other's beliefs: a society immobilised by the concern for not hurting the other, no matter how cruel and superstitious this other is."

The reason why we "tolerate" seeing Muslim men who lead women behind them on a piece of string, as if these women were dogs, is not respect for a different cultural tradition. The only truth behind this "tolerance" is contempt, lack of respect, and the desire to infantilize the menacing Other. How would you react if you saw a Western couple interact in this way? Would you sneer? Give them a piece of your mind? I know I would. But when somebody we can easily identify as the Other does things that offend our sensibilities, we are supposed to avert our gaze in an utterly hypocritical show of our worldiness and sophistication.

Otherness is always scary. Tolerance allows us to deal with our fear by treating the Other as a wayward child who is allowed all kinds of pranks we will never put up with if they came from an adult.