WhatsappTwisted language is an existential threat of real violence against Jews and Israel.
A catachresis isa forced and paradoxical figure of speech, the wrong word in the context of a subject that signifies an unexpected or implausible metaphor. It originates from a Greek word meaning “misuse.”
I have discovered that an Indian postcolonial theorist, Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak, applies the term to “master words” imposed upon people that draw an arbitrary connection to the meaning of those words.
In February 2024, Spivak spoke out against Israel’s so-called “settler-colonialist genocide.” A professor of humanities at Columbia University, she considers the Arabs of “Palestine” as residing on “ancestral lands.”
Spivak was a friend and colleague of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, a Palestinian American who was among the founders of post-colonial studies. At a June 2018 conference in Berlin, she announced: “I am, of course, a member of the BDS.” That is, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.
Catachresis, according to French philosopher Jacques Derrida, is a term indicating the original incompleteness that is a part of all systems of meaning. Derrida was perceived as being sympathetic to Israel, and when he referenced the term “war for Jerusalem” as metonymic for global religious struggle, he was criticized as “effacing the colonial nature of the continuing occupation of the holy city more historically known by the name Al-Quds.”
This attack came from Native American academic Christopher Wise, who, in a 2001 essay in the journal Diacritics titled “Deconstruction and Zionism,” first rejected Derrida’s universalizing term “messianicity,” seeing it as too Jewish, as well as Derrida’s sympathetic views about Zionism. Wise argued that because Derrida was a Sephardic Jew from Northwest Africa (his family originally came from Toledo, Spain), his work was not at all useful.
It is particularly ironic that Derrida—being the father of the deconstructionist school, which emphasizes the deferral of meaning and the utmost need for context—has become a target for those enthralled with the paradigm of probably the most pernicious employment of the misinterpretation of meaning: That is “Palestine,” which represents a reconstruction of false history, an example of which is the above-quoted claim by Wise regarding his preferred term, the Arabic “Al Quds,” for the name of Jerusalem.
Several months before his death, Derrida made clear in a May 2004 speech, published in Le monde diplomatique in November of that year, that he supported the aspirations of the Arabs seeking a state of Palestine, while expressing disapproval of the suicide attacks and antisemitic propaganda present in the Arab world. As for Zionism, he opposed then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s call for European Jews to come home to Israel.
In a sense, it should be obvious that championing the cause of “Palestine” is a perfect flat-earth paradigm that without the use of multiple forms of catachresis would not exist.
Catachresis is an existential threat of real violence against Jews and Israel.
As a first example, take Wise’s claim that the name “Al Quds” is “historical.” Besides the uncomfortable lack of the city being mentioned in the Quran (which should signify that the Al-Aqsa Mosque might not have been in Jerusalem in the first place), his ignorance is, if anything, embarrassing.
The earliest Islamic text that mentions Jerusalem, written in the eighth century C.E. and published in the ninth century, is Ibn Ishaq’s Sirat Rasul Allah. In it, Muhammed flies to a place called “Aelia,” which was the Roman colonialist Latin name for Jerusalem, just like Palaestina was the Roman name for the country with its three districts—Prima, Secunda and Tertia—from the fourth century C.E. on.
This form of anachronist inversion is not unique in Islam. For example, the Quran at Sura 3:67 declares that “Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but he was one inclining toward truth, a Muslim.” As Islam was only formulated at the beginning of the seventh century C.E., this is a flat-earth fraudulent formulation.
Another early Islamic term was al-Bayt al-Muqaddas, the Holy/Sacred House. That, of course, was an adoption of the Hebrew term Beit HaMikdash, the Temple.
In fact, that building is referenced in the Quran as “Solomon’s temple” in Sura Al-Isra 17:7. Warning the Jews of Divine retribution, the text recalls the destruction of Jerusalem: “If you do evil, [you do it] to yourselves. … [We sent your enemies] to sadden your faces and to enter the temple, as they entered it the first time.”
The phenomenon of flat-earth Palestinianism is not just one of linguistic oddities or minor incorrect facts of history. It has a very direct influence on current affairs and the well-being, lives and security of Jews and the State of Israel.
On June 5, Ohio immigration attorney Shayan Parsai gave a sermon at the Ursuli Institute located in the Columbus, Ohio metropolitan area, which can be viewed on YouTube. He asserted, starting at 49 minutes or so, that Jews have no connection to the Western Wall. Instead, the Jews use the Wall as a pretext to “sneak ever closer to the Al-Aqsa mosque in order to destroy it.”
Parsai flat-earth insisted that “The Wailing Wall is nothing in Jewish tradition … they kiss that wall because they’re digging under it, and they’re going over it, and they’re going inside it.” Jews seek to “crush the Al-Aqsa mosque … trying to remove it.” Moreover, Jews “are psychopaths who engage in the same rituals of child sacrifice and child cannibalism.”
In case you’re wondering, the Ursuli Institute is “commit[ted] to pursuing beauty, reasonableness and the principles of Godliness.” It views itself, according to its website, as part of the “movement to reinvigorate beautiful and ethical Islam.” That, I would assert, is a flat-earth catachresis.
We have already experienced flat-earth rhetoric regarding a supposed Gaza genocide, famine and starvation. Colonialism and “Zionism as racism,” we have heard. “Globalize the intifada” has been chanted, as well as “eliminate Israel.”
You are now being welcomed to a new phase of catachresis: Jews as cannibals, Jews who purposely kill children, Jews who commit ethnic cleansing. One need not be Muslim to engage in the linguistic exercise.
In their joint pastoral letter following their five-day pilgrimage “to the Holy Land,” Anglican Archbishops Sarah Mullally of Canterbury and Hosam Naoum in Jerusalem say there is a “desperate” situation in Judea and Samaria (their term: “the occupied West Bank”). Palestinian Christians face an “existential challenge.”
I suggest that their catachresis is an existential threat of real violence against Jews and Israel. Let us not be taken in by this flat-earthism, and may we convince others not to be taken in either.
