Let’s Get a Couple Things Straight Right Off the Bat
I DO NOT “hate Palestinians.” I’m an ardent supporter of their rights and an ardent opponent of Netanyahu (although he’s pretty hot :)–he who is always scowling and frowning–government’s policies vis a vis the Palestinian people.
A dear Jewish friend of mine, who I won’t name because I’d fear for his safety, wrote this brilliance on social media. Shared with his permission.
Here are a few factors that complicate the ‘Israel as white colonial enterprise’ narrative:
The origins of the Jewish people, and the site of the ancient, independent Jewish commonwealths, were in the territory currently encompassed by the State of Israel and the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The Jewish calendar, early literary tradition, language, and earliest historical references are all rooted in these geographic areas.
There have always been thousands of indigenous Jews living in the territory currently encompassed by the State of Israel and the West Bank, including during the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid, Crusader, Mamluk, Ottoman, and British colonial periods. These indigenous Jews and their descendants are not white and European.
Beginning in 1882, and continuing for a century, European and Arab nationalist movements expelled or destroyed by other means the majority of Jewish communities on the European, Asian, and African continents (including Jewish communities indigenous to what is today the West Bank; in 1929, for example, centuries of Jewish habitation in Hebron ended with the massacre of many of its residents by their Muslim neighbors). Few countries were willing to settle the survivors and refugees of these expulsions and massacres, many of whom had no choice but to flee to Palestine or, post-1948, the State of Israel, whose legal system allowed for the immigration of anyone who fit the definition of a Jew under the Nazi’s Nuremberg laws.
A majority of the State of Israel’s Jewish population emigrated within the last four generations from North Africa and the Middle East. By definition, therefore, a majority of Israeli Jews are not “white and European.”
So to anyone who believes that Israel is a “white colonialist enterprise,” I would ask the following questions:
What is the “country of origin” with which Jews maintain “political allegiance,” and to which we should return once a Palestinian state is established “from the river to the sea,” as so many uninformed college students like to scream at campus rallies? Or is the implication that all of the Jews between the river (Jordan) and sea (Mediterranean) should simply be liquidated (murdered) to make way for a Palestinian state?
Where should my Jewish friend, whose family has been in Israel for eight generations (after moving from Egypt), go? How many generations in a place confers indigenous status? Should he and his parents and children move “back” to Egypt where they no longer speak the language or have family or commercial ties?
Where should the approximately 150,000 Jews who were expelled by the Iraqi government in 1951, and their hundreds of thousands of descendants, go? “Back” to Iraq? How about the Jews of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iran… or how about survivors of the Holocaust? Should they go “back” to countries to which they have no personal ties? “Back” to countries that legally prohibited them from living as full citizens with rights equal to their Christian and Muslim counterparts? (You’ll note, for example, that many of the Jewish surnames cited in the NY Times article below about the Israeli town of Ofakim, devastated by Hamas on October 7, are actually Arabic; many of the town’s Jewish founders were refugees from Arab countries. Again, not white, not European.)
There is no country to which Israeli Jews can “return” because they were never fully part of those societies. There is a reason that Jews who live outside of Israel have always been described as part of a “diaspora” (in English) and “in exile” (in Hebrew, בגלות). Our language developed in the Land of Israel, our formative literature was written there, our calendar developed there, we pray in that direction, our ancient cities are there… it IS our “country of origin.” And for some of us, we have always physically lived there, even when it was ruled by some other, actual colonial ruler, like the Romans, Ottomans, or British (people who were able to return to their own homelands).
But practically speaking, seven million Jews aren’t going to disappear between the “river and the sea” anytime soon. So maybe, instead of chanting ridiculous, genocidal slogans, people can be part of the solution: advocating for two states, for two people, living in peaceful coexistence… both of which have deep historical roots in the land. It is time for a safe, secure State of Israel, and a safe, secure State of Palestine next door, in the territory now known as the West Bank. Let’s please dispense with the lazy, pseudo-intellectualism, and faux-progressivism, and try to make some real, long-term change.”
“Anyone who harbors the notion that [Jane] Austen’s circumscribed world of rural English parlors and parks was small-minded, provincial, or dull needs to reread Pride and Prejudice to reencounter the vigor of Elizabeth Bennet’s quick wit and astute social observation, or the generosity of Jane’s moral reflection, or the instructive trajectory of Darcy’s growth in self-knowledge, largely through defining moments of honest conversation with the woman he comes to love.” –Marilyn McEntyre, Caring for Words In a Culture of Lies
The April 12th, 1993 cover of Time magazinewas an unforgettable picture of a long series of images in rectangular formation entering an eyeball. The article was by Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who writes frequently on issues related to technology.
