Better lives for our children’s grandchildren · by some friends

Posting 16. to The Jewish-Israeli Lobby category, by Bill Templer

To answer George: yes, it IS about language. My own recent critique is precisely about discourse and language. Rhetorical analysis. That is what I’m trying to address a bit in the constructions of a masterful journalist like Blankfort. One dimension is FACTS ABOUT SOCIAL PRACTICE, the societal networks of Capital and its geopolitics, which Ash looks at pretty convincingly — what at a LEVEL OF POLITICAL ANALYSIS the discussion is about.

SOCIOSEMIOTICS AND THE POLITICS OF DISCOURSE: But another level in any text or their ensemble is the texturing of the discourse itself, the representations and imaginaries it creates, its discoursal world. It seems elementary to have to say this here. How racism functions at various key levels is through LANGUAGE and imaging, its architecture and innuendo and inculcation. How gendered talk is reproduced and constructs a universe is something any feminist knows. How anti-Zigan talk works is bitter knowledge to East European Roma. How anti-Palestinian racism works as a ‘discourse’ in Israel is likewise clear to any Palestinian, in the Negev or elsewhere. That discourse underpins and reproduces social practice. How anti-Semitism circulates at the level of verbal construction of attitudes and images in Europe, North America and elsewhere remains an analogous set.

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS: CDA sets out to look precisely at that, like the key work of linguist Norman Fairclough (U Lancaster) and many others. Teo talks about the need to “unpack the ideological underpinnings of discourse that have become so naturalized over time that we begin to treat them as common, acceptable and natural features of discourse.” You can find some papers of Fairclough at http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/norman/norman.htm A recent book of his on CDA is Analyzing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research (Routledge 2003).Here a brief paper for starters: http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/norman/paper4.doc

I’ve worked with Palestinian social scientists on how reporting about Palestinians is slanted in the North American press. We’ve used some techniques of CDA.

I’m pretty sure that what Eliot Cohen and others on the Jewish right are responding to in part is this DISCOURSAL WEB OF INNUENDO AND UNDERTONE that shapes and reproduces attitude in analysis on ‘Jewish power and its organizations.’ The politics of rhetoric. Ash in his analysis does not address that. Neither does Chomsky or John Spritzler. Neither do Mearsheimer and Walt. Nor in fact does Eliot Cohen in an explicit way.

They look at the elephant and what it could be — not its discoursal construction and texturing and ‘framing as a narrative.’ I suggest that part of what is seriously needed is CDA analysis of this Lobbytalk.

Any 9^th-grade high school kid can be taught to do this in critical media analysis. In CDA, Fairclough also examines “the ‘resonance’ of discourses, their capacity to mobilize people, not only in the institutions but also in the lifeworld.”

In any event, I would agree with Juan Cole that Likud and its stateside mafia are what need concentrating on. As he says: “David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes are encouraging a new kind of antisemitism, which sees it as unacceptable that Jews should be liberals or should crticize Likud Party policies.”

ANTI-ZIGANISM: I worked for many years with Roma in southeastern Europe, who are the pariah minority par excellence. Their discrimination in social practice is huge, insidious. And it is interwoven with a whole web of anti-Gypsy DISCOURSE in Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova, Serbia, and most especially ‘Albanian’ Kosovo. –Is discourse everything? Of course not. Especially for the Roma. –Is it central? You bet. Bulgarian discourse is saturated with anti-Roma talk and attitude, a whole anti-Zigan imaginary that kids are inculcated with from an early age. And their parents take for granted, naturalized discourse. Ask any African-American, including Cynthia McKinney: what African-Americans are highly sensitive to in the media is a whole webbing of allusion and innuendo.

MAIN THESIS: The same techniques in CDA we have used to analyze ‘rhetoric’ in slanting reporting on Palestine or in anti-Roma discourse have to be applied to Lobby talk to unpack the discoursal features. That is part of the problem of how Lobbytalk is perceived and interpreted. That is not being done.

Of course: anti-Jewish attitude is far more than language as it is translated into a world of actions. But it is ALSO a tissue of word and subtext and allusion. That is one level. In a mediatized world, a primary level many Jews may be responding to in their unease about Lobbyspeak. And the level mobilized when conservative Jews point to anti-Semitic aspects of anti-Israel analysis, and attacks on AIPAC and ADL.

