doccitrus

I've been thinking about the same kinds of arguments today, too.

Another line of reasoning I'm too tired to fully lay out right now but that I've seen elsewhere and I think is compelling:

Israel's history of targeted assassinations and arbitrary imprisonment of activists in the occupied Palestinian territories, taken together with the fact of the Oct 7 attack itself, proves that the state of Israel doesn't know who or where the Hamas leaders they supposedly want to target are. So the only 'targeting' they can do is indiscriminate, and the only endpoint of their bombing campaign is total destruction. And this is borne out in the rhetoric of many officials, much of the Israeli public, and of course the atrocious, ongoing violence the IDF is right now carrying out.

The impossible goal becomes an excuse for 'no red lines' because no matter how far they go, they can always say they are still not done. This dovetails as well with the analogizing of Oct 7 as an 'Israeli 9/11', the 'War on Terror', and the USA's forever wars in the Middle East.

But your point about the reflexive brutality, the observation that somehow a military response is the only one considered or undertaken here, is also extremely vital. Because part of the rationalization here is absolutely this idea that 'there was no choice', given the desire to uproot Hamas. But of course that's bullshit.

Why are you opposed to studying something from the Quran?

I'm not. In fact, despite my atheism and anti-clericalism, all of this chatter increased my general curiosity about the Quran and I picked up a copy of a translation that now sits (digitally) alongside my Oxford Annotated Bible, my JPS Jewish Study Bible, and my JPS Jewish Annotated New Testament. (If you know of a modern, annotated, interfaith English translation of the Quran comparable to the above, please let me know. For now I've incidentally ended up reading only the same Study Quran that Hakim recommended.) I started reading it this morning!

What I'm opposed to is the notion that the post in the OP somehow constitutes Marxist analysis. I'm also opposed to the confusion of the dialectical interplay between base and superstructure with a confounding of the distinction between base and superstructure. I also think it's dishonest and silly to characterize the recommendation of a reading list comprised exclusively of intrafaith texts as anything but proselytism.

Edit: see also my edit to the grandparent comment.

Wow, that's really hideous.

The first time I read this comment, I started to write a reply but then realized that I'm not totally sure what you mean in some places, and I figured it would be better to ask than just assume.

Islam in this context is a material force, precisely because it is imbedded in the people - the colonized and the working classes, in their decision-making and power. It becomes entrenched in the material base.

What do you have in mind with the notion of 'entrenchment' here?

It is in the masjid where muslims congregate and form communal bonds. It is in the masjid where people recieve their political and cultural education.

How does this distinguish the masjid from superstructural institutions generally, like schools or mass media?

It is in the masjid grounds in which people partake in the political economy.

What does this mean? That the masjid is an employer? That it's a marketplace? Or just that it carries out the functions of the state in Islamic societies?

Why is it when state secularism and athiesm is mentioned, we only mention those in AES, like the conditions of the ummah is somehow exactly one-on-one the same as that of China or the USSR?

To be clear here, 'the' ummah extends to everywhere Islam is believed or practiced? Or does it mean instead something more like 'Muslim countries'?

Islam is the form that the anti-imperialist essence of the ummah takes.

To make sure I understand what you mean here, Is this a fair (equivalent) restatement or does it miss some things?

in the ummah, anti-imperialism takes the form of Islam

Anti-clerical (or outright suppressive policies) have been a real problem for some socialist regimes. But policies that suppress religious institutions or practices aren't a matter of undertones.

In English I don't see the ambiguity you describe— it's definitely affirmative.

ambiguous: 'there is no question as to whether...'

affirmative: 'there is no question that...'

I think in cases where religious institutions are actively organizing and encouraging people to engage in struggle, political or armed, to change their circumstances, it doesn't make much sense to call it false consolation.

Even when religions assert a kind of cosmic justice outside the scope of individual earthly lives, it's not always true that religion serves mainly to console, even in matters of personal psychology and belief. Christianity certainly falls into that pattern, but John Brown was not as consoled by the prospect that justice would be achieved in the afterlife as he was convicted by his religious morality that the earthly evil he saw in slavery had to be combatted by all means available, immediately.

I do think that desperate situations drive people to religious belief as a way of upholding the just world hypothesis in the face of powerful cognitive dissonance. But that's just one factor among many in promoting religious belief, and as a general tendency, it doesn't necessarily address what religion inspires or motivates people to do in particular circumstances.

I have a very strong negative reaction to this, admittedly only some of which is due to its dissemination through a channel supposedly focused on Marxist analysis.

