The Daily Angry

"When people invoke their Zionism advocacy in their writings (like Lewis and Ajami and others) they lose it completely and forget about the scientific method or even basic logic." 

 Thus intones my favourite Arab intellectual, Prof. Abu Khalil, he who is a professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley:

This high standard for writing, coming from the Angry Arab stupefied me. As a short perusal of his heavily loaded "news" service will show you,  a concern for scientific method or basic logic is not exactly a strong aspect of his writing.

A few examples:

The self proclaimed anarchist's idiosyncrasies


The writer who cannot comprehend what he reads


No such thing as  logic or scientific verification of fact where Israelis are concerned


The basic logic of AbuKhalil's priorities


And the list goes on ...

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Update a day later: AbuKhalil's scientific method and basic logic of writing at its most evident:

" I usually avoid mentioning those types: those handful of Arabs who do tours and gigs for Zionist entertainment.  I tell Arabs that they should be ignored.  Of course, Saudi media now take orders from Zionist handlers in the US--yes, I believe that and please call me conspiratorial--I mean that.  So someone called Noona Darwish was on Al-Arabiyya (the news station of King Fahd's brother-in-law) but she was interviewed by one of the few able journalists there, Hasan Mu`awwad.  He grilled her and it was a Zionist fiasco.  Her Arabic is halting, and he would ask her questions about things she said in her books and she would not be able to answer and clearly revealed that she did not write a word that is attributed to her (like the Cicero of Damascus: her English is atrocious but we are led to believe that he writes long articles for the New Republic).  She would make claims about Islam and she would not be able to back them up.  Mu`awwad would ask her for reference and she would hold a book to the camera but would not be able to even read from it or cite what she wants to say from it.  It was rather a comedy.  I don't think that Zionists had this in mind when they put her on the network.  I must say that Mu`awwad seemed very pleased to mock her for the entire show and expose her for what she is.  Ha."

You will note that this "news" item is merely a tirade full of sarcastic commentary and not one verifiable example of the claims being made in this post. You will also note that there is no  link to any source whatsoever.

So here is a link to an article posted on Al-Arabiya News website (it was easy to google once you adjust AbuKhalil's insistence on the phonetic spelling of Arabic names to the way these names are actually spelled in the media; thus Noona Darwish can be found under Nonie Darwish and Al-Arabiya has only one "y" in it)).

When you read the article and the quotes provided by the author of what Darwish said, AbuKhalil's  reluctance to apply the scientific method will become self-explanatory.

Some thoughts about cutlery

Traditionally, good quality cutlery was made from silver, steel, pewter, electroplated nickel silver.

Nowadays, most cutlery is made from stainless steel or from a nickel and copper alloy.

Plastic cutlery is made for disposable use, and is frequently used for camping, excursions, and BBQs, at fast-food or take-away outlets, or provided with airline meals.

I don't like plastic cutlery (does anybody?), though I am obliged to use it when I'm on a trip. Plastic forks and knives can do the job they are meant for but just barely. The knives often don't cut well if the food is slightly harder than an over cooked broccoli flower, and the fork bends out of shape if you try to stick it into something more solid than a slice of cheesecake.

Consequently, plastic cutlery is very easy to dispose of. The value of its service to the hand that uses it is of such transitory and temporary effectiveness that the user never thinks twice before chucking it away. Plastic cutlery, by its very inferior quality and execution of purpose, inspires nothing but a bored and indifferent kind of relationship. As soon as its utility is done, it is garbaged away, together with the remains of the meal it helped to be eaten.

Unlike the stainless steel cutlery. THAT is chosen with greater care and attention to detail and quality. It is used regularly and does the job well, no matter what the density of the food it requires to cut up or scoop. It is washed and dried and placed in a special place. The relationship between the cutlery and the user is long-standing and requires some care and maintenance. No one throws away a piece of real cutlery off-handedly.

Sometimes when I go on picnics I opt for metal cutlery, and never mind the trouble that goes with it. But it is rare that I do so.

