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Who is a true intellectual? In my opinion, a true intellectual, a thought warrior who speaks just, egalitarian, and informed truth against harmful power structures or any hegemonic entity without hesitation, rises above all interests and narrow-mindedness for people’s rights, planet, and all living beings. Farhad Mazhar says 'Bhabuk' in Bangla, meaning the one who thinks. Many say 'Buddhijibi,’ which means the one who lives by selling his intellect.
Antonio Gramsci called it Organic Intellectual in the 'Prison Notebooks', and the 'inorganic' adulterated academicians of Bangladesh translate it as 'Joibo Buddhijibi’ or more like 'Public Intellectual'! Professor Dr. Salimullah Khan often grumbled about this. He does not like the pro-authority attitudes of Bangladeshi intellectuals – he even criticised at times Derrida, for instance, in his book 'Adamboma', which was written as a critique of Talal Asad’s `On Suicide Bombing'.
I use a definition from my favourite Jewish scholar, Noam Chomsky, to distinguish between impure and organic intellectual. Chomsky, in his article The Responsibility of Intellectuals published in The New York Review of Books on 23 February 1967, said: it is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. What happens in a plain Bengali translation? The Sanskrit word for responsibility, 'Dayitto', is associated with liability. In the dictionary, you will find that ‘dayitto’ is the responsibility for the good and bad of a particular task, taking the risk of this job, etc. For this reason, sitting in an AC room as an inactive observer is not a job for an intellectual; it is not a job to just read slides in front of students; it is not the job of an intellectual to pretend to be a big book-reading man.
A true intellectual does not engage in mere intellectual pursuits. His job is to keep the pure current of thought flowing from all political and socio-economic influences of culture, capital, and profit. If he does not keep it, he is no longer a pure thinker or no longer an organic intellectual; he can be a trader of wisdom in the conventional sense—not a pure pro-public intellectual. One such good-turned-evil intellectual is Jürgen Habermas from Germany. He is famous for the concept of ‘public sphere'. On 13 November 2023, this man made a statement in support of Israel's genocide, along with some of his fellow German intellectual comrades.
I can understand their language a little because I learned German in a course while at university. I am very embarrassed to see this statement by the famous scholars of the modern Frankfurt School published on the website ‘normativeorders.net’! It seems that these individuals are not critical thinkers or organic intellectuals anymore—they are reproducing the weaponisation of antisemitism to back Israel's war criminals who are committing holocaust in occupied Palestine, especially in besieged Gaza.
The Jewish theorist and one of the best organic intellectuals in the world, Norman Finkelstein, presented the facts of the ‘Holocaust Industry’ against illegal Israel. Habermas appeared as a trafficker in that trade to demonise anti-war people in Germany and the West who are raising their voices against the ongoing pogroms in Gaza and occupied West Bank!
What statement did Habermas make? First, under the title 'Principles of Solidarity’, three other theorists with Habermas, namely Nicole Dietelhoff, Rainer Forst, and Klaus Günther, expressed solidarity for Israel's ongoing genocide of Gazans in occupied Palestine. They then wrote, ‘The current situation created by Hamas’ extreme atrocity and Israel's response to it...'. That is, the brutality that the IDF is running by murdering thousands of civilians after October 7, 2023, is mainly the responsibility of the democratically elected Hamas group in Gaza!
But the origin of this crisis is the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians by the European white radical Jews before 1948 and the occupation of Palestinians’ lands and resources, according to Jewish scholar Dr. Ilan Pappe and many more historians. Even earlier, through the Balfour Declaration announced on May 2, 1917, even further back to the 1896 publication of the Jewish radical Theodor Herzl's 'Political Zionism', the catastrophic conditions of Palestinians can be described from many angles.
Without approaching these historical backgrounds, Habermas assigns all the blame to Hamas, which is a solid proof of his intellectual dishonesty.
In the 73 days since 7 October 2023 to 20 December 2023, Israeli occupation forces killed 19,667 Palestinians, according to Al Jazeera Network, including more than 50% women and children and nearly 90% civilians. The Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has wiped out 1% of the entire Gaza population. However, unlike 1140 Jewish people, Habermas and his partners in solidarity said nothing about this oppression! So, has he acted upon pure thinking?
