What Does "Left" Mean Today? Is the Right-Left Spectrum Notion Anymore than a Fraud Nowadays?

Who said professors don't have  a sense of humor? Two professors wrote an article as a spoof on the pretentiousness and earnest absurdity of the rather new and novel field of Gender Studies. Their article, “The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct,”  claimed to prove that the penis, the male reproductive organ, was not only a leading cause of the medical condition called pregnancy, but of, among other things, climate change. Anyhow, soon after publication in the journal Cogent Social Sciences, they revealed their real names and that the article was a hoax. I personally think that they should have waited a while longer before revealing the reality in order to see how many fish --or dupes-- they could catch who might take the article seriously and quote from it in all seriousness with admiration for and in agreement with its novel thesis. Here is a quote from the original hoax essay:

 "Nowhere are the consequences of hypermasculine machismo braggadocio isomorphic identification with the conceptual penis more problematic than concerning the issue of climate change,”

Be that as it may, the online magazine for academics, Inside Higher Ed [Ed = education] ran an article describing the hoax and quoting from it liberally while discussing several related issues. This article in turn drew a good number of comments. One line of discussion was how the toilers in the field of Gender Studies, although identifying themselves as Left, neglected the traditional concerns of the Left:

Don't you all miss the days when the "academic left" was preoccupied with issues such as social formations and the class structure of contemporary capitalism, the relationship between the dominant economic order and the state, the analysis of ideological hegemony, the application of Marxist theory to contemporary social conflict, the anarchist critique of Marxian strategies for social change, labor history . . .  

This raises the question of just what meaning the label or term Left has today. Especially since its concerns have changed so much and some charge that it is too often preoccupied with what the critics call "Identity Politics." Some used a phrase of the poet William Blake who lived in the late 18th century when the factory, the steam-powered mill was just making its appearance. Blake hated early industrialization which he characterized with the phrase: dark, satanic mills. Here is my contribution to the discussion between the two broken lines:

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It really is hard to know nowadays just what "Left" is and how it may be different from "Right." Furthermore, the gender studies and queer theorists seem to have no time to study the Dark, Satanic Mills that actually exist today in the inevitably progressive 21st century. How about the building sites in Qatar for the 2022 world soccer championhip as today's counterpart --or worse-- to Blake's dark, satanic mills? So are the gender and queer theorists really Left, in the traditional (patriarchal?) sense of the term, as they neglect the oppressed proletarians of Qatar? Indeed, an earnest lady of the philosophical persuasion prestidigitating in the gender studies field informed us a few years ago that Hamas and Hizbullah were parts of the "Global Left". Yet precisely Hamas was at the time (and probably still is) a recipient of $$ billions from Qatar. Now Qatar, besides overworking --sometimes to death-- the toiling gastarbeiter from Nepal and India, etc, enjoys one of the highest per capita incomes in the world, at least for its own citizens which the laborers are not. 

Although Lenin defined imperialism as not only the highest stage of capitalism but as any very large concentration of capital --a definition that surely fits Qatar & some of its neighbors on the Persian Gulf-- our philosophical theorist of what is Left today failed to see the contradiction in her own labeling of Hamas as Left. Since it is an Islamist organization funded in large part by Qatar, an imperialist state by Lenin's definition anyway, Hamas would seem to be an imperialist cats paw.

On the other hand, the old style Marxist-Leninists too might quite possibly have failed to apply Lenin's definition of imperialism consistently and might also have been reluctant to define Qatar as imperialist. And I certainly reject Marx and Lenin's notion of historical inevitability. Which leaves us with prejudice, preference, and selectivity marching forward hand in hand with new-fangled theories.

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Here is a comment that partly expresses some of my thinking about the meaning and purpose of today's "Left":

. . .  the American "Left's" preoccupation with identity politics has been a major distraction from the economic and critical methodologies noted above by Goodsensecynic [= another commenter-Eliyahu]. Maybe we're talking "post-Marxism" but, if we are in that period, then Capital can continue to have its way with most workers and citizens, no matter what their race, color, creed, or gender. The "hoax" article is, of course, about gender.
Capital has always offered "bread and circuses" to the masses (although not always the bread); chariot races have been replaced by NASCAR.
The implications of all this are obvious in the current state of academia . . .          [Frank Tomasulo]

In my view, circuses today are more the demonstrations of the Occupy Movement than of NASCAR.
The Left in the 21st century -- is it any more than pane et circenses, the Roman practice of giving the plebeians Bread and Circuses? Does the left-right notion do any more than confuse and mislead the public and the student of politics in our first fifth of the 21st century?
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--More on Qatar as well as on how certain capitalist institutions finance "leftist" organizations, especially if they are anti-Israel/anti-Jewish [here]
--Qatar's beneficiary, the Hamas Islamist group that controls the Gaza Strip [here]
-- The Qatar paradox, anti-American & pro-American at the same time [here]
-- How Qatar's royal broadcasting enterprise, Al-Jazeera, broadcasts anti-Israel "leftists" [here]

Capitalists Finance Anti-Israel "Leftists"

The funds contributed to anti-Israel organizations by the Ford Foundation is old news. Indeed, at the monstruous Durban I conference in 2001, which was supposedly opposed to racism, Israel and Jews came under intense hatred. As researcher Edwin Black discovered, many of the so-called "civil society" bodies and  "non-governmental organizations" attending and voting against Israel at the conference turned out to have been financed by the Ford Foundation, which was founded with the wealth of automobile mogul Henry Ford, who was one of the most notable Judeophobes in American history and gave encouragement to Hitler.