This article, in which he said the Internet would welcome in a new age of information. Information, which “wanted to be free,” would be available to more people than ever, on our phones and computers. People would be smarter, healthier, and happier.
DeWitt wrote: “The Internet, for those who haven’t been hanging out in cyberspace, reading the business pages or following Doonesbury, is the mother of all computer networks–an anarchistic electronic freeway that has spread uncontrollably and now circles the globe. It is at once the shining archetype and the nightmare vision of the information highway that the Clinton Administration has been touting and that the telephone and cable-TV companies are racing to build. Much of what Bell Atlantic and Time Warner are planning to sell–interactivity, two-way communications, multimedia info on demand–the Internet already provides for free. And because of its cold war roots, the Internet has one quality that makes it a formidable competitor: you couldn’t destroy it if you tried.”
Does anyone have a sedative I can take? This utter insanity.
We’re Drowning
The Internet has become a sea of disinformation, where people create information grottos where they invent “fake news” and lure others in to join them, like Ursula from Disney’s “The Little Mermaid.” In my estimation, no one is doing better than the days of Pride and Prejudice. I don’t blame DeWitt. He couldn’t have known the cesspool of information that the Internet would become. But he could see complications lay ahead, as in that menacing sentence above: “You couldn’t destroy if if you tried.”
It did seem like it would encourage people to access true, valuable facts, because they were so readily available. To give DeWitt and all of us hope that the Internet would make available so, so much accurate, reliable, trustworthy information–well, what could go wrong! pproximately 3,992,222 websites are created every day, 2,772 websites are created every minute, and 46 websites are created every second,” according to Ruchi Gupta writing for https://themeisle.com/blog/, But who is she? What is this website? Why should anyone trust either? They could be totally legit and correct–but how is anyone to know?
As a journalism student at University of Maryland College Park, one of my professors, Chris Callahan, wrote a book A Journalist’s Guide to the Internet. In it he listed the how trustworthy websites are based on their domains (in descending order of reliability: .gov, .edu, .org, .com. How quaint it all seems now! No one trusts anything but their social media networks, or websites they’ve, for whatever reason, decided are offering truth (yes, that’s still a thing!).
I remember getting my first AOL account. That was more for social interaction. But I thought, “In the same way that I can create relationships in a much easier fashion, so will we soon all be able to find out anything we want to because of the Internet.” I was an information junkie, for sure, also. I devoured information. I had CNN on all the time, turned down so the anchors’ and reporters’ were a dim murmur but loud enough for me to focus on if I heard something intriguing as I wrote on my laptop, being a writer. I read hard-copy newspapers; bought books on my favorite topics, like Judaica, animal rights, and queer issues. All the while, I felt an itch, you might say, as I ingested all this information. I squirmed in my seat as I took it all in. I felt like a drug addict more than a gustatory connoisseur, though. It was making me anxious, this constant need to know everything and everyone that was “happening,” to everyone, and everywhere around the world at every moment.
My cousin, Jaffer, opened my eyes to a new way of seeing my consumption of this endless stream of new-now-next (as the news show’s title went). He said, “I hate information.” I realized I did–do–too.
Knowledge, on the other hand, is good. It’s contained in books, journals, and the like–libraries! Instead of making me anxious, it makes me feel energized and powerful and allows me to think in new and useful ways.
I disagree. The aforementioned websites contain well-vetted, meticulously researched, firsthand facts–knowledge. News sites, entertainment sites, and personal blogs altogether amount to a flurry of words, ones often not used well, claiming to clue is on must-know information. There are tens of millions (with millions added every day, often hijacks on “The Info Superhighway”) and are often, unintelligible, incomplete, or tediously self-involed.
And it’s all about sell-sell-sell, because they get money from advertising or subscriptions. It’s endless, seamless, and frankly, pointless. If I need to know something, as I was taught in my rhetoric and composition classes in graduate school, Wikipedia is an OK place to get leads. But you should then get the knowledge you’re looking for from the sources mentioned in the footnotes. And when it comes down to it–what I need to know versus what I can know is very different.
As the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon said: “In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently.”
The difference between information and knowledge is like that between idle gossip and a probing speech.
I believe strongly in the benefits of a liberal arts education, in which, as one of its champions from the 18th to the 19th century, Alexander von Humboldt, wrote: “There are undeniably certain kinds of knowledge that must be of a general nature and, more importantly, a certain cultivation of the mind and character that nobody can afford to be without. People obviously cannot be good craftworkers, merchants, soldiers or businessmen unless, regardless of their occupation, they are good, upstanding and – according to their condition – well-informed human beings and citizens. If this basis is laid through schooling, vocational skills are easily acquired later on, and a person is always free to move from one occupation to another, as so often happens in life.”
