The Contentious Centrist

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 16:58:00 +0000

... ad Hitlerum

Our perpetually Apoplectic Amigo, the professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley, is very upset with Obama's visit to Israel. So he takes special pleasure and consolation in the way Palestinians are planning to welcome the American president.

This is one way they do it. (CC warning: graphic representations of the horrors of life in "Palestine").

And here is another:

PA's welcome to Obama:
Americans behind 9/11 attacks and

Hitler was greater than Roosevelt

Official PA daily:
History is written by the victors,
therefore "Muslim terrorists" are falsely blamed for 9/11
and Nazism is prosecuted instead of honored

"Had Hitler won, Nazism would be an honor"

Hitler has also been on Prof. AbuKhalil's mind today:

"Michele and I have been arguing: who is the better failed artist, Hitler or George W. Bush. I argue that Hitler was a far better failed artist than George W. Bush. Just google some of his paintings [Link helpfully provided by CC].

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 12:53:00 +0000

A woman to admire ...

Here is Charlize Theron on Samira Ibrahim:

Samira represents the model of how to stand up to fear, and the impact she has made reaches far beyond Egypt. It takes just one woman to speak out, and thousands of others around the world will listen and feel inspired to act.

Tweets by this model for inspiration by women all over the world, Samira Ibrahim:

"An explosion on a bus carrying Israelis in Burgas airport in Bulgaria on the Black Sea. Today is a very sweet day with a lot of very sweet news."

“I have discovered with the passage of days, that no act contrary to morality, no crime against society, takes place, except with the Jews having a hand in it. Hitler.”

“Today is the anniversary of 9/11. May every year come with America burning.”

" (Al Saud dirtier than Jews) "آل سعود اوسخ من اليهود #ثورة_السعودية

"Today is the anniversary of 9/11. May every year come with America burning."

__________

Update: So far the professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley is silent on the subject of Samira Ibrahim, even though he is aware of this day's significance. He cannot remain silent for long, as I'm sure his many readers will ask him to respond to the incident. Let's wait and see what he has to say. (I suspect he is probably trying to find the sweet spot between her antisemitic and anti-American rants and his instinctive inclination to agree with each one of her tweets).*

_________

Update II: "Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, had said earlier Thursday that Ibrahim was on her way back to Egypt and would not participate in a State Department ceremony Friday that will honor nine other recipients of the International Women of Courage Award.”

________

Update III: Just remembered this incident

________

*Update IV: Looks like the enraged professor from the West Coast found his sweet spot. Or so he thinks. Of course he cannot quite get it right when he says: "1) hateful words by Arabs are worse--according to Western standards--that actual killing of Arabs by Israel.", forgetting, that one of her tweets was a celebration of the killing of Israelis by Arab terrorists. It appears that the actual killing of Israelis by Arabs - according to AbuKhalil's standards- doesn't matter one little bit.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:09:00 +0000

The Purveyor of Scientific Truths

Prof. AbuKhalil seems to credit the recent conspiracy theory about the death of Hugo Chavez with not only possibility but likelihood.* Here is his justification for thinking so:

In theory, carcinogens ... can be applied as a weapon. Carcinogens are employed in experimental animals to study cancer initiation and progression. However, cancers take a (long) while to develop, and the impact of using a carcinogen cannot be carefully targeted. If applied in large doses, they can cause cancer development in multiple tissues. These uncertainties limit their usefulness as an assassination tool (if it is going to take a few years for someone to die as a consequence of their use, then they would be too blunt of an instrument).

Far more useful and clever to my mind has been the use of Polonium 210 as an assassination tool. It is difficult to detect and decays naturally over time. Arafat was probably assassinated that way.

BTW, Chavez was a heavy smoker, which is a risk factor for cancer. His cancer was reported to be pelvic, although its exact provenance remains unknown. It has been speculated that it could be a bowel cancer.

Of course, a conspiracy theory for Chavez demise has its roots in his targeting by the US early on. The 2002 coup against him was an intrinsic component of the Bush administration quest to control oil producing countries as part of its overall aim for American hegemony in the 21st century. That coup failed, but the invasion of Iraq followed. This month is the 10th anniversary of that catastrophe."

I then asked him if it is possible that the government science of assassination is ahead of civilian medical science, and he wrote:

"Of course there are methods of assassination that must have been developed as part of programatic efforts to improve the practice of assassination. The polonium 210 and the ricin assassinations (most likely KGB and FSB, respectively) and the case of Khaled Mishal (Mossad) most likely reflect such programs. I am sure the Americans have their own. The science of such assassinations is however relies on known properties of the agents involved, not some secret unknown effects that no one in the scientific community knows about."

I think it is obvious from this exchange how eager AbuKhalil is to have this conspiracy theory credited with scientific truth.Consider how his interlocutor ("a comrade") is equally eager to lend some plausibility to this outlandish proposition, relying on a non-fact for his "scientific"explanation. Which explains why the prof. contacted him for enlightenment in the first place.

However, I'm a little puzzled as to why AbuKhalil attributes such progressive methods and knowledge to Israel's Mossad (for who else could have done the deed?) after reassuring his readers time and again of how dumb the Mossad is?

This is a teacher of some academic stature, entrusted by the American Ministry of Education to teach young minds how to collect information, think critically and rationally and grow in understanding and knowledge.

