Zone1 The Palestinians as “victims of the victims."

[Procrustes Stretched]

Here we are: Religion and Ethics (Religion, Philosophy and the discussion of right and wrong.)

https://archive.ph/OnZQ9

Opinion: In the Israeli-Palestinian debate, you might be wrong. So be humble.

By Shadi Hamid
Columnist and Editorial Board member

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/16/intellectual-humility-israel-palestine-debate/

"the Palestinians as “victims of the victims,”"

"humility involves the recognition that the truth itself is more complicated than it might first appear"

Intellectual humility is a trait and a practice that allows one to accept their own limitations. Even if we think we are right, it entails holding open the possibility that we might be wrong. But on a deeper level, humility involves the recognition that the truth itself is more complicated than it might first appear.

The search for truth, even if one finds it, should not involve rigidity. We are all a product of our environments. When it comes to Israel and Palestine in particular, we bring our own preconceptions to any debate — our own selective read of history and our own developed sense of injustice. This is not about a disagreement over facts; it’s about how to interpret them. My hope is that more Americans will understand this, considering how much we disagree with one another over our own founding as a nation.

Obit
Edward Said
By Christopher Hitchens
Sept 26, 2003

A valediction for Edward Said.

The loss of Professor Edward Said, after an arduous battle with demoralizing illness that he bore very bravely, will be unbearable for his family,...

slate.com

His feeling for the injustice done to Palestine was, in the best sense of this overused term, a visceral one. He simply could not reconcile himself to the dispossession of a people or to the lies and evasions that were used to cover up this offense. He was by no means simple-minded or one-sided about this: In a public dialogue with Salman Rushdie 15 years ago, he described the Palestinians as “victims of the victims,” an ironic formulation that hasn’t been improved upon. But nor did he trust those who introduced pseudo-complexities as a means of perpetuating the status quo. I know a shocking number of people who find that they can be quite calm about the collective punishment of Palestinians yet become wholly incensed at the symbolic stone he once threw—from Lebanon!

Personally, I preferred his joint enterprise with Daniel Barenboim to provide musical training for Israeli and Palestinian children. But for Edward, injustice was to be rectified, not rationalized. I think that it was, for him, surpassingly a matter of dignity. People may lose a war or a struggle or be badly led or poorly advised, but they must not be humiliated or treated as alien or less than human. It was the downgrading of the Palestinians to the status of a “problem” (and this insult visited upon them in their own homeland) that aroused his indignation. That moral energy, I am certain, will outlive him.

I knew and admired him for more than a quarter-century, and I hope I will not be misunderstood if I say that his moral energy wasn’t always matched by equivalent political judgment. Indeed, it should be no criticism of anyone to say that politics isn’t their best milieu, especially if the political life has been forced upon them. Edward had a slight tendency to self-pity, and the same chord was struck even in the best of his literary work, which often expressed a too-highly developed sense of injury and victimhood. (I am thinking of certain passages in his Orientalism and some of the essays in Culture and Imperialism as well.) He was sometimes openly alarmed at the use made of his scholarship by younger academic poseurs who seemed to despise the classical canon of literature that he so much revered. Yet he was famously thin-skinned and irascible, as I have good reason to remember, if any criticism became directed at himself.

Some of that criticism was base and outrageous and sordidly politicized—I have just finished reading the obituary in the New York Times, which in a cowardly way leaves open the question as to whether Edward, or indeed any other Palestinian, lost a home in the tragedy of 1947-48—but much of it deserved more patience than he felt he had to spare. And he was capable of stooping to mere abuse when attacking other dissidents—particularly other Arab dissidents, and most particularly Iraqi and Kurdish ones—with whom he did not agree. I simply had to stop talking to him about Iraq over the past two years. He could only imagine the lowest motives for those in favor of regime change in Baghdad, and he had a vivid tendency to take any demurral as a personal affront.

It's a lot of reading and would take some time to digest the issues and points made here. I wish I could say more, but it will have to wait. I hope a few people read the two links and become motivated to a serious discussion of point issued in the WAPO article and especially on Christopher Hitchens' Obit for his friend.

 

[onefour1]

If one breaks into your house and murders your children, is the one who did this the victim? I think not.

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

If one breaks into your house and murders your children, is the one who did this the victim? I think not.

Please do not hijack this thread. It's not for lightweights who cannot think. Learn some respect and manners.

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

from the link: A valediction for Edward Said.

To address these wrenching thoughts in their reverse order, one could commence by saying quite simply that if Edward’s personality had been the human and moral pattern or example, there would be no “Middle East” problem to begin with. His lovely, intelligent, and sensitive memoir Out of Place was a witness to the schools and neighborhoods in Jerusalem and Cairo where fraternity between Arabs, Jews, Druses, Armenians, and others was a matter of course. (His memory also comprised a literary Beirut where the same could be said.)

He took an almost aesthetic interest in the details, eccentricities, and welfare of his own particular confession—the Anglican Christians of Jerusalem and especially St. Georges school in the eastern part of the city—but it’s hard if not impossible to imagine anyone with less sectarian commitment. When talking to him about the various types of sacred rage that poison the region, one gained the impression of someone to whom this sort of fanaticism was, in every declension of the word, quite foreign.

