Ali H. Musleh’s Surpassing Gift For Gibberish

Ali H. Musleh, a Muslim man on the make, has just become a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. He’s “working on” a book — or rather, a “book project,” as the handout about him claims, with the rebarbative title To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth? It is based on his 341-page — phew! — doctoral thesis. Musleh has also provided the world with an abstract of his dissertation’s contents, and I dare anyone of sense to try to make sense of the nonsense contained therein. He writes, you see, not in English but in double Dutch.

Elder of Ziyon simply could not pass up the chance to expose the gobbledygook of the newly-minted Ph.D, “Dr.” Ali H. Musleh, and to do it with the unkindest cut of all — that is, by quoting Musleh’s abstract of his dissertation verbatim, which is both the cruelest thing, and the funniest, that could be done to this exemplar of academic deliquescence in 21st century America. More about “Dr.” Musleh and his contribution to the world of scholarship, can be found here: “How to become a post-doctoral fellow at Columbia? Write 341 pages of anti-Israel gibberish!,” Elder of Ziyon, September 5, 2023:

Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies welcomes its newest post doctoral fellow!

Ali H. Musleh will be working on his first book project, To What Abyss Does This Robot Take the Earth? Using his dual background in design and political theory, he focuses on Israel’s design, development and deployment of drones, autonomous weapons and artificial intelligence, treating them as technological processes of managing and differentiating forms of life.

Why is he working on a “book project”? Why not just a “book”? And what do all those words mean? I think they mean that these Israeli weapons are used on some people, and not on others. Or did I miss something?

Apparently, this book is a version of Musleh’s 341-page PhD dissertation, with the same title. Here’s the abstract:

How do weapons make the colonial worlds that Palestinians and Jewish-Israelis inhabit? My dissertation attends to this question starting from an experience shared by Palestinians: that the majority of us have never encountered an Israeli settler, whether in uniform or out of uniform, who is not attached to a weapon, be it an assault rifle, a fighter jet, or a tank, etc. Taking this experience as a philosophical provocation, I subject the settler colony to a form of insurgent study exercised everyday by Palestinians that confronts the settler as contingent and transitory human-weapon ensembles. These studies are bodying and worlding. They reveal and unravel the spatialized embodiments, sensations, affective terrains, orientations and regimes of truth that weapons generate as lived world(s) of experience. In doing so, Palestinians exercise a fleshy sociality that constantly puts into question the self-evidence of the settler and the settler state. Thinking with Palestinians and alongside peoples of struggle, my dissertation is a performance in reverse engineering that moves from micrological sites, scenes and bodies of war, to macro formations of sovereignty. My itinerary focuses primarily on encounters with remote and robotic weaponry as technologies of engineering spatial and procedural distance between the settler and weapon. My task has been to show how that distance became the abyssal site from which forms of war, apartheid, and erasure emerge that consign settlers to martial automatisms that materialize and mediate their existence. The result is a work that dissects settler colonialism as a form of life inseparable from weapon power, as I also consider Palestinian rehearsals of decolonial life in the robotic age of war.

Elder of Ziyon comments:

This abstract is a combination of gobbledygook, lies, obfuscation and antisemitism.

Gazans indeed don’t have much of a chance to see Israelis, settlers or otherwise, since no Israelis live there. But it is really true that West Bank Palestinians never see “settlers” without weapons? The thousands of Palestinians that visit Rami Levy supermarkets shop alongside Israeli civilians. Well over 100,000 Palestinians work in Israel, and tens of thousands more work in settlements – and most “settlers” do not walk around their towns toting assault rifles. Those “settlers” who roam the Temple Mount, where they are seen by thousands more, don’t carry weapons. Most Jews at the Mamilla Mall in Jerusalem, where many Palestinians shop, don’t carry weapons. His assertion that most Palestinians never see Jews without weapons is a fabrication….

To Musleh, all Jewish Israelis are “settlers.” After all, how would Palestinians know that Israelis in fighter jets or tanks are settlers or not? And in the first sentence he considers all Israeli Arabs to be “Palestinian” which means that when he says “settlers,” he really means “Jews” from either side of the Green Line. Further proof from a similar article he wrote in Politics Today, where he said, “Weeks, months, if not years can go by without an inhabitant of Gaza encountering a settler, but they are more likely to encounter a faceless machine in their day to day life.”

Elder of Ziyon might have mentioned, but did not, that 19,000 people from Gaza enter Israel every day to work; they certainly encounter lots of Israelis, including their employers, who are not “settlers.”

To Musleh, every Jew is an implant, who has no business living in the land of their forefathers. If that isn’t antisemitic, what is?…

Yet no one in Columbia University is the least bit bothered by these issues. After all, the social sciences are filled with self-serving propagandistic garbage like this, where the “feelings” of the writer are considered more factual than actual facts.

To Columbia, this is self-serving propaganda filled with lies and Jew-hatred that are a feature, not a bug.

Ali Musleh will fit right in at Columbia, where the Middle East Studies Department includes such purveyors of anti-Israel hate as Rashid Khalidi, Joseph Massad, and Hamid Dabashi. They won’t question his language, which never deviates into sense, because Musleh’s heart is in the right place — firmly opposed to the settler-colonialist armed-to-the-teeth “Zionist entity.” And besides, they — Khalidi, Massad, Dabashi et al — are slingers of similar hash, though none, I think, can quite measure up to the standard set by Ali H. Musleh.

The late comedienne Gracie Allen famously said this: “Before the behind yet under the vast above, the world is in tears and tomorrow is Tuesday.” I find more sense in Gracie Allen’s single sentence than in all 341 pages of the dissertation typed out by the opposable thumbs of Ali H. Musleh. There may be a teeny-tiny semblance of sense somewhere in Musleh’s work, but I have yet to locate it.