| It contributes to 'a mutual sense of incomprehension that is meant to control the discourse and reinforce the Manichean world-view of each side and leave us resigned to a future of hopelessness, fear and perpetual war.'
Salaam writes: David Shasha is the director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, N.Y. It's hard to do justice to Shasha's in-depth and extensive treatment of the subject with an excerpt, but a coherent piece of the larger whole will have to do. There are many posts in the archive at this blog if this is the first article you are reading about the "Obsession" movie. Just use the search function.
David Shasha writes:
We cannot forget while watching this execrable piece of propaganda, a work that is as unhelpful pedagogically as it is dangerous, that the dual logic of contradiction is continually at play: we are TOLD that Islam is not like what is being shown on the screen and yet this is what is being SHOWN to us with a relentlessness that puts the rhetoric of Islam as a peaceful religion to the lie. After a steady diet of one solid hour of seeing images of Muslims juxtaposed - LITERALLY - with those of Hitler and other Nazis, I am not sure if it takes a genius to figure out that we are being browbeaten into capitulation to hate all Muslims.
And to make sure that we do not forget this fact, we are treated to an extensive set of interview clips with an old man named Alfons Heck - a now-reformed former member of the Hitler Youth!
The "obsession" of this film is to turn the current situation with what are admittedly some very dangerous people - all of whom it must be honestly stated are religious Muslim fanatics who twist the words of their traditions and promote ideas of hate and violence that have continually been spread throughout the world over the course of the past century - and make it into a primordial battle being waged between absolute good and absolute evil.
Now it is not at all necessary for us to demand that "Obsession" be fair, or that it present the socio-political and historical contexts that have created this mess. Having said this, it does seem more than curious that the producers of "Obsession" make this demand of the Muslims themselves. And indeed, the visual techniques used in the film are eerily similar to those used by the Muslim fanatics themselves: the endless repetitive barrage of flashy and shocking images presented in a de-contextualized atmosphere smacks of what we might best call hypocrisy. But I think we would more accurately understand the rhetorical mechanisms of "Obsession" as a form of PILPUL; the attempt to speak out of both sides of one's mouth while not-so-subtly railroading home a single, obsessive mono-causal point.
In essence, this is the very rhetorical means that is used against Israel and the US by the Arab media which often inflames the masses to hate Israel and the US. When Israeli and American acts of violence are stripped of their socio-political context, the Arab viewer's feelings are inflamed and the individual is left with a passionate hatred bordering on the pathological.
So the way in which the producers of "Obsession" juxtapose images of victims of Islamic terror with those of Nazi slaughter can easily be transposed into an anti-Western frame of reference by cross-cutting the same Nazi images with images of Israeli or American brutalities - of which there are of course many. In fact, the film does indeed show the ways in which the Arab media applies Nazi imagery to Jewish figures and contexts.
In this sense, the rhetorical means that "Obsession" utilizes to construct its arguments lead us nowhere. The viewer is taught absolutely nothing about the roots of this Islamic mentality or its historical connection to Western politics. The viewer is not told about Daniel Pipes' Zionist proclivities and the way in which he has reframed Middle Eastern history along the lines of those beliefs to disfigure and transform that history. We are not told of Caroline Glick's own sympathies for the messianist Settler movement and its belief in the sacred nature of the land of Israel.
And while I do not mean to imply or state that Pipes and Glick are not entitled to their own fanaticism which is often made more extreme when put to the uses of the apocalyptic Jews themselves, I find it more than a bit curious that the whole point of the film is to reject fanaticism and to reject propaganda. I am not sure how this is to be done when the film itself is constructed along the lines of a classic propaganda tract filled with stirring emotional manipulation of the basest variety. It would appear that propaganda itself is not the real issue, only Arab propaganda.
And to quickly short-circuit the nature of the PILPUL-dialectic, a trap that is often used by the practitioners of PIPLUL to mark their own irrational hermeneutics, we are not rejecting the rhetoric of people like Pipes, Dershowitz and Glick in order to lift up the debased discourse of the Muslim fanatics. And often this is seen as a sort of lock in winning the debate on the Jewish side - either you support us or you are supporting them. It is something that has become a crucial part of the Bush discourse - a discourse that has been strongly informed by an Ashkenazi Jewish influence from people like David Frum and Bill Kristol who have tapped into the Ashkenazi PILPUL tradition and made that tradition a formative part of the new thinking in Bushworld.
It is altogether possible in rational terms to decry the fanatic Muslims and to reject the arguments of "Obsession" and its own particular brand of Jewish fanaticism.
Story here.
I would add to that last point that it is also altogether possible to denounce Jewish fanaticism without validating, supporting or accepting the arguments and positions of extremists in the Islamic world. |
