Has anybody seen a good response to this loaded question? The best I've seen have involved turning the tables on the questioner and refusing to answer one way or another, eg: Ambassador Zomlot's masterclasses:
However the headline is always 'refuses to condemn', with the implication that they view the alleged atrocities as justified or secretly approve. Hacks must be schooled on asking this 'gotcha' question, and particularly in who to ask it of - ie: never those in the real positions of power, whose atrocities dwarf those of tiny guerilla resistance orgs.
I found this academic paper looking at examples of Israeli journalists posing the question aggressively to Israeli Arabs. The jargon is heavy, but the point about this being a loyalty test, with the threat of being banished from society always hovering behind it was well made:
'Calls to condemn as rituals of loyalty in political interviews
During a panel discussion on Channel 2, Jewish-Israeli journalist Sivan Rahav-Meir identified a “recurrent ritual in Israeli news interviews with Arab-Israeli representatives. According to Rahav, following a violent action inflicted by Palestinians against Israelis or provocative statements made by an Arab-Israeli representative, there is “a kind of amusing practice in which an interviewer tells himself he will be the one who is going to educate the (Arab-Israeli) interviewee (by asking)‘Do you condemn the terrorist attacks?’” (July 19, 2006, Channel 2).
The call for condemnation serves in this case as a pivotal action around which a ritual of loyalty to the nation is constructed. The ritual is opened with an assertive yes/no "do you condemn” question (Clayman and Heritage 2002a), which in the context of the ethnic identities of the two participants can be interpreted as a demand to choose between one of the two components of the Arab-Israeli identity: civic affiliation (resulting from citizenship in the State of Israel) or national sentiment (Arab-Israeli affinity to the Palestinian people who are not citizens of Israel) (see Al-Haj 2000). In the second part of the ritual, interviewees face an avoidance dilemma (Bavelas, Black, Chovil, and Mullett 1990) since they must choose between one of two untoward alternatives: to condemn the act and thereby publicly adhere to the normative model of the Jewish-Israeli political community while ignoring national Palestinian sentiment, or conversely, to refuse to condemn and thereby distance themselves from what is constructed as consensual by the interviewers while aligning with the national Palestinian sentiment. As happens in most cases in which interviewees face an avoidance dilemma, a third option, that of equivocation by means of indirect answer design, is also plausible (Bavelas, Black, Chovil, and Mullett 1990; Bull 1998). If the call to condemn is rejected by interviewees, the ritual continues with a negotiation over the non-normative stance taken by them or by discussing the equivocal answer in order to make it less ambiguous (Blum-Kulka and Weizman 2003).
The call to condemn and its respective answer serves as a resource for self-and-other positioning at both the interactional and social levels (Blum-Kulka, Liebes, and Kampf 2003; Harré and Moghaddam 2003; Weizman 2008).
At the interactional level, the various options for responding to the direct question – ranging between direct yes/no to indirect answers – represent a struggle over interactional power and a negotiation over the level of freedom allowed in responding to an assertive question (Clayman and Heritage 2002b). At the social level, in calling to condemn a previous act, Jewish-Israeli interviewers pose the threat to discursively exclude their interviewees from their mutual civic community. The call requires interviewees to conform to the political script the interviewers envision as binding so as to regain a moral status and membership rights in the national community. Thus, in responding to the call, Arab-Israeli interviewees have a range of options to position themselves in relative proximity to the Jewish-Israeli political community and the Palestinian one.' - https://www.academia.edu/49359472/_Do_You_Condemn_Negotiating_Power_Relations_through_In_Direct_Questions_and_Answers_Design_in_Ethno_political_Interviews
None of the responses by Arab Israelis cited seemed particularly effective, though they are in the difficult immediate situation of subjugation, so the consequences of appearing to justify are much more severe.
It would be nice to have a magic bullet response to this question! I'm reminded of the quote from a Jewish resistance fighter (I forget his name, sorry): 'When the oppressor gives me two choices i always take the third'.
Posted by Dovetail Joint on October 26, 2023, 8:42 pm, in reply to "Do you condemn?"
I glanced at a Guardian headline today about Israel's reponse to something or other, and I thought about how they seem to regard... Israel. For them, Israel is only the Israeli Jews, they hardly ever mention the over 20% of the population who are Arab/Palestinian citizens. I wonder, do they count for Guardian journalists? Does the Israeli state speak for them as well? Why are they, a sizable minority included in what the majority Jewish population says or thinks? Do Guardian journalsits, even think at all?
