Welcome to Tostada Speaks Blog.
I'm an avid reader and author, with a wide range of interests. Guest bloggers, most from fellow Taylor Street Publishing authors, will be here from time to time as well.
Stop by, look around, read what we have, and by all means, leave your comments for us.
My author's website is www.geogepolleyauthor.com, which also has its own blog.
I don't usually review comic books, but when this one landed in my Inbox from a friend in the UK, I couldn't resist it.
"Captain Israel" is a new Superhero comic book for youth produced by Los Angeles-based StandWithUs. According to its mission statement StandWithUs is "an international education organization that ensures that Israel's side of the story is told in communities, campuses, libraries, the media and churches through brochures, speakers, conferences, missions to Israel, and thousands of pages of Internet resources." Produced for youth "Captain Israel" is one of their efforts. I did not find it amusing ... or heroic. I found it appalling.
Though peace in the Middle East is one of its objectives, none of the images or text in "Captain Israel" are peaceful. Quite the contrary. The message is simple: What we say is the truth. People who disagree with us are anti-Semitic liars and Jew-haters who are trying to destroy us. Follow us and you will participate in greatness. The images, text (which is all in CAPS) and tone mirror the propaganda produced by totalitarian regimes around the world: Don't think, follow us, be a hero. The message talks peace and prosperity, but the images are aggressive and violent. The message is scripted, point by point, from the Israeli propaganda (hasbara) playbook.
Anti-Semitism is a major preoccupation of StandWithUs and their Captain Israel comic book (the one reviewed here is the first of a series). I think the book is anti-Semitic. If you're wondering why, the answer is obvious: "Captain Israel" presents Jews as narrow-minded, clannish, bitterly antagonistic towards their neighbors, and dismissive of people who -- like Palestine's Arab population -- get in their way. If I were Jewish, I'd be offended. Jewish or not, I am offended and sickened by this Taliban-like screed.
CAPTAIN ISRAEL, A SUPERHERO for OUR TIME? I don't think so.
If you want to check it out for yourself, click here.
I first ran across this book in a shop in Seattle, Washington back in 1993 when it was first published. Updated in 2005, it and its companions (which includes "Still Mostly True", published in 1994 and updated in 2005) have long been my favorites. The following story, "Tiger Rain", will tell you why ... it's the kind of story that sends my imagination off on fantastic adventures.
“Her umbrella was filled with rain she had collected in her travels & on hot summer days she would open it up for the neighborhood kids & we would splash in the puddles & then it would smell like Nairobi or Tasmania & later on we would sit on the porch & eat ice cream & watch for tigers in the bushes.”
"Mostly True" stories are the kinds of stories that I keep returning to, either by reading them over and over or inventing stories of my own, fantastical tales that "never could really happen", but might, just might, and most definitely do when we were children ... and still are in our deepest parts magical things happen that are "mostly true", but in a special way, and not quite.
These books and others are available from amazon.com and from Brian Andreas' website, Story People. I find Story People to be a fun place to play and browse around in.
My wife found a reference to this novel in one of her Japanese language newspapers and suggested that I buy and read it. Am I ever happy that I did!
Nina Revoyr has written a wonderful, gripping novel about some very tough times in our country, and has done so with understanding, compassion and feeling. Readers who lived through the era following World War Two will recall the ugly racial tensions of the era with all its denial, and the firestorms that erupted in Watts and other places as a result. Those who didn't live through it will get a harsh dose of reality as the protagonist searches for the killer of four black young men during the Watts riots, and the unexpected outcome as she discovers who the killer was.
Nina Revoyr is a good story teller and writer. Though an uncomfortable story and period in our history, I couldn't put this book down. I'm excited to say that her new novel, Wingshooters, will be out on March 1st of this year. I can't wait.