His lovely, intelligent, and sensitive memoir Out of Place was a witness to the schools and neighborhoods in Jerusalem and Cairo where fraternity between Arabs, Jews, Druses, Armenians, and others was a matter of course. (His memory also comprised a literary Beirut where the same could be said.)o him about the various types of sacred rage that poison the region, one gained the impression of someone to whom this sort of fanaticism was, in every declension of the word, quite foreign.

 

[Sixties Fan]

Please do not hijack this thread. Learn some respect and manners.

No, let us not hijack the thread.

Let us call it for what it is.

A repetition by Muslims that the Jews are doing to them what was done to the Jews during the Holocaust.

You are so unoriginal, one can see what you are about with your threads a mile away.


Jews are heartless, how could they after what happened to them during the Holocaust?

The problem is that you forget all the other massacres of Jews, and the Inquisition and more massacres by Christians and Muslims though the centuries, and not ONE Jew turned into a monster and turned their persecutors into victims, because they were victims.


But by all means go by anything you can find which will dehumanize all Jews, especially the Israelis, refusing to know anything about Judaism, Jewish laws, and how Jews think.


Your moral ground is exactly the same as the one Muslim extremists go by.

Turn Jews into monsters, Muslims into victims.

 

[BreezeWood]

If one breaks into your house and murders your children, is the one who did this the victim? I think not.

so true ...

indiscriminate bombing is so much better.

 

[toobfreak]

Palestinians as “victims of the victims."​

LESSEE: There once was a region of Palestine claimed by and fought over by many people changing hands many times. Then 800 years B.C during the Middle Iron Age, it was settled into a number of lose kingdoms and empires:

Both the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah were all both controlled and owned by the Jews. You'll note there is no state of Palestine. Prior to 1947, the nomadic Palestinians had a pretty good thing going and were offered a fair state of settlement by the UN to be permanently theirs that everyone else agreed upon but them. Bad decision. They have been losing land ever since.

 

[BackAgain]

Here we are: Religion and Ethics (Religion, Philosophy and the discussion of right and wrong.)

https://archive.ph/OnZQ9

Opinion: In the Israeli-Palestinian debate, you might be wrong. So be humble.

By Shadi Hamid
Columnist and Editorial Board member

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/16/intellectual-humility-israel-palestine-debate/

"the Palestinians as “victims of the victims,”"

"humility involves the recognition that the truth itself is more complicated than it might first appear"





Obit
Edward Said
By Christopher Hitchens
Sept 26, 2003

A valediction for Edward Said.

The loss of Professor Edward Said, after an arduous battle with demoralizing illness that he bore very bravely, will be unbearable for his family,...

slate.com

It's a lot of reading and would take some time to digest the issues and points made here. I wish I could say more, but it will have to wait. I hope a few people read the two links and become motivated to a serious discussion of point issued in the WAPO article and especially on Christopher Hitchens' Obit for his friend.

Zzz

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Here we are: Religion and Ethics (Religion, Philosophy and the discussion of right and wrong.)

https://archive.ph/OnZQ9

Opinion: In the Israeli-Palestinian debate, you might be wrong. So be humble.

By Shadi Hamid
Columnist and Editorial Board member

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/16/intellectual-humility-israel-palestine-debate/

"the Palestinians as “victims of the victims,”"

"humility involves the recognition that the truth itself is more complicated than it might first appear"





Obit
Edward Said
By Christopher Hitchens
Sept 26, 2003

A valediction for Edward Said.

The loss of Professor Edward Said, after an arduous battle with demoralizing illness that he bore very bravely, will be unbearable for his family,...

slate.com

It's a lot of reading and would take some time to digest the issues and points made here. I wish I could say more, but it will have to wait. I hope a few people read the two links and become motivated to a serious discussion of point issued in the WAPO article and especially on Christopher Hitchens' Obit for his friend.

Here we are: Religion and Ethics (Religion, Philosophy and the discussion of right and wrong.)

https://archive.ph/OnZQ9

Opinion: In the Israeli-Palestinian debate, you might be wrong. So be humble.

By Shadi Hamid
Columnist and Editorial Board member

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/16/intellectual-humility-israel-palestine-debate/

"the Palestinians as “victims of the victims,”"

"humility involves the recognition that the truth itself is more complicated than it might first appear"

Intellectual humility is a trait and a practice that allows one to accept their own limitations. Even if we think we are right, it entails holding open the possibility that we might be wrong. But on a deeper level, humility involves the recognition that the truth itself is more complicated than it might first appear.

The search for truth, even if one finds it, should not involve rigidity. We are all a product of our environments. When it comes to Israel and Palestine in particular, we bring our own preconceptions to any debate — our own selective read of history and our own developed sense of injustice. This is not about a disagreement over facts; it’s about how to interpret them. My hope is that more Americans will understand this, considering how much we disagree with one another over our own founding as a nation.

