Katayoun > Recent Status Updates

On Jerusalem:
“Rather than a multicultural city centre the Jewish Quarter might be better described as an artificial, ethnically homogeneous, gated neighborhood, whose construction was made possible by the forced displacements of its inhabitants. It is a ‘biblical’ theme park, sending out further tentacles of Jewish housing enclaves and religious study-centres into the Muslim Quarter […].”

T. Leitersdorf, architect and planner of the largest settlements in the West Bank and his orientalist perspective:
“I look upon the morphology of the Arab villages with envy. The beauty of the Arab village lies in its accumulative and somewhat irrational nature … it is always better than when an architect comes in, the architect only spoils things because the architect has to work logically and they do not.“

“A cozy little social gathering” – Eichmann on the Wannsee Conference, which aimed to coordinate all efforts toward the implementation of the Final Solution.

FU Berlin has today cancelled an event with Francesca Albanese and Eyal Weizman due to ‘security concerns,’ which is, of course, a cowardly lie. They were under pressure from the mayor and others, who called the event ‘a disgrace.

You can take the German out of the Gehorsam but you can’t take the Gehorsam out of the German.

The Jews “desired” to emigrate and he, Eichmann, was there to help them, because it so happened that at the same time the Nazi authorities had expressed a desire to see their Reich judenrein. The two desires coincided, and he, Eichmann, could “do justice to both parties”.

“In March, 1938, [Eichmann] was sent to Vienna to organize a kind of emigration that had been utterly unknown in Germany, where up to the fall of 1938 the fiction was maintained that Jews if they so desired were permitted, but were not forced, to leave the country”.

From the introduction:

“The Nazis had succeeded in turning the legal order on its head, making the wrong and the malevolent the foundation of a new “righteousness”.”

That rings a bell.

Reread

“[…] Israel and its supporters today lurch towards the ‘terrible probability’ James Baldwin once outlined: that the winners of history, ‘struggling to hold on to what they have stolen from their captives, and unable to look into their mirror, will precipitate a chaos throughout the world which will bring about a racial war such as the world has has never seen’.”

“Visiting Germany after the war, Hannah Arendt confessed to being ‘oppressed by a kind of pervasive public stupidity which cannot be trusted to judge correctly the most elementary events’”.

Me every time I open German Twitter.

Now seems like a good time to reread this