[lbo-talk] Amnesty Report: Hezbollah War Crimes

ravi gadfly at exitleft.org
Thu Sep 14 11:41:15 PDT 2006


At around 14/9/06 2:01 pm, Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Sep 14, 2006, at 3:47 PM, Eric wrote:
>
>> Your analogy assumes a pretty Orientalist view of "the" Lebanese
>> people; namely, that Hezbollah and the Lebanese are identical--they
>> are both "prisoners." So for you, Lebanon's citizens have no agency
>> themselves; they are merely the appendage of whatever state or
>> state-in-waiting you decide gets to represent them.
>
> Carrol loves to say outrageous shit, then to shrink from defending it
> when called on its absurdity.
>

I do not quite understand the stuff about "Orientalist", "state-in-waiting", etc and that may be why the following questions arise in my mind:

How is Carrol's analogy inapplicable, except in terms of scale? If the US would supply Hezbollah with billions in cash and arms, they too I am sure would be happy to fly about in F-18s and carry out "precision" bombing. In the absence of any of that power (surely we are not equating Iranian support to what Israel has at its disposal and was visible during the recent war), while under a terrible attack, they (Hezbollah) took the only measures they could: lob rockets into Israel (most of which were, from what I can tell, ineffective). Carrol's analogy, it seems, is exactly to draw out the thinking: how do you differentiate between the two things being analogized and what does that differentiation amount to, in this context? What prevents us from examining that, apart from Jewish Holocaust exceptionalism?

--ravi

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