Fictions and artifices |
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| Authors: | Adam Blitz |
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| Institution: | Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, and a former Fulbright scholar. He writes on cultural heritage and its demise and maintains a blog at http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/author/adam‐blitz/. He is a member of PEN International. Twitter: @blitz_adam.Adam Blitz here engages Prof. Laura Nader's guest editorial ‘Three jihads’ (AT 31,2) in what he believes is a necessary corrective backdrop to comprehend holy war across the three traditions. A few words are necessary to contextualize this. Mr Stephen Oryszczuk (Foreign Editor, Jewish News (JN)) addressed an email (14.04.2015) to the RAI director accusing Laura Nader of bias and calling for a disciplinary against whoever published her editorial. In his acknowledgement (27.04.2015), the RAI director offered an apology in case Nader's editorial had offended anyone whilst also asserting editorial independence for the RAI's journals. Without verification with the author or editor, however, JN published two inaccurate unsigned features, one before (Anon. 2015a) and one after (Anon. 2015b) the director's acknowledgement. For example, JN falsely stated that Prof. Nader was ‘aping the term “lone wolf” used to describe Islamist fanatics who kill Jews’ where she in fact used no such expression. Mr Oryszczuk followed this campaign up with a further email (23.06.2015) criticizing a brief newsitem in the AT June issue. Anonymous accusations and browbeating do little to inform readers of the issues. Free and open academic debate across a range of accountable signed contributions under independent editorship, as evident in these pages, is surely an important step towards tackling public opinion on controversial issues. Ed. |
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| Abstract: | This article is in part a critique of Laura Nader's position on the three jihads (as published in AT 31,4). The author argues that Nader's critique of the privileges afforded to Zionism, specifically the failure to prosecute foreign British‐Jewish enlistees who served in the Israel Defence Forces program (Mahal), under the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870 is misconstrued in Law. It further maintains that Nader's obfuscation of the term jihad as a ‘catch all’ in the framework of Jewish Christian and Islamic war ethics (‘holy war’) ignores the independent development and uniqueness of these phenomena which are necessarily historically and substantively distinct. The prevalence of metaphorical language, notably the modern use and abuse of the terms ‘jihad’ and ‘crusade’, denigrates the agency of medieval Christians and Muslims at the same time as it exculpates the agency of man today. |
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