Finkelstein update

One would think that Father Dennis Holtschneider and DePaul University could stoop no lower, after they denied Norman Finkelstein and Mehrene Larudee tenure on the absolute flimsiest of premises--let's call it The Dershowitz Ultimatum. However, they outdid themselves on Sunday, when they cancelled Finkelstein's classes, and announced that he would be placed on "administrative leave, with pay" for the 2007-8 academic year, which was anyhow to be his last at DePaul. To take it even further, they are keeping him out of his own office and barring him from the political science department. When classes begin September 5, Finkelstein says he will be there, and if he continues to be shut out, he'll resort to alternative measures.

Well-Made World 19

For the NLR, Alex Cockburn has expanded a piece from Le Monde Diplomatique--which we linked to several weeks back--on the state of the American anti-war movement. Cockburn writes on the recent history of anti-war and left groups in America, both popular and marginal, and details the ineptitude of the splintered coalitions opposing the Iraq war, finding much fault with the mainstream anti-war movement's "occasionally petulant subservience" to the Democratic party since 2003.

Also, tacked onto a piece for Counterpunch on Nuri al-Maliki is a reaction to Cockburn's criticism of the anti-war movement from the Institute for Policy Studies' Phyllis Bennis. Bennis takes issue in particular with the notion, proposed by Cockburn in his original piece, that it would behoove the left in the US to humanize Iraq's multifaceted resistance. Bennis complains that because the Iraqi resistance lacks a cohesive and demonstrable central authority (unlike the FMLN, or the African National Congress), it lacks accountability to the population of Iraq (who bear the brunt of the America's aggression, as well as of the resistance) and so does not deserve the support of anti-war sympathizers in America. It's puzzling, if not plain stupid, that Bennis could possibly expect an El Salvadorean-style resistance authority after six years of the Bush administration doing everything in its power to exploit deep-seated ethnic tension in Iraq. Bennis also makes the point that, because some actions taken by the resistance are morally reprehensible, no further attempt at humanizing the resistance are necessary, or even warranted. Cockburn then responds. Read on.

George Bush has recently likened the situation in Iraq, and the consequences of a troop withdrawal, to the fate suffered by millions of Vietnamese following the end of the war there. The New York Times claims that "Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies." Bush mentions the Khmer Rouge and the "killing fields" of Pol Pot, but neglects the fact--pesky historical memory! motherfucker!--that, had Richard Nixon heeded the antiwar movement, the war would've ended in 1969, and the "secret" war in Cambodia, which paved the way for Pol Pot by completely destroying the country, would've never taken place.

Munir Chalabi has written a crucial piece of analysis of the Iraqi oil law, which remains stillborn.

Here's a trio dealing with fallout from the recent Hamas putsch/Fatah coup, and it seems that Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad combined may yet outflank post-Oslo Arafat's desperate ineffectivity and enslavement to US-Israeli diktats. Amira Hass, an NE hero and an Israeli woman who has lived in and reported from Gaza for over a decade, gives us the latest from Israel's wet-dream of a "Palestinian state." Amira is characteristically even-handed in reporting the Palestinian political civil war, faulting

Israel, the occupier that shirks its obligation as an occupying power; the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, which is abandoning its citizens while continuing to try to ostracize the majority movement and make it fail; Hamas, which boasted about "liberating" Gaza and uses Qassam fire and declarations of "resistance" to escape its political and economic failures; the donor states, which use (generous) donations to cover up political powerlessness; and the United States, which is leading the boycott campaign [against Hamas] and supports Israel.

Exiled ex-Israeli MK Azmi Bishara, writing for al-Ahram Weekly, draws historical, political, and moral parallels between apartheid South Africa and the occupied Palestinian territories. This is a concern, of course, pursued in recent decades by Maxime Rodinson, Edward Said, Norman Finkelstein, Nelson Mandela, Ramzy Baroud, Jennifer Loewenstein, and others. Bishara remains under threat of arrest, were he to return to Israel, due to accusations that he provided tactical support to Hezbollah during last summer's Lebanon war, charges with both Bishara and Hezbollah have stringently denied.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article8962.shtml

On inactivity

As "regular" readers (to sound presumptuous) of NE can recognize, we haven't exactly been the most prolific blog-keepers of late. Early on, we set an ultimately untenable precedent of 15-20 postings a month. That we probably would not be able to stick to such a rate of output was in the back of our minds when NE took off--but we remain confident and ambitious.

At the time of writing, NE's contributors are preparing for a transatlantic rupture, half of which has begun, and which culminates in one month, when one can find half of NE in Bloomington, Indiana (one can already), and half in London, UK. While the expected communication lag may make the idea of continuing this project seem daunting, we feel that it can only bring our work to better, and more unexpected, places.

We've begun to feel that the work we've done here so far, while exciting for us and hopefully of some greater services to those who read it, has become somewhat constricted and, dare we say it, even predictable. The "Well-Made World" series, an urgent and challenging part of NE (as well as subtle tribute to B.C. Gilbert), has been predominant here, and while it will continue to be a cornerstone of the project, our perhaps-overweening focus on it has caused the overall "diversity" of what we would like NE to be to suffer. All by way of saying: we're not getting too comfortable (or at all comfortable, really...), and we're going to push this thing a whole lot further in the coming weeks and months.

On a more exuberant note: No Empires has recorded a three-song cassette (two originals and one cover; total running time approx. 4 1/2 to 5 mins.), mixing of which will continue over the next few weeks. A (very) limited edition of this tape will hopefully be available this winter.

Well-Made World 18

Hi again. Thought that, come August, we had gone the way of the US Congress or its Iraqi counterpart? You were wrong. We are back.

Over the past 40 years, Regis Debray has made it from languishing in Bolivian jail--after being one of the last people to see Che Guevara alive--to being one of the most respected and sought-after political analysts in Europe. We've returned with Debray and this piece on Palestine, commissioned last winter by then-outgoing French president Jacques Chirac, and published in the August 2007 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. Debray's report reads as somewhat dated--it was handed in to the French government in January, and therefore cannot cover even the most obvious and directly important events that have transpired since then, such as the Hamas putsch in Gaza and the subsequent illegal Fatah coup. What Debray finds is far more damning than a simple gap between intent and action on the part of Israel or the "international community." Rather, what he sees at work is a fundamental break between the lip service paid to the "peace process" or a putative "Palestinian state," and the creation of facts on the ground--Israel's favored "strategy" since the pre-state Yishuv--that are destroying what slight chances remain for even an "imperfect peace."

The Guardian's Jonathan Steele writes that, unfortunately for Dick Cheney and his friends in the US oil lobby, Iraqi legislators did not pass the oil law that Washington has been trying to ram through the Iraqi parliament before it began its much-debated August recess. This could be due to the simple fact that, to the chagrin of Cheney et al, the Iraqi lawmakers have actually decided to carefully read the legislation, which would greatly destabilize Iraqi sovereignty over the country's oil reserves if passed in its present form.

Works Consulted #4

• witold gombrowicz, cosmos (trans. danuta borchardt) (yale, 2005)
• raymond williams, the politics of modernism: against the new conformists (verso, 1989)