Analysis
Defining Israeli Zionist racism -- part 7 of 12
By Kim Petersen & B. J. Sabri
Online Journal Contributing Writers


Jan 15, 2008, 00:09

SeCTION 1: (Continuation: G: ISRAELI ZIONIST RACISM IN THEIR OWN WORDS)

A: The case of Barbara Kay

In a recent email exchange, Barbara Kay asked one of us, Kim Petersen, to read an article by Bernard Lewis on �population exchanges.� [1] The reply:

Kim Petersen: On 11-Dec-07, 9:18 PM, �Hi Barbara, Edward Said already exposed the animus of Bernard Lewis years ago. Why should the existence of a Jewish state take precedence over a Palestinian state? I am doing a series with BJ Sabri that will explore much of the nonsense Lewis has written here. It should start on Saturday. Kim� [2]

On Dec 12, 2007, 11:25 AM, Barbara Kay replied, �And at that time you will explain why all these other population exchanges are irrelevant and only Israel is wrong. The Palestinians had their own state and rejected it. Why should Israel be destroyed for them? Are you saying Jews have no claim to their ancestral lands which they never stopped living in? If so, don't bother replying.� [italics added]

Comment: This is how we read the exchange: because Kay could not keep up with the cogent questions posed by Petersen, she proposed to end the exchange on her terms, that is, to cease the discussion if Petersen does not agree to her terms and vision of history. In the ample sense, this means that the truth that Zionists seek is a truth tailored to their story. Meaning, if a story requires verification, for instance, the ultimate test for its acceptability is whether the Zionists approve of it. Otherwise, all discussions cease! How did Petersen reply to Kay?

On 11-Dec-07, at 9:36 PM, Kim wrote: �Dear Barbara, First, your premise that because a crime was carried out in one location and succeeded that crimes should be permitted to be carried out in other locales is dangerous. Second, the Palestinians never had a chance to state what they wanted. It was a take-it partition shoved down their throats by imperialists. Third, who is talking about destroying Israel for anyone? Supposedly, it was okay for Zionist Jews to destroy the millennial long life of indigenous Palestinians in their homeland, but that their destruction of another should be protected? Fourth, Let's make a distinction here for accuracy: Mizrahi Jews (and some Sephardic Jews) who are indigenous or long resident in Palestine have the right of continued secure residency free from discrimination; Ashkenazi Jews have no connection to historical Palestine; their ancestral land is in Europe. Kind regards, Kim�

On Dec 12, 2007 11:38 AM Barbara Kay wrote, �The Jews are a people and have been dispersed for many centuries, but we are a people made up of different cultural traditions and we all recognize Israel as our ancestral home. My ancestral home is not Europe, and it is not for you to tell me where my ancestral home is. I can see this is not a fruitful conversation.� [italics added]

Comment: Again, because Petersen challenged the historical validity of Kay�s Zionist theses, she decided to truncate the discussion because it is �not a fruitful conversation.�

Conclusion: we do not need to generalize; but the replies of Kay are indicative of a mentality that is common to most, if not all, Zionists. That is, to be accepted, all quotations, tales, anecdotal stories, witnessed events, analyses, and history facts must conform to Zionist dogmas and promote Zionist issues. If this does not happen, then whatever was negatively said about Israeli Zionist racism and history is fake!

B: The case of Raphael Patai

Patai is a Hungarian-Israeli-American lecturer and author. In his book The Arab Mind, Patai, animated by extreme anti-Arab racism and by intense prejudice against Islam and the social culture of the Arabs, improvised himself as an �authoritative Psychoanalyst� of the collective Arab mind, although he was targeting the Palestinians in particular. [4] Interestingly, while he concentrated on Muslim Arabs, he spared the Christian Arabs for obvious tactical reasons intended to isolate Islam as the only source of discord between the West and Israel from one side and the Arabs on the other. Patai, the editor, or a reviewer wrote the following on the book�s back cover:

