One of the few merits of the Wikileaks project is that it puts the obvious and already well-known on the front pages. Take Iran and its nuclear program, for example. Everybody who takes an interest in such matters and is not blinded by hatred of Jews running their own affairs knows that most Arab states are far more worried about the nuclear ambitions of the ayatollahs than they are about Israel and would be quietly pleased if the US and/or Israel put an end to them using whatever means necessary.
Continue reading ‘Wikileaks: Shock Revelations! Bomb Iran Now Say Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Bahrain’
Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist and a longstanding contributor to Z Word, interviewed Esther Webman, research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, Tel Aviv University, about her new book on Arab responses to the Holocaust.
Karl Pfeifer: In your book From Empathy to Denial / Arab Responses to the Holocaust (Co-author Meir Litvak) you emphasize discussing “as Jews and Israelis” this subject matter, to have “tried to maintain, as much as possible, a dispassionate approach”. Why did you qualify your ethnic origin as “our shortcoming”?
Esther Webman: Unfortunately, when it comes to the Arab-Israeli conflict there is a widespread belief that an Israeli is biased when he deals with Arab issues. And we do understand that as historians, we always have our own subjective position which might be reflected in our writing.
Continue reading ‘Arab Responses to the Holocaust: Esther Webman Interviewed’
Those of us who have written about Islamism and its connection to the terrorist attacks of the past decade have always gone to great effort to define this tradition as an extremist interpretation of the traditions of Islam. We have distinguished between Islam and Islamism, but we have also insisted that it is naïve to assume that when terrorists say they act in the name of Islam that their actions have nothing at all to do with their interpretation of the religion. To criticize Islamism is not a sublimation of hostility to Islam. It is the result of an interpretation of widely known facts about one extremist interpretation of that religion.
Achcar is a man at war with what he has written in his own book. It is Achcar, not us supposed Islamophobes and anti-Arab racists, who documents the tradition of Pan-Islamism and the fusion of Nazism and Islamic fundamentalism that was a key chapter in its history. The same author who traced this tradition from Rida to Husseini now writes as if the terms “Islamism” and “Islamofascism” are the product of anti-Islamic bigotry. Isn’t it possible, and even likely, that those he denounces for criticizing Islamism in recent years have arrived at conclusions similar to his own regarding the Islamists of the 1930s and 1940s because they, like him, concluded that there was good evidence in both cases to do so?
From a fine review by Professor Jeffrey Herf of Gilbert Achcar’s new book, The Arabs and The Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. Read the whole article at The New Republic.
Did Richard Holbrooke, the US Envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, meet the Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister, Mohammad Mehdi Akhoondzadeh, on the sidelines of a major international conference on Afghanistan? Holbrooke says he did. The Iranians say he didn’t.
Continue reading ‘Iranxiety Attack’
As I’ve argued before, one of the problems in portraying Iran’s drive for nuclear weapons as a concern for Israel alone is that it ignores the panic in the Arab world. In the Gulf especially, the chorus for a direct confrontation with Iran is growing. Here’s the Kuwait Times:
Continue reading ‘Iran Spurs Regional Nuclear Race’
Asked at a major press conference earlier this week about the prospects for talks with Iran, President Obama highlighted two issues which could likely derail any meaningful exchange. First, Iran’s nuclear program, and specifically the fear that it could trigger a regional nuclear arms race. Second, Iran’s funding of terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Continue reading ‘Iran’s Nuclear Program: Don’t Forget the Arabs’