Sometimes when at some motel at night I want to eat a yogurt but no utensil in sight, I search high and low for something to use and if by any chance I manage to fish out one small plastic spoon forgotten deep in the bottom of an unused pocket in my suitcase, all of a sudden that plastic spoon takes on the value of a gold plated silver spoon. But, alas, such is the fate of the plastic spoon that its moment of being gloriously valued is all too brief. A blink of an eye (for how long does it take to eat a yogurt?) and it finds itself joining the other rubbish in the bin. For once it has been used, it becomes dis-needed, disposable, discardable.

Such is the nature of plastic cutlery and such is its fate.

_____________

My clueless reader may wonder what this rumination about cutlery is all about. He or she might even suspect that cutlery is not my suit. I may look at cutlery but I am in fact speaking of something else. Let me reassure that doubting reader that he or she is absolutely wrong.  This post is a nothing more nor less than what it says.  It's absolutely about how we humans differentiate among relationships and what rational and irrational factors come into our decisions and actions.


I trust this is helpful.

Analogies of an Angry Arab


On a post in his "News" service today, Prof. Abukhalil finally got wise as to whose opinions President Obama finds congenial and enlightening: Fareed Zakaria and Thomas Friedman.

AbuKhalil doesn't like it. So he offers the kind of thoughtful and analytical criticism one certainly expects from a   respectable professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley:

"This is like seeking neo-Nazis to find out what Jews in a country are thinking..."

The radical anarchist

 I.

"Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful,^[1][2] or alternatively as opposing authority and hierarchical organization in the conduct of human relations.^{[3][4][5][6][7][8]} Proponents of anarchism, known as "anarchists", advocate stateless societies based on non-hierarchical^[3][9][10] voluntary associations.^"

^II. 

 ^" AbuKhalil describes himself as "a former Marxist-Leninist, now an anarchist",^[5] a feminist, and an "atheist secularist".^[6]"

^III.

AbuKhalil:

"I don't like flags, and I don't like nationalisms but for Palestine and the Palestinians, everything and anything. "

____________________

Imagine, just for the sake of the point I want to make in this post, No'am Chomsky saying something like the quote, with one tiny alteration:

I don't like flags, and I don't like nationalisms but for Israel and the Jews, everything and anything.

____________________

BTW, what's an atheist secularist?  

***

Addendum:

According to the wiki entry " AbuKhalil  ...supports one secular state in historical Palestine" 

What kind of "one secular state" does the peace-loving, secularist-atheist, radical anarchist envisions?

Here are a few examples:

"Prof. Abukhalil dreams about the day Palestinians take over Israel's institutions, towns, cities, malls, universities, etc etc. Here are some of the fantasies he shares with his readers:

"... once Palestine is liberated, I don't think that Hebrew poet living under a Palestinian flag (and using the renamed George Habash International Airport) should be harassed unless they harm the security of the anti-Zionist state."
" But your delusions are good for us: you won't know what will hit you in the future in response to all the war crimes that you have committed against our people. "

"And once the Palestinian refugees are returned to their homes all over Palestine, I will make sure that you get decent rents in the formerly Palestinian refugee camps because we may be a bit short of space for the occupiers then. " 

And then there is this:

" (Nothing incenses me or provokes me like watching scenes of "tourist" promotion for the enemy state of Israel: I scream in my inside. The stones are not yours. The flowers are not yours. The beaches are not yours. The clouds are not yours. The blueness of the sky is not yours. All will return to their owners. Then, everything will be more beautiful and more splendid.)"

***

Abukhalil, let me re-iterate, is not some nutcase who fulminates on street corners, or a wild-eyed Islamist mullah in his Friday sermon. He is a respectable professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley. 

Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!

No such thing as a terrorist against Israelis

Prof. AbuKhalil, who teaches at at State University of California, provides a helpful "news" service in which he promotes every possible lie, fantasy and random wish or thought as "truth".  

Here is the latest example from his ever so feverish and fertile mind:

" In that awful book by Daniel Byman, A High Price: The Triumphs and Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism", the author claims that when Mossad murdered Abu Hasan Salamah with a car bomb in Beirut in 1979, that "four innocent bystanders...also perished in the blast." (p. 54).  In reality, the blast killed 9 people and injured"

Let's look at what Byman writes: "four innocent bystanders...also perished in the blast." (p. 54).  

Abu khalil claims that "In reality, the blast killed 9 people and injured..."