Not to be outdone by the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund turns out to be funding at least two noxious anti-Israel bodies, the campus-based "Jewish Voice for Peace" and the American Friends Service Committee, an offshoot of the Society of Friends, a religious group usually known as the Quaker church which ordinarily takes pride in preaching a pure pacifism in line with Jesus' supposed call on his followers to "turn the other cheek".

Some of the stunts performed by the "Jewish Voice for Peace"  cost a fairly large amount of money. Consider:

On February 2, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), an anti-Israel organization that seeks to “drive a wedge” in the Jewish community over support for the Jewish State, distributed 10,000 copies of a propaganda pamphlet masquerading as The New York Times. Claiming to be a special edition of the paper, the publication featured “articles” praising BDS and blaming Israel for the latest round of Palestinian terrorism over the past four months.The high production value of the lookalike—described by the Times as “deliberately designed to trade on our name and mislead users”—should direct focus towards those that provided the funds required to make such a stunt possible. Aside from the cost of printing thousands of copies of the multi-page fake, JVP and its partners devoted resources towards launching a faux Times website and Twitter account to accompany the handouts.
While JVP does not publish information on its financial backers, some of their supporters proudly announce their bankrolling of this group. In 2015, JVP received a two-year, $140,000 grant from the New York-based Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF). The private fund made the allocation through its “Peacebuilding” program, which claims to “advance just and durable peace by supporting innovative and collaborative approaches and policies for conflict prevention, management, and transformation.” It is unclear how financing groups that demonize Israel, promote discriminatory boycotts, and aim to silence its advocates can be considered a “collaborative approach” that will advance peace.

Here is some info on the American Friends Service Committee and its tie to the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF):

JVP is far from the only hostile and offensive group to receive RBF’s blessing. In 2015, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC)—a group that regularly refers to “Israeli apartheid” and Israel’s “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians—received $50,000 for its “Israel Program.” The Quaker group is a close ally of JVP, andpromotes BDS initiatives throughout the United States, including on university campuses. AFSC’s Dalit Baum authored a 2014 divestment resolution at Loyola University and has spoken numerous times with the pro-BDS group Students for Justice in Palestine. Similarly, JVP and AFSC have partnered to host “BDS summer camps” to train college activists. [full article by Yona Schiffmiller here]

According to the article that I have quoted, the AFSC received only $50,000 from the RBF. But don't worry about the AFSC. It is a very well funded body and has many sources of funding, some of them government-connected. It maintains offices in Ramallah, Jerusalem and many other places throughout the world. All that takes money.

Now, getting away from the specific details, is it not curious that groups conventionally identified as "Left" enjoy generous funding from capitalist bodies, foundations representing super rich capitalist families and founded with money from the profits --in some cases-- of inhuman exploitation of poor working men and women? When the smug and self-righteous and "do-gooder" recipients of Ford Foundation funds receive their thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions, do they think of how the money was made upon which the Ford Foundation was founded?

Many of these "do-gooder" and pro-"peace" and pro-"human rights" bodies support Hamas, the branch of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood that has established a statelet in Gaza. One addled mind who teaches, if you please, in an American university, one Judith Butler, informed the benighted world that Hamas, as well as Hizbullah, was part of what she called "the Global Left." Are these bien pensant "do-gooders" and "progressives" and "leftists" aware that the main financial support of their dear Hamas, their "leftist Hamas," is the super wealthy sheikdom of Qatar on the Persian Gulf? If they are so aware, does it bother them that slavery is practiced in Qatar under very cruel conditions which have led to the deaths of hundreds of foreign slave laborers in Qatar over the past few years as they build facilities for the 2022 world soccer championships, the Mondiale? And that Qatar contributed to the corruption of the highly corrupt FIFA, the international soccer/football/ body? If Qatar did not hand out huge bribes to FIFA board members to vote to award the sheikdom with the Mondiale for 2022, why would anybody have thought for a moment that the Persian Gulf sheikdom with its 50 degrees centigrade temperatures in the summer, would be suitable for hosting a soccer championship?
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UPDATES
3-27-2016 Ziva Dahl tells more on funding by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund [here] from New York Daily News.

