New York University Faculty

"After World War Two, with decolonization and partitions, life shifted for many communities. There were transfers of populations, wherein one identity was transformed into another identity. A Muslim Indian became a Pakistani. In our case, Arab-Jews became Israelis. All of this happened virtually overnight. These new official identities did not reflect the feelings of the displaced people, and could not translate the contradictions on the ground. This new situation did not necessarily reflect those communities` sense of belonging. Hence, a crucial tension was generated between one`s official documentation and one`s emotional map of identity and sense of home and belonging. I have tried to explain this historical context in order to make sense out of our brutal rupture in the wake of partition. I grew up in Israel as a Jew, in a country that defines itself as a state for the Jews and as a Jewish state, which was presumably a solution for “the Jewish problem.” But for which Jews, and a solution for what? Being schooled in Hebrew in a Jewish state required that I completely reject everything associated with my home: namely, the Arabic that we spoke at home; my Iraqi parents; my Iraqi grandparents who didn't speak a word of Hebrew. The fact is that many people in my community missed Baghdad. But in this context, Iraq and the Iraqis were the enemy of the state to which we now officially belonged. I often describe my experience as a child as one of virtual schizophrenia, where I had to simultaneously live two identities, one outside of the home and another inside the home...The conflict between Israeli Zionism and Arab nationalism generated a situation where we had no place."

"in recent times, largely because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, there has been a construction in the public sphere of Jews and Muslims as always already enemies. In the media, journalists often appeal to the cliché that “this conflict goes back thousands of years.” But historically that is false; it largely goes back to the late nineteenth century and the emergence of Zionism. For many centuries and even millennia, Jews and Muslims often faced Christian prejudice together...The two stories/histories of Jews and Muslims are often told in isolation, but in fact the two groups were subjected to the same inquisition and continued to live together within Muslim spaces. In my work, I have insisted on the Judeo-Muslim hyphen, because while the Judeo-Christian hyphen implies a legitimate meta-narrative, the Judeo-Muslim hyphen has been elided. Yet, historically the Judeo-Muslim hyphen could be seen as the norm rather than the Judeo-Christian, which is a relatively recent phenomenon, going back to the Euro-Jewish enlightenment and reinforced by Zionist Eurocentrism."

"The particular/universal dichotomy often gets enlisted into a rescue narrative. We cannot forget how colonial discourse often represented colonialism as not simply conquering and exploiting, but also as advancing a universal civilizing mission, rescuing those barbaric people–especially, of course, their women and children–from their own horrible traditions, rituals, and culture. This idealist discourse was framed by the arrogant imperialism that saw itself as bringing light to dark places. This is unfortunately one side of the enlightenment. And addressing the intersection of the Enlightenment metanarrative with colonial discourse does not mean rejecting the Enlightenment in general. The Enlightenment is a complex phenomenon featuring contradictory discourses; what is required, therefore, is to highlight its philosophical contradictions as wells as its imperial dark side “on the ground.” In the colonial context, the Enlightenment often meant cultural subordination and psychic devastation. So the question is, what is a “barbaric practice,” and who has the right to determine what is barbaric? Who has the right to say, “I am the savior of these children?”"

"Zionism, to my mind, can be described as an effort to whiten the Jew philosophically and even literally."

"While the constitutions of Western liberal democracies preserve the freedom of new religions, I am not sure whether new religions, including New Age and neo-Paganism, preserve western liberal democracies. In Weimar they did not."