* A possibility is a thing that may happen or be the case. A likelihood is almost certainty. A subtle difference but not that subtle to a trader in words of Angry Arab's ilk.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 23:24:00 +0000

Hate Crimes

According to wikipedia:

"A hate crime is a category used to describe bias-motivated violence: "assault, injury, and murder on the basis of certain personal characteristics: different appearance, different color, different nationality, different language, different religion."^[2]

Prof. AbuKhalil complains about hate crimes against Palestinian students:

"I thought it would interest you to know that there have been hate crimes committed against Palestinian students at St. Olaf College ... . After the SJP chapter at St. Olaf posted a display for their annual Palestine Awareness Week, 2 large Palestinian flags that were part of the display were stolen. Soon after someone wrote "Death to Gaza" on one of the posters on the display, and several other posters by an SJP member were stolen"

I'm willing to bet, without even checking, that the law-loving, anti hate crimes, professor would never record this kind of event:

"School officials are busy rebuilding the library at United Talmud Torahs elementary school in Montreal, Canada, after vandals firebombed the room April 5, the eve of Passover. The school was closed at the time and no one was hurt, but the blaze left the library a charred ruin. Only a box of 25 books was salvaged from the 10,000-volume collection, which served some 235 K–6 students. The fire did not spread to the rest of the school."

Or this:

"A Jewish schoolboy was punched in the back of the head and beaten up in the latest anti-Semitic attack to hit France.
The 12-year-old was walking near his Jewish school in southeastern Paris yesterday when a gang set up on him, calling him a 'dirty little Jew'."

(Judging by his recent complaint about the tentacles of "Jewish power" in France, perhaps he doesn't consider these to be hate crimes, but rather a legitimate resistance against Israeli occupation of the whole of Palestine.)

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 17:29:00 +0000

Read and weep for freedom of speech on Canadian Campuses

"... United States and Canada are the two worst places in the world for pro-palestinian talks in college campuses, academic freedom..."

Indeed.

Act I: Here is a little historical record for this statement:

"For the duration of the standoff, ticket-holders pushed their way through a thick crowd of protesters and police outside the building, entering the Hall building through a secured access point complete with metal detector. They were then escorted to the auditorium where the lecture was to take place. Ticket holders later complained that the protesters had subjected them to antisemitic slogans and even physical attack. Holocaust survivor Thomas Hecht was kicked in the groin by protesters and a local Rabbi was also physically assaulted.^[2]

Shortly after ticket holders were escorted into the Hall building the large window front that protestors and bystanders were banging on shattered, prompting a police officer to immediately discharge pepper spray through the window of the Hall building, poisoning both the small minority of protestors involved and the large majority of innocent bystanders. The spray entered the building's ventilation system forcing an evacuation of the entire building. At approximately the same time, a second window on the building's first floor, on the western side was broken when protesters threw a metal barricade into it because they were being intimidated by police.

The immediate result of the protest and subsequent evacuation was the cancellation of the lecture"

And here is the visual record

Act II: The follow-up:

"A Montreal university has barred former
Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak from speaking on
campus, igniting a storm over whether the institution
is curbing free speech in the name of keeping peace on
its politically fractious campus.

Concordia University, the site of violent clashes two
years ago that scuttled a speech by former Israeli
leader Benjamin Netanyahu, has turned down a request
by a Jewish students group to have Mr. Barak deliver a
lecture this month."

*****

Just a little reminder and then, two questions:

Who exactly is being denied the exercise of their freedom of speech?
What good is a cause that needs to rely on lies, distortions and violence in order to sustain its "justice"?

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 01:44:00 +0000

Whoever chooses to sleep with dogs ...

According to Tehran Times, the film "Argo" is an anti-Iranian propaganda film, on the same level as the films of Nazi publicist Leni Riefenstahl. She made Nazi war-mongering and Jew-hatred look beautiful. "Hollywood, you see, is a virtually 100% Jewish enclave. And with a few noble exceptions, the Jewish billionaires who own and run Hollywood, and determine what kinds of motion pictures dominate the world, are rabid supporters of Israel's genocide in Occupied Palestine."

Why does the author of this article think Jews make films like "Argo"?

Because:

"... war on Iran -- as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Chuck Hagel and all genuinely American strategists have been screaming from the rooftops -- is an Israeli plan, not an American plan."

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 00:02:00 +0000

The Snarl of the day:

Angry Arab cannot wait for Amos Oz to die ...

Here is why:

"Oz was one of the first Israelis to advocate a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict after the Six-Day War. He did so in a 1967 article "Land of our Forefathers" in the Labor newspaper Davar. "Even unavoidable occupation is a corrupting occupation," he wrote. In 1978, he was one of the founders of Peace Now. Unlike some others in the Israeli peace movement, he does not oppose (and in 1991 advocated^[2]) the construction of an Israeli West Bank barrier, but believes that it should be roughly along the Green Line, the pre-1967 border.^[1] He has also advocated that Jerusalem be divided into numerous zones, not just Jewish and Palestinian zones; including, one for the Eastern Orthodox, one for Hasidic Jews, an international zone, and so on.^[2]
He has opposed settlement activity from the beginning and was among the first to praise the Oslo Accords and talks with the PLO.^[2] In his speeches and essays he frequently attacks the non-Zionist left and always emphasizes his Zionist identity. He is identified by many right-wing observers as the most eloquent spokesperson of the Zionist left. His views can be encapsulated as follows:

Two Palestinian-Israeli wars have erupted in this region. One is the Palestinian nation's war for its freedom from occupation and for its right to independent statehood. Any decent person ought to support this cause. The second war is waged by fanatical Islam, from Iran to Gaza and from Lebanon to Ramallah, to destroy Israel and drive the Jews out of their land. Any decent person ought to abhor this cause." (April 7, 2002)"

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 00:27:00 +0000

“It’s from when she was in the camps”

An Israeli story

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 19:22:00 +0000

The warrant for the third intifada is being prepared

Remember this little boy who was killed by Israeli soldiers, except that he wasn't ?? Get ready for Act II, and the manufacturing of outrage.