Curious title, isn't it? If war is a force that gives us meaning, how does it give us meaning? The answer lies in the underlying myth that supports it, and has supported it, from the dawn of the human species. This is the Warrior Myth, and it is part of every culture and society. We see it in familiar stories of great warriors, heroes, heroines and gods, all of whom fight great battles to defeat "the enemy". In these tales, it is the warrior that is held up to be emulated by the young, especially young men. In Japan it is the samurai and his code; in America it is the pioneers, the adventurers, the men and women who fight our wars, and the war heroes. Underlying the Warrior Myth are two underlying assumptions that are woven so tightly into it that they reveal the great myth that underlies and defines it. This is the myth that says that our side is goodness incarnate, and their side (the enemy) is evil incarnate and must (and will be) destroyed, since the gods (or God) is on our side (the side of virtue and goodness). If you don't think so, review the history of the past thirty years, or the past sixty years, in which our acts have uniformly been presented as necessary and good, and their acts as unnecessary and evil. Anyone who questions our collective behavior, motives and the Warrior Myth is labeled as foolish ord dangerous -- an enemy, an outsider who is, at best, shunned.
A myth is a traditional story that is accepted as history, a story that explains the origins and the world view of a people. In America's national myth, ugliness, brutality and meanness are denied, or are romanticized, explained away and justified. We declare our motives to be pure, we set our heroes on pedestals, and we parade the veterans of our wars up and down streets on national holidays, all in the service of the great, underlying myth that we are paragons of virtue who do not and never have engaged in questionable or wrong behavior. If you doubt this, look back over the past seven years of the Bush Administration's "war on terror", in which every single act, no matter how questionable legally, has been justified as right and good, and all who have questioned it declared to be irrelevant buffoons or traitorous.
Myth, and more particularly the Warrior Myth may make great drama, but it is lousy history. As Chris Hedges powerfully illustrates, it is destroying us and the planet on which we live. The Warrior Myth devours the soul of our humanity, destroys countless lives (including those who return from combat, and those civilians who have survived it), and has morphed into a huge, powerful automated machine that has proven almost impossible to shut down because our society and our culture has become dependent on it. Myth is self-justifying, self-reifying...and in the case of the Warrior Myth, also self-destroying on a massive, impersonal scale.
"War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" is not an easy book to read, because Chris Hedges presents war in all its grisly, ugly and senseless detail. As a veteran war correspondent, he has lived it, and it shows. One of the chapters, and the longest one (Chapter 4: "The Seduction of Battle and the Perversion of War") which shows graphically the lie of "purity" that is embedded in the Warrior Myth, was very difficult for me to read. I recall reading "The Brothers of Gwynedd", three historical novels by British writer Edith Pargeter, and having to stop midway through the second novel because the stupidity and carnage of battle was too overwhelming. Set in medieval Wales at the time of the Plantagents, I read until I literally could not read any more. "Nothing," I told my wife, "has changed in the last five hundred years, nothing except our weapons, which are worse. We must change ourselves before we destroy ourselves, either accidentally or on purpose." But, as Hedges and others show, the march goes on.
What is the solution? "To survive as a human being is possible," Hedges writes, "only through love. And, when Thanatos" (the death instinct) "is ascendant, the instinct must be to reach out to those we love, to see in them all the divinity, pity, and pathos of the human. And to recognize love in the lives of others -- even those with whom we are in conflict -- love that is like our own. It does not mean that we will avoid war or death. It does not mean that we as distinct individuals will survive. But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has power both to resist in our nature what we know we must resist, and to affirm what we know we musts affirm. And love, as the poets remind us, is eternal" (pages 184, 185).
This is an important book for your future and for mine, and for our grandchildren. Unfortunately it is not a book that those in whom the Warrior Myth is most embedded, most especially our leaders and those dependent upon it for their livelihood, are likely to recommend or read. But it is a must read for anyone who wants a better future for those we love.
Howard Sachar, author of A History of Israel, calls it “A work of meticulous, even exhaustive scholarship which must be taken with great seriousness and respect by historians of diverse points of view. Indeed, any student of modern Israel will ignore at their peril its sheer cornucopia of factual revelations” (from the dust jacket) … and the sheer abundance of its factual exclusions.
