Pross is interesting for a view of resistance within the German legal, insurance and medical establishments to recognising psychological or other harm suffered by inmates of concentration and death camps ... a resistance evident in wilful insistence on the provision of proof that injuries were attributable to time spent behind the wire, distortion of evidence by claim assessors and arbitrary decisionmaking by people who in some cases had moved from executive positions in the killing machine to posts in local government saying yay or nay to representations from ailing 60, 70 and 80 year olds. As a passenger on the flight noted, sometimes bureaucratic rationality is a real bummer.
Massad has gained attention for polemics against Israel (characterised as an illegitimate colonialist Orientalist state) and for 'Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World' in (2002) 14(2) Public Culture 361-385. That article - reflected in his Desiring Arabs (Chicago University Press, 2007) - claims that "the Gay International" (more sinister than the Homintern - oops, the Comintern - and of course so very very Orientalist) is engaged in a global conspiracy directed at the Muslim world by the secular/Christian West.
Along the way he'd offered treats such as comparison of Israel with Nazi Germany (apparently both are engaged in genocide) and claims such as "The only constant in Palestinian lives for the last century of Zionist atrocities has been resistance to the Zionist project of erasing them from the face of the earth". Uh huh
A spirited review by the Guardian's Brian Whitaker comments that
While it may be interesting to consider how far modern (western) constructs of sexual identity have been adopted (or not) by various cultures, in terms of sexual rights the question is largely irrelevant: it is the behaviour that is liable to be penalised, regardless of how people describe themselves. ... much Arab activism (of all kinds) is organised from abroad. Inevitably, in Massad's eyes, that turns the activists into "native informants", aiding and abetting the western "missionaries".Nicely put. A core attribute of universal rights (such as the right not to be sealed with superglue) is that they are universal, not magicked away if there is a palm tree or a camel or a yurt or an elephant in proximity.
Massad appears similarly blinkered to the human cost of the prevailing attitudes towards homosexuality in Arab countries: the murders of gay men in Iraq, entrapment by the police in Egypt, the arrests of men who "behave like women" in Saudi Arabia, the beatings at the hands of families, the futile and potentially harmful psychiatric "cures", blackmail, the lack of state protection, and more. There is no real acknowledgment of a problem that Arabs should attend to.
People who regard human rights as an undesirable import might refer to the persuasive analysis in Bede Harris' acute submission [PDF] to Australia's National Human Rights Consultation - discussed elsewhere in this blog - and to two papers by Eric Heinze.
His 'Wild-West Cowboys Versus Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys: Some Problems in Comparative Approaches to Hate Speech' [here] comments that
All European states prohibit some form of hate speech. US law fundamentally precludes such bans. Euro-American comparisons can shed light on debates about hate speech, but little attention has been paid to comparative methodology. In view of the political and symbolic importance of free speech, the trans-Atlantic divide inevitably invites cultural comparisons. It is important to avoid drawing broad conclusions about deeper Euro-American differences based solely on black-letter norms. Unduly broad extrapolation from formal norms can lead to problems of essentialism and ahistoricism. Attention is paid in this chapter to the balance between formalist and realist jurisprudence as a pathway into constructive comparisons.Heinze's 'Truth and Myth in Critical Race Theory and Latcrit: Human Rights and the Ethnocentrism of Anti-Ethnocentrism' in (2008) 20(2) National Black Law Journal 62-107 [here] argues that
Critical race theorists and LatCrits argue that, throughout US history, norms promising liberty and equality have been myths. They examine the formalisms of US rights discourse through the lens of a realist jurisprudence, arguing that guarantees of 'equal protection' or 'due process' have failed non-dominant groups throughout long histories of slavery, segregation, subordination, and ongoing exclusion. However, a number of them merely substitute a simplistic myth of US-is-good with an equally simplistic myth of US-is-bad. Scholars such as Mari Matsuda, Richard Delgado, Celina Romany, Berta Esperanza Hernández-Truyol, Elisabeth Iglesias condemn those who praise the black letter of US law while overlooking its brutal realities; yet they then take precisely that approach to non-US legal regimes, such as the standard norms of international human rights law, praising the black-letter norms while ignoring the oppressive politics and histories of many of the powerful countries and institutions behind them. Far from overcoming American ethnocentrism, they thereby recapitulate it. Within an ever more global discourse of human rights, critical theorists can only retain credibility by applying the same realist methods to international and non-US regimes that they demand for US law.'