Ladies and Gentleman, I Now Present to You…Everything!
The disorganized format of most of the information on the Internet is part of its unappealing nature. In Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance rhetoric, a speech (or, now, more often, a piece of writing) was taught to be, ideally, been in this format: Introduction (wherein the author offers an initial entry into the topic to be argued), Narration/Statement of Fact (wherein the author puts forth what she/he/they are arguing, briefly), Proof/Confirmation, Refutation (wherein the author refutes his/her/their opponent’s view on the subject), and Conclusion (wherein the author inspires readers’ emotions to convince that all you’ve said previously is true, and summarize it).
I studied journalism at the University of Maryland College Park. I know “news,” much of what clogs the Internet takes on a different format. My excellent journalism professors taught me about the Inverted Pyramid. Your lead, the “must-know” of an article goes first and less important information follows. The thing your audience “needs” to know least comes last.
In 2023 we, apparently, need to know every move anyone on Earth makes the moment they make it. The fault for this madness lies in the business model of journalism. News sites need to make money of clicks and advertising. I know this firsthand because I worked for four soap opera news websites. We reporters constantly scrolled through social media looking for what was, well, “new” with soap actors, soap operas, and on and on. I sat at my desk 10 hours a day for one of these sites to find four news stories and write four spoilers, one for each soap opera on the air at the time. I tried to write well, but my articles contained slapdash, 300-word-minimum (search engines only picked up articles with a minimum of 300 words then) articles. I rushed to finish 8 articles per day, and it showed in the quality of the information each provided.
Now, as a could-be-consumer, I’m thrilled, to avoid those soap websites and most news websites. As an inherently talkative person I’m glad not to have more to talk about by avoiding such sites. No one wants to hear my opinion on why this and why that. And why should they? We all have enough going on in our lives already.
Undergraduate college students often roll their eyes (I’m a big eye-roller, so I love that part), and sigh in exasperation as they say they don’t see the point in knowing about 19th-century European history, say, when they are going to be a doctor. But the point of a liberal arts education, and liberal arts educators, is to create informed citizens, who can do many things better than if they knew none of the things they learn in liberal arts classes–like vote intelligently, for one very, very important example.
An uncle of mine whom I love dearly, reads the New York Times cover to cover every day. He benefits from it. He’s a cardio-thoracic surgeon, and he’s curious about the world. I cannot imagine taking in all that information. I have to clutch my pearls just thinking about it! And I’d never be able to do it all at once, so all day I’d be thinking, “I have to read that article on the delights of Cambodian street food–when will I get the time?!?!?!!?”
Me? I’m with Lenny Bruce on this one. “The reason I don’t smoke it is because it facilitates ideas and heightens sensations–and I’ve got enough shit flying through my head without smoking pot.” Me too, Lenny, me too.
All knowledge is useful. Most information is not. Not by a long shot. Now, part of my antipathy toward information stems from the fact that I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, as diagnosed by a psychiatrist many years ago. I already knew it, but the official diagnosis got me on medications for it and led me to pursue non-chemical ways of managing it–deep breathing, meditation, and, as I’m a huge self-help book reader, books like How To Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything–Yes, Anything! by Dr. Albert Ellis. He co-pioneered Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Rational-Emotive Therapy.
That’s the name of a marketing software program. The name alone makes me shiver in my seat as I write this. I will remain in “constant contact” with the world–my loved ones, various forms of media, and fliers on the bulletin board in my gym if I can. And now I can But I have to limit it. I have to. It’s too much. If someone were screaming in our ears constantly everything that’s going on with everyone its going on with at all times, as this New York Post article states “Five teens charged in savage mobs beating at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, (misspelled Marjory Stonemason Douglas High School) we’d all know that the information bombarding us at all times damages us. If I do need to know about this “savage mob beating,” it only emphasizes all the bad things in the world. Now I know about the beating and have to be reminded of “one of the worst school school shootings.”
Why is each word in that headline, also not capitalized, following Associated Press Style? Why do three pop-up ads for the New York Post’s sister publications come up as soon as I click on the link to the article? It’s because the Post isn’t trying to give us useful knowledge. It’s trying to get more clicks, more subscriptions, and more page views for money. “Money, Money, Money” as the song by Abba goes. Water, water everywhere–and not a drop to drink.
All knowledge is useful. But most information is garbage–a big pile of garbage that stresses me out to look at while destitute Indian people sift through it in a desperate attempt to find food, wares they could sell, things they have lost. That’s another thing with the glut of information available to us at all times. I don’t want or need to be reminded of the fact that 1 billion people in India are starving every day.