The Paradoxes of Qatar: Pro-American & Anti-American at the Same Time

Qatar hosts the headquarters of the American Central Command, which actually guided the US war on  Saddam Hussein's Iraq in 2003. The same Qatar owns and operates from Qatar the Al-Jazeera TV network which broadcasts and incites in both English and Arabic, particularly  through the voice of one Sheikh Qaradawi, who preaches hatred of America. The two facilities, the CENTCOM HQ and the premises of al-Jazeera can be seen with the naked eye one from the other.

Hussein Ibish, a spokesman to the American public of Arab views --therefore he writes with relative restrain and moderation-- describes the Qatari paradox: anti-American & pro-American at the same time. He writes on the occasion of the closing down of al-Jazeera America, which never succeeded in gaining enough audience share to make the project worthwhile for Qatar:

Al Jazeera America was the latest, and perhaps most ambitious, branch of a media empire that the tiny but wealthy Gulf emirate of Qatar has used to project its influence, first regionally and then globally. The American-specific incarnation, begun in 2013, was partly an effort to rebrand for the United States the earlier iterations of the franchise, Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English. But the American network was hobbled from the start by this very legacy.

Because Al Jazeera Arabic overtly promoted Doha’s foreign policy objectives, the network was controversial and disliked by virtually every other government in the region. The Arabic station introduced a freewheeling reporting style — except for avoiding any criticism of Qatar — that transfixed Arab audiences with previously unheard-of debates.

Impartial it was not: A hefty dose of old-fashioned Arab nationalism and a strong bias for the Muslim Brotherhood, which was supported by the Qatari government, were unmistakable. This ideological orientation led to exaggerated accusations in the United States, especially in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that Al Jazeera served as a media affiliate of Al Qaeda.

Hyperbolic as such claims were, there was a distinctly anti-American bent to its reportage. The Iraq war, in particular, was portrayed virtually as a campaign of mass murder.

The real problem here was the Janus-faced nature of Qatari foreign policy, contradictory and ultimately unsustainable.

On one hand, the huge American military presence in Qatar is a key element of Qatari security strategy. Centcom largely ran the Iraq war out of its forward headquarters at the Udeid Air Base, which Qatar built to encourage a United States establishment there. On the other hand, Qatar gave a hugely influential platform on Al Jazeera to the Muslim Brotherhood cleric Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who elsewhere preached that “Americans in Iraq are all fighters and invaders” whether they were military or civilian, and that it was “a duty for all Muslims” to kill them. Thus Qatar was indispensable to the American war effort in Iraq and at the same time gave credence to one of the most influential Islamic propagandists against it.

Al Jazeera English, the network’s global English-language incarnation, was much more subtle than its Arabic-language counterpart. But it, too, has played a distinct role in Qatar’s ambitious outreach.

The English channel reached its peak of influence through its unrivaled coverage of the Egyptian uprising in January 2011. Despite a pro-Brotherhood bias, its reporting of the insurrection was also extraordinarily detailed, comprehensive and informative. Even the White House was said to be relying on Al Jazeera English for information during the uprising.

Since then, though, Al Jazeera’s credibility has suffered, particularly in the Arab world. After the 2013 ouster of the Brotherhood government of President Mohamed Morsi, the English network’s Egyptian bureau fell apart when its staff members were arrested and charged with disseminating “false news.” Qatar was eventually forced to close its pro-Brotherhood Arabic service to repair relations with Egypt.

That is the baggage that Al Jazeera America inherited on its debut. . . . . 
[New York Times, 17 February 2016; emph. added] [full article here]

As far as it goes the article is interesting and informative. And, I believe, factual. However, it is curious that Ibish somehow forgets to mention another paradox: the USA, the world's great friend of liberty and enemy of Communist tyranny, tolerates the slavery the prevails in Qatar in the form of the indentured servitude of tens of thousands or more of foreign workers brought in to do the  hard and work in the  sheikdom. It is Nepalis and others, horribly treated, who build the stadiums for the 2022 world soccer championship or FIFA Mondiale. Many of them have died. But the USA does not seem to care. Neither does the so-called "Global Left" such as it is, seem to care about slavery in Qatar. Nor does the anti-Israel BDS movement seem to care. 

In the summer of 2014 when Israel was fighting against thousands of rockets shot at Israeli towns and cities by Hamas, the USA in the person of John Kerry wanted Israel to accept mediation between itself and Hamas on the part of both Turkey and Qatar, both of them Muslim states hostile to Israel. Just by the way, perhaps the US State Department thought that the fact that Qatar was financing Hamas, itself a jihadi organization, was inconsequential. Israel thought otherwise and preferred Egyptian mediation. Maybe this is explained by the fact that the US press, the contemptuously called MSM, hardly reports on the  ugly social conditions prevailing in Arab states. At least not in Qatar.

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Hamas, the "Left" & Qatar [here]
Marxist-Leninst enjoys favor of rich Arab amir [here]

Do US Think Tanks Violate US Law Mandating Registration of Foreign Agents?