� . . . In the �Arab Mind,� Raphael Patai unravels [sic] the complexities of Arab traditions and their effect on the Arabs� social and political behavior in the twentieth century. . . . The �Arab Mind� discusses the upbringing of a typical Arab boy or Arab girl, the intense concern with honor and courage derived from Bedouins, the Arab tendency toward extreme behavior and to substitute words for deeds, and their hostile attitude toward the West. . . . The �Arab mind� provides additional conclusions about the Arab personality based on the effects in the Arab world in the past decade. . . . It shows how despite the wealth and power brought to the Arab world by their new weapon -- oil -- these rich nations maintain largely illiterate, at war with each other.� [italics added]

This is how the above �unraveling� of the �Arab Mind� relates to our discussion: to prove that the racist dissertations he made against Palestinians and other Arabs were right, Patai provided testimonials. In the preface to the 1983 Edition, pages ix and x, Patai wrote the following: �The critical reception of the first edition was overwhelmingly favorable. The very few negative reviews that came to my attention were penned by writers uncritically committed to the radical-leftist point of view of the Palestine Liberation Organization and similar groups, and were more in the nature of personal attacks than dispassionate evaluation of my findings.� [italics added]

Analysis

In analyzing the reviewer or Patai�s summary one cannot but notice a Zionist deception at work:

1.      The most notable thing about The Arab Mind is the fact that the author adheres to the racist ideology of Zionism. As such, his vantage point is structurally adversarial to the Arabs; hence, thematically it is tendentious and worthless. In addition, a patently chauvinistic author such as Patai is neither qualified nor trustworthy to be an independent observer of the Arab mind (or any other mind) since deep-seated prejudice impedes a minimum level of objectivity. On the other hand, being an adversary of the Arab nation and, specifically of the Palestinians, Patai, as an emigrant Zionist to Palestine, is, unavoidably, in the business of denigrating his adversaries and victims alike. Lending credence to this point, we have never heard that Patai wrote a book about the minds of Japanese, Bolivians, Danes, or Canadians. He only abused and denigrated the Arabs. And that is targeted racism.

2.     To further reveal Patai�s Israeli racism thus demonstrating how Zionists think, we would like the reader to know that in 1977, Scribner�s Son published another book of Patai's, entitled The Jewish Mind. In contrast to The Arab Mind, where he reduced the Arabs to nothingness, The Jewish Mind exalts the �extraordinary character of the Jews.� Here is how a sycophant from �Wayne State University Press� with clear connections to Zionism comments on the butter-and-honey story told by racist Patai [5]:

The Jewish Mind is a sweeping intellectual history of the Jews. Raphael Patai takes readers on an insightful journey through three millennia; examines six great historical encounters between the Jews and other cultures; and analyzes the manner in which each of them left its mark on the Jewish mind. This historic venture is followed by another journey, perhaps even more fascinating: a journey into the depths of the contemporary Jewish mind, involving the exploration of Jewish intelligence giftedness, and genius; of the phenomenology of special Jewish talents; of Jewish personality and character; and of the physical and mental health of the Jews. Patai concludes with a note of optimism by emphasizing that basic Jewish values, which for two thousand years have been constants in the Jewish mind, contain the promise of the Jewish future.

3.      In The Arab Mind, the reviewer (or Patai himself as own reviewer) tossed all Arabs (wherever they are) into one category, despite the fact that the author based his so-called study on �observing� the Arab Palestinian Bedouins, which, of course, are a fraction of the totality of Arab peoples. For starters, this cannot be true because the socio-economic and social behaviors of the Arab peoples vary from country to country; therefore, they are neither uniform nor inherently identical, although similarities may exist. Conclusion: the reviewer�s statement is false.