More will come, and the compulsive consumers of rage and hatred will gobble it up like candy. They need their hourly fix in order to be able to justify the deliberate, premeditated targeting of Israeli kids for annihilation.

According to the the NYT's Jerusalem correspondent, who started her mission learning about the I/P conflict from her friend, EI's Ali AbuNimah (need more be said about her understanding or knowledge?):

"Nabil A. Shaath, the Palestinian commissioner for international relations, said in an interview that the West Bank leadership was “doing our best to keep calm” and that “violent confrontation absolutely is not our plan.”

“I don’t know how much people can be contained,” Mr. Shaath said of the Jaradat case. “I don’t think anybody is planning an intifada. The question is how much accidents, incidents like this might lead to an anger that can explode.”

According to this source, more than 800,000 Palestinian prisoners have been held in Israeli jails since 1967. You may ponder the likelihood of this one seemingly low-level prisoner dying of torture just now, when clearly the Palestinian leadership is trying to whip up a frenzy of hatred and violence. Remember Pallywood and the case of Al-Durrah, and what damage that theatre had inflicted on both Israelis and Palestinians.

Remember Arafat's repeated insistence that he had absolutely no interest in fomenting violence but that "the people" spontaneously combusted after Camp David II? Well, years later the full truth came to light, and from an unimpeachable source:

Yasser Arafat’s widow, Suha, admitted that the late Palestinian leader planned the second intifada, in an interview with Dubai TV earlier this month, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

“Immediately after the failure of the Camp David [negotiations], I met him in Paris upon his return.... Camp David had failed, and he said to me, ‘You should remain in Paris.’ I asked him why, and he said, ‘Because I am going to start an intifada. They want me to betray the Palestinian cause. They want me to give up on our principles, and I will not do so,"

Any genuine peace loving activist out there ought to realize by now that all it needs for Palestinian plight to end is a will to peace, which will translate into a very simple principle: All we Palestinians want is to be Palestinians. We will no longer kill, seek to kill, educate to kill or want to kill any Israeli Jew. Once that paradigm shift takes place, every obstacle that causes Palestinian suffering will fall away like a dry scab from a healed wound.

Surely this is not such an impossible thing to do?

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 15:29:00 +0000

"The real problem is in the hearts and minds of men.

It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature

the evil spirit of man." -Albert Einstein

Apologia

in Literature means: A work written as an explanation or justification of one's motives, convictions, or acts.

So I feel bound to provide a kind of apologia for the way I've dedicated so much time and space on my blog to examine the deranged statements featured on Prof. AbuKhalil's Angry Arab News Service.

Here is my apologia, then:

An Israeli joke tells about a man who visits a zoo and stands for hours next to the giraffe's enclosure, staring at the beast in utter fascination. There is no such animal, he finally says.

This is more or less how I feel whenever I visit A's AA blog (on a daily and sometimes even hourly basis). I've been asked why I find this person's fulminations so interesting. I don't really know how to answer except that I look and read and think to myself: this cannot be real. This is not being written by a member of an academic corpus, this is not happening in our rational, enlightened, informational time and culture.

Or, if you wish to get poetic about it, you can't do much better than Yeats' fearfully close-to-the-bone poem:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I think, when the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur spoke of evil as "perversion, [-] a reversal of the order that requires respect for law to be placed above inclination." he must have been intending the same kind of thought as Yeats was trying to impart in this line:
"the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

Enough said.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 01:23:00 +0000

On "Dispelling" Common Misconceptions about the violent History of Palestinian "Resistance" to Israeli Occupation

As’ad AbuKhalil... a professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus:: "...the movement began its resistance nonviolently .. —petitions, demonstrations, sit-ins, peaceful letter writing campaigns, poetry—in the 1930s..."

An article in "The Chicago Maroon" reports, with some indication of approval, the following report:

"As’ad AbuKhalil, a Lebanese-born professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus, dispelled what he considered common Western misconceptions of the Palestinian resistance movement to Israeli occupation, such as that the Palestinian resistance had always been violent.

“The Palestinian people have been in a state of resistance for over a century,” he said. “But the movement began its resistance nonviolently, in the same ways as the rest of the civil rights movements throughout the world—petitions, demonstrations, sit-ins, peaceful letter writing campaigns, poetry—in the 1930s.”

How do I guess the approval of the article author? From the use of the verb "dispelled" which means "Make (a doubt, feeling, or belief) disappear."

It means that the author of the article found the professor's arguments and facts so compelling and irrefutable that they made any beliefs he/she may have held up to that moment about Palestinian terrorism's long and bloody history null and void.

