The war between the civilised man and the savage

A provocative ad which debuted last month in San Francisco is making its way to New York subways today

By Hamid Dabashi
Al-Jazeera

(Click on photo to enlarge)

".......By thus commercialising the Zionist cause, it places it squarely within the visual regime of loutish consumerism - where it now squarely belongs. It thrives on mimicking Zionism in its advanced stage of having wedded the ethnic cleansing of Palestine to the consumerist fetishism definitive to American militarism. 
But Americans and non-Americans alike baffled by the depth of this vulgarity in effect blind themselves to what this blatant vulgarity conceals and reveals at one and the same time.  

To understand this concealment, this commodified mystification of Zionism, we need a quick detour to the sublime insight of the exquisite French semiotician Roland Barth (1915-1980) in his reading of Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954). In one of his most insightful short essays in his Mythologies (1957), "A Sympathetic Worker", Barth speaks of a certain kind of "truth vaccine" by which he means how in Elia Kazan's film "a small gang of mobsters is made to symbolise the entire body of employers, and once this minor disorder is acknowledged and dealt with like a trivial and disgraceful pustule, the real problem is evaded, is never even named, and is thereby exorcised".   

This is exactly what we are seeing here. The thick vulgarity of the ad turns it into a caricature, safely distances it from Harvard political scientists theorising "the clash of civilisation", as it distances it from the very core of American imperialism, so that "once this minor disorder is thus identified and acknowledged" as "a trivial and disgraceful pustule", the real problem - namely the fact that the entire American foreign policy, its demonisation of Muslims in the courses it teaches in its military academies, its flushing the Quran down the toilet by way of torturing Muslim "savages", by drone attacks on innocent people in Pakistan or Afghanistan, and by its unconditional support for Israel repeatedly articulated by President Obama are all "evaded, never even named, and thereby exorcised". ....."