Your quote was from Meir Berliner who knifed a SS corporal at Treblinka:
Posted by sashimi on October 26, 2023, 8:44 pm, in reply to "Do you condemn?"
Thanks Sashimi, that was the one. Imagined conversation in 1942 Germany: "Yes, yes, I know what they do to the Jews is bad, but do you condemn this barbaric, unprovoked, terrorist murder of a glorious Wehrmacht soldier just carrying out his duties?"Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
Dr. Yasir Qadhi: The "Do You Condemn" Game
Posted by Ian M on October 26, 2023, 9:16 pm, in reply to "Do you condemn?"
From politics of condemnation to politics of refusal
Being on standby to condemn every ‘terror’ incident has long been a precondition of being a ‘good’ Muslim. Not anymore.
Sahar Ghumkhor is an academic based in Australia. Her research focuses on political violence, psychoanalysis, law and the politics of difference. Hussein Mohamud's research is in the theories of race, psychoanalysis and nationalism.
Published On 11 Jul 201711 Jul 2017
Muslim public figures who occupied the media landscape in Australia for years pontificated how Islamophobia was the result of a lack of knowledge about Islam, write Ghumkhor and Mohamud [Reuters]
This year Eid al-Fitr came as a relief from a month of bloody events. Most of us hailing from countries that have witnessed, or continue to witness, the horrors of the war on terror, have learned to live with thorny contradictions wherein joy and pain rarely find separate homes.
For the Australian Muslim community, this year’s Eid al-Fitr hasn’t been unusual in this respect. Many of us reflected on the troubling state of the Ummah globally and the feeling of being under siege in a growing hostile environment locally, but there was a remarkable change in tone to our usual concerns. Some Muslim leaders came out on the day criticising the frequent demands on Muslims to condemn terrorism.
In an interview with Australian network SBS, The Grand Mufti Ibrahim Abu Mohamed expressed his frustration: “Some people in our community expect us to act as recording machines (on repeat). We have condemned terrorist attacks. What more can I say?”
The president of the Lebanese Muslim Association expressed similar frustration at the Eid prayer at Lakemba mosque in Sydney, calling on Muslims to be “unapologetic Muslims” and insisting: “I am not here to answer calls by racists and bigots to condemn something that is not ours to condemn. We do not own these actions nor these individuals, to have to speak out against them.”
Earlier in the month, the peak body of Muslims in Victoria, the Islamic Council of Victoria (ICV), announced their Safe Space Project for young Muslims to communicate their concerns without consequence in an effort to build stronger relationships of support and understanding. The programme was proposed after concerns were raised about the mental health and vulnerabilities young Muslims might face. In response, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews threatened to have the body’s funding reviewed, insisting: “There is no safe way to rail against the West.” Soon after, the ICV announced it would not be attending the premier’s annual iftar, without his providing an official explanation.
These incidents signal a shift in Australian Muslim discourse from a politics of condemnation wherein Muslims are presumed to be on standby to condemn every incident labelled as terrorism, to a politics of refusal.
Good Muslim vs bad Muslim
The politics of condemnation is an iteration of respectability politics that is activated without fail after every violent and morally objectionable event involving Muslims, forcing them to answer for what Joseph Massad describes as the “atrocity exhibition”. Seeking to dissuade an increasingly hysterical public, whose anxieties – whipped up by dramatic media images and political rhetoric – demand frequent addressing, Muslim leaders and representatives plead Islam’s case. Marking Muslims with the stain of terrorism, proclamations of Islam’s peaceful nature, how it has been hijacked by perverted readings, and Muslim commitment to the fight against terrorism, are piled on in a fraught tone.
Caught within this binary of good Muslim/bad Muslim, the conversation over the years has been stifled within its disciplinary folds. In these series of negations, Muslims cannot speak without reference to their pejoratives.
This dichotomy of good and bad Muslims sustains the semblance of tolerance at the heart of Australia’s multicultural liberalism. The type of community imagined in this process of continued splitting and projecting is essentially a perverse communion – a national investiture, one might say, in the figure of the bad Muslim.
For those who make the demand and can speak in the name of the nation, this fantasy provides a boundary of non-belonging, a way of excluding any possible overlap between perceived self and others. In this sense, the vacillation between good and bad Muslims doesn’t so much offer a dialogue within Australian multiculturalism; it renews a commitment to a national identity without fracture.
It is in this post-colonial scene that critics of empire such as Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak realised that the politics of representation is not simply about misrepresentation of the other; it is about the coming to being of “The West” and its others.
