[R-G] Hamid Dabashi vs. As'ad AbuKhalil!

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Watching Hamid Dabashi and As'ad AbuKhalil fight is not unlike
watching Bette Davis and Joan Crawford fight.  Such divas.  BTW, as
you may have noticed, by now there's more infighting among leftists
than any fighting against mollahs.  As for the main event -- the
battle of mollahs, between Khamenei and Rafsanjani! -- they don't do
any fighting themselves.  Instead they let their followers do their
fighting.  Clever mollahs.  I bet that's how mollahs defeated Marxists
during the Iranian revolution. -- Yoshie

<http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2009/07/hamid-dabashis-attacks-on-my-person.html>
Friday, July 17, 2009
Hamid Dabashi's attack on my person

Hamid Dabashi is criticizing me here [LINK:
<http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2009/956/op5.htm>]. He seems focused (but
very selectively and unrepresentative) on what I have been writing on
my website on Iran, and manages to misunderstand what I say, or
manages to distort what I say. I wrote a long article on Iran for
Al-Akhbar and if Dabashi can read Arabic, I would recommend that he
read it. He then said: "Ten years I spent watching every single
Palestinian film I could lay my hands on before I opened my mouth and
uttered a word about Palestinian cinema." Well, good for you, Hamid.
Do you want a blender for watching "every single Palestinian film"?
Would you like the Palestinian people to bow down in awe for that
movie effort of yours? He then said: "But he has such a deeply
colonised mind that he thinks nothing of us, of our will to fight
imperial intervention, colonial occupation of our homelands, and
domestic tyranny at one and the same time." Come on. I expect better
from you, but maybe I shouldn't. And what is this with "nothing of
us"? Who are "us"? It seems to me that you can't from exile pretend to
be one with the Iranian masses under tyranny just as I can't from
exile pretend to be one with the Arab masses under tyranny. Let us be
aware of our privileges and locations and let us remember that famous
dictum by Marx in the German Ideology. Are you trying for purposes of
political sympathy to erase class and geographical boundaries? I can
say more about the Dabashi piece but Dabashi always makes an effort to
sound sophisticated and trendy (intellectually speaking). It was
apparently difficult for Dabashi to understand my position: to say
that the US, Saudi and other reactionary forces were involved in a
conspiracy in Iran is in no way to deny the existence of a genuine and
sincere movement in Iran against the oppressive regime there. In fact,
I made that very argument in my long article on the subject in
Al-Akhbar which Dabashi should bother to read before he makes all
those generalizations about my stance on Iran. On the blog in English,
of course I am more concerned with Western media representation and
yet you even managed to misunderstand those, or seem hurt by my
criticisms of the New York Times' and CNN's coverage of Iran, and on
that we disagree. And no, I am no fan of Soroush by the way. Does that
make me colonized in my mind further? Please diagnose me, o expert on
leftist maladies. I deliberately wanted to address the Iran situation
in Arabic to Arab audiences and part of my task was to dismiss the
fashionable conspiracy theories among some Arab nationalist and Arab
leftist circles that dismiss the indigenous sources of the protest
movement of Iran, and many Arab leftists and Arab nationalists wrote
to me in disagreement with that. Maybe if Dabashi takes some time off
from watching Palestinian movies and spend more time reading what
Arabs say in Arabic, he would be better informed. I don't pose as Iran
expert but I comment on matters of international affairs. But I really
believe that Dabashi has serious comprehension problems because he
quotes me as saying: "I do believe that the majority of Iranian
protesters were motivated by domestic issues and legitimate grievances
against an oppressive government."" And yet he then (a few sentences
later) claims that I have dismissed all the Iranian protesters as
tools in the hands of an American-Saudi conspiracy. Let me try to
explain it again to Dabashi in more simple terms: the two don't
contradict one another. To say that there is an American plot in Iran
is not to say that all the protesters in Iran are tools of a Western
plot. He laments that I love to hate CNN and the New York Times and I
believe that it is an obligation for a leftist (since he has appointed
himself as the world authority on Leftism, Arab and otherwise) to
oppose and deconstruct the media of the US corporate powers. In fact,
the extensive coverage of CNN and the New York Times was actually
criminal because it distorted the pictures of what is happening in
Iran, and it gave a false sense of the stance of Western governments
to the Iranian peoples, and some of whom who were under the false
impression that the West really cares about their plight. He then
again misunderstands what I had to say about Honduras which leads me
to believe that Dabashi has his most difficulty when dealing with more
than one variable at a time. He then said: "One simply must have dug
oneself deeply and darkly, mummified inside a forgotten and hollowed
grave on another planet not to have seen..." This is not related to me
but there is really no need for such effort in artificially trying to
construct a complex sentence when in reality it is not. Just some
advice. Dabashi then cites this section that I wrote: "In his most
recent posting, AbuKhalil has this to say about Iran: "For the most
reliable coverage of the Iran story, I strongly recommend the New York
Times. I mean, they have Michael Slackman in Cairo and Nazila Fathi in
Toronto, and they have 'independent observers' in Tehran. What else do
you want? If you want more, the station of King Fahd's brother-in-law
(Al-Arabiya) has a correspondent in Dubai to cover Iran. And according
to a report that just aired, Mousavi received 91 per cent of the vote
in 'an elite neighborhood'. I kid you not. They just said that." The
Iranians have no reporters, no journalists, no analysts, no pollsters,
no economists, no sociologists, no political scientist, no newspaper
editorials, no magazines, no blogs, and no websites? If AbuKhalil ipso
facto deprives an entire nation of their defiance against tyranny,
their agency in changing their own destiny?" You just don't get it.
That was the point I was making: that one should not rely on those
silly New York Times articles but should rely on the Iranian peoples
themselves. Get it? It is difficult for me to debate him but he so
easily misunderstands and he will inevitably misunderstand those
words. Dabashi then ends his article by a string of cliches, but then
again, that is what he does: stringing leftist sounding cliches. "A
colonized mind is a colonized mind whether it is occupied by the
European right or by the cliché-ridden left: it is an occupied
territory, devoid of detail, devoid of substance, devoid of love,
devoid of a caring intellect. It smells of aging mothballs, and it is
nauseating." But here is the problem with Dabashi: he claims to be
responding to Arab leftists on Iran but he has only read one piece by
Azmi Bisharah (and missed what he had to say in Arabic on the
subject), and he cites a few of my blog posts on the subject.
Al-Akhbar is a leftist publication and has published me and others on
Iran, and he has missed all of that. Also, I understand being
emotional on the subject as I am on issues of political injustice but
emotions don't replace arguments, even if they pose (falsely)
arguments, as they do in this piece by Dabashi. (thanks Raed and
twenty others)

Posted by As'ad at 10:19 AM