If Israel has a ‘right to respond or defend’ then surely the Palestinians have that right too. So what? They said a lot of lies in their statement that Hamas carried out this attack to exterminate the Jews. But they did not think that this attack was a boomerang (blowback) of Israel's persecution, continuous aggression, and colonisation of native Palestine. They wrote, 'The Hamas massacre with the declared intention of eliminating Jewish life in general has prompted Israel to strike back.' In other words, Israel struck back after Hamas attacked first, which is a complete lie if we take the entire context of the conflict into consideration. Because there is no Hamas in the occupied West Bank, Israel has killed hundreds of Palestinians there and is still doing so. And, before this bloody October, did Israel not commit genocide in Gaza? In Jerusalem? In Jenin? In Ramallah? Nablus? In Bethlehem? West Bank?
Of course, it did. And it even tried to erase Palestine from its so-called Abraham accord with the Saudi Arabia-led so-called normalisation talks.
Despite being a critical thinker, Habermas did not interpret this phenomenon critically with his co-intellectuals. Hamas (or its military branch, Ezzedine Al Qassam Brigade), can be read as freedom fighters despite the fact that Hamas was once supported by Israel as a proxy of the IDF to fight against the Fatah movement. Noam Chomsky, Mearsheimer, and Finkelstein say that Palestinians have legitimate rights to fight back against occupation and colonization. Palestinians are fighting for liberation, either from a Marxist point of view or based on Fannon's revolutionary theory. Their right to resist genocidal extermination is a right recognised in all international law and every theory of political science. Habermas, who popularised the concept of the public sphere, forgot that fact and devoted himself to the intellectual service of the Zionist devils!
It is universally accepted that Israel is an apartheid state. They openly say that they are exterminating Palestinians as ‘human beasts’ by committing crimes against humanity in the occupied territories, including Gaza. Nevertheless, Habermas shamefacedly rejected the charge of genocide against Israel in the statement. They say: ‘How this retaliation, which is justified in principle, is carried out is the subject of controversial debate; principles of proportionality, the prevention of civilian casualties, and the waging of a war with the prospect of future peace must be the guiding principles. Despite all the concern for the fate of the Palestinian population, however, the standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel's actions.’
How inhumane can an academic write ‘which is justified in principle’ even after 20,000 people lost their lives in just two months?
Their next statement is the call that anti-Semitism should not arise in Germany by anti-Israel activists! In fact, Habermas, who once joined the Hitler Youth, did not argue that the people of Palestine were closer heirs to Semitic bloodlines than the Ashkenazi occupying Jewish colonialists of Europe.
When people start protesting the statement, they say that we are not anti-Muslim. We talked about ‘proportionate’ responses, etc. While Forst offered an explanation to avoid criticism, he did not make the mistake of being tight-lipped about Israel's genocide, saying that ‘we are even in agreement with a number of critics that the strict criteria for a genocide have not been met’.
Even if you dislike the Palestinians, you have to admit that Israel is now playing the role of Nazi Germany, Gaza is a concentration camp, the Hitler of this era is Israel’s rightwing President Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinians are the ‘oppressed Jewish nation’ in the context of the Israel-Palestine conflict. In other words, opposing Palestine and supporting the genocide of Palestine in the name of killing Hamas is the neo-Nazism and anti-Semitism of this era. The thinkers of the German nation have never been so degraded in history that they could not think impartially about this!
I have a study that was first published in the journal of Jahangirnagar University Social Science Review in 2018 titled ‘Social media as a platform of mass interaction: A study on the virtual environment in Bangladesh’. In this study, I used Habermas's ‘public sphere theory’ along with several other theories as the theoretical framework. Although Habermas's recent moral decline does not invalidate his earlier thoughts or intellectual contribution, I feel uncomfortable thinking about his role in supporting the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Besides, it is hard for Habermas that his name will come into history as the ideological apparatus of the war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu, who is next to Hitler!
What a pity for such a great thinker who failed to establish the relationship between Zionism and white colonialism and that he did not say a single word about how Israel was selling occupation in different parts of the world by exporting deadly weapons and mass surveillance technologies developed in the besieged Gaza, which is a laboratory for developing weapons of mass destruction. Not even once could he say #CeaseFireNow, even though—according to Chomsky—proclaiming an unconditional ceasefire in Gaza is the fundamental duty – perhaps a grave responsibility of the intellectual. It’s, in fact, a duty that Habermas has already failed to execute or lost in the public sphere of thought by failing to do so!
The writer, a researcher, is currently the Editor of Bangladesh Agricultural Development Corporation (BADC).
Messenger/Fameema