It is no secret that many area studies centers and institutes specializing on the Middle East (or other subject areas for that matter) at American universities are subsidized by some of those that they are supposed to study. That is, by super-rich Arab oil kingdoms and sheikdoms, especially on the Persian Gulf. But it is not only the university-based Middle East studies centers that are funded by Arabs and their friends, it is many of those Washington think tanks. The first institute in the United States specializing on the modern Middle East was likely the Middle East Institute located in Washington, long funded by friends of the Arabs, a large part of the US petroleum industry, and still going strong. Iran too has its own lobby in Washington, DC, especially but not only in the NIAC [see previous blog post]. Jan Sokolovsky asks whether any of the respected think tanks [perhaps wrongly respected] that infest DC are violating US law by not registering as foreign agents under the FARA, foreign agents registration act. Here is her article:

November 23, 2014

Do Major Think Tanks Violate US Law?

By Jan Sokolovsky

Prominent American research organizations may have violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, (FARA), by failing to register and to disclose lavish donations they have received from foreign governments, as documented in a recent major report in the New York Times, “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks”, by Eric Lipton, Brooke Williams and Nicholas Confessore. Such funding by foreign governments, especially when not disclosed, is extremely detrimental to the interests of the United States, since their goal is to influence our policies.

 “More than a dozen prominent Washington research groups have received tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments in recent years while pushing United States government officials to adopt policies that often reflect the donor’s priorities.”

Although receipt of such funding is not illegal, failure to report it is.

“The think tanks do not disclose the terms of the agreements they have reached with foreign governments.  And they have not registered with the United States government as representatives of the donor countries, an omission that appears, in some cases, to be a violation of federal law, according to several legal specialists who examined the agreements at the request of the Times”

FARA requires registration and disclosure by persons who are funded by foreign nations if they engage in “political activities” which is defined as an attempt to influence public opinion or any part thereof, in the United States on matters of policy.  That is precisely what these think tanks do, as Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institute explicitly states in this article. “Our business is to influence policy with scholarly, independent research, based on objective criteria, and to be policy-relevant, we need to engage policy makers,” said Indyk. To assume that the researchers and the think tanks are not influenced by the agenda of their donors belies common sense.

Norway, Japan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are among nations identified as heavy donors to these think tanks

Indyk’s problematic role as an envoy of the United States to Israel during the early stages of its campaign against Hamas in Gaza, Protective Edge, is a perfect example of conflict of interest, because of the financial role of Qatar.   At that time, Indyk was the Vice President and director of foreign policy for Brookings; Qatar gives extensive support to both Brookings and Hamas.

Qatar is widely accepted to be Hamas’ main financial backer.   The New York Times reported that Qatar gave Brookings $14 million, making Qatar also its largest donor.  Neither Brookings nor Indyk disclosed this financial connection during Protective Edge.

The entire purpose of the FARA law is to ensure transparency when foreign nations try to influence American policy.  Unfortunately, no reference to Qatar was found either on the Brookings website or in its annual report. From the NYT article, one may reasonably infer that the same invisibility is true for donations from foreign governments received by the other think tanks.

Shortly before Attorney General Eric Holder announced his imminent resignation, he ordered investigations into the Ferguson, Missouri police department, and domestic violence within the ranks of the NFL.  As important as these issues are, it is incumbent upon his soon to be appointed successor to promptly initiate an investigation into the funding of major research organizations by foreign nations. Clearly, there is ample cause for the Justice Department to open an investigation promptly into violations of FARA both by these institutions and the individuals involved, and if warranted by their findings, to commence judicial proceedings to impose the full extent of the civil and criminal penalties provided.

Qatar denies that any workers have died working on sites for the 2022 soccer World Cup

Of course, we would expect a government accused in a situation like this to deny or minimize the loss of life that it may be  responsible for. Here Qatar engages in a brazen lie. The Guardian has followed this story and we have previously used the Guardian's material at Emet m'Tsiyon. What is interesting and what the Guardian still conceals or works to disconnect from other facts, from the wider context of Qatar, is Qatar's role as the leading funder of Hamas, the ones who made it possible for Hamas to shoot thousands of missiles at Israeli civilian locations last summer. Also missing is the efforts of US secretary of state John Kerry to force Israel to use Qatar's "mediation" to end the war with Hamas, whereas Qatar was clearly a major or the major ally of Hamas along with Iran and Turkey. In other words, the US as a great power or superpower or imperialist power worked to favor Hamas over Israel. When the Guardian talks about Qatar's oppression of foreign workers, it does not make a connection with Hamas or the USA. If you find something to the contrary, a Guardian webpage that I am not familiar with, let me know and post it here as a comment. [Guardian June 3, 2015 at 6:59 British time].

Qatar: 'Not a single worker's life has been lost'

The state-run Qatar News Agency has published a denial by the Government Communication Office of claims surrounding the deaths of migrant workers working on World Cup sites. (Read the Guardian’s investigation into these deaths here and here.)

