Talking about " intellectual giants" and here I don't count the guy who thinks that he is Goliath, as I wonder what the by all accounts brilliant Kwame Anthony Appiah thinks about the whole mess.
Unlike Alan Dershowitz who is 1000% pro-Israel, Kwame Appiah the Humanist and Modern Renaissance Man doesn't have a degree in law, but nevertheless it should be interesting to listen to how he weighs in on the current Israel-Palestine debacle.
It should also be worthwhile listening to some inputs from Paul Eidelberg, a great admirer of George S. Patton whose motto was to hit them hard and hit them frequently
I have strong suspicion that the secret services of U.S and its allies may have planted "assets" inside Hamas and Hezbollah to provoke Israel into military campaigns to downgrade the capacities of both group, which is happening now.-Chidi Anthony Opara (CAO)
"Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angels'
Orders? and even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart: I'd be consumed
in his more potent being. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can still barely endure,
and while we stand in wonder it coolly disdains
to destroy us. Every Angel is terrifying.
And so I grip myself and choke down that call note
of dark sobbing. Ah, whom can we turn to
in our need? Not Angels, not humans,
and the sly animals see at once
how little at home we are
in the interpreted world. That leaves us
some tree on a slope, to which our eyes returned
day after day; leaves us yesterday's street
and the coddled loyalty of an old habit
that liked it here, lingered, and never left.
O and the night, the night, when the wind full of worldspace
gnaws at our faces—, for whom won't the night be there,
desired, softly disappointing, setting hard tasks
for the single heart. It is easier on lovers?
Ah, they only use each other to mask their fates.
You still don't see? Fling the emptiness in your arms
out into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the increase of air with more passionate flight."
(The first paragraph - let's call it that - of Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies)
Pre and post-Holocaust Poetry endure while killer bombs continue to be dropped on the dwelling places of defenceless innocent men, women and children in Lebanon and several generations later, the current inhabitants of what was once the Northern Kingdom …
Talking about "intellectual giants", what would Edward Said have said about the situation in Lebanon today, that he has not said in the past, in relation to the latest developments in the Israel - Palestine Conflict / the Israel and the Arabs conundrum, since he (Said) passed away in September 2003?
When I attended his lecture in Stockholm, it must have been a year earlier - little did we know that he was suffering from cancer - and on that occasion before he appeared on stage the atmosphere was already electrically charged with expectation as if "Surely some revelation is at hand" of the type the children of Israel & the mixed multitude received from the Lord of Hosts the event known as Torah Mi-Sinai, at the foot of Mt. Sinai.
Everybody was there, certainly all the pro-Palestinian and the pro-Israel people - perhaps not exactly like stone age barbarians and savages, potential suicide bombers and wannabe murderous Israeli settlers about to make aliyah, now not at each others throats, but looking dignified, nicely scrubbed and dressed, not wearing battle fatigues and not armed with hand grenades and genocidal machine guns, sitting in civilised peace and tranquillity, side by side waiting for some precious words like anointing oil to pour from the lips of, as it were, the God-sent Edward Said in person…
I remember who was sitting next to me & Better Half, it was Schalom Haddad an Oriental / Sephardic Jew from Libya, who after many trials and tribulations eventually migrated - made it to the safe haven of Sweden, one of the many in the great exodus of Jews from North Africa after the 1948 Arab –Israeli War … so much to be said about that era of expulsions and mass deportations and in its wake, also an imported Antisemitism which as you all understand, not without cause, must be now flourishing, full blast enjoying a rebirth and seething like never before : Antisemitism in the Arab world.
Did I say "an imported antisemitism" ?
Yes. Schalom told me that at one of the social studies classes at the University of Stockholm, an Arab (I can't remember if he said that the Arab in question was Palestinian) and this was after the Munich Massacre, well, he said that this is what the Arab in question gave as a good example of the mathematical term "subtraction" in front of the whole class which I assume was another mixed multitude composed of mostly ethnic Swedes:
"You line up ten Israelis in Jerusalem; you shoot nine of them, how many remain?"
Schalom said that at that point he had to raise his voice in that class, with one word: Objection - that the example was gross, anti-Semitic, and out of order !
Which reminds me , yesterday I met Professor Bernard Porter at an annual family get together (the cousins) and I told him that although both of us are non-native speakers of the Swedish Language, I was more of an outsider than he was because, as he had told us some years ago, he probably had a drop or two of Viking blood coursing through his veins since some horny Dane must have raped one of his ancestral grandmothers - and that back in those days they used to refer to all the Vikings and Scandinavians as "Danes "; he further told me about the special affection that the Brits have for the Danes to this day, going back to before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet Prince of Denmark - sometime after some of Shakespeare's players visited Pelisor castle in Denmark and that's why the play has so much local colour / verisimilitude - such as this line from Hamlet which has earned Shakespeare so much endearment from the Danes : (Send him off to England where everybody is crazy - if you've got enough mental elasticity, you could be kind enough to give yourself some poetic latitude when interpreting The Bard of Avon ) -the exact wording , " If that doesn't work, they'll ship him off to England, where his crazy act can do no harm."
