There is no politics quite as vicious as academic politics,
because there is so little at stake.

Every day, I get emails and MySpace messages from people who say that they check out the blog but never leave any comments. Since the blog gets as many as 25,000 hits a day but most posts only receive 20-30 comments, I’m sure that this is true.

Today, I’d like you “lurkers” out there to drop a comment telling me how often you read, what topics you like, and why you don’t usually post. In addition to satisfying my curiousity, I’d like to know how I can make the Barbershop more interesting and engaging for the silent majority.

Don’t be scared!!!

Of course, if you’d rather remain in the shadows of the blog, there’s no hard feelings. Just keep reading and supporting the page.

The Will to Change
Matt Birkhold

A few months ago my then girlfriend and I were walking out of her Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn apartment when we saw a young couple across the street.  Almost as soon as our feet hit the sidewalk we heard the young man, who looked no older than 15 or 16 years old, call the young woman “stupid” in a tone that was anything but playful.  We stopped, watched the couple for a minute, and when they got halfway down the block it looked as though he might hit her.  He didn’t, but I felt the need to have a conversation with him.  When I voiced this to my partner, she cautioned me.  She casually reminded me of an article I wrote that began with the murder of a 38 year old Brooklyn man named Rodney Jones who was killed for breaking up a fight between a group of 16 year olds and said that I had no idea what the young man was capable of.  Intellectually, she was right.  Morally, I felt dead wrong.  As we walked down Fulton Street on the way to my Crown Heights apartment we encountered a group of four young men and three young women who appeared to be together.  The men openly referred to the women as bitches and it clearly sparked an argument between them.  As I watched them I couldn’t help thinking about the young couple I felt I had abandoned.

The next week I contacted an artist/activist I know to ask him what he would have done.  He told me he had been in the same situation many times and, noting that safety was a real issue, said there were times when he approached men to talk and other times where he called the police.  He said he tried to go with his intuition.  While his answer was very good, I wasn’t quite satisfied.  I kept thinking of ways to avoid involving the police.

Then yesterday, I had a conversation with a female friend who told me that she encountered a group of young men on the train with “no home training” and confronted them.  Her courage inspired me.  We then proceeded to discuss ways to solve problems inflicted on our communities by members of our community.  We both agreed that old school town halls where older women vent their frustrations about how frequently ads for Girls Gone Wild appear on TV and older men demand that we act immediately to free all political prisoners were not going to cut it.  She suggested that we throw block parties more frequently and make countering sexism part of the festivities.  I thought that was a good plan and added that these conversations need to become part of card games and regular gatherings.

Still, I was left thinking about the young couple in Bed-Stuy who I felt I had abandoned.

In order to apply my friend’s insight to countering sexism and ending street harassment, I’m suggesting that men of all ages get together and spend Friday nights in the street confronting sexism where and when it happens.  If done in a loving way, such organizing could turn into real community building by creating spaces where women feel safe to walk down the street.  However, we men must be willing to put ourselves on the line to confront the sexist behavior of other men.  We have to find the will to change and help others to do the same.

Matt Birkhold is a Brooklyn based independent scholar, educator, and writer.  His work appears regularly in Wiretap and has also appeared in The Nation and Mother Jones in addition to several other places.  He is founder of Political Education Outreach Collective and editor of the forthcoming National Hip Hop Political Convention publication, Elements

Can Israelis ever recover from the self-inflicted damage of becoming a brutal occupier?

Dark Truths About the Israeli Occupation
By Daniel Levy

Edith Zertal and Akiva Eldar end their exhaustive study of Israeli settlement policy with a poignant question: Is it possible, they wonder, that Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip will become a “first step in Israel’s journey of liberating itself from the enslavement to the territories that it occupied in 1967, and which have occupied [it] since then and have brought it to the verge of destruction”? Negotiations that have been set in motion by the Annapolis peace conference in November will likely provide a partial answer. Zertal, a leading Israeli historian, and Eldar, a chief political columnist and a former Washington correspondent for the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, have recently published Lords of the Land: The War for Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories, 1967-2007. It is a detailed history of Israel’s nearly forty-year occupation of Gaza and the West Bank with a painful contention at its core. The occupation, say Zertal and Eldar, has wounded Israel’s very psyche, damaging both its sense of self and its moral standing in the world. “The prolonged military occupation and the Jewish settlements that are perpetuating it have toppled Israeli governments,” write the authors, “and have brought Israel’s democracy and its political culture to the brink of an abyss.”

The Hebrew version of this book was a best-seller in Israel, and sparked a debate there on the devastating realities and consequences of Israeli settlement policy. It would be useful to replicate that debate here in the United States — in the belly, as it were, of the enabler. The book’s unflinchingly provocative title is matched by a narrative that pulls no punches, and the cast of villains (there are precious few heroes) runs the gamut from Jewish militia terrorists and their supporters in the Rabbinate to Labor Party apologists for the settlers and feckless judges who looked the other way as settlers created illegal outposts within Palestinian territory.

There are two sides to the settlement coin. The first is the settlers themselves, who are for the most part religiously inspired, unswervingly motivated, and highly effective. Religious Zionism was very much in the backseat of the Zionist enterprise until 1967, but once Israel assumed control of Judea and Samaria (as the settlers refer to the West Bank), the national religious camp saw its moment to seize the ideological steering wheel of state.

Their method was to create facts on the ground — that is, to quickly build settlements — and then get the political system on board by a number of means. The first step was persuasion (”We are all Jews surrounded by a sea of enemies”), followed by integration (the settlers’ tentacles reached into all branches of government), and then coercion (the use of intimidation, threats, and violence). Any dubious action could be “koshered” by a shared appeal to Jewish history and Zionist destiny. If all else failed, there was the threat of Arab terror, which the settlers had a key role in encouraging. For believers, there was a religious justification and meaning — a theology of settlement, if you like. The final ingredient was an approach to the Palestinians that was at best colonial and at worst murderous. The new Lords of the West Bank arrogantly dismissed the region’s indigenous population, and when the Palestinians showed opposition, settler militias and terrorist groups were formed (yes, Jewish terrorist groups). In 2001, an Israeli group named the Committee for the Defense of the Roads claimed responsibility for the drive-by killing of a six-month-old Palestinian baby and her family. Similar groups carried out additional attacks, and between 1980 and 1984, before the First Intifada began, twenty-three Palestinian civilians were killed in violent attacks by settlers, mostly involving firearms (often army issue). American readers might be shocked to discover that a religiously sanctified cult of martyrdom and “redemptive death” among elements of the Israeli settler community even exists at all, and then horrified at the extent of its destructiveness.

For the rest of the story, click here.