The answer is already provided together with the libelous accusation. But you need to know how to read Abukhalil. and that means that you need to know that for him there is no such thing as terrorists against Israelis. Every single terrorist who acts to kill or assist in the killing of,  Jewish Israelis, is "innocent" as per definition.

According to this source: "The blast killed Salameh and eight other people."

Who were those 8 others? 

According to this source: 

" Salameh's four bodyguards were killed. Four bystanders were also killed."

So, altogether, nine people were killed. Salameh ( "the chief of operations—code name Abu Hassan—for Black September, the organization responsible for the 1972 Munich massacre and other attacks."), his 4 bodyguards (not "innocent" by any stretch of the imagination) and 4 verifiably innocent bystanders.

So where is the lie that Daniel Byman is accused of writing in his book, and that merits a special entry in the "news" according to Abu Khalil's academically learned opinion? 

Is this the type of analysis you expect from an academic who is supposed to teach young students how to obtain information and check the veracity of what they are being fed? 

"Netanyahu

The Swollen Envy of a Pygmy Mind

The New York Times featured a nicely admiring article about Israeli Jazz artists performing in New York:

"The proposition that jazz is a global language, spanning continents and cultures, has been a reliable diplomatic device for so many years that it now has the ring of a banality.

Dani Miller

“Jazz became the world’s music long ago,” said Susan E. Rice, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, in that organization’s General Assembly hall on Monday night. “There is by now a rich tradition of Nordic jazz. There’s South Asian jazz, there’s Russian jazz and Chinese jazz.”

Ms. Rice was speaking at a concert to celebrate International Jazz Day, an initiative of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and if her quick catalog left out Israeli jazz, that was probably just as well: no need to state the obvious. Over the last 15 years, Israel has produced and exported so many serious young musicians that the jazz landscape is hard to picture without their influence, particularly in New York and especially now." (My emphasis)

Let's re-read what the article states: "Over the last 15 years, Israel has produced and exported so many serious young musicians that the jazz landscape is hard to picture without their influence,"

Prof. Abukhalil, ever the vigilant Zionist-hater, expresses a violent displeasure to this rather innocuous and easily verifiable accolade. According to his intelligent interpretation, the article is claiming that Jazz is Israeli. That is, Israel claims to be the originator of Jazz. And Abukhalil will have none of it. What, Jazz is Israeli? Isn't it enough that Israel "stole the Falafil" it now pretends that Jazz is authentic Israeli music?

This is the kind of mind that the State University of California entrusts with teaching its young students. 

***

Here is another example that highlights the distinguished quality of Abukhalil's thinking. Note how delighted he is by the vulgar humour displayed by some young Arabs: 

"Netanyahu

I have noticed that many young Arabs write Netanyahu's name in Arabic as:
نتن يا هو
which would read as "filth, o people".

PS Ali tells me:  "Just wanted to tell you that نتن يا هو was first used during the 1996 Zionist attack on Lebanon".

And how ignorant he is when he quotes "Ali" as avowing that this vulgarizing tradition of spelling Netanyahu's name was  begun during Israel's 1996 attack on Lebanon. 

The Prime Minister who presided over "Sour Grapes" was Shimon Peres, not Netanyahu.  So, do you believe "Ali"? Are you impressed by AbuKhalil's  intellectual quality of criticising Israeli policies (or whatever)? Are you moved to mirth by his inclination for low-brow spurts of childish and vulgar animus towards Israel?

If you are still hesitant in making a severe judgment on AbuKhalil's intellectual abilities and general faculties (such as they are), read this comment.

Do you wonder what kind of news, information, understanding or analysis is exactly being purveyed by this person with his incontinent verbal passing of noxious intestinal gas via the anus?

Do you know how easy it is to make fun of As'ad, a name that could be read as an acronym of ass and head?

***

Update: Another empty braggadoccio from the professor:

"US cash

I am willing to bet my farm (the family sold the farm in Tyre, actually), that there has never been an election in the Middle East since the 1950s in which the US did not intervene in with cash.  Not one."

 

He is willing to bet a farm he does not own on making some outlandish statement which he has no way of proving, ever. What does it mean when you make a bet on something while your bank account is totally empty? What do we call such persons who do that?  A liar? A coward?  An empty barrel that makes a lot of noise when on a roll? Would he dare bet his academic position on this fulmination?  What do you think?

