By Russell A. Berman · Wednesday, October 4, 2006 News reports over the weekend, including in the New York Times of September 30, recounted developments in France involving Robert Redeker, an article of whose in Le Figaro of September 19 on Islam elicited death threats which have forced him into hiding.
Redeker has been described as a high school teacher in Toulouse, which is true. He is also the author of some ten books and numerous article publications, listed on his c.v. He has written for Le Monde as well as for Le Figaro (so he cannot be cast simply as conservative); indeed he is an editorial board member of Les Temps Modernes.
Unfortunately it is important to underscore all of this. We are facing another case of threats to free speech and free thought in Europe, but the news reporting subtly tries to minimize the significance (did somebody say “appeasement”?). There are suggestions that he is merely a high school teacher (as if high school teachers have less of a right to free speech than do the journalists of the wire services), or that he was writing for the “center-right” Le Figaro, suggesting that he probably got what he deserved. Shall we henceforth write that Elaine Sciolino writes for the “center-left” New York Times? In fact, Redeker turns out not to be a “center-rightist,” for whose free speech our “center-left” might not give a hoot, but very much a European intellectual with a publication record with all appropriate pedigrees.
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By Vernaccia · Tuesday, October 3, 2006 Much to the chagrin of those terrorists who were hoping to be the ones to shut her up, Oriana Fallaci passed away peacefully in her beloved Florence, surrounded by her sister, her nephews, and very few close friends—those, that is, who did not repudiate the Italian intellectual after her well-known and courageous stance vis-à-vis the Islamic war on the Western world. The room in the downtown clinic, where she spent her last few days, overlooked both the Florence synagogue and Brunelleschi’s dome, two of the most powerful symbols of that Judeo-Roman legacy at the heart of the Western culture that Fallaci so strenuously and tenaciously defended.
She loved Florence as much as she loved her adopted home, New York. There, she owned a town house on the Upper East Side where she had lived for many years. It was shortly after the 9/11 attack that, in her home in Manhattan, she wrote a powerful and hard-hitting editorial for Il Corriere della Sera. An outcry of civic courage as well as a rare example of journalism which tells it like it is, the article was a preview of what she was to discuss in her best selling book The Rage and The Pride, followed a few years later by The Force of Reason, and more recently by The Apocalypse.
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By Aviezer Tucker · Monday, October 2, 2006 The Origins of Postcommunist Elites: From Prague Spring to the Breakup of Czechoslovakia. By Gil Eyal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Pp. xxix + 238.
Many social scientists have noted that the popular carnivals that accompanied the revolutions of 1989 did not last. When the masses returned home, the same nomenklatura elite remained in power, even if it had to share power with a new democratically elected political elite. [1] 1989 was not a year of social revolutions but of political upheavals. Since post-Communist civil societies are feeble or absent, elites have a far broader maneuvering space than elites in other democratic contexts. [2] Elite theory is increasingly useful and used for the analysis of post-Communist politics and societies. In the Czech and Slovak contexts, it is striking to note that the division of Czechoslovakia was agreed upon by the respective political elites in 1992 without popular approval. It is unlikely that the division of Czechoslovakia would have been ratified in a plebiscite. Accordingly, sociologist Gil Eyal attempts to understand the division of Czechoslovakia as neither the result of deep historical rifts between the Czech and Slovak peoples, nor of conflicting economic interests, nor of unintended game-theoretic implications of the 1968 Czechoslovak federal constitution, but of a deal between two conflicting wings of what he calls the Czechoslovak “new class.” Eyal’s new class is composed of “knowledge experts,” bureaucrats, the intelligentsia, managers, and technocrats. Since the Slovak elite has had a federalist, pro-Czech faction, and a nationalist, anti-federalist faction since the early twentieth century, Eyal’s interesting question is: How did the Czech and Slovak elites come to agree on the dismantling of a federation that held for three-quarters of a century?
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By Matthias Küntzel · Saturday, September 30, 2006 This is part three of Matthias Küntzel’s article “Confronting Anti-Semitism — But How?” which appears in Telos 136 (Fall 2006). Parts one and two appeared on Thursday and Friday. Click here to purchase the full issue. The German version is available on Matthias Küntzel’s website, www.matthiaskuentzel.de
Openness instead of Concealment
What would have happened if the anti-Semitism of the member of the Bundestag Hohmann had been articulated through e-mails internal to the CDU, instead of in a public speech? Would the public have ever found out about it? Or would those responsible have outwardly kept quiet on the basis of party loyalty?