Islam is something that is brought into meaning through antonyms that mobilise speeches, debates, academic studies, the culture industry and the personal questions often asked of Muslims: Islam and the West, democracy and Islam, women and Islam, Islam and human rights. Is there an Islam without its ideological gatekeepers? Can Muslims speak beyond them? The politics of condemnation demands that Muslims first prove their right to speak.
As Muslims are held between the demand to speak and the invalidation of one’s voice, Islamophobia rages across the globe, captured in countless polls and studies. These sentiments are most visible in the increasing scale of controversies: halal certification, segregation debates, mosque protests, and the banning of Muslim women’s dress. With the focus on “deradicalisation” (from “what to where?” is rarely discussed) the community is perceived as a potential enemy within, subject to surveillance, and questioned on so-called national loyalties. Implicating victims of racism
Spouting the sanctity of purging terrorism from Islam, Muslim public figures who occupied the media landscape for years – often without expertise or with little consideration of the implications of their words – would pontificate how Islamophobia was the result of a lack of knowledge about Islam. Refusing to reassess their response, we were told that the public just needed to know the “truth” about Islam.
Strangely relying on the narrative churned out in the speeches of Western politicians, who remind us that this is a “war within Islam”, Muslims are called on to rescue Islam from itself. Promoting Islam in the best positive light is to salvage Islam. But this strategy reveals a naive understanding of not only the geopolitical landscape by reading it as “culture talk” – as a product of the war of ideas, but also of how racism works.
OPINION: Australia – Is halal food funding terrorism?
Not only does it implicate the victims of racism by positioning them as responsible for the fear and anxiety they trigger in the public, the politics of condemnation also assumes that racism is driven by a failure of knowledge. By correcting people’s perception of Islam, it presumes that this hostility will cease. Indeed, Islamophobia appears as persistent questions about Muslims: What is Islam? Why do Muslims hate us? These questions are driven by unease, suspicion and fear that no answer can satisfy. They attempt to create, what Judith Butler – reflecting on white paranoia – called the “intent to injure”, by repeatedly reminding the public of the trauma of past attacks.
It has become increasingly apparent to many members of the community that the strategy to combat Islamophobia through education via condemnation has utterly failed. The first significant recognition was in the aftermath of the 2012 protest in Sydney against the poorly produced anti-Islam film, Innocence of Muslims. The protest was widely condemned by Muslim bodies and self-proclaimed representatives, after reports of violent altercations. Wringing their hands from the thought of a backlash, they rushed to condemn the “rioters” with public statements without speaking to those involved, ignoring the role that aggressive police tactics played in the incident. The incident marked a turning point, raising issues about whose interest community representatives represent and the need to tear up the script that centres the Muslim as the problem.
Never have we seen such formal denunciation of the role given to Muslims in the theatre of the war on terror. This change in tone, most likely the result of (scrutiny) fatigue, signals a change in the community’s role in the politics of condemnation. The apparent amnesia of the unrelenting demands on Muslims to “condemn” has finally eroded the fantasy required to sustain the discourse. The discourse is inherently ambivalent, relying on the operation of delicate constellation of subjective positions for its guarantee.
If we consider the familiar script as sets of practices, speeches and policing techniques already in deployment we can begin to appreciate the tension between the empty rhetoric of condemnation and the semblance of civility in the preceding demand to condemn as a signal of gnawing anxiety. Insofar as you are playing into its impossible demands, the more you speak to your innocence the more you stand accused.
Years of educating the public through condemnation statements, mosque open days, media appearances, donning the national flag over one’s head, speed-dating Muslims, Hug-a-Muslim, Hijab Days, have not quelled the paranoia of these questions. What is remarkable is how there has been little acknowledgment of how Islamophobia is about the performance of these questions, and how the answers are already presumed through the interrogation of Islam.
The Islamophobe knows more about Islam than Muslims do. It is this certainty that motivated former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s avowal that Muslims must speak up, and when they claim Islam is peaceful, they should mean it. Muslims are called upon to speak on not the “primary qualities” of Islam, the supposed object of fear/hatred, but to quell a racist delirium.
These examples of frustration on the part of Muslims, who are rarely identified as victims of post-9/11 racism, gesture to a politics of refusal that says “no” to the collapsing of Islam with terrorism, the interrogation, harassment of the community, the securitisation of multiculturalism. It is a “no” to the ventriloquising of the Muslim who is only animated to fulfil the other’s will.
