Links for November 25th
Automatically posted links for November 25th:
- Angry Arab on Eric’s Hobsbawm’s memoirs - “I have no emotional obligation to the practices of an ancestral religion and even less to the small, militarist, culturally disappointing and politically aggressive nation-state which asks for my solidarity on racial grounds.”
- “If Annapolis fails, smash me,” souvenir mug says - Brillant! I want one!
- King Hussein of Jordan | From the desert he rose | Economist.com - Review of Avi Schlaim’s biography of King Hussein. Sounds rather too positive, but he was certainly an interesting man
- The absurd world of Martin Amis | Comment | The Observer - Funnyman Chris Morris slams into Amis, Hitchens
- The Political Compass - Pretty decent test of political values…
Categories: General.
There are prayer rallies here in Jerusalem. To be specific, the rallies are seeking God’s intervention to make sure the Annapolis peace conference fails.
Sometimes I wonder if there’s anyone among the religious Zionists and Hamas who is aware of the humor in the two groups’ unintended convergence.
Probably not. What you get from the inside of these perspectives is the idea that they are fighting on behalf of the poor and oppressed, while the other side is filled with violent fanatics for whom human life has no meaning. Most religious Zionists are simply in denial about the effects of the occupation on Palestinians, or insist the Palestinians are descendants of people who migrated to Israel specifically to oppose Jewish settlement (the Joan Peters thesis). I’ve heard Palestinians insist that Israel is entirely a colonial creation settled by European immigrants as an extension of western imperialism. Their own records are cleansed - my neighbor denies there was ever such a thing as a Jewish resistance against the British, and when I point out the physical evidence around town, she turns and says they deserved it because of their conduct during the Holocaust. I presume there’s a parallel Arab position on the Hebron massacre.