But poor thing it has no speech….

I took out Isabel Fonseca's book "Bury me Standing" about the history of European Gypsies. I'll explain my particular interest perhaps at a later date.  This morning I just went over the book very quickly. It is a remarkable work And I have the impression that when I finish reading it I will understand even less about the Gypsies than I do now, though perhaps I will know more.

Two short excerpts:

"Papusza lost more than a hundred members of her family during the war. But even this was not the tragedy that would shape her. She wrote at a critical moment in her people’s history, in Poland and (unknown to her) everywhere else- life along the lungo drom, life on the road-was coming to an end and nothing recognizable or tolerable looked like taking its place.


O lord, where should I go?
What can I do?
Where can I find
Legends and songs?
I do not go to the forest,
I meet with no rivers.
O forest, my father,
My black father!


The time of the wandering Gypsies
Has long passed. But I see them,
They are bright,
Strong and clear like water.


You can hear it
Wandering
When it wishes to speak.


But poor thing it has no speech….


…the water does not look behind.
It flees, runs farther away.
Where eyes will not see her,
The water that wanders.


Nostalgia is the essence of Gypsy song, and seems always to have been. But nostalgia for what? Nostos is the Greek word for a “return home”; the Gypsies have no home, and, perhaps uniquely among peoples, they have no dream of a homeland. Utopia-ou topos- means “no place”. Nostalgia for utopia: a return home to no place. O lungo drom. The long road." (pp. 4-5)

***

 

"At fifteen, Karoly Lendvai lost everyone. From his town of Szengai, seventy-five miles southwest of Budapest, he and his family were rounded up by Hungarian police and forced to walk forty miles north to Komarom, to the notorious Csillag internment camp which was run by the Arrow cross, the Hungarian fascists. Fifty years on, Karoly Lendvai’s memory was undimmed.

“As we marched through, others joined our group, more Gypsies and more gendarmes,” he told a Reuters reporter in the summer of ’94. “Some babies died along the way, and some would-be escapees were shot, left by the roadside. No one knows who they were….  We were in the camp about two weeks with hardly any food…. More people died as typhus broke out, and others were killed. The dead were thrown into a huge pit, covered with quicklime. There were layers upon layers of dead. I do not know when the pit was finally filled because one day we were herded into cattle cars to be taken to who knows where.”

Lendvai was saved by an air raid. In the confusion of sirens and bombings he escaped into woods “for about a year….[and] I never saw the others again.” Lendvai hadn’t heard the word Holocaust and, at sixty-five, he still couldn’t quite believe that all of this happened simply because Gypsies were Gypsies; but he knew that his family had all been been murdered. Prisoners of the Csillag internment camp were transported to Auschwitz.

“Rot you Jew-Gypsy!” Lendvai remembered an Arrow guard screaming at him as he was being pushed onto the train. The curse still troubled him: “Why,” he interrupted himself to ask the journalist, "why did he call me a Jew?” (pp. 252-253)

[-]

The Romani word for the (Gypsy) Holocaust is Porraimos, the Devouring. In addition to a haunting evocation of the events themselves, ‘the Devouring” usefully describes the continuing suppression or denial of the Gypsy case. (Appropriately, porraimos is a term even less well known among Gypsies than "Holocausto”)"  (p.253)

____________

Update:

""It’s no accident that Lorca came to understand the duende as a result of watching and listening to Andalusian Gypsy singers, whose troubled voices defy virtuosity. The best among them drag a spirit of revelation up into the room, and when this happens, the duende has been wrested from his den. And the songs that make such revelation possible in the first place are always—always—about struggle. They are always a kind of serenade to the resilience and the resistance that struggle creates—and offers proof of its success.

Any poet who is honest with him or herself recognizes a struggle very near the impetus to write. The Gypsy struggle might be described as the struggle to subsist, to resist absorption by a larger more powerful culture. It’s a struggle, literally, not to disappear. This struggle is not exactly the case for most poets in American society. But in one way or another, there is a connection with the Gypsy's plight. There are two worlds that exist together, and there is one that pushes against the other, that claims the other doesn’t, or need not, exist. The duende stirs as a way of saying: you will only stay whole by moving—day after day, note after note, poem after poem—from one world to the next."