There's nothing in the screencapture that could be recognized as Marxist analysis. There's no science here, just idealism and essentialism (Islam is about not just the culture but the 'nature' of the Palestinian people, really?).

Even the book recommendations seem dubious to me. Is biography really central enough to history for Marxists for the biography of one man to be a 'great historical work'? The next title even sounds like it could have been AI-generated from a collection of apologetics tropes, from its fixation on the figure of the convert to the 'this was supposed to be an anti-religious book' move other grifters in the space use to enhance their credibility.

Yes, I think religious faith absolutely plays a role in organizations like Hamas (as well as in daily life, 'resistance by existence', for many) that is not reducible to material interests or other forces. Religion, like ideology, takes on a force of its own beyond the material conditions that shape both its initial formation and constrain its evolution. For that reason, superstructural forces like religion are worth analyzing in their own rights (alongside the material forces that are, as Marxism understands, 'determinative, in the final instance' in the unfolding of history). It can even be argued that particular religious institutions (as distinct from religious beliefs or doctrines) are material, are members of 'concrete social relations'.

But an analysis which asserts that Islam is the driving force of the resistance movement in Palestine without any account of things like the fact that secular forces' leadership were in exile, outside Palestine, when Hamas rose to prominence during the first intifada; or that there are nearby Islamist nation-states willing and able to smuggle arms to resistance groups in part to serve their own geopolitical interests, while there have not been any such Marxist-Leninist states for many decades... this is neither dialectical nor historical nor materialist.

Analysis of how religious institutions on the ground in Palestine organize, support or constitute anticolonial resistance is one thing. Exhortations to study the Quran are another: ordinary proselytizing.

Edit, a couple days later: I still think it's true that the post pictured in the OP isn't Marxist analysis. But I also think that my turning that observation into criticism was a mistake, and that my criticism was fundamentally misplaced.

Political education is a task, not an identity. It's no one's job to speak always and only in a Marxist idiom. Sometimes a reading recommendation is just a recommendation, not a thesis— and that's fine.

My hostile reading of the individual book recommendations was also reductive and uncharitable. I glossed over the analogy Hakim asserts between the broader social context of the emergence of Islam and present-day Palestine. Because other aspects of its premise remind me of hackish Christian apologetics books that have been pushed on me in the past, I also discounted one good faith reason Hakim had (and stated!) for recommending von Klaveren's book: namely that the author's conversion journey involved overcoming common Islamophobic myths and stereotypes. Even if that book absolutely sucks, that's a feature it couldn't have in common with Christian conversion narratives situated in cultures where Christianity is dominant.

It may be true that as a writer, Hakim could have done something to frame his post in Marxist terms, or to 'tag' it as not really directly concerned with Marxism. But as a reader, I think I failed to recognize a lot of implicit framing that was already there, in the form of the Deprogram catalog itself, by considering pretty much only what was excerpted in the OP when I started commenting here.

One thing that US-centric and Israeli media like to stress about Neturei Karta is that they are a 'fringe sect'. This clashes, of course, with the general language Rabbi Weiss uses in claiming that 'religious Jews' do not support and have not supported Zionism.

For those curious about that contradiction and what historical contradictions it might bear traces of, Chapter 3 ('Zionism is Judaism') of Ilan Pappé's Ten Myths About Israel summarizes the historical position, a pre-1948 consensus, in which that sect roots itself:

I strongly recommend reading the whole chapter, as it provides additional context as well as an overview of the history of Jewish political critiques of Zionism (as opposed to just religious ones), but hopefully this gives a sense of the historical perspective from which members of that sect speak of the incompatibility of their understanding of Orthodoxy with Zionism, and a bit about how it has largely been cooperation and involvement with the Israeli state that has coincided with a shift away from that original anti-Zionist position in other ultra-Orthodox sects.

PS: The book is presumably on LibGen and you can also get a DRM-free (but watermarked) copy online from the publisher at the moment.

PPS: I'd be happy to hear from comrades about more specialized/dedicated sources on this topic, since that book is more of a summary of arguments and histories of many related topics. It just came up for me because I happen to be reading it now.

Wow, that is quite a thread! Thanks very much for the link.

Never mind— I found this, at least, which sucks and even conflates identifying heroic figures in US labor history with patriotism, and describes the US Revolutionary War as 'anticolonial'.

I haven't kept up with his videos. Does he self-identify that way? What are his patsoc positions?