Editor’s Note: This is a follow-up to a commentary Prof. Falk posted on his blog that was republished in Foreign Policy Journal and received a considerable amount of attention owing to deliberate distortions and lies about what he wrote in that piece.
I want to offer a brief clarification and an explanation.
It should have been clear from my post that I regard the Boston Marathon massacre as a despicable crime, so horrifying that I lack the imagination to comprehend the sociopathic mentality that planned and executed such a monstrous event. And beyond this, that I feel great empathy for the unspeakable human loss that brought such acute suffering on entirely innocent victims, their families and friends, and the wider community in Boston and elsewhere.
Further, I had no intention whatsoever to connect any dots as to whether there was a causal linkage between what the U.S. or Israel have done in the world and what happened in Boston. My only effort was to suggest that in addition to grieving and bringing the perpetrators to justice, this could also become an occasion for collective self-scrutiny as a nation and as a people. Should this be seen as such a provocative assertion as to provoke a wave of hate mail?
At a time when the U.S. Congress rejected even mild legislation requiring more extensive background checks for gun purchasers, it should be a no brainer that something has gone badly wrong on the home front. And the fact that the Tsarnaev brothers assembled such an arsenal of weaponry might at least have raised a few additional eyebrows!
By way of explanation, because there was such a flood of comments on my post, I abandoned just this once, my recent blog policy of excluding those responses that seem hateful and insulting, and lack substance. My intention remains seeking a blog site that is hospitable only to discourse conducted in a spirit of civility. My departure in this context was that I felt there were significant substantive issues and strong emotions sometimes bound up with the invective, and that I should not try to pick and choose among the various comments to select those I deemed appropriate. It would be misleading, however tempting, to allow only those comments that supported my outlook, and even the most hostile disclosed one dimension of the national mood.
I realize, of course, that my post can and will be read in different ways, but what I have tried to clarify is the nature of my intentions when it was written and now after the array of responses.
If this isn’t blowback, then I am a 6 foot lizard. One interesting result of this concocted outcry is that this fact above probably won’t get the attention it deserves. But since we’re on the subject of blowback, let’s go to Pakistan and query a random Waziri citizen for their feelings on America’s counter-terrorism policies:
Fascinating.
“But as for those who disbelieve, garments of fire will be cut out for them; boiling fluid will be poured down on their heads; Whereby that which is in their bellies, and their skins too, will be melted; And for them are hooked rods of iron” (Sura 22:19-21).
No drones then, my friend. You are also confusing Muslim rationalizations for terrorism with the doctrines and worldview at its root. Try reading the Koran and the Hadith.
Those who want to come out of the darkness of ignorance and see the light of day should read, or remind themselves of, dark passages in scriptures of other religions, and their own, including Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/03/08/dark_passages/?page=full
The difference is that Jews and Christians inspired by religious texts do not fly planes into office buildings or send out suicide bombers nearly every day to wreak havoc among innocent people.
No, they just send out drones guided by some stick-jockey in the U.S. heartland, or they invade and overthrow governments that do not agree with their hegemony. or they occupy territories through military force and ethnic cleansing (the latter which is really the main stream of U.S. history.
This worst kind of stereotyping and Orientalism cannot serve any purpose in a serious debate. And rhetorical hopping is no help to one who practices it. End of the matter.
There is much to learn from each such event.
http://digwithin.net/2013/04/28/mother-of-terrorism/
But not for religious reasons, Jim, no matter what you think about drones or the occupation or how America and Israel defend themselves against terrorism. “Jihad” doesn’t mean war against imperialists. It means war against infidels, and it is as alive today as it was 14 centuries ago.
Falk’s clarification, that he never meant to connect the dots, is shallow and false: he deliberately chose to go on at great length about misdirected American policies and their resulting “blowback” in THIS PARTICULAR (original) post, putatively about the Boston bombings, but, which, in fact, hardly touched on them. Nor did he explore at all the fundamentalist worldview that might have at least contributed to the mindset of these two individuals — and certainly thousands like them — but which may not be wholly the result of U.S. policies. However right or wrong Falk may be, he deliberately abused this occasion to make these points. Moreover, his treatment clearly unbalanced.
I am not a fan of many of Falk’s critics who are in the habit of deliberately misrepresenting his words and clear intentions. However, in this particular case, they were foolish: no misrepresentation was needed. Falk should own up to the fact that his original was an unseemly act on his part, not because he was misinterpreted, but because he was interpreted correctly.
You are correct, Falk was not “misinterpreted”, but his commentary deliberately distorted with the false claims that he justified the bombings and blamed them on Israel.