Let's look at the statement again: "Western misconceptions of the Palestinian resistance movement to Israeli occupation, such as that the Palestinian resistance had always been violent." and that the movement began its resistance, in the 1930, nonviolently.

Now let's look at the historical record:

Israel's occupation of the WB and Gaza (and now only in the WB) began in 1967, not in the 1930's, when there was not yet a state of Israel to occupy anybody.

In the 1930's there was a Jewish Yishuv, community, in Palestine, a region managed by the British as a Mandate from the League of Nations. The Jewish Yishuv included new and veteran Zionist immigrant communities (townships, cooperative villages, kibbutzim, newly-established cities like Tel-Aviv) and centuries-old Jewish communities which had been concentrated mostly in the Jerusalem, Hebron, Jaffa, Zafed, comprising the majority of these cities' populations.

Before the 1930's the following violent riots were recorded:

"Incidents included the riots of April 1920, the riots in Palestine of May 1921, the 1929 Hebron massacre and Safed massacre, and the 1936-1939 Arab revolt in Palestine. "

Here is another, fuller account of the historical record.

It took me 3 minutes to find this information by Google. I assume the authors of the article above did not bother to check their facts before gushing over the professor's "dispelling" of misconceptions.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 16:16:00 +0000

Case #1:

Here is how Prof AbuKhalil, (who teaches young American students how to receive facts and interpret them ethically and correctly), describes a historical incident:

Israeli terrorism is not made famous in the West: Libyan Flight 114

And here is what the article he links to explains:

"As the airliner cruised over northern Egypt, a large sandstorm below forced the crew to rely completely on instrument navigation. A short time later, around 13:44, the pilot suspected that he had made a navigational error because of a compass malfunction: he could not find an air traffic beacon, and could not ascertain the plane's current location. He did not report his worries to the Cairo air control tower. Instead, at 13:52 he received permission from Cairo to begin his descent. Pushed by strong tailwinds, the aircraft had drifted east, and was flying over the Suez canal. Sinai (to the east of the canal) had been occupied by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) were on high alert; Israel was in a state of war with Egypt at the time, and thought it suspicious that no Egyptian missiles had been fired at the plane, nor MiGs scrambled to intercept it.^{[citation needed]}
At 13:54, Flight 114 entered airspace over the Sinai desert, cruising at 20,000 feet (6,100 m). Two minutes later, two Israeli Air Force F-4 fighters were scrambled to investigate and they intercepted the airliner at 13:59. The Israeli fighter pilots attempted to make visual contact with the passenger airliner's crew, and tried to communicate to them by signaling with their hands, dipping their wings and firing warning shots, that they should follow the F-4s back to Rephidim Air Base. The 727 crew's response was interpreted as a denial of that request.^[3] The 727 turned back to the west, and the Israeli pilots interpreted this as an attempt to flee.^[4]
The Israeli F-4 pilots fired bursts of 20mm rounds with the F-4's cannon. The rounds severely damaged control surfaces, hydraulic systems, and the wing structure itself. Flight 114 crashed while attempting an emergency landing^[3] in an area covered with sand dunes. Following an explosion near the right main landing gear during the crash, 108 of the 113 people aboard died.^[4]

Aftermath
The co-pilot, who survived, later said that the flight crew knew the Israeli jets wanted them to land but relations between Israel and Libya made them decide against following instructions.^[1] In direct contradiction to the co-pilot's own account the Libyan government stated that the attack occurred without warning.^[1] Israel's air force claimed that Flight 114 was a security threat, and that among the possible tasks it could have been undertaking was an aerial spy mission over the Israeli air base at Bir Gifgafa.^"

^{What should be recalled is that (1) AbuKhalil has never been able to recognize the deliberate killing of Israeli Jews as terrorism.}

^{And (2) that his statement about how the "West" is kept in ignorance of this 1973 incident is belied by the very link to wikipedia that he himself provides.}

^{One might conclude that the internal tension between truth and lie}^{is due to the simple fact that the prof. may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer. I doubt that very much. How can a truly stupid, clueless and ignorant person get to be a teacher at a high academic institute, entrusted with the instruction of good thinking to thousands of young pliable minds?? No. The reason why the prof shoots himself in the foot every time he posts some piece of "news" about Israel is because anger makes you stupid.And sometimes even very stupid.}

^{Case #2:}

^{According to Freud's theory of dreams}^{the impulses and desires of the id are suppressed by the superego.
Through dreams, you are able to get a glimpse into your unconscious or the id.
Because your guards are down during the dream state,
your unconscious has the opportunity to act out and express the hidden desires
of the id. However, the desires of the id can, at times, be so disturbing
and even psychologically harmful that a "censor" comes into play and translates
the id's disturbing content into a more acceptable symbolic form.}

^{In the case of AbuKhalil's reported dreams (apparently he considers his dreams newsworthy, why else would he post them on his "News Service"?), there is no such censor. The dream's lucid wish fulfilling content is strutted as self-salutary moral achievement.}

^{Here is the case in point:}

"I dreamt that ... Thomas Friedman was my roommate in that home. We moved in and Friedman and I were looking down from the window when he fell out of the window straight on his head. I alas could not save him. True story--i mean true dream."

Not a surprising revelation from the same person who openly enjoyed fantasizing about burning Condoleezza Rice
^{or about the end of the world.}

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 23:52:00 +0000

Birds of a Feather ...

