"The Crisis of Multiculturalism"
- Videos from ICI Berlin workshop. (Very basic but impeccable presentations from Alana Lentin and Gavan Titley)
- The naming of the analogy between Nazi anti-Semitism and contemporary Islamophobia - a show of awareness and apparent concern - serves to license the articulation of the latter. In a typical move available to the possessors of white supremacist privileges, the writer adopts the position of moderator, standing above the question of the reproduction of racist discourse and practise rather than participating in it. He evaluates the rival claims of two Jewish Dutch intellectuals regarding whether Muslims in the Netherlands should be viewed as the victims or perpetrators of a revived anti-Semitism. As proposed by Defenders of the Faith, "our" ruthless critique of Islam and Muslims is now undertaken, a ritual of our European liberal generosity and advanced customs of critique and self-criticism from which the objects are only naturally excluded.
- From "dot", the excellent RaceFail09 linklist.
It also serves to license the articulation of something similar to the former—because the analogy totally erases a possible structural understanding of the history of how Jews were made into targets of hatred, violence, and social exclusion in Europe in particular, and what purpose this practice served ruling power.
ReplyDeleteSo the analogy that is supposed to be enlightening and get people to see that the new hatred, stereotyping, and violence is wrong, unfair, unjust--
It does that to a very limited extent, but because it is not a very good analogy at all, it distorts and erases the history of Islam in Europe and Islam and Europe, and the history of Jews in Europe and Judaism and Europe.
yes in the oversimplified way this analogy is made, the actual historical relation and how in particular the antisemitic mythology is revived now for muslim intruders is really obscured. and this contributes to the transformation of real history - of Narizm and anti-Semitism, of Judeophobia, Islamophobia and the creation of christendom, europe, white supreamcy - into myths severed from the present in a way that naturalises and justifies the present.
ReplyDelete