The following two quotations, one from the first page, the other from the last page of the text (257) establish the parameters of Professor Karsh’s study. “For Jews all over the world, this was the fulfillment of a millenarian yearning for national rebirth in their ancestral homeland. For Arab political elites, it was a shameful surrender of (a however minute) part of the perceived pan-Arab patrimony to a foreign invader.”
“And so it goes on. More than six decades after the Mufti and his followers condemned their people to statelessness by rejecting the UN partition resolution and waging a war of annihilation against their Jewish neighbors, their reckless decisions are still being re-enacted by the latest generation of Palestinian leaders… Only when Palestinian and Arab leaders change these dispositions and eschew their genocidal hopes will the refugees and their descendants be able to leave the squalid camps where they have been kept by their fellow Arabs for decades, and will the Palestinians be able to look forward to putting their self-inflicted ‘catastrophe’ behind them.”
To Professor Karsh there is no need to present the Palestinian point of view, because to him the Palestinian point of view is not valid. Yet there is no evidence from his research that he ever tried to assess it, and he excoriates those historians (like Ilan Papé, Shlomo Sand and others) who have. “It is indeed a historical irony that, since the late 1980’s, much of the Palestinian historiography has been written by Israeli ‘new historians’ … younger, politically engaged academics and journalists who claim to have discovered archival evidence substantiating the anti-Israeli case. These politicized historians have turned the saga of Israel’s birth upside down, with aggressors transformed into hapless victims and vice versa” (page 4). He goes on to claim that these “new historians”, instead of unearthing “new facts or offer[ing] new novel interpretations”, they have “recycled the standard Palestinian Arab narrative of the conflict” (page 5). His evidence? A Survey of Palestine. Prepared in December 1945 and January 1946 for the Information of the Anglo-American Committee of Enquiry (repr. 199) in full with permission from Her Majesty’s Stationery Office by the Institute for Palestine Studies, Washington, D.C), Vol. 2, pp 570-80; the Peel Commission Report, p. 91; and Aharon Cohen: Israel and the Arab World (London: W. H. Allen, 1970), p. 228. No mention of the sources they have used, no questioning of same, just dismissal of them as “politicized historians” who, being “politicized” are biased whereas he, somehow, is not.
From the simple exercise of reading the modern history of this region, the following things have occurred to me, but not to Professor Karsh: that large numbers of new, mostly European immigrants would have seemed invasive to Palestine’s indigenous population … that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the UN’s declaration in 1947 to create a Jewish State in Mandated Palestine would have caused alarm bells to go off in the Middle East … that it is normal to expect that Palestine’s Arabs and their supporters would have fought against what they viewed as another in a long line of European colonialist adventures … that the continued expansion of illegal Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories and Arab East Jerusalem is a problem … and that Israel’s Arab citizens are treated as second class citizens. All of these things are extensively documented, but not by Professor Karsh. Does this represent “meticulous, even exhaustive scholarship”? I don’t think so.
Is the book worth reading? Oh, definitely. His disrespect for Palestine’s Arabs is as crystal clear as his pro-Israeli bias. It is so clear that it is propaganda: stern, dismissive of other points of view, and very much interested in convincing its readers that what it presents is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. But it isn't. Even the title, Palestine Betrayed gets it wrong.
To have peace in the Middle East or anywhere else, one must quit propagandizing and engage in peacemaking. Propaganda perpetuates conflict and suffering because, being dismissive, it refuses to listen to points of view other than its own. And that is as sad as it is troubling.
Professor Karsh has an undergraduate degree in Arabic and Modern Middle East History from HebrewUniversity (Jerusalem), and an MA and PhD in International Relations from TelAvivUniversity (Tel Aviv). He is currently Professor and Head of the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Programme, King’s College, London.