Dr. Mearsheimer, of "Israel Lobby" fame, is on record schmoozing with and pandering to, rabid antisemites and other mad dogs (when it comes to Israel, his very own particular bête noire.)

Here are two examples:

"To give you a better sense of what I mean when I use the term righteous Jews, let me give you some names of people and organizations that I would put in this category. The list would include Noam Chomsky, Roger Cohen, Richard Falk, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Judt, Tony Karon, Naomi Klein, MJ Rosenberg, Sara Roy, and Philip Weiss of Mondoweiss fame..."

"Gilad Atzmon has written a fascinating and provocative book on Jewish identity in the modern world. He shows how assimilation and liberalism are making it incredibly difficult for Jews in the Diaspora to maintain a powerful sense of their 'Jewishness.' Panicked Jewish leaders, he argues, have turned to Zionism (blind loyalty to Israel) and scaremongering (the threat of another Holocaust) to keep the tribe united and distinct from the surrounding goyim. As Atzmon's own case demonstrates, this strategy is not working and is causing many Jews great anguish. The Wandering Who? Should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike.'"

And here is his most recent triumph :

"I had a chance to ask John Mearsheimer yesterday at the University of Chicago about his experience since the publication of his article (with Stephen Walt) and later book about the Israeli lobby. He permitted me to cite on the blog: he told me that he had published 11 op-ed pieces in the New York Times before the appearance of the article on the Israeli lobby. Two of those were solicited by the Times. He said that after the appearance of the article, he has not published one op-ed piece and the ones he sent were rejected. He said that his speaking engagements went through a steep decline as a result. But it was refreshing to see him not intimidated by the Israeli lobby that he wrote about. I suggested that some academic should write a book similar to the book that Paul Findley wrote about the US Congress. "

Weep for Prof. Mearsheimer and salute the courage of Prof. AbuKhalil. What courage?

Here, as exemplified in this proclamation:

"People have been asking me about him a lot as of late: in the UK and the US. I make it very clear: this is somebody that we should reject from the pro-Palestinian advocacy movement. He is anti-Jewish and his offensive language against Jews and Judaism should be categorically rejected. I would put the name of Israel Shamir in the same category. Anti-Semites belong to the Zionist side, and not to our side."

Clearly the prof. is a man of deep and binding convictions. He is quite happy to accept the word of a man who had enthusiastically endorsed the writings of an author whom AbuKhalil deemed an irredeemable antisemite of the worst kind. Of course, the greatness of knowledge and moral perspicacity of AbuKhalil are impossible to emulate. Consider the lengths he is willing to travel in his quest for the annihilation of Israel. He is even willing to sit with and quote approvingly the utterances of an antisemite and a Zionist like Mearsheimer.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 01:56:00 +0000

February is for love ...

"What Is Life Without Aphrodite," (Anne Carson)

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 15:01:00 +0000

Sidebar on a matter of bloggery:

It appears as though at least my blog dashboard was hacked soon after I published this post. I noticed that links were added where there had been none and those links lead to some pages from "behind the scenes" blogspot.

On the same day, I received a suspicious phone call from someone claiming to call from California, from this number: 253-802-0308.

I have no idea whether the two events are related to one another or just an unhappy coincidence.

Checking my StatCounter, I found this somewhat frenzied activity taking place:

________________________________


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It is my custom to publicize any unusual occurrences that take place in and/or around my blog. If anybody has a plausible explanation or speculation about what all this means, I'd be very grateful for his or her contribution.

Let me remind you that a few weeks ago my blog was shut down for a period of over a week due to some complaint lodged against it by some readers. The only explanation I got was that there was some malware in one of the Contentious Centrist posts and once removed by Blogspot's technicians, my blog was re-instated.

So it is all a big mystery to me. It might have a perfectly innocent explanation but then again, it might have a perfect explanation that is not so innocent.

******

Update: Within minutes of posting the above, my StateCounter registered this:

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noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 15:17:00 +0000

Apes that can fly and Oranges

Our enraged friend, Prof. AbuKhalil, who teaches political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley, likes to point out factual errors that occur in American media outlets.

Here is one example:

Saturday, February 09, 2013

Zaydis in Yemen

"The Huthis are Zaydis, followers of a variant of Shiite Islam, and they make up about a quarter of Yemen’s population ." Zaydis are at least 40% of the Yemeni population.

Detecting, notifying, and correcting the errors in media outlets are an interest of mine, too. So I can well sympathize with the good professor's reflex here. But unfortunately he often tends to jump in before actually paying the slightest attention to his facts, even when they are laid out explicitly. In this case his correction is a case of a fool rushing in. The reported statement does not say that the Zaydis make up about a quarter of Yemen’s population but rather, that the Huthis do. It is obvious the author was aware of the difference and wanted to state the facts as accurately as possible. AbuKhalil's miscomprehension could have been excused had the author written "The Huthis are Zaydis, followers of a variant of Shiite Islam, [who] make up about a quarter of Yemen’s population." But the author chose to avoid the potential ambiguity (the "who"could refer back to either Huthis or Zaydis) by repeating the "they" which clearly refers to "Huthis", the subject of the sentence, and not the "Zaydis".

