There are no facts. This is the mantra of radical deconstructivism. All knowledge is relative, temporary, subjective, and ultimately political. No one has a greater claim to truth than anyone else, certainly not by virtue of birth or class, but not even by education and training. So, for example, science is no more valid a ?narrative? than astrology, because science is the product of white male Europeans, and therefore its methods and conclusions are dependent on its practitioners.
This is a very brief summary of what is known in academia as the Culture Wars. But the mind set has also spread into the general society. Facts have been relegated to a lower status than theory. That is of course not entirely new. Totalitarian ideologies have always chosen theory over actual data (and murdered the data that didn?t fit). The transcripts of Stalin?s purge trials of the late 30’s explicitly dismiss the question of factual guilt or innocence as a bourgeois construction. Holocaust revisionism is another prime example of a counterfactual theory.
What is new is the degree to which this kind of deconstruction has become acceptable and unchallenged in democratic society. One of the watershed events was the Tawana Brawley case, in which a young black woman claimed that she had been attacked by several white men. After lurid news reports and the destruction of the reputations of the accused, it turned out that she had concocted the story. One of the accused sought and won a defamation suit against Brawley supporter Al Sharpton, but Sharpton?s disregard of the facts has hardly hindered his political career. More dangerous, however, was the argument by a prominent feminist that ?on a deeper level? Brawley was telling the truth, because her story was a paradigm of the oppression of black women by white men. The equal validity of all narratives, indeed.
What does this have to do with the interests of Ameinu, of the Zionist movement, of the Jewish people? Facts which matter are being deconstructed all around us:
Evolution is just a theory. Right wing Christian ideologues have happily adopted the tactic of left-wing deconstructionists to decouple theory from data, from the facts. So the real theory of evolution, which has yet to be contradicted by a single observation, is made out to be equivalent to the so-called theories of ?intelligent design? and ?creation science,? which have not only not been confirmed by a single fact, but which indeed do not submit themselves to factual testing. Like astrology.
Israel conquered the West Bank in a pre-emptive strike against Jordan in 1967. No, Israel?s preemptive strikes were against Egypt and Syria, after they had massed troops for an attack, and Egypt had blockaded the Gulf of Aqaba, an act of war. It was Jordan that attacked Israel. But this counterfactual statement is widely disseminated and rarely contradicted.
Because Israel?s annexation of Jerusalem in 1967 is not recognized by the world, most nations do not have their embassies there. This claim was made by New York Times reporter Steven Erlanger on July 16. In fact, most nations have refused to have their embassies in Jerusalem since Israel?s founding; this despite the fact that the seat of the government is in Jewish West Jerusalem. But there has been no contradiction or retraction of Erlanger?s incorrect, a-historical rationalization for this morally corrupt policy.
It?s all Ariel Sharon?s fault. The Times editorial staff has adopted this theory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Any facts that fail to fit are just left out. So, in its July 28 editorial: Israel hesitates to re-arm the Palestinian Authority. It must be simply because Sharon wants Abbas to fail. Well, maybe Israel should re-arm the PA, because having it outgunned by Hamas might be even worse. But the inconvenient fact that the last time Israel armed the PA, those weapons were turned against it, has simply been deconstructed out of the Times?s one-dimensional analysis.
The largest group of perpetrators of anti?Semitic acts in Europe appears to be young, disaffected white Europeans. This claim, in a 2004 European Union press release on a report by its own Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, is directly contradicted by the report itself. No place is it stated that white right-wingers outnumber Muslim/Arab/pro-Palestinians as perpetrators of anti-Semitic violence. In fact, in numerous countries, the data supported the opposite. But the EU politicians were not constrained by the facts. (In the most laughable case of deconstructivist denial, Finland?s racism monitoring organization noted that anti-Semitic acts were almost completely correlated with Israel?s incursions into the West Bank, so Finnish politicians called for monitoring of ? indigenous right wing organizations.)
Jonathan Pollard was given a life sentence after pleading guilty to spying for Israel as part of a plea bargain that the U.S. government did not respect. This claim was made by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on July 24. Omitted is the fact that the government argues that Pollard violated the plea agreement by continuing to withhold information, and that is why he sits in jail, not because the U.S. wants to punish a Jew who spies for Israel more than a Gentile who spies for another country. Is the government?s argument valid? It is certainly worth investigating, and it should be mandatory for a news service to report it. But JTA apparently doesn?t think so. Here, by the way, is former President Clinton?s statement about why he didn?t commute Pollard?s sentence or pardon him: ?For all the sympathy Pollard generated in Israel, he was a hard case to push in America; he had sold our country?s secrets for money, not conviction, and for years had not shown any remorse.? So is Clinton to be deconstructed as an anti-Semite?
Ethnic profiling is an absolute evil. Despite the fact that almost all suicide bombers are young Muslim males, New York transit police have been ordered to randomly inspect the bags of every fifth or tenth or twelfth passenger. Airport security personnel continue to carry out full-body searches of elderly ladies whose prosthetic hips set off the detectors.
When theory trumps facts, deconstruction can be dangerous to your health.
