(no subject)

[taratemima]

David E disses Dan Savage. Hard.

Today was an okay day, a day I decided to go eat out and use the computer at Harvard Square rather than go home. Hm, I listened to hip-hop CD samples, trying to think of songs for a mix CD for a short story, and scenes as well. I might do it by phrases. During data entry, I had a brain storm.



I had this long theory in my head why Arab Muslims (and non-Arab Muslims who live around the area, like Iran, although they seem to get along great with Iranian Jews with no contact with Israel, or say they do) and Jewish folks don't seem to get along anymore, puttting it mildly. Some rough points, subject to serious revision:

1. Dhimmi and jiyza seems involved. As long as the Jewish folks were paying the jizya, they were following the dhimmi, they were okay. Except when there is rioting, and oh, some folks get killed, oops, they started it anyway (Hebron in 1929).
   
2. Different waves of settlement, different views. The folks who lived in Hebron before and around 1929 had a much kinder view of the rioters and blamed those loud-mouth Zionists (that was the term used, though I know there are different POVs within that movement). Stockholm Syndrome?
   
3. Sure, the founding of Israel is too, but I think their reasoning is that they already won the area from the Crusaders so it's theirs, God likes them better anyway, the Zionists acted real uppity and violent too and oh Temple was really an older version of Al-Asqa and David was a Muslim, they are Muslims, so it is really theirs, and not your overly legalistic selves, so Bronx cheer to you. No, I am not sure if that is the reasoning, but I suspect it is for some Islamist clerics. Supersecessionist bullcrap, much like the dispension meme.
   
4. E. Said reasoning: Sure, life sucked, you wanted to establish own state, but why here and why us? Because emotional attachment, 'next year in Jerusalem.' Do they understand? Narrative clash. Comprasion to other wars and nations doesn't help, nothing to compare it to, unless the Cherokee decide to secede Georgia from the US
   
5. Maybe most Palestineans don't think much about such involved theological matters. I remember a remark about ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, that they arrived late enough for people to remember when they weren't here, but long enough for them to think they have always been there. I suspect it is like that. Some thought God would make Egyptians victorious and left, others left because they didn't want to get killed, while others couldn't or just didn't leave.
   
6. Western contact also brings Western-style anti-Semitism. Not the cause, but new tools of outrage.
   
7. Settlements. I have the good bleeding heart liberal position of dismantling them, but I confess it is for a not so good reason. Individually, they might be nice people, but when they talk to the press, they make as a good of a case as some Hamas spokesperson. In short, they sound like assholes. I'm going to quote Michael Walzer, who said something which I've been trying to articulate:
   "For the settler movement is the functional equivalent of the terrorist organizations. I hasten to add that it is not the moral equivalent. The settlers are not murderers, even if there are a small number of terrorists among them. But the message of settler activity to the Palestinians is very much like the message of terrorism to the Israelis: we want you to leave (some groups on the Israeli right, including groups represented in Sharon's government, openly support a policy of "transfer"), or we want you to accept a radically subordinate position in your own country. The settlers' aim is Greater Israel, and the achievement of that aim would mean that there could not be a Palestinian state. It is in this sense only that they are like the terrorists: they want the whole thing."
   
8. Why the Jews? They are meme-changers, even the non-religious have activists. Also have a history of hanging around and encouraging other outliers and meme-changers: gays, artists, women, blacks. Systems that assume they are the final word, communism, fascism, Christianity and Islam are afraid that their own meme being corrupted or destroyed, Islam and Christianity remembering that they owe something to Judaism, thus hunting for any clue of dark conspiracy, something to spin into the assertation they want to destroy nations. On the face of it, stupid but presistant. Are religious and non-religious anti-Zionists screwing their own people. or are they so used to thinking others as stupid they just don't care? Is that even a question to ask? Why hang out with people who hate you?
   
9. The Grand Mufti Amin el-Husseini and his work, a man whose name I never can remember to spell.
   
10. The fear of annihilation by death or redemarginalization (ay that three times fast): first Israel, then the rest of the Diaspora? When to hit the panic button? Why am I caring? I have friends who have friends from Israel, Maybe in my own mathematics of annihilation, I am a target just for being in the periphary.
    
11. Can people arrest their own? When they are attacking the other? Or each other?
    
12. Will talk of transfer/walls/bombing turn the teacher into the conquerer? Other nations have done worse, it is not fair that only one nation is criticized, but why emulate other nations? Destruction or corruption? There has to be a better way, or am I just hunting for the one righteous man in Sodom?
    
13. Why are lefties picking on them? Fits too well in third world wretched of the earth meme. Never mind who is funding who. Wouldn't call the four sides equal, the moderates get less funding and intellectual support than the fanatics.
    
14. A divestment congress, Haggai goes and mocks so I don't have to. My own view closest to this.