When I say: The orange is the fruit of the citrus, and it is the colour between red and yellow in the visible spectrum, I am clearly speaking about the Orange and not the larger category of Citrus. This is elementary.

Why does this even merit a mention and a post on my blog?

Because this is a professor who is entrusted with teaching young American students the proper and reliable ways of reading and understanding texts so as to be able to collect facts and form arguments and ethical positions based on the kind of information they (the students) collate. If the teacher cannot perform this easy task of at least understanding what a sentence really says, how can he teach? And what is the reason for such dismal performance, from someone who managed to get a PhD and write a few books himself? Is it that the prof has no time to read properly? Or does he go out looking for errors and finding them where they do not even exist? And why would a teacher, with presumably a trained mind in reading comprehension, act in this pedestrian way?

It is of course conceivably possible that the prof has erected an iron wall between his performance as teacher and his role as a blogger with a biased agenda.

And this could serve as some sort of exoneration of a disciplined academic mind at work: The prof provides an scientific explanation why Jews should not be offended by being referred to as apes.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 20:31:00 +0000

Academic Excellence, Angry Arab style

I've written about Prof. AbuKhalil, who who teaches American students at an American university of a good standing in California. I think there is no need to spread another layer of icing on the ~~case~~ cake of the good prof's credentials and suitability for the job of educator at an academic institute at a Western, democratic country. But here is a cherry:

Yesterday, I told my students in American Government class that I came to America in 1983, with two dollars in my pocket. I said that I came here in a boat and that I peddled my way through the ocean. They were listening intently and did not realize that I was kidding until I added: there were sharks all around me and a monster from outer space was attacking me from above. Ha ha.

A prof, who has so much contempt for his students that he spends time telling them tales from a hate filled imagination, believes he fools them, and then has a good chuckle at their expense with his so much cleverer and savvier readers. That's what I would call a creative teacher with a healthy sense of humour.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 15:19:00 +0000

The Sixth Deadly Sin

The prof. is pissed. Why? Because Israel keeps defying the image he wishes to impose on her. In this post he complains that Americans are inclined to regard Israel as a vibrant, decent democracy:

Israeli comedians are always funny, its poets are always talented, its writers are always brilliant, its politicians are always gifted, its people are always wonderful, its army is always humane even when butchering children, its courts are always fair even when ruling for apartheid, its women are always beautiful, its children are always cute, its culture is always vibrant, its diplomats are always skilled.

Here is the thing, though: Israeli comedians are not always funny, Many of its poets, but not all, are not necessarily very talented, many of its its writers are, but not invariably so, brilliant, its politicians are by no means always gifted, its people are not always wonderful (if they were, they would not be called Sabras, the thorny cactus fruit whose flesh is sweet bit somewhat pebbly to eat with comfort), its women are only almost always beautiful (what can you do? It's the mixtures of races and colours that produces this anomaly:).

However:

Israel's diplomats are, unfortunately very often far from skilled, or even thoughtful, sometimes embarrassingly so.

Israel's army is indeed always humane; it does not butcher children. That particular crime is reserved for Palestinian terrorists such as Hamas, and some of their Hizzbala terrorist supporters, whom Prof. Angry Arab finds very congenial.

Israel's courts are always fair, and scrupulously so when they deal with grievances submitted by Palestinians from the West Bank. The term "apartheid" is bandied about by the good professor in the same way good and shrunken-hearted women refer to a good-looking sexy woman as a whore for no other reason than she is good looking and sexy.

In other words, the slurring judgment comes from envy, and envy, as you know, is not unaccountably designated as one of the seven deadly sins.

According to wiki,

"Dante defined this as "a desire to deprive other men of theirs." In Dante's Purgatory, the punishment for the envious is to have their eyes sewn shut with wire because they have gained sinful pleasure from seeing others brought low. Aquinas described envy as "sorrow for another's good".

Mark Twain once defined antisemitism as "the swollen envy of pygmy minds.” The prof. may regard himself as clear of antisemitism, because he can spot an antisemite when he sees one*, and that is not him, but the output on his blog as regards Israel is quite commensurate with the staple marks of antisemitism, the three "S"es: Singling out, slandering, stalking.

The prof may imagine he has nothing against Jews. His main beef is with the Zionists. But after you subtract the Jews of Israel, Jews who support Israel, Jews who don't mind Israel's existence, Jews who are not actively or by inclination against Israel, you are left with one or two Jews he approves. And when he writes posts like this, having nothing to do with facts, or arguments, or history, or proper science, or thoughtful rational criticism, but only a wailing scream of pure hatred and frustration, then what else can you conclude?

* Note how the prof. is all too eager to recognize Sadat's antisemitism, but not this man's genocidal Nazi sympathies. Why? Need I ask? Because Sadat made peace with Israel.

All right. Enough said.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 19:01:00 +0000

Isn't he the clever little boy?

Prof. AbuKhalil, who who teaches American students at an American university of a good standing, weighs in on the question of Jewish origins being from "apes and pigs":

... if one believes in evolution theory, we all are descendants of apes so this should not be insulting to us evolutionary theory believers.

This might remove the taint from "apes" but what about the "pigs"? Perhaps the scholarly prof. does not realize that pigs are known to be very intelligent animals, so it is not at all a slur to refer to Jews, known for producing lots of intelligent little Jews, as "pigs". It is actually a compliment.