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5898

 Where fatigue is great, the mind
Will invent entire stories to protect sleep.

Dark stories. Deep fright.
Syntax of nonsense.

(Tracy K. Smith)

AbuKhalil's Delight

Prof. AbuKhalil shares his delight in the sight of Moroccans burning an Israeli flag.

Strange how he doesn't seem to notice that no Moroccans, nor Egyptians, nor any other Arabs in any Arab country ever seem to be slightly outraged or even perturbed, by the mass massacres in Syria which by some reports already account for over 10,000 Arab Muslim dead.

I can never begin to fathom the shallows of this person's hypocrisy.

_______

Update: Via Snoopy the goon, here is another illustration of Arab moral priorities

Once out of the pit

Norm Geras is in his best Obi Wan shape as he easily pokes an effective saber at Antony Lerman's  article in which the latter discusses "whether or not Günter Grass's recent poem, 'What must be said', was an instance of anti-Semitism."

With his usual acuteness, Norm hits the nail right on its head when he identifies the gaping hole in 

 Lerman's argument:

" He doesn't neglect to refer to that element in the poem which is most problematic in the context of his central question: Grass's suggestion that Israel claims the right to a first strike that could snuff out - or destroy - the Iranian people. But, then, at no point in what follows does Lerman relate this element to the issue which his piece purports to be about."

Lerman's polemical sleight of hand reminds me of a story I once read about a nineteenth century British rag that used to publish sensational novels in weekly serialized instalments. The story was written from one week to the next and only the author knew how he was going to resolve the knotty problems that he himself had set up in the week before.

On one such occasion, the author ended his weekly chapter with a breath-stopping situation, his protagonist hanging with both hands from the rim of a pit, snakes snapping at his feet, on one side of him a roaring lion, on the other - two crooks with their guns trained on him.

Then he failed to submit the next week's chapter. As he was a known lush, everyone suspected that he had gone on one of his drinking binges. The editor asked other writers to provide the necessary installment but they were all stymied. They had no idea how to get the hero out of the pit, and away from the menacing snakes, roaring lion and would-be killers. The paper was issued with an apology to the readers for missing that week’s episode.

Finally the author showed up. Everyone pounced on him, yelling and angry and predictably, demanding to know how he was going to resolve the situation.

No big deal, shrugged the author. He inserted a sheet of paper into the typewriter and started the next chapter:

"Once out of the pit, our hero ..."

Singing Israel       

Miriam Makeba - Erev Shel Shoshanim 

Twilight of roses

Let's go into the garden

Myrrh and frankincense

a carpet under your feet

Night is descending

and rose wind blows

In your ear I'll whisper

a rose melody love 

Shimon Israeli - Stam Yom shel hol (Just an everyday day) 

Just an everyday day

A bright blue morning

No special fete or dance

No trumpets or violins 

But a young girl smiled

as she passed by 

on her way to the beach

A flower in her hand

Matti Kaspi - Hine Hine (Here, here...)

Here here here is a melody

that starts low, in Mi-major

but wants to grow, wants to grow 

to La-major

               Fa-minor

Looking for an outlet

And here she is, 

climbing up up

I had no idea that she'd thrive and spread her wings

That she would soar, and get away

become cheeky and answer back...

 

Sixty years old

Someone painted red
Mount Gilboa’s head
The rooster’s call
Proclaims the day is here

Sixty years old opens her eyes
And puts on her shoes
A big day at the door
Coming up, her own day

At the door the big day,
Young and fresh
Irons her wrinkles
Erases the years

She is real, not a symbol
Not just a banner, or an emblemThe past is behind her
She looks to the future

She is a grandmother and mother
A grandchild and great grandchild
In short, she is a self-renewing cycle
Like the seasons

A summer wife, a winter wife,
A loving wife, a contentious wife
But deep in her heart
Always it is spring
Her callused hand
Rough like dry parchment
Gently caressing
Infinitely tender

Sixty years the calendar says
But in all the rest
She is hardly sixteen
Or even six years old…

 

Ofra Haza - Eli, Eli (A walk to Caesaria)

My God, My Own God
Let this never end
the sea, the sand,
the whispering water
the splendour of the sky
a pleading in the human heart