Making a Sow’s Ear from Palestinian Protest

Camalita Naicker, The Con

The recent decision by the Congress of South African Students (COSAS) to place a pig’s head in what was assumed to be the kosher section of Woolworths, and then, in fact, turned out to be the halal section, could be written off as a mere “fail of the week.”

But it is indicative of a far more serious and insidious politics being cultivated by Boycott. Divestment. Sanctions-South Africa (BDS-SA) who have proved unable and unwilling to run a disciplined and ethical campaign in solidarity with Palestinians.

The Discourse of Terror: An Interview With Judith Butler by Cihan Aksan and Jon Bailes

To what extent, in your view, do the ways in which mainstream media select and contextualise events determine the boundaries of public thinking?  You have said on one hand, regarding the “framing” of war and terrorism, that, “Efforts to control the visual and narrative dimensions of war delimit public discourse by establishing and disposing the sensuous parameters of reality itself”,[i] but also that “specters are produced that haunt the ratified version of reality”.[ii]

Judith Butler: There are surely many ways that this happens, but we can note at the most obvious level the way in which forms of resistance or violence get cast as “conflicts” that assume two sides that are fighting only against one another.  We are more often than not asked, for instance, to regard Israel and Palestine as in a conflict of this kind, a framing that sets each of them on equal footing, and implicitly analogises the political situation to a fist fight, a soccer match, or a domestic quarrel.  So if, then, the only two intelligible political positions are “pro-Palestinian” or “pro-Israeli,” the presumption is that one’s position is determined by a sentiment that wants one side to win over the other.  In the meantime, what is lost is any sense that the Palestinian resistance to Israeli colonial rule is waged from a situation of occupation or expulsion, that there is a military order that controls the boundaries of what would be a sovereign Palestinian state, that the land on which that state is now thinkable has been radically diminished by an ongoing practice of land confiscation and appropriation.  So we set the actors on the scene through the banal discourse of “conflict” in ways that fully deflect from the history and struggle of colonial resistance, refusing as well by that means to link the resistance to other forms of colonial resistance, their rationale, and their tactics.

Statement of Opposition to the Failure of BDS South Africa to Condemn the Singing of "dubula e juda" ("shoot the Jew")

RHODES UNIVERSITY PALESTINIAN SOLIDARITY FORUM (RUPSF)

Statement of Opposition to the Failure of BDS South Africa to Condemn the Singing of "dubula e juda" ("shoot the Jew")

On 28 August 2013 protesters gathered at the Daniel Zamir concert at Wits University as part of BDS South Africa’s campaign and sang songs containing the slogan "dubula e juda" ("shoot the Jew").

RUPSF supports the broad principles of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against the Israeli state’s continued illegal occupation of Palestine precisely because we reject racism in any form. It therefore goes without saying that we are equally and unequivocally opposed to any expression of Anti-Semitism.

Judith Butler's Remarks to Brooklyn College on BDS

Judith Butler

Editors Note: Despite a campaign to silence them, philsophers Judith Butler and Omar Barghouti spoke at Brooklyn College on Thursday night. In an exclusive, TheNation presents the text of Butler's remarks.

Usually one starts by saying that one is glad to be here, but I cannot say that it has been a pleasure anticipating this event. What a Megillah! I am, of course, glad that the event was not cancelled, and I understand that it took a great deal of courage and a steadfast embrace of principle for this event to happen at all. I would like personally to thank all those who took this opportunity to reaffirm the fundamental principles of academic freedom, including the following organizations: the Modern Language Association, the National Lawyers Guild, the New York ACLU, the American Association of University Professors, the Professional Staff Congress (the union for faculty and staff in the CUNY system), the New York Times editorial team, the offices of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Governor Andrew Cuomo and Brooklyn College President Karen Gould whose principled stand on academic freedom has been exemplary.

Anti-Semite and Jew: A review essay

by Joel Pearson, August 2012

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in 1906, at the beginning of what would prove to be a century of great turbulence. Two cataclysmic wars would ravage Europe as ‘modernity’ shuddered through society. In a climate of alienation, marginalization and violence, Sartre developed his diagnosis of the human condition. His writings – plays, biographies, novels and notebooks – explored the problems of “existential thought (la contingence) and the vicissitudes of social history through the troubled lives of individual actors” (Jules-Rosette, 2007:266). With the smoke of Auschwitz still looming large over a continent in ruin after the Second World War, Sartre’s political work interrogated how the devastations of fascism, racism and inequality had erupted, and what their effects were on the individual psyche (Jules-Rosette, 2007:266). In 1944, as the war petered out in Europe and an increasing number of Jews returned home from Nazi Germany, Sartre set out to examine the roots of anti-Semitism in France. Anti-Semite and Jew (Réflections sur la question juive) examined the “interpersonal construction of personal identities” in the dramatic personae of the anti-Semite, the democrat, the inauthentic and the authentic Jew (Walzer, 1995:xxvi). His central claim, perhaps: identity and culture cannot be reduced to timeless essences; they are socially constituted within historical situations; and both individual and group perceptions are intimately tied to the (often hostile) perceptions of the “other/s” (Walzer, 1995:xxiii).

Orientalism

Edward Said, CounterPunch 

Nine years ago I wrote an afterword for Orientalism which, in trying to clarify what I believed I had and had not said, stressed not only the many discussions that had opened up since my book appeared in 1978, but the ways in which a work about representations of "the Orient" lent itself to increasing misinterpretation. That I find myself feeling more ironic than irritated about that very same thing today is a sign of how much my age has crept up on me. The recent deaths of my two main intellectual, political and personal mentors, Eqbal Ahmad and Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, has brought sadness and loss, as well as resignation and a certain stubborn will to go on.

Oppression and the Human Condition: An Introduction to Sartrean Existentialism

Thomas Martin applies Sartre's philosophy to contemporary issues and concerns, and draws on two case studies to make his point. The cases examine modern-day oppressors--in one case an anti-semite, in the other a sexist who objectifies women--in the context of Sartre's "bad faith." The case studies also reinforce Martin's argument that Sartre's early philosophy, especially his concept of "bad faith," provides a framework for discussions of oppressions such as racism and sexism.

"Tom Martin, writing in contexts marked by colonial legacies of racism and economic dependence, offers here one of the clearest statements on Sartre's philosophy and its importance for our continued efforts to forge a humane world. This is, indeed, one of the very best books on the subject for both scholars and lay readers."—Lewis R. Gordon, Brown University

Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate

Sartre constructs his landmark postwar analysis of anti-Semitism around four feature characters: the anti-Semite, the democrat, the authentic Jew, and the inauthentic Jew. He presents their interactions as a kind of hypothetical drama. Sartre examines how the four actors in the “drama” create the others, or more precisely, how each character both defines the others and is defined by them.