Let me repeat my wonderment at this unfathomable exhibit: that this is the kind of person who teaches young students how to think properly, at an AMERICAN university.

Oh, and BTW, it would appear that the prof. does not really know the Quran very well:

Case Study: Portraying Jews as "Apes and Pigs"

In three instances (Surahs 2, 5, and 7), the Quran tells of Muhammad turning Jews into apes and/or pigs. For instance, Surah 5:60 states, “Those (Jews) who incurred the curse of Allah and his Wrath, and those of whom (some) He transformed into apes and swine.” Another section of the Quran compares the Jews to donkeys. There are two differing traditions in Islam regarding what happened to the Jews who were turned into pigs. One view maintains that all pigs alive today are descendants of the Jews who were turned into pigs by Allah. The other view holds that all the Jews who were turned into pigs by Allah died out without reproducing, and therefore there is no relationship between today’s pigs and Jews:

“There are two opinions among the Ulama [Islamic scholars] in this regard: The first is that the Jews, whom Allah transformed and turned into pigs, remained in that state until they died, without producing descendants. The other opinion is that the Jews who turned into pigs multiplied and produced descendants, and their line continues to this day.

Sheikh Othman [Ahmed Ali Othman, supervisor of the Da'awa (Islamic Indoctrination) of the Egyptian Waqf Islamic Holy places]: "I personally tend towards the view that the pigs that exist now have their origins with the Jews, and therefore their consumption is forbidden in the words of Allah: 'A carcass, and blood, and the flesh of a pig are forbidden to you....' Moreover, our master Jesus, peace be unto him - one of the tasks that he will fulfill when he descends to earth is the killing of the pigs, and this is proof that their source is Jewish. Sheikh Othman said that whoever eats pig, it's as if he ate meat of an impure person…

Sheikh Ali Abu Al-Hassan, head of the Fatwa Committee at Al-Azhar [Sunni Islamic university], said that the first view is accurate, because when Allah punishes a group of people he punishes only them. When Allah grew angry with the nation of Moses, He turned them into pigs and apes as an extraordinary punishment... but they died out without leaving descendants."

[Al-Moheet Arab News Network, May 10, 2009, Al-Hakika al-Dawliya, May 9, 2009]

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 15:22:00 +0000

I don't get it ...

Look at this post by Prof. AbuKhalil. Read the title he gives to this entry and then click on the link to read the whole article, authored by Bilal Y. Saab and Andrew J. Tabler.

Here is a synopsis of the main idea in the article:

After almost two years of bloodletting in Syria, there is little chance that negotiations of the kind UN peace envoy Lakhdar Brahimi has been urging would end the conflict. More likely, they would prolong it. And worse, they would perpetuate Bashar al-Assad’s favorite strategy of fanning fears of rebel sectarianism and extremism to dissuade the world from intervening against him.

Here is the title the prof. gave this analysis: "Zionist hoodlums don't want peace in Syria, damn it"

I ask you: Where is the "Zionist" angle in this article? Why is Bilal Y. Saab defined by AbuKhalil as a "Zionist hoodlum"? Where is the rejection of "peace" in the article? And why is the Prof. who teaches American students in a Californian university using "Zionist" as a demonizing adjective?

I keep looking at what this so-called academic writes on a daily basis, while he is assigned with the teaching young impressionable minds the foundational principles of good thinking, critical analysis and ethics, and I just don't get it. I really don't.
_______________

Later: Another baffling entry from the professor, blaming a report in the New York Times of distorting a story:

"A spokeswoman for the Israeli military, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under army rules, said the purpose of Tuesday’s raid on the village, Tamoun, was to arrest a resident, Murad Bani Odeh, who she said was suspected of being a terrorist." In the early version of this lousy article, Mr. Odeh was referred to as "suspected terrorist".

Isn't a person who is "suspected of being a terrorist a "suspected terrorist"? In the first instant, the "suspected" is used as a verb and in the second instant it is used as an adjective. One of Chomsky's discoveries in his thesis on universal grammar was the fact that a phrase like "A beautiful girl" means "A girl who is beautiful" and is a fundamental structure common to all languages. AbuKhalil can hardly claim that he made this allegation out of ignorance of the English language.

What exactly is the point to this fulmination, then? Is the prof running out of material? If you read the several entries he devotes to his hobby of demonizing Israelis for the same day as this example appears you will notice how he is reduced to scrapping the bottom of the barrel.

Like I always say, anger makes you stupid and no better model to exemplify this principle that Prof. AbuKhalil.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 19:04:00 +0000

The Essence of Hatred

I. Remember the surreal "proportionality " argument taken by some media persons as a convenient dart to throw at Israel when it launched its attack on Gaza in an attempt to stop the barrage of rockets aimed at killing Israelis and Israeli babies? What it boiled down to, was very simple: Not enough Israeli babies were killed by the Gazan rockets. Or, to put it more bluntly, in positive terms, more Israeli babies should have been killed, before those particular media persons could be persuaded that stopping the rockets would be justified.

II. Prof,. AbuKhalil frowns at the rate of births in Israel. He seems to find something suspect and even genocidal in the trend by Israeli families to make babies, and in the Israeli medicare system that goes to a great deal of effort and expense to make sure Israeli babies are born healthy, and that those families who cannot make babies so easily will get a chance to have their babies, despite their biological difficulties (I mean, of course, having relatively easy access to in-vitro fertilization).

