Ambiguous rhetorical devices (by Eve Garrard)

In his original post at Liberal Conspiracy responding to this one, Unity wrote that Brian Keenan had doubly stressed that his use of the word 'holocaust' to describe parts of Beirut involved no reference to or comparison with the destruction of the European Jews; that this was obvious even apart from the way in which the context of the article indicated that Keenan wasn't so referring; and that it was counter-intuitive and indeed paranoid to think that Keenan was referring to the Shoah. But in a response to critical comments Unity now declares (see the comments thread) that Keenan is actually deliberately making an ambiguous reference in what he says, and that he, Unity, knew this all along - he knew about the ambiguities and he knew that people would respond critically. So according to Unity, Keenan stressed that he wasn't referring to the Shoah, and he also deliberately made that reference part of his meaning; Unity, for his part, knew all along that Keenan intended a reference to the Shoah and he (Unity) also thinks that construing Keenan's words in this way is counter-intuitive and paranoid.

I think we all need to lie down in a dark room for a bit...

(Unity also tells us that he knew that people would be critical of his defence of Keenan, because that's the kind of thing that supporters of the Iraq war do tend to say about those who like Unity opposed it all along, and anyway the Holocaust is pretty well irrelevant, according to Unity, to the political and military situation of the Middle East today, or, in Unity's eyes, to the legitimacy of the State of Israel, or to the peace process, being really, according to Unity, just a crude rhetorical device which serves as a handy distraction, so Unity thinks, from Israel's territorial ambitions, which are, as Unity sees it, the main obstacles to a two-state solution; unlike, in Unity's view, Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel or Hamas's anti-Semitism. How this unstructured heap of assertions is supposed to hold together in a logical progression is anyone's guess.)

However, floating in this logical minestrone is a genuinely interesting claim. Unity says:

FFS even the Medieval warlords of Europe managed to figure out that if you start killing civilians (however unintentionally) you only end up serving up a new batch of fresh recruits to the enemy.

It's not entirely clear whether he intends to refer to Iraq or Lebanon here, but given his admiration for Keenan's (alleged) intentional ambiguities it seems likely that the ambiguities in Unity's claims, the multiple possible referents, are also intentional. So we can reasonably suppose that he's also referring to Palestinian suicide bombings and rocket attacks on Israel, since these are all intentional attacks on civilians. Unity is giving us an argument to the effect that the attacks on Sderot and Ashkelon are bound to be counter-productive - as he says, even a European medieval warlord could work out the likely consequences - and it's quite a persuasive argument at that. (Eve Garrard)