The Qatari rebuttal tackles a blog published by the Washington Post, which said 1,200 migrant workers are estimated to have died during the construction of World Cup sites, and a further 4,000 could die by 2022:

This is completely untrue. In fact, after almost five million work-hours on World Cup construction sites, not a single worker’s life has been lost. Not one …

Qatar has more than a million migrant workers. The Global Burden of Disease study, published in the Lancet in 2012, states that more than 400 deaths might be expected annually from cardiovascular disease alone among Qatar’s migrant population, even had they remained in their home countries.

It is unfortunate that any worker should die overseas, but it is wrong to distort statistics to suggest, as the Post’s article did, that all deaths in such a large population are the result of workplace conditions.

The Post’s article was accompanied by a dramatic graphic, which purports to compare the imagined fatalities in Qatar with the number of lives lost in the construction of other international sports venues, including the London Olympics, where just one worker was reported to have died.

A more accurate comparison according to the Post’s analysis would have also suggested that every migrant worker in the United Kingdom who died between 2005 and 2012 – whatever the job and whatever the cause of death – was killed in the construction of the 2012 London Olympics. [Guardian June 3, 2015 at 6:59 British time]

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How Hamas leaders got rich, with the help of Qatar and others [Globes 24 July 2014].
Hamas is led by very rich people [Egyptian TV]
Qatar funds the so-called "Free Gaza Movement"
Qatar and other super-rich Arab powers help finance American "higher education."

Business Insider comments on the numbers of dead workers [here]

Hypocrisy in Higher Education

The moral corruption of the American academic world is well underway. We now have academic departments, especially those devoted to Middle Eastern, Arabic and Islamic studies, that are funded by oil-rich Arab governments. We also have today branches of once prestigious American universities that operate in the Persian Gulf sheikdoms. Yale, once highly prestigious as one of the top schools of the prestige-encrusted Ivy League, kowtowed  to real or anticipated pressure from wealthy Arab patrons. This became notorious in August 2009 when the Yale University Press was about to publish a book about the Muhammad Cartoons controversy. After the Yale administration "consulted with experts" (according to the NY Times), the Yale Press decided not to publish any of the Muhammad cartoons nor any of the old and classic artistic representations of Muhammad that were to be in the book.

Now, it just so happens that in April 2009, Yale had appointed a woman who served as an academic operative for Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal to a prestigious, if temporary post.

"In April, Yale named Muna AbuSulayman a “Yale World Fellow” for 2009. This isn’t some honorific, and she’ll reside from August through December in New Haven. (Her Facebook fan page, August 16: “I need help locating a Town House/condo for short term leasing near Yale University… Anyone familiar with that area?”) Can you imagine a better way to set the stage for a major Alwaleed gift? Hosting for a semester the very person who structured the Harvard and Georgetown gifts, and who now directs Alwaleed’s charitable foundation? A stroke of genius." [Martin Kramer, emph. added]

Now, we see that  Madame Abu Sulayman had already been instrumental in bringing some of Prince Al-Waleed's generosity to Harvard and Georgetown. Could it be that Yale too was hoping to share in some of Prince Al-Walid's largesse? Maybe Yale was only acting  like those prestigious professors of mathematics who lent their names in exchange for money to the Mathematics Dept at King Abdulaziz University in Jedda, Saudi Arabia. Does this matter? Yes, it does, if academic integrity and honesty have any worth anymore. Yes, if the academic world is to have any more claim to the  respect of decent and informed people.

In this vein, Jonathan Marks has discovered another reason not to honor the academy. He tells a story involving the fanatical bds movement, the movement to boycott Israel which began with funding in part from the well-connected and well-established Ford Foundation.