How do I know the prof. perceives something suspect and even genocidal in the trend by Israeli families to make babies?

You need to read the entry on his Angry Arab blog, in which he quotes from three articles which discuss the increased birth rate of children in Israel, and the meticulous care by the medical institutions of the state, and labels them:

Zionism is always racism: the fear of Palestinian babies

According to the professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley, the increased rate of child bearing levels among Israelis is tantamount to a genocidal instinct towards Palestinians. How else can you explain the fantastic leap from the subject of the articles he quotes to the title he chooses for this entry? Note how he starts with: Zionism is always racism before inserting the fear of Palestinian babies.

AbuKhalil does not wish for the Jewish population of Israel to grow. The joy and optimism that are conveyed through the natural growth of the Jewish population is for him a form of genocidal racism.

III. Now combine that with the media premise that I pointed to in section I, and what do you get?

On the one hand, not enough Israeli babies are killed. On the other hand, too many Israeli babies are born. Both statements are presented as bad propositions.

Let's see what we get when we take these premises and act on their logic:

More Israeli babies need to be killed.

Less Israeli babies need to be born.

Bottom line: There must be less Israeli (by which both premises imply actually Jewish) babies.

IV: Some tangentially relevant statistics:

In 1933, the world's Jewish population at that time was estimated at 15.3 million.

Projected number of Jews worldwide for 2020: 13,558,000

80 years since world Jewry numbered more than 15 million, the loss of the six million has not been recovered.

Still, prof. AbuKhalil, who teaches American students at an American university of a good standing laments that Jewish Israelis produce more babies than would suit his perverted moral universe. And still, media persons fancying themselves on the side of universal justice, humanism and equality, lament that not more Jewish Israelis babies were/are killed before their Jewish-Israeli parents need to take steps to protect them from such genocidal killings.

V. And just for the hell of it, here are some other tangentially relevant statistics:

According to this source, the number of Palestinian Arabs in 1946 was: ~ 1, 221,000

According to this source, the estimated number of Palestinians all over World by the end of 2005 is 10.1 million.

Less than 50 years after the Palestinian "Nakba", and for all the genocide that Israel is accused by the likes of AbuKhalil and his ilk, to have perpetrated upon these Palestinians, their population worldwide sprang from 1.2 million to possibly 11 millions today.

And still, the professor from the State University of California bewails the fact that Jewish babies are born in Israel at an unseemly rate.

How do you define the essence of evil?

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Tue, 25 Dec 2012 16:56:00 +0000

Angry Arab's Christmas Wish: Burn Condoleeza Rice

In the spirit of Christmas, Prof. AbuKhalil posts a peaceful and life-affirming wish on his website:

.... p. 181 recalls sacrifices of Abrams et al. during Lebanon war: “we flew first to Beirut to see Siniora; the war was now in its third week. It was not safe to use the airport in Beirut, so Rice’s plane landed in Cyprus and we jumped over to Beirut in a helicopter. The ancient military craft was deafeningly loud and leaked oil all over us, ruining suits, dresses, and hairdos as we flew the 125 miles. We rigged up plastic sheeting over Rice to protect her from the steady dripping.” (Pity no one lit a match.) ..."

To repeat: "(Pity no one lit a match.) ..."

We know Abukhalil's recorded fantasies about Israel, Zionists, and those who have not displayed a hatred pure enough to meet his strident standards. Nonetheless, it always catches me by surprise that he should be so openly honest about sharing those fantasies. But then, the fantasies of genocidaires have never been secret. They are usually written and repeated for all to see and hear and read. Their very explicitness seems to work in their favour. Nobody believes that anyone would share such fantasies and mean them literally. After all, historical records are evidence that writing books and making speeches about the annihilation of people are just that; they never ever get to the point of actual execution.

BTW, these words, fantasies, preachings, fulminations, are made by a bona-fide professor, a teacher of young American students in an American university. This is the moral core of this particular teacher.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Sun, 23 Dec 2012 01:13:00 +0000

From the Pantheon of Prof. AbuKhalil's Fantasies:

The End of Israel

I was looking forward to the end of the world as it would have permitted me--even for a second--to witness the end of the Zionist entity over Palestine.

This sentiment is being declared by the professor of political science at California State University, Stanislaus and visiting professor at UC, Berkeley.

* By the way, I'm sure AbuKhalil himself would describe his fantasies about the ultimate and complete destruction of Israel, with all of its 6 Milion Jewish Israelis as an ironical comment. Which of course it is not. It is straightforward and sincere.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 12:02:00 +0000

A Teachable Moment

We have all been struggling to make sense of the human catastrophe that hit Newtown, CT, last week. It is hard to imagine anyone who was not shocked beyond his or her cynical composure. But not our angry friend, whose pity is exclusively reserved to one and only one people in this world. The two references on his blog, to the event that has shaken the American nation involve mockery. Perhaps we are supposed to be impressed by his universalizing view about religious nuttery at this moment of great perplexity, or by his ability to make hay of whatever sun shines upon his explicit agenda.

He is a man of the world, seen all done that. He knows what our sympathetic priorities should be.

Perhaps it is his way of settling accounts with Western media.

noreply@blogger.com (The Contentious Centrist) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 13:05:00 +0000

This is a great resource (H/T: Simply Jews)

Israel's documented history