"Liberalism broke the ground enabling the emergence of radicalism. (p. 21)"

"It was precisely Hauer’s and other Nazis’ radical liberalism that led them to National Socialism. (p. 20)"

"Goebbels followed the stations of political ideologization from Catholicism toward freer forms of a Christian view of the world and self (as in liberal theology) and then National-Socialism. (p. 7)"

"[T]he variant core elements of Goebbels’ religiosity consisted of Christological symbols and Vitalism. (p. 24),"

"There is no dogma, word or scripture. German morality is not rigidly chained to words but changes as reality changes and as the original nature adapts to new conditions. It is a convenient moral relativism that Hauer and his cohorts developed. In the final analysis, it is […] a fighter ethic that negates all moral ties except those with respect to the interests of one’s own Volk. (p. 15)"

"The Third Reich represented yearning for salvation from despair through the fount of power that had its source in the German people (Volkskraft), not in an otherworldly God. Krieck ended his midsummer night’s talk with a hail to the German Youth, German Volk and Third Reich. (p. 151)"

"The whole thrust of core Nazi radicals was to overcome what they regarded as an already secularized Christianity and replace it with a faith in the ‘Third Reich’. (p. 149)"

"European neo-paganism sees itself as the restorer of all that it claims Christianity removed from European life and thought, that is, human godliness, the seamless unity of religion and science, and the harmony of human beings with the environment. (p. 173)"

"The source of anti-Semitism lies elsewhere than with religion. It lies in a fundamental human divide between those people who love culture, by which I mean the poetics and politics that grew out of a very specific local condition and history, and those who love civilization, by which I mean the poetic and politics that are rooted in non-specific, universal laws meant to protect civilian, local or foreign. Hauer’s fight against Jewish-Christianity is on this divide. (p. 14)"

"The new religions founded in the pre-Nazi and Nazi years, especially Jakob Hauer’s German Faith Movement, would be a model for how German fascism distilled aspects of religious doctrine into political extremism."

"Those Germans (from Hitler, to Rosenberg, to Himmler, to Heydrich, to Klagges, to Hauer, to Grimm and innumerable others) who became prominent National Socialist ideologues, even though Grimm and other nationalists like him did not become members of the party, were uniformly obsessed with overcoming Christianity and persuading other Germans to do likewise."

"Just the focus on trauma and healing … is not something you see much in the criminal justice system,’ said Mullins. However, this is seen now through TRCs. I think it really has become very central to communities as a place of safety, where you can go and get what you need .… I think they really are a shining example of the direction we should be moving."

"You’ve got to make modifications based on what works for your culture."

"On Parole, Staying Free Means Staying Clean and Sober."

"I didn’t expect that the funding lines would be as slim as they were, and that they were cobbling together."

"The best ally in the struggle against violent Islamism is moderate Islam."

"When I heard the news that Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan, I had a lot of questions. And one of the people I wanted to talk to was Lawrence Wright. He's joined us several times on the show. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2006 book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaida and the Road to 9/11, which is based in part on more than 500 interviews, including interviews with friends and relatives of bin Laden."

"I’ve studied Jonestown, radical Islam. They’re oftentimes good-hearted people, idealistic, but full of a kind of crushing certainty that eliminates doubt."

"People are always asking me if I'm frightened, hanging out with al Qaeda, but usually those encounters are one-on-one interviews. I'm talking to people whose views I don't agree with, but that happens all the time."

"Bin Laden is dead. Al-Qaida eventually will die. But the model that al-Qaida has created of an asymmetric terror group that has enormous consequences in the world well beyond the size of the group, that's going to endure. Other groups are going to try to follow that model."

"Listen, bin Laden is - you know, he's not irrelevant. He was important all along. Just the fact that he was able to elude capture or being killed for nearly a decade, actually more than a decade if you go back to the embassy bombings in 1998 when we first went after him. He's been a symbol of resistance and also of the failure of American policy to reach out and stop this kind of terror. It emboldened other imitators all around the globe. So getting bin Laden is immeasurably important."

"In response to nearly a thousand queries, the Scientology delegation handed over forty-eight binders of supporting material, stretching nearly seven linear feet."

"The tug-of-war between Scientologists and anti-Scientologists over Hubbard’s legacy has created two swollen archetypes: the most important person who ever lived and the world’s greatest con man. Hubbard was certainly grandiose, but to label him merely a fraud is to ignore the complexity of his character."

"The most worrisome development in the evolution of Al Qaeda’s influence since 9/11 is the growth of pockets of Islamist radicalism in Western populations."