. . . . this year’s award for higher education hypocrisy surely must go to eight signatories of the latest anti-Israel petition to emerge from our universities. The petition itself, signed by members of the faculty of New York University, is the standard call to punish corporations that can be connected in some way to Israel’s activities in the West Bank or Gaza. What’s striking about this one is that eight of the signatories, more than ten percent of the present total, are affiliated with NYU’s satellite campus in Abu Dhabi. NYU’s Abu Dhabi outpost, “wholly bankrolled by the oil-rich Abu Dhabi government,” opened in 2010, and its permanent campus, located alongside an “idyllic resort” under development on Saadiyat Island, was completed in 2014. So I wonder when these eight faculty members, who pompously stand on NYU’s “long and proud tradition of demanding that the university live up to its professed values,” will be renouncing their affiliation with the government of the United Arab Emirates. As Freedom House observes in its 2014 report, the UAE bans political parties, and “criticism of the government, allies [and] religion” is prohibited by law.
The UAE also has a labor problem. UAE’s mostly foreign workers do not have the right to organize, bargain collectively, or strike. Expatriate workers can be banned from working in the UAE if they try to leave their employer prior to at least two years of service. NYU responded to this difficulty by issuing a statement concerning labor values they expected to be adhered to in the building of the campus. Nonetheless, some of the workers who built the campus “lived in squalor, 15 men to a room.” Almost all had to pay a recruitment fee, consisting of about a year’s wages, for the privilege of getting the job, then worked 11 to 12 hours per day. Workers with the temerity to strike were arrested, beaten, and deported. But it’s a lovely campus, and I am sure the faculty members who want NYU to live up to its values are enjoying it. Who can begrudge brave and hardworking anti-Israeli petition signers their day at the beach? Besides as the signatories of this letter—who include three of the faculty members who signed the anti-Israel position—explain, “our partners are trying to do their best.” Moreover, many of the NYUAD faculty discuss “the complexities of labor in the Gulf” with their students, which is undoubtedly a comfort to the workers, who, because they were not allowed to hold onto their passports and sometimes not even to have their own bank cards, had little hope of escaping their employers, much less bettering their conditions.
It’s nice, though, that NYU’s Abu Dhabi faculty feels able to discuss labor “complexities” since, according to Freedom House, faculties at Western universities typically “take care to not criticize the UAE government or its policies out of fear of losing funding.” There are other incentives for silence as well: “in 2012, several academics critical of UAE government policies were dismissed from their positions and either arrested or expelled from the country.”
But it is commendable that these faculty members, busy enjoying a campus built by indentured servants, and the hospitality of a government that honors neither academic nor political freedom, have found time away from kayaking in Saadiyat Island’s lovely mangrove lagoons, to demand that NYU break with Israel and live up to its values. Some would call this breathtaking hypocrisy. I call it the quintessence of the academic anti-Israel movement.

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Talking about the conditions of indentured servitude in Abu Dhabi, reminds us that the working conditions and shameful treatment of workers in Abu Dhabi are similar to those in Qatar, although the situation in Qatar may actually be worse. The hypocrites and self-righteous Judeophobes who sign petitions to boycott Israel and who praise and justify Hamas, conveniently omit from their concerns the oppressed, exploited and humiliated foreign workers in Qatar who often die under the burden of their harsh working conditions. Qatar is of course a major funder of Hamas, which declares its genocidal goal regarding Jews in its Charter (Article 7).

While we're talking about the nefarious influence of Muslim money, of Islamic filthy lucre, on Western intellectual life, we may recall that more than 200 years ago the French playwright Beaumarchais put into his famous play, The Marriage of Figaro, how a play was censored because of the pressure of Muslim potentates on a European monarch. This was brought to light by the columnist Ivan Rioufol writing in Le Figaro, the newspaper precisely named after the hero of Beaumarchais' play.

Hamas, Qatar and the "Left"

Updated as of 9-22-2014 re Tariq Ramadan & the Left, & article on Qatar-see at the Bottom

Anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools
Eliyahu m'Tsiyon

Once upon a time, children, the "Left" prided itself on defending the workers, the honest workingman, the toilers in the factories, mills and mines of capitalism, etc etc. Those days are long gone. Stalinist and Trotskyist Communists claimed to always be guided by the class interest. that is, the interest of the working class.  Nowadays, most of the "Left" gets most passionate when hating Israel. Various Communist factions [such as the New Anti-Capitalist Party] and the Communist trade union, the CGT, were sponsors and organizers of the pro-Hamas demonstrations in Paris. "Death to Jews" [not Zionists but Jews --mort aux Juifs!] was chanted at some or all of these demonstrations, among other hateful slogans. Some of these demonstrations split up into the non-combatants who went home and the more "militant" element who rushed to make pogroms against Jews in Paris.

The French government led by Francois Hollande and Manuel Valls realized the danger of letting these marches and demonstrations take place near Jewish neighborhoods, and forbid them to take place or come near to synagogues and areas with many Jewish residents, often Jews who had fled Arab lands like Algeria, Morocco and Egypt. In other words, the organizers, both Islamist militants and Communists, wanted to march from Republic Square to Bastille Square, near many Jewish residents. One of the first pro-Hamas marches did go that route and gangs of thugs broke off to raid  synagogues near the Bastille on the Rue des Tournelles and on the Rue de la Roquette, where a street brawl took place between Jewish defenders and Muslim thugs, until police reinforcements arrived. Another would-be pogrom took place in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles where many North African Jews live, close to many North Africa Arabs, as well as Assyrian Christians from Iraq, now the target of Islamist fanaticism in their homeland. There is a lot more to say about these demonstrations/riots/pogroms but our object is to point out the "leftists"  fighting for Hamas. The Hamas charter of course calls for genocide against Jews [especially Article 7].

In Oakland, California, certain "leftist" led workers groups organized to stop unloading of Israeli ships. We can go on with examples of "leftists" and even workers unions joining in the lynch mob trying to hang Israel for defending itself.