Obit
Edward Said
By Christopher Hitchens
Sept 26, 2003

A valediction for Edward Said.

The loss of Professor Edward Said, after an arduous battle with demoralizing illness that he bore very bravely, will be unbearable for his family,...

slate.com

His feeling for the injustice done to Palestine was, in the best sense of this overused term, a visceral one. He simply could not reconcile himself to the dispossession of a people or to the lies and evasions that were used to cover up this offense. He was by no means simple-minded or one-sided about this: In a public dialogue with Salman Rushdie 15 years ago, he described the Palestinians as “victims of the victims,” an ironic formulation that hasn’t been improved upon. But nor did he trust those who introduced pseudo-complexities as a means of perpetuating the status quo. I know a shocking number of people who find that they can be quite calm about the collective punishment of Palestinians yet become wholly incensed at the symbolic stone he once threw—from Lebanon!

Personally, I preferred his joint enterprise with Daniel Barenboim to provide musical training for Israeli and Palestinian children. But for Edward, injustice was to be rectified, not rationalized. I think that it was, for him, surpassingly a matter of dignity. People may lose a war or a struggle or be badly led or poorly advised, but they must not be humiliated or treated as alien or less than human. It was the downgrading of the Palestinians to the status of a “problem” (and this insult visited upon them in their own homeland) that aroused his indignation. That moral energy, I am certain, will outlive him.

I knew and admired him for more than a quarter-century, and I hope I will not be misunderstood if I say that his moral energy wasn’t always matched by equivalent political judgment. Indeed, it should be no criticism of anyone to say that politics isn’t their best milieu, especially if the political life has been forced upon them. Edward had a slight tendency to self-pity, and the same chord was struck even in the best of his literary work, which often expressed a too-highly developed sense of injury and victimhood. (I am thinking of certain passages in his Orientalism and some of the essays in Culture and Imperialism as well.) He was sometimes openly alarmed at the use made of his scholarship by younger academic poseurs who seemed to despise the classical canon of literature that he so much revered. Yet he was famously thin-skinned and irascible, as I have good reason to remember, if any criticism became directed at himself.

Some of that criticism was base and outrageous and sordidly politicized—I have just finished reading the obituary in the New York Times, which in a cowardly way leaves open the question as to whether Edward, or indeed any other Palestinian, lost a home in the tragedy of 1947-48—but much of it deserved more patience than he felt he had to spare. And he was capable of stooping to mere abuse when attacking other dissidents—particularly other Arab dissidents, and most particularly Iraqi and Kurdish ones—with whom he did not agree. I simply had to stop talking to him about Iraq over the past two years. He could only imagine the lowest motives for those in favor of regime change in Baghdad, and he had a vivid tendency to take any demurral as a personal affront.

It's a lot of reading and would take some time to digest the issues and points made here. I wish I could say more, but it will have to wait. I hope a few people read the two links and become motivated to a serious discussion of point issued in the WAPO article and especially on Christopher Hitchens' Obit for his friend.

 

[ding]

Here we are: Religion and Ethics (Religion, Philosophy and the discussion of right and wrong.)

https://archive.ph/OnZQ9

Opinion: In the Israeli-Palestinian debate, you might be wrong. So be humble.

By Shadi Hamid
Columnist and Editorial Board member

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/16/intellectual-humility-israel-palestine-debate/

"the Palestinians as “victims of the victims,”"

"humility involves the recognition that the truth itself is more complicated than it might first appear"





Obit
Edward Said
By Christopher Hitchens
Sept 26, 2003

A valediction for Edward Said.

The loss of Professor Edward Said, after an arduous battle with demoralizing illness that he bore very bravely, will be unbearable for his family,...

slate.com

It's a lot of reading and would take some time to digest the issues and points made here. I wish I could say more, but it will have to wait. I hope a few people read the two links and become motivated to a serious discussion of point issued in the WAPO article and especially on Christopher Hitchens' Obit for his friend.

Yes, it is a lot of reading. I couldn't help but notice the irony of the opening plea for objectivity and an open mind coming from you. I stopped reading after that. It was a bridge to far for me.

 

[ding]

"...they must not be humiliated or treated as alien or less than human..."

Hollow words for someone who wouldn't even consider classifying the ending of certain human lives as a misdemeanor crime.

 

[onefour1]

so true ...

View attachment 843972

indiscriminate bombing is so much better.

It's called retribution.

 

[Meriweather]

It's a lot of reading

First, this is a discussion forum not a reading forum. Summarize your position and we can discuss that. I can't have a discussion with people who wrote the information you posted only with interested members here.

Second: At the moment, the blood of beheaded babies obliterates the "victimhood" of anyone else, and that includes the Palestinians. Now is not the time for anyone to play the victim card. If anything, Palestinians should be as outraged as any of us and mourning the loss of life, never forgetting how vicious it was. Put.away.the.victim.card. Where do we go from here. How do we get there.

 

[BreezeWood]

It's called retribution.

... and murders your children

i believe you have missed the point of your own makebelieve cynicism ...

- take a good nap, maybe when you wake up things will be different.