HYPHENATED AMERICAN: Let me comment a bit (more) on Jeff’s construction linking Lantos, McKinney and “out of town wealthy Jews.” In anti-Jewish discourse, that latter phrasing is incidentally absolutely loaded. What I didn’t mention in the brief bit I posted on George’s blog is Jeff’s ‘implicit labeling’ of Lantos as a ‘hyphenated American.’ Whose real loyalties are to another country.

This is an old part of the nativist representation and imaginary in the states. As Theodore Roosevelt said in 1915: “There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.” Jeff does not use the term specifically (how could he?) but suggests this quite clearly at a couple of points, letting the reader ‘extrapolate.’ This is typical rhetoric on the right. It is old stock in anti-Semitism stateside. A whole sub-universe is brewed beneath the textual surface where these things reverberate.

Jeff is a masterful journalist who knows how to ‘texture’ his narrative. Which is why he foregrounds Lantos and then does not mention him again in the last 40 percent (!) of his Counterpunch article on McKinney. Is this good writing? Yes, when slanted texturing is part of the journalistic game. Something we look at a lot in CDA analysis of newspaper articles.

Jeff writes: “Far too many Palestinians have been killed, tortured and imprisoned on the altar of Jewish sensibilities for Bill or anyone to have legitimate objections to anyone else calling people and things for what they are.” ‘Legitimate objections’?

Fabricating implicitly racist discourse is illegitimate. The media are full of such fabrication. Is some specific discourse subtextually or overtly racist? Sometimes a hard question. But discussing and analyzing whether discourse is racist (or chauvinist or ableist) is a central part of what the left in the states remains about. Where’s the line between ‘implicit’ and ‘explicit’? Sometimes hard to determine.

So I’ve tried to begin (really just begin) to unpack some of the DISCOURSAL underpinnings of what may be going on in critique of the Lobby. Others should do this more systematically. It’s needed. Beyond the kind of debate by Ash, Chomsky, Spritzler and others. I know that Rob Jensen, a critical journalism prof at U Texas very sensitive to how journalists manipulate discourse — and just gratuitously attacked by Jeff in his last posting — also agrees about this.

‘Gratuitous’ is an accurate term to designate some of what is going on here. For example, Jeff’s remark that someone named ‘Mordechai’ objected pretty strongly to his slash-and-burn bit on Lantos in Counterpunch. He could have said: ‘one angry respondent’. But Jeff didn’t. This is how ‘representation’ works, CDA Lesson 1.

Jeff is very aware of this: “I have not read Bill’s critique and if all he found to object to was my reference to Jews (and no doubt mentioning Mordechai by name stirs the same reaction) then … I am not inclined to read it.” Jeff knows the levers he pulls. ‘Stirs the same reaction’ is part of what CDA foregrounds in its prisms. It also looks carefully at the tightrope between labeling with or without the article ‘the’.

Jeff: “Saying Jews’ is very different from saying ‘The Jews,’ but that applies to every ethnic, national, or religious group.” Sure, but depending on context, that specific semiotic difference can be minimal, even if the ‘semantic’ difference is specifiable. EXAMPLE: ‘Mormons are there behind the scenes trying to gain control ….’ vs. ‘The Mormons are there behind the scenes ….’ Mormons would probably object to both. In Bulgaria, we have struggled to have the print media stop labeling people arrested as ‘Roma.’ Does Jeff want California papers to give the race or ethnicity of anyone arrested? I’m sure not. In Germany in 1935, it used to be: ‘Der Jude xxxx …’ To echo Jeff: “Calling people for what they are”?!

As Fairclough notes: “language connects with the social through being the primary domain of ideology, and through being both a site of, and a stake in, struggles for power.”

Meanwhile, the real struggle is against Israeli fascist policy and U.S. geopolitics. Our comrades are in Budrus and Bil’in every week fighting that. Direct action. Palestinians and Jews shoulder to shoulder, facing the Israeli army.

Bill (Zeev bin Natan)

This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2006 at 7:31 am and is filed under The Jewish-Israeli Lobby. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.