Now we won't go into how Hamas sacrifices its own civilian population in Gaza in order to charge Israel with war crimes. We have done several previous posts on the subject of Hamas' strategy and the riots in Paris. We have not yet mentioned how some Hamas leaders have become billionaires as have some Fatah leaders. Interesting that so much of the "left" believes or may believe that it is in the interest of the working class to support a mass murder movement led by very rich people.

Let us now ask where Hamas gets its money. Is Hamas funded by the pennies of the poor?
. . .  . the money came from two directions: "Legacies from the deceased; money from charity funds; a donation called zaka, one of the six pillars of Islam; and donations from various countries. It started with Syria and Saudi Arabia, with Iran added later and becoming one of Hamas's biggest supporters, and ended with Qatar, which has now taken Iran's place."   [Globes English, 24 July 2014]

So now Qatar is Hamas' major benefactor. And Qatar also has one of highest per capita incomes in the world. So the major part of the global "Left" supports a mass murder movement funded by a very rich country. Indeed, one of the leading muddled brains of today's academic world, one Judith Butler, openly declared that Hamas and Hizbullah were parts of "the global left."

Well, if Qatar is rich, then maybe it is still somehow anti-imperialist, which might still be enough to justify "leftist" support for its projects, since anti-imperialism was always supposed to be in the working class interest and in favor of revolution, objectively at least, for the true blue reds. Now, for a very long time, anti-imperialist has been interpreted to mean anti-American, anti-Western, by the true blue Communists. Yet if Qatar is anti-American, it surely has a strange way of expressing that stance. Qatar hosts the Middle Eastern headquarters of CENTCOM, the United States armed forces Central Command. Qatar also owns the Al-Jazeera TV network which agitates anti-Jewish propaganda throughout the Arab world by means of Shaykh Qaradawi. The latter was a leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood who took refuge in Qatar from the Egyptian government that he and the Brotherhood were long trying to undermine. Now he is a regular on Al-Jazeera. The network also stirs up hatred of Israel and tries to undermine several Arab governments through broadcasting agitprop hate propaganda. Its "reporting" is highly tendentious and partisan. And that includes its "reporting" on the Gaza war.

Well, what is the connection between Al-Jazeera and CENTCOM? I honestly don't know. But at least a visual connection exists. Journalists have reported that the CENTCOM HQ is within eyesight of the al-Jazeera offices. Now, if the "Left" wants to associate --indirectly at least-- with CENTCOM while declaring opposition to US foreign policy, and with Al-Jazeera while claiming to oppose racism and religious bigotry, they certainly can do what they like. And they may not be capable of  understanding what they are doing anyway.

Now, let's take up how workers are treated in Qatar, yes, there are workers there. However, most of the workers there are foreigners who do not share the privileges of native subjects of the al-Thani family, the princely family that runs Qatar. Indeed, the many many foreign workers in Qatar are treated horribly. They are not merely  subject to exploitation but they work under very harsh and dangerous conditions and they are forced to do jobs that they may want to refuse but their passports are typically confiscated by employers and labor recruiters.  And their pay is often withheld. Without their passports they cannot leave the country and if they have not been paid they are working for nothing, that is, they are slaves.

Is that all that we can point to about Qatar that is negative from what used to be considered a leftist, class-conscious viewpoint?

The biggest project in Qatar now is building facilities for the 2022 Mondiale world soccer championships. Of course, thousands of foreign workers have been brought in to do the actual building work, which is made all the more difficult by the summer heat. Indeed Qatar is warm most of the year. In the summer the temperature may go over 50 degrees centigrade/Celsius. The harsh working conditions plus the extreme heat in summer make it a danger to life to work on constructing the soccer stadiums for the Mondiale. Just in the past couple of years hundreds, literally hundreds, of foreign building workers have died building for the 2022 Mondiale. Have we heard of any "leftist" or workers union protests in the West against the horrid working conditions in Qatar, whether the unsafe physical conditions or the conditions of exploitation and oppression of the foreign workers, many of them from Nepal and India, by the way? Has the "Left" protested the near slavery conditions? Any street demonstrations in Paris or New York or Oakland or London or Brussels?  Yet, demonstrations and marches, often turning into anti-Jewish pogroms and riots have taken place in those cities against Israel's war of self-defense against a mass murderous jihad movement funded by Qatar, a clear enemy of the working class one would think.
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postscript: before we forget, Qatar won the right from the world soccer federation, FIFA, to host the Mondiale in 2022, because it bribed many of the representatives on the FIFA board.
Qatar also is a big advertiser on CNN, hosting its program on the Middle East. Maybe that helps  ensure that news coverage of Qatar will be favorable. The coverage is directly paid for by the Qatar Foundation that claims to do all sorts of good works. Judge for yourself:

Inside the Middle East is a 30 minute monthly feature program on CNN that seeks to capture the dynamism and broad range of cultural diversity in countries across the Middle East. Together with exclusive online articles and galleries it gives a fresh perspective on life in the region that goes beyond the news headlines. It is broadcast in association with Qatar Foundation.

