ideological criminal

Saree Makdisi, a professor of English at UCLA, spent nearly an hour being interviewed on the Jan 28 KPFA Voices of the Middle East and North Africa. Makdisi’s latest book is Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation. He notes in the preface:

Simple word choices both express—and more importantly—generate political effects.  Language and politics are inseparable in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and is virtually impossible to understand what is happening without paying particular attention to the ways in which language is being used.

In his interview, Makdisi emphasizes the role of false language used to describe the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.  (For one of the best analyses of this phenomenon I know of, watch the excellent documentary Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land: Media & the Israel-Palestine Conflict [Google video]).  A clear example is the use of settlement versus colony.

What the Israelis are doing in the Occupied Territoritories, by transplanting their own population to the Occupied Territories, in housing units they have constructed in violation of international law, what that is according to the English language is colonization, and those are colonies and colonists.  However, we are not supposed to use those words to describe it, we use instead the words settlement and settler and so forth, settlement activity, etc.

Despite this, Makdisi consistently uses the false but acceptable language in his books and articles.  In a Boston Globe interview, he says it is because he does not want to be “marked as an extremist.”  The obvious question, which he immediately goes on to ask, is “What does it mean when someone who uses language accurately can be dismissed as an extremist?”