Barcelona, Academia, Madness

So, after going through some paranoid, rude and arrogant interrogations at the airport in Tel Aviv (where everybody is a terrorist unless otherwise is proved), two nice fligths, a relaxing weekend with my love and his family in Moss and a dizzy Monday in Amsterdam I now find myself in Barcelona. Ana's Guesthouse turned out to be a good choice, and I am trying my best to erase the inconceivable and inexplicable distances I've travelled lately from my mind and focus on the here and the now.

And so what is the here and the now? Apart from the Bangkok-like heat in the streets at noon and the cool and soothing beer in the tapas bars after dinner, it consists of trying out the intellectual game of poster sessions, champagne, roundtables and networking. Thanks to SEMUT who gave me a nice master's grant I was able to come here and attend the International Society for Political Psychology's (ISPP) Annual Meeting, this year bearing the heavy (and one would think promising?) title The Political Psychology of Oppression, The Political Psychology of Liberation. Ah! Oppression and Liberation. It's pretty clear to me that the world suffers from a severe and acute lack of understanding of these issues and that giving them some serious consideration therefore would be nothing but a positive contribution to the status quo.

Even so, I am starting to realize that being an informed and well trained academic, a successful social scientist even, does not by any means inhibit you from having rather extreme opinions. I also realize how naive I was in thinking this way, believing that if people only are well educated they will for sure also hold educated attitudes... it has dawned on me lately how terribly wrong this rather childish assumption is, but even so, knowing that academia does not equal wisdom, I got so shocked at the conference today that it felt like my head would collapse, fall off my neck and bump around on the ground like an abandoned football and then be lost in some dusty corner.

This is what happened. At lunch I went to a café and sat down with my laptop, checking up on the news. And so I learnt that Israel is just about to invade Lebanon too, as if Gaza was not hell enough. Thinking about Manal, Ibrahim, Amira and all my other friends who are stuck in Rashedie (a Palestinian refugee camp) in southern Lebanon I had a hard time finishing my lunch. What will happen to them? How long will it take before Israeli tanks moves past the Lebanese entrance checkpoint and into the camp? Will they be bombed? Will they survive? How much blood must be spilt before the world starts to care? Will the world ever care? And what the hell can you do?

Fuck! (Don't know what else to say really.)

Well, these were the thoughts in my head as I headed for the first afternoon session at the conference, amptly entitled "Strategies and Elements in War and Peace Processes". After some blablabla talk on peace, reconciliation and justice (the latter presented as a possible obstacle to the former)(...!), there came the time for the paper named "The Psychology of Counterterrorism: the Israeli Misuse of Strategic Assassinations". Aha! I thought, and I have to admit I was quite excited about it, curious what this Arthur Honig would tell us. Finally somebody who would criticise some of the madness going on!

Well - and this is where the shock comes into the story - I couldn't have been more wrong. In fact, I was so wrong I really had trouble following what he said in the beginning, as my ears simply refused to believe what they heard. (This is really true, for a long time I sat there being completely sure that I somehow misunderstood it all.) True, Mr. Honig (who, off the record, both looked and behaved like a rather unfortunate edition of George from the Seinfeld series), talked about the Israeli Misuse of Strategic Assassinations just like his paper title suggested he would. But what he had to say about it ran contrary to anything one would expect from a serious scientist: his aim was to show how Israel more often than not assassinated Palestinians (or 'terrorist leaders', of course) at the wrong time, in the wrong way and in the wrong place. The misuse of strategic assassinations: the conduct of assassinations in too childish and too obvious ways. Point being; they are not strategic enough! The state of Israel should plan their actions more carefully and not be so open about their crimes. In that way they would be far more successful in their operations! Alas, his point was not that assassinations are bad (he didn't even consider that option for a second, and explicitly admitted it on top of it all), but that they should be carried out in much more cleverer, more subtle and more invisible ways.

Seriously!!!!

This man is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science at the University of California - Los Angeles. His paper has been accepted to one of most serious conferences in the field of social science, and he presents his views in the name of scientific research.

What happened to the ethical standards that are supposed to be guiding principles of all research? How can anyone be allowed to conduct research that has as its explicit aim to find out how strategic assassinations can be more strategic? So that more people can get killed without it having to look so ugly? And howcome his 'research' was not rejected by the ISPP in the first place? Are there absolutely NO moral standards guiding the world of 'educated intellectuals'? What the hell is academia good for if this is how you can use it?

True, there was a heated discussion afterwards, where Mr. Honig was angrily attacked by several professors pointing to the missing ethics of his research. This does not help much though, especially when taking his response into consideration: his research had in fact a 'good aim', namely to "make the Israeli strategies of survival more successful - so that more lives can be spared".

I wonder how that relates to the terrified civilians in Rashedie and in Gaza, who have their homes bombed as we speak.

So much for the insights on oppression and liberation, I don' know, maybe I'll just quit this academic shit and do something more useful.