Robert Fulford on slavery in the Persian Gulf and Arabia [here]
8-25-2014 Salem ben Ammar writes on the Eurabia blog that the Emir of Qatar funds Tariq Ramadan and bought him his university chair at Oxford (Oriental Institute, St Antony's College) [ici]. "Adoubé et sponsorisé par l’Emir du Qatar qui lui a acheté sa chaire d’islamologie . . . .  Tarak Ramadan est le premier agent de propagande de l’islam ou islamisme modéré."

9-2-2014 Fergus Downie on Tariq Ramadan and the "Left" -- Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. He is now popular among progressive circles in France and elsewhere as the authentic voice of Moderate Islam. The only problem is that he is not really moderate, more like the subtlest slithery snake north of the Mediterranean. [here]
9-13-2014 Gil Mihaely of Causeur.fr gives some background and analysis of Qatar's success and policy -- À quoi joue le Qatar? [ici] -- " un pays . . . .  peuplé de deux millions d’habitants dont moins de 300 000 nationaux (les statuts subalternes du reste de la population s’apparentent parfois à une forme d’esclavage)" [emphasis added].
9-22-2014 UN "human rights council" praises Qatar's human rights record -- you have to see it to believe it!!! [here] -- UN Watch says foreign workers in Qatar die at the rate of one per day [same as previous link].

Marxist-Leninist Writes His Judeophobic Drivel by the Grace of a Superrich Arab Amir

UPDATING at bottom

Prof Richard Landes at The Augean Stables blog has a long, mad quote from James Petras published on Al-Jazeera. Here is the link to the Augean Stables post. Prof Petras is an obsessive Judeophobe who has found solace in the warm bosom of Qatar's al-Jazeera website. For many years he published "anti-imperialist" articles [against US policy in South America, not always good policy, to be sure], particularly in the "Marxist-Leninist" Monthly Review. But there are a number of bizarre positions and inner contradictions in Petras' stance and arguments.

Petras uses the phrase: "On the key issue of a compromise on the key issue of Jerusalem..." This is the same language used by State Dept officials and anti-Israel MSM commentators about Jerusalem, as if the Arabs would make peace if Jerusalem were redivided as it was for 19 years, between 1948 and 1967, and only for those 19 years.

It is noteworthy that Petras published "anti-US imperialism" screeds in the "Marxist-Leninist" Monthly Review [which has disavowed part --only part-- of what Petras said in his favorable review of the walt-mearsheimer tract] for many years. Now, al-Jazeera operates out of Qatar, not exactly a socialist or revolutionary state, nor a poor state. The per capita yearly income in Qatar is rather high on a world scale. Al-Jazeera operates there by the grace of the Shaykh or Amir or whatever title the local potentate holds. He is not exactly a democrat [small D]. Qatar also hosts, by the grace of the Shaykh or Amir, the Middle Eastern HQ of Centcom, the high command of US forces in Iraq. So Petras is being published --indirectly to be sure-- by the grace of the Amir of Qatar who also shows his grace to CENTCOM. Further, the journalists who actually set up al-Jazeera were mainly veterans of BBC and Voice of America, which Petras' old Marxist-Leninist friends might call "imperialist" press services. If I'm not mistaken, the potentate of Qatar also holds a share of ownership in al-Jazeera [maybe a majority share] which is also a commercial TV operator, if I am not mistaken, thus a profitmaker. Curiously, the corporate headquarters of Al-Jazeera are in London, although it operates out of Qatar. Figure that one out.

Be that as it may, Qatar and the other Persian Gulf emirates and sheikdoms, etc., plus Saudi Arabia, own a great deal of capital and real estate in Western countries, including the United States. So by allowing his pen to be rented out by al-Jazeera, Petras seems to be --collaborating-- with imperialists, at least according to Lenin's definition. Lenin said that big capital or finance capital was imperialist by definition.

So Petras' role as a pristine pure Marxist-Leninist anti-imperialist would seem to be very tarnished by his association with or employment by Qatar's al-Jazeera.

UPDATING:
Here is a web article with documentation on the al-Jazeera link to the Qatar government and ruling family, as well as on the career history of most of its original journalists and editors as employes of BBC or VOA. George Bush, visiting Qatar, referred to the ruler as an "amir." However, shaykhs abound in the ruling al-Thani family. According to a book on Al-Jazeera by Hugh Miles (London 2005), the Amir and/or government of Qatar have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in Al-Jazeera which is a commercial enterprise but apparently not yet profit-making [correct error above]. Hence, members of the al-Thani family and/or the Qatar govt have given al-Jazeera additional capital inputs or loans over the years [see Miles book, p 346, quoted in the web article linked to from this paragraph].
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Coming: More lies of the "peace process" and Annapolis, more on Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, elsewhere in the Land of Israel, etc.