Refusal, the sociologist Marcel Mauss argues in The Gift, breaks with social relations and a rapprochement of the conditions of these bonds. After nearly two decades of carrying a guilt that was never theirs, Muslims are realising that the conditions of recognition have been built on their erasure by denying them a will of their own. Any deviation from their prescribed role of docility is identified as a symptom of radicalisation. Islam is gradually hollowed out as it is expected to prove its civilisational claims before a scrutinising gaze of human rights, women’s rights and secularism – each mobilised to detect traces of modernity.
These signs of refusal are a welcome change. But to really mine its emancipatory potential, Muslim interlocutors in Australia and the wider West have to take responsibility for their own contribution to the politics of condemnation, and not simply switch discursive gears because the political mood is shifting at the grassroots level.
They should not rush over this important lesson: How did we come to be implicated in Islamophobia? If those on the public stage insist on having their political education in public, this should include the recognition that learning about where and how things went wrong requires the public recognition of one’s historical contribution to the problem – from rallying behind the reductive politics of condemning bad Muslims, silencing and demonising critics, lack of consultation and accountability to community.
At a time where meaning is slowly collapsing with the rise of fake news and of the increasing commodification of ideas and faith, to take a principled stance – no matter what the moral and political consequences are – could be the radical break we need.
Sahar Ghumkhor’s research explores the intersections of race, gender and psychoanalysis.
Hussein Mohamud’s research is in the theories of race, psychoanalysis and nationalism.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.Tell your story; Ask a question; Interpret generously http://storybythethroat.wordpress.com/tell-ask-listen/
"I'll condemn Hamas if you condemn Israeli terrorism"
Posted by Fionn on October 26, 2023, 9:38 pm, in reply to "Do you condemn?"
If they're going to be childish about it, that'd be my starting point.
If you condemn 75 years of Israeli terrorism and of its US enabler (nm)
I suppose that's a good way to undermine the question and turn the focus back where it belongs, ie: on the perpetrator of the greater atrocities and the occupying power who bears ultimate responsibility for reactions to its rule.
But the whole thing is so performative - why does it matter what one person says about whether a particular act was evil or not? That makes it clear that it's an enforcing of discipline and a way of stifling expressions of solidarity which are inconvenient - or even dangerous - to the ruling elites. Or a loyalty test, as the above paper argued.
"But the whole thing is so performative - why does it matter what one person says about whether a particular act was evil or not? That makes it clear that it's an enforcing of discipline and a way of stifling expressions of solidarity which are inconvenient - or even dangerous - to the ruling elites. Or a loyalty test, as the above paper argued."
Yes. It's essentially wrong-footing: a means of excluding anything outside whatever has already been decided by the interviewer/ establishment is acceptable opinion or actual cause and effect: the Overton window parameters.
Refuse to condemn and face moral outrage ...try to give some history and then you face the soundbite modern media catastrophe encapsulated by the memorable phrase often attributed to Ronnie Reagan:
Pirates & Emperors, Old & New December 21, 2015 Preface to the First Edition (1986)
Noam Chomsky
St. Augustine tells the story of a pirate captured by Alexander the Great, who asked him “how he dares molest the sea.” “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replied: “Because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an Emperor.”
The pirate’s answer was “elegant and excellent,” St. Augustine relates. It captures with some accuracy the current relations between the United States and various minor actors on the stage of international terrorism: Libya, factions of the PLO, and others. More generally, St. Augustine’s tale illuminates the meaning of the concept of international terrorism in contemporary Western usage, and reaches to the heart of the frenzy over selected incidents of terrorism currently being orchestrated, with supreme cynicism, as a cover for Western violence.
The term “terrorism” came into use at the end of the eighteenth century, primarily to refer to violent acts of governments designed to ensure popular submission. That concept plainly is of little benefit to the practitioners of state terrorism, who, holding power, are in a position to control the system of thought and expression. The original sense has therefore been abandoned, and the term “terrorism” has come to be applied mainly to “retail terrorism” by individuals or groups. Whereas the term was once applied to emperors who molest their own subjects and the world, now it is restricted to thieves who molest the powerful – though not entirely restricted: the term still applies to enemy emperors, a category that shifts with the needs of power and ideology.
Extricating ourselves from such practices, we use the term “terrorism” to refer to the threat or use of violence to intimidate or coerce (generally for political, religious, or other such ends), whether it is the terrorism of the emperor or of the thief.