4.      Patai then went on to extract a conclusion based on his Zionist vision of the Arabs and call them extremists since they �substitute words for deeds.� This conclusion, of course, is the core of crusade that the author wants to affirm. But Patai�s principle objective was also to give another conclusion based on his �observations� which decried notions such as �honor� and �courage� etc., thus explaining the Arabs� �hostility to the West.� In other words, Patai claims that the Arabs (meaning the Palestinians) are not hostile because of Jewish Israeli-western colonialist imperialism and usurpation of land, cities, and the destruction of the Palestinian identity and social structures but because of their social notions of �courage� and �honor.�

Incidentally, the Zionist Indian-British novelist Salman Rushdie went as far as he could to state that the cause of Arab and Islamic extremism is due to a repressed sexuality and deformed sexual behavior [6]. Once he rose from obscurity to fame with his anti-Muslim and anti-Arab stance, and despite his shattering political mediocrity and lack of imagination for the social problems that affect his native Bombay, Rushdie, who sided with Bush�s war in Iraq, became the darling of Zionism. As a reward, British racist colonialism knighted him, US imperialism gave him faculty tenure at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Bill Gates� MS Word spelling program corrected the misspelling in Rushdie�s last name as we're typing it!

Once Rushdie wore the �sexo-psychoanalyst robes� and unleashed his anti-Islamic sexuality themes, Zionist websites were already behind him to for the next move. Rushdie, however, was not even original in his anti-Muslim sexuality charge, as he did not set the trend for tying so-called Arab-Islamic terrorism to the passions of troubled sexuality. It was Zionists who set that trend much earlier [7] as appeared on FrontPageMag, the website of the hard-line Zionist David Horowitz.

5.      Patai�s fanatic journey in racism is unparalleled. Aside from hatefully attacking the Islamic traditions, he went as far as to indict the Arabic language, its syntax, grammar, idioms, and figures of speech, and decreed that they are the sources of Arabs�s �exaggeration� and �extremism.�

6.      Patai speaks of the Arabs�s oil wealth. But, since he wrote his book in 1973, he alluded to the Arab oil-weapon consequent to the Israeli-Arab war in October of the same year. With this, he meant to instigate Western citizens against the �extremist� Arabs who caused the price of oil to soar consequent to Arab boycott of the countries that supported Israel in the war. However, the major point here is that Patai with direct racism depicted the Arabs as being illiterate despite wealth, then continued by generalizing the Arabs� oil wealth, while indeed, not all Arab states have oil and most of them are resources-poor.

Aside from the explicit racism of Patai, his remarks about the reception of his book is relevant to our discussion about the Zionist way of debating historical truth and other matters that relate to Israel, Palestine, and the Arab states. Patai divided his critics in two groups: he characterized those who approved of his thesis as being �critically overwhelming� and those who disapproved as, �The very few who uncritically disapproved.� [italics added]

Conclusion: The above discussion is unequivocal: Zionists move in one direction only. Those who oppose their ideology and the state of Israel are dubbed �minority,� �uncritical� thinkers, and leftist-leaning pro-PLO. One more note: imagine an Arab writer using the Zionist tactics in writing a book with the title: The Israeli Mind. Now, imagine the frenetic Zionist reaction assuming that such an author could ever find a publisher . . .

Next: Part 8 of 12

NOTES

[1] Bernard Lewis, �On the Jewish Question,� Washington Post, 26 November 2007. Available at the Wall Street Journal.

[2] Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage: 1979), 315-321. Said dissected Lewis�s work and compellingly revealed it to be �aggressively ideological,� in the sense that the purportedly �liberal objective scholarship� is �in reality very close to being propaganda against his subject material�: �the culmination of Orientalism as dogma that not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practioners.� [Italics in original]

[3] Raphael Patai, The Arab Mind (Charles Scribner�s Sons: 1983).

[4] Edward Said, op. cit., illustrated a �particular sort of compression and reduction� in the writing of Patai (309).

[5] Wayne States University Press, Review of the Jewish Mind, Column: about the book

[6] �It's all about sex: Rushdie's ruling on Islamic fanatics,� Sunday Morning Herald, 20 January 2006.

[7] Read Jamie Glazove, �The Sexual Rage Behind Islamic Terror,� 4 October 2001.