Well, at the start of the Edward Said lecture, there sat Schalom, perhaps patiently waiting for question time to shoot his hand up with a question either arising from what Said had just said at the lecture or perhaps like some of the veterans who, when it comes to asking questions at public lectures about matters of great concern to them and to their hearts, usually start with a mini-lecture of their own, concealed in a prearranged question - a mini lecture which after 45 seconds usually succeeds in getting everybody in the audience a little impatient, thereby causing the MC to say, "Could you please get to the point! What's your question?"
The ultimate question, of course an existential question, has already been asked by Bob , the kind of question that the Christian Palestinians in Bethlehem could be asking, with Benjamin Netanyahu in mind:
"Is there a place for the hopeless sinner who has hurt all mankind just to save his own beliefs?"
The other question here and now is: How much closer are we to a final solution to this problem (no wicked pun intended ) since his 1993 Reith Lectures and after that, the numerous Edward Said Memorial Lectures ?
Some more hypocritical posturing about a " two state solution" on which /what territories - after Armageddon, the arrival of Jesus on the roof of the mosque in Damascus , and the advent of Sahib al Zaman, The Twelfth Imam, Muhammad ibn al-Hasan -alaihi salaam ?
About what's now being observed as Hezbollah martyrology - being so far away from the theatre of action, Islamically thinking, the Mumin wonders how would the Prophet of Islam - sallallahu alaihi wa salaam have handled the Israel-Palestine situation that's been bedevilling the ummah since The Nakba?
How would those following Rasulullah's (s.a.w.) directives to the best of their understanding - those with tawakkul - have been dealing with the caravan being led by Benjamin Netanyahu & his crew ?
The Mumin probably only has this much to say, with these quotes from Imam Ali b. Abi Talib - alaihi salaam "the Lion of Allah" - according to Nahjul Balagha
"Beware! I called you (insistently) to fight these people night and day, secretly and openly and exhorted you to attack them before they attacked you, because by Allah, no people have been attacked in the hearts of their houses but they suffered disgrace…"( Sermon 27) …
in the same vein, Sermon 34
these, and the rest of what Imam Ali -alihi salaam says in Nahjul Balagha on War
Of relevance too , what Imam Ali -alaihi salaam says in Nahjul Balagha : On Making Peace
These quotes are of relevance to some of the facts of the case : that Hezbollah was reputed to have stockpiles of some 200,000 rockets and ballistic guided missiles in their deadly arsenal - you would think, enough to serve as a deterrent that would cause an adventurous Chief Netanyahu & Crew comprising Yoav Gallant and the voluble and for the moment triumphalist spokesman Daniel Hagari to put on their brakes - so that Nathan Sachar wouldn't have to ask these kinds of rhetorical questions :
"The big question in Israel right now is why Hezbollah's reaction to Hassan Nasrallah's death is so limited. According to all wargame scenarios, immediately after the attack in Beirut, Israel's power plants, airfields and fuel depots would have been subjected to barrages of homing ballistic robots. Israel's anti-robot system can handle tens of incoming robots in each sector. To damage its vital assets, Hezbollah would have to overwhelm air defenses with hundreds of simultaneous strikes—something Nasrallah used to describe with great drama in his speeches. Why is none of this happening?"
The answer which Nathan Sachar and everyone else knows is that Hezbollah has been unable to reply due to the fact that Lebanon lacks anything near a credible air force defence capability, and that's why the IDF was able to bomb - to their heart's content and without any real opposition in the air or on the ground, all ammunition depots and rocket launching sites that they could discern- after disrupting their pager communications…
If - instead of saying that they would continue firing an occasional rocket / firecracker into Israel - until the Israelis stopped their war on the defenceless Hamas warriors who have long been totally defeated and destroyed - if Hezbollah had chosen the path of a full, all out attack - God forbid - with everything that they had - it would have been very different , but they didn't and they haven't …
End of story.
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Chidi Anthony Opara is a Poet, Institute Of Information Management Professional Fellow, MIT Chief Data Officer Ambassador and Editorial Adviser at News Updates(https://updatesonnews.substack.com)He is a recipient of International Award/Recognition For Excellence In Data And Information Management, with 253 mentions on Academia(academia.edu)as at July 22nd, 2024.
More about him here: https://independent.academia.edu/ChidiAnthonyOpara
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
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