The pirate’s maxim explains the recently evolved concept of “international terrorism” only in part. It is necessary to add a second feature: an act of terrorism enters the canon only if it is committed by “their side,” not ours. That was the guiding doctrine of the public relations campaign about “international terrorism” launched by the Reagan Administration as it came to office. It relied on scholarship claiming to have established that the plague is a “Soviet-inspired” instrument, “aimed at the destabilization of Western democratic society,” as shown by the alleged fact that terrorism is not “directed against the Soviet Union or any of its satellites or client states,” but rather occurs “almost exclusively in democratic or relatively democratic countries.”
The thesis is true, in fact true by definition, given the way the term “terrorism” is employed by the emperor and his loyal coterie. Since only acts committed by “their side” count as terrorism, it follows that the thesis is necessarily correct, whatever the facts. In the real world, the story is quite different. The major victims of international terrorism in the past several decades have been Cubans, Central Americans, and inhabitants of Lebanon, but none of this counts, by definition. When Israel bombs Palestinian refugee camps killing many civilians – often without even a pretense of “reprisal” – or sends its troops into Lebanese villages in “counterterror” operations where they murder and destroy, or hijacks ships and dispatches hundreds of hostages to prison camps under horrifying conditions, this is not “terrorism”; in fact, the rare voices of protest are thunderously condemned by loyal party liners for their “anti-Semitism” and “double standard,” demonstrated by their failure to join the chorus of praise for “a country that cares for human life” (Washington Post), whose “high moral purpose” (Time) is the object of never-ending awe and acclaim, a country which, according to its Pirates admirers, “is held to a higher law, as interpreted for it by journalists” (Walter Goodman).
Posted by Keith-264 on October 26, 2023, 10:55 pm, in reply to "Do you condemn?"
"Do you condemn the massacre at Dier Yassin?" "Do you condemn the slave uprising in Warsaw during 1943?" "Does Sudetenland have a right to exist?" "Does East Prussia have a right to exist?" Jim Crow America? The Prod ascendancy in Nireland? N+Boer south Africa? the smith Regime? Two apartheid tyrannies down, one to go.The last working-class hero in England.
Clio the cat, ? July 1997 - 1 May 2016 Kira the cat, ? ? 2010 - 3 August 2018 Jasper the Ruffian cat ? ? ? - 4 November 2021
Re: Start first
Posted by Ian M on October 26, 2023, 11:30 pm, in reply to "Start first"
Well quite, the only other option I could think of would be pointing out some of these historical parallels, or like the Kristallnacht article you posted, where shock and outrage is manufactured or hyped to justify an upcoming atrocity. Another example would be the stories of English women being raped during the 1857 mutiny, which turned out to be false propaganda but served the purpose of justifying the brutal crackdown that ensued:
'Reaction in Britain
Justice, a print by Sir John Tenniel in a September 1857 issue of Punch
The scale of the punishments handed out by the British "Army of Retribution" was considered largely appropriate and justified in a Britain shocked by embellished reports of atrocities carried out against British troops and civilians by the rebels.[175] Accounts of the time frequently reach the "hyperbolic register", according to Christopher Herbert, especially in the often-repeated claim that the "Red Year" of 1857 marked "a terrible break" in British experience.[171] Such was the atmosphere – a national "mood of retribution and despair" that led to "almost universal approval" of the measures taken to pacify the revolt.[176]: 87
Incidents of rape allegedly committed by Indian rebels against British women and girls appalled the British public. These atrocities were often used to justify the British reaction to the rebellion. British newspapers printed various eyewitness accounts of the rape of English women and girls. One such account was published by The Times, regarding an incident where 48 English girls as young as 10 had been raped by Indian rebels in Delhi. Karl Marx criticized this story as false propaganda, and pointed out that the story was written by a clergyman in Bangalore, far from the events of the rebellion, with no evidence to support his allegation.[177] Individual incidents captured the public's interest and were heavily reported by the press. One such incident was that of General Wheeler's daughter Margaret being forced to live as her captor's concubine, though this was reported to the Victorian public as Margaret killing her rapist then herself.[178] Another version of the story suggested that Margaret had been killed after her abductor had argued with his wife over her.[179]
During the aftermath of the rebellion, a series of exhaustive investigations were carried out by British police and intelligence officials into reports that British women prisoners had been "dishonoured" at the Bibighar and elsewhere. One such detailed enquiry was at the direction of Lord Canning. The consensus was that there was no convincing evidence of such crimes having been committed, although numbers of British women and children had been killed outright.[180]
But perhaps a more pithy response would be to call their bluff and say that you support the right of an oppressed people to resist their oppressors, with violence if necessary - as international law in fact permits.