Informed Comment
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
Hitchens the Hacker; And, Hitchens the
Orientalist
And, "We don't Want Your Stinking War!
Christopher Hitchens owes me a big apology.
I belong to a private email discussion group called Gulf2000. It has academics,
journalists and policy makers on it. It has a strict rule that messages
appearing there will not be forwarded off the list. It is run, edited and moderated by former
National Security Council staffer for Carter and Reagan, Gary Sick, now a
political scientist at Columbia University. The "no-forwarding" rule
is his, and is intended to allow the participants to converse about
controversial matters without worrying about being in trouble. Also, in an
informal email discussion, ideas evolve, you make mistakes and they get
corrected, etc. It is a rough, rough draft.
Hitchens somehow hacked into the site, or joined and lurked, or had a crony
pass him things. And he has now made my private email messages the subject of
an attack on me in Slate. (I am not linking to the article because it is highly
unethical and Slate does not deserve any direct traffic from my site for it.)
Moreover, he did not even have the decency to quote the final outcome of the
discussions.
I'd like to take this opportunity to complain about the profoundly dishonest
character of "attack journalism." Journalists are supposed to
interview the subjects about which they write. Mr. Hitchens never contacted me
about this piece. He never sought clarification of anything. He never asked
permission to quote my private mail. Major journalists have a privileged
position. Not just anyone can be published in Slate. Most academics could not
get a gig there (I've never been asked to write for it). Hitchens is paid to
publish there because he is a prominent journalist. But then he should behave
like a journalist, not like a hired gun for the far Right, smearing hapless
targets of his ire. That isn't journalism. For some reason it drives the Right
absolutely crazy that I keep this little web log, and so they keep trotting out
these clowns in amateurish sniping attacks. It is rather sad, that one person
standing up to them puts them into such piranha-like frenzy.
The precise reason for Hitchens' theft and publication of my private mail is
that I object to the characterization of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as having
"threatened to wipe Israel
off the map." I object to this
translation of what he said on two grounds. First, it gives the impression that
he wants to play Hitler to Israel's
Poland, mobilizing an armored corps to move in and kill people.
But the actual quote, which comes from an old speech of Khomeini, does not
imply military action, or killing anyone at all. The second reason is that it
is just an inexact translation. The phrase is almost metaphysical. He quoted
Khomeini that "the occupation regime over Jerusalem should vanish from the
page of time." It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a
medieval Persian poem. It is not about tanks.
Since Mr. Hitchens wants to splash my private mail all over the internet
against my will, as though he were himself an agent of the Bush
Administration's electronic spying on the private conversations of Americans,
I'm glad to share the message that encapsulates the results of our deliberations
at Gulf2000.
Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2006 15:34:18 -0400 From: "Cole, Juan"
The
speech in Persian is here:
Sorry that I misremembered the exact phrase Ahmadinejad had used. He made an analogy to
Khomeini's determination and success in getting rid of the Shah's government,
which Khomeini had said "must
go" (az bain bayad berad). Then Ahmadinejad defined Zionism not as an Arabi-Israeli
national struggle but as a Western plot to divide the world of Islam with Israel as the pivot of this
plan.
The phrase he then used as I read it is "The Imam said that this regime
occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time
(bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)."
Ahmadinejad was not
making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that
pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of
Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of
the Shah's government.
Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that
"Israel must be wiped off the map" with the
implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said
that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.
Again, Ariel Sharon erased the occupation regime over Gaza from the page of
time.
I should again underline that I personally despise everything Ahmadinejad stands for, not
to mention the odious Khomeini, who had personal friends of mine killed so
thoroughly that we have never recovered their bodies. Nor do I agree that the
Israelis have no legitimate claim on any part of Jerusalem. And, I am not exactly
a pacifist but have a strong preference for peaceful social activism over
violence, so needless to say I condemn the sort of terror attacks against
innocent civilians (including Arab Israelis) that we saw last week. I have not
seen any credible evidence, however, that such attacks are the doing of Ahmadinejad, and in my view
they are mainly the result of the expropriation and displacement of the
long-suffering Palestinian people.
It is not realistic for Americans to call for Iran to talk directly to the
Israeli government (though in the 1980s the Khomeinists did a lot of business
with Israel) when
the US government won't talk directly to the Iranians about most bilateral
issues. In fact, an American willingness to engage in direct talks might well
pave the way to an eventual settlement of these outstanding issues.
cheers
Juan Cole