The conservative party’s own Hans-Böckler Foundation decided against openness in a comparable situation. Until May of this year, the anti-Semitism argument internal to the foundation, which flared up in February 2003 on the Böckler Foundation Fellows mailing list, remained concealed. The reason for the controversy was a paper containing anti-Semitic stereotypes, which had been composed and distributed by a doctoral candidate of Arab descent, who was supported by the foundation. Several other scholarship recipients arranged things so that the debate could be reflected in a self-critical way, in the context of a graduate conference in November 2003. And, fortunately, a general political seminar about anti-Semitism on the Left was sponsored by the Böckler Foundation and organized in Berlin as well.
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By Matthias Küntzel · Friday, September 29, 2006 This is part two of Matthias Küntzel’s article “Confronting Anti-Semitism — But How?” which appears in Telos 136 (Fall 2006). Part one appeared on Thursday, and part three will appear on Saturday. Click here to purchase the full issue. The German version is available on Matthias Küntzel’s website, www.matthiaskuentzel.de
Enlightenment against Anti-Semitism
I will not be concerned in the following with the societal parameters (politics, media, culture) that more strongly shape the anti-Semitic consciousness than pedagogical endeavors can ever counteract. I also do not want to speak about those who no longer allow themselves to be educated or changed, those who have become unapproachable for enlightenment. For them, Adorno’s motto remains unchanged: “[T]he instruments of power, which really are at one’s disposal, must be applied without sentimentality, certainly not out of the need for punishment or in order to avenge oneself against these persons, but rather in order to show them that the only thing that impresses them, namely real social authority, is in the meantime, actually really against them.” And Adorno repeats, “Anti-Semitic utterances should be confronted very energetically: they must see that the one who confronts them is not afraid.” Today more than ever, these must be the criteria in schools, universities, and other educational institutions—independent of the question of whether the carriers of the anti-Semitic stereotype have a Muslim or a non-Muslim background. It is therefore absolutely right (and deserves emphasis during professional education) that, based on accepted work jurisdiction, trainees are to be let go without notice in response to anti-Semitic or racist comments.
However, here I am not concerned with those stubborn characters but rather with subjects capable of being enlightened, whom I can and want to influence through pedagogical methods. Unfortunately, it is not possible to present to this clientele recipes for success. Instead I will try to show, by means of three case studies from my field of occupation, how the confrontation of anti-Semitism at any rate does not work.
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By Matthias Küntzel · Thursday, September 28, 2006 This is part one of Matthias Küntzel’s article “Confronting Anti-Semitism — But How?” which appears in Telos 136 (Fall 2006). Parts two and three will appear on Friday and Saturday. Click here to purchase the full issue. The German version is available on Matthias Küntzel’s website, www.matthiaskuentzel.de
During my preparations for this lecture, I realized that the German Coordinating Group had already sponsored a lecture with the title “On the struggle against Anti-Semitism today” in 1962. [1] At that time they invited a more prominent speaker—a person whom I esteem and admire, Theodor W. Adorno. Adorno’s suggestions for combating anti-Semitism remain relevant today, a point to which I will return later. Anti-Semitism itself, however, which at that time Adorno attributed to an “excessive nationalism,” has changed its form of appearance. First of all, hostility against Jews today is directed less against the Jewish minority in Europe and more toward the Jews in Israel and the United States. Second, we find the most radical propagandists for eliminatory anti-Semitism today not in Europe but in the Islamic World.
Ahmadinejad’s Final Solution
Recently, the newly elected president of Iran, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, declared that his country wanted to “eliminate” Israel through force of arms. Since the wording of his speech was hardly noticed by the German media, I would like to quote a few of its key sentences.
The speaker marks the obliteration of Israel as a stage in a war that began long before the founding of Israel. Ahmadinejad said, “We are in the process of an historical war that has been going on for hundreds of years.” He continues, “The current war in Palestine is the forward front of the Islamic world against the world of arrogance.”Apparently the Jews are only the first targets, since the characterization of the enemy as the “world of arrogance” undoubtedly means the whole of the West. Furthermore he states that he has “no doubt that the new wave that has begun in our dear Palestine and which today we are witnessing in the Islamic world is a wave of morality that has spread all over the Islamic world. Very soon, Israel, this stain of disgrace, will be purged from the center of the Islamic world—and this is attainable.” The Iranian president places under the term “wave of morality” the repression of sensuality and sexuality, as is prevalent in his country, whereas Israel is regarded as a “blemish” because there, for example, homosexuality is not only not punishable by death, but is allowed.
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