At first, it won’t surprise you to know, I used practically every method of “messaging” with friends, coworkers, and family I could get my hands on. Then that same cousin I mentioned above, Jaffer, told me about the one and only app for “gratuitous communication” (a phrase I love) he used. I don’t recall what it was–perhaps because there’s so much information in my head, that a conversation between a dear cousin less than 3 years ago escapes me.
I have lost jobs, friends, and daily contact with family members due to my penchant for “over-communication.” I have two new rules: “before you say what you’re about to blurt out…stop…take a breath…decide if you truly need to say it.” And, “communicate 50 percent less than you have an instinct to.”
As far as news goes, I interviewed a good friend and delegate in the Maryland General Assembly on one of this site’s sister websites, rocoinhoco.com (see, I do that “sister website” thing too–for money, the nefarious creature underneath the floorboards of this horror movie. That’s also why this headline reads, shamefully, “NOW!”) and reported for CNN for ten years, how we restore the faith of U.S. citizens in the news. She said, “I think we need one, trusted news source.” Both of us choked on our falafel, laughing and spitting it on each other, at Syriana, a restaurant in downtown Ellicott City, Maryland. Fascism! But kind of true.
Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of the transistor radio, believed sound waves never “die.” If he was right, imagine them all floating around all over us, everywhere, all the time. I’m adding to them as little as possible.
This Says It All
I took this picture at my gym while on a stationery bike…while music also played. And most people had earphones or earbuds on.
Remember a few years ago when that awful, horrific crawl appeared at the bottom of every news show’s screen. It wasn’t enough to know everything going on everywhere to everyone. We had to know everything that was ALSO going on everywhere to everyone. Again, this is out of control.
I’m grateful for your readership! Check back with me each week here at politicalpoetrypastiche as my linguistic, literary, and generally loquacious involvement in local politics takes on a mélange of prose and poetry genres. After all: All Politics Is HoCo-al™. Join me on Facebook here, find me on Twitter at @politicalpoetr3, and follow me on Instagram using the handle @politicalpoetrypastiche.
Epilogue: A Perfect Example
Epilogue: A Perfect Example
My best friend, the aforementioned Jewish woman sent me an article via text this morning: (December 23rd, 2023): It’s Time for the U.S. to Give Israel Some Tough Love by Middle East expert Thomas Friedman. It is, actually…knowledge! In a newspaper–imagine that! I learned something from the article. And if my best friend hadn’t sent it to me, I wouldn’t know those things. And they seem like vital facts to know about, say, the Houthis Zaidi Shia Muslims, and how they fit in to the picture of the war in Israel right now. I’m a Shia Muslim, but I wasn’t aware of the Houthis and that they are Zaidi Syeds.
No easy answers.
In a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility I was a patient at 11 years ago, a therapist said something that’s always stuck with me: “If you freak out about something, ask yourself this–“Will this matter in a year?” Yes, it will. Will I have any more power (if I have any now) to do something about it? Or am I just consuming this information over Early Grey tea in a sprawling estate in a the British country, smirking vaguely, placing the teacup down gently, dabbing the corners of my mouth with delicate lace napkins handed down in my family for generations…“Hm—well, isn’t that fascinating. Honestly, what will those Orientals think of next! Aunt Augusta, dear, shall we take a walk this morning? Your rheumatism has been acting up lately, and Dr. Bumbervale said you must take a walk every day!”
I’m grateful for your readership! Check back with me each week here at politicalpoetrypastiche as my linguistic, literary, and generally loquacious involvement in local politics takes on a mélange of prose and poetry genres. After all: All Politics Is HoCo-al™. Join me on Facebook here, find me on Twitter at @politicalpoetr3, and follow me on Instagram using the handle @politicalpoetrypastiche.
The people of Jewish descent mentioned in the following article go un-named. In the current climate of increased anti-semitism in the United States and the world, I don’t want to put them in harm’s way.
I will always stand by Israel because Jews saved my life.
I have a recurring genre of nightmares in which I’m trying to say something…but I can’t. In one, my mouth feels sewn shut. In another, it seems like it’s stuck together with some adhesive from hell. In the worst, there’s nothing stopping me from opening my mouth–but I can’t get my lips to part.
“A true friend accepts who you are, but also helps you become who you should be.” –Unknown
If you’ve read this article, you know that in Classical Greece and Rome, the encomium was, as theorized in rhetoric—the study of the art of persuasion—a speech in praise of someone.
An encomium was, In Classical Greek and Roman culture, was a speech in praise of someone. My good friend Jeff Fitzgerald often listened to me talk about my love of rhetoric. We lost touch, and I always intended to reconnect with him.
