Judith Butler Quotes
I am sorry to be so blunt, but I do not see much ambiguity here. [Barack] Obama was late to affirm the Egyptian revolution as a democratic movement, and even then he was eager to have installed those military leaders who were known for their practices of torture. And now he is quick to make allies with the Muslim Brotherhood for tactical reasons as well (though earlier that same administration stoked Islamophobic fear about that very political party).
Butler, Judith, and Athena Athanasiou. Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Polity Press, 2013.
This was a classic criticism of Barack Obama—namely that he was an intellectual who could only communicate in a rational, academic, unemotional style and was reluctant to express outrage and publicly chastise other parties or counties.
After this statement was issued by the embassy, a mob stormed the embassy as shown in the graphic. The reason that this statement is an important quotation is that that Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate for President took the situation as an opportunity to attack the President. Specifically he claimed that this statement was an “apology” and it was terrible for America to apologize. The administration and most media fact checkers could not find anything in the statement that was an apology as opposed to as statement of United States policy and practice. Romney and his supporters insisted it was an apology. So the statement itself has become a major historical quotation where people can judge for themselves if indeed it was an apology. There are many who believed that under the circumstances an apology might not have been a bad idea. A few years earlier when a Danish magazine had published some insulting cartoons of The Prophet, riots broke out around the world and dozens of people were killed.
Helen Suzman, 1917–2009 was a white South African member of Parliament representing Capetown. She came from a Jewish English background and was the leader of the Progressive Party which was the opposition to the Nationalist party that had established the Fascist style Aparteid government where the 10% white population dominated and ruled the 90% black and Asian population. When all the other progressive MPs lost their seats, Suzman was the only member of the South African Parliament who totally opposed the racist apartheid of South Africa. She had little power to change or block Apartheid laws being only a single MP, but her eloquence and vigorous verbal demand for freedom and equality for blacks provided a focal point for foreign boycotts to produce change in South Africa. However, she did not publicly advocate revolution and violence. As a result most of the militant blacks did not value or even follow her activities to end apartheid, and many had no idea who she was. However, Mandela, imprisoned on Robin Island at the time, not only followed her activities, but sent frequent compliments and notes of encouragement to white opponents of the government and apartheid even though many did not support the armed violence that had become necessary to produce change. Mandela knew that there would be core of a white leadership that would favor one-man-one-vote which would make South Africa a black-dominated government when the apartheid Nationalists could be defeated. Mandela was like a great chess player playing a current game but thinking 5 and 6 moves in advance even while in prison. Suzman was one of Mandela’s leading white supporters after the regime change.
The only soldier ever so honored
In response to America abstaining from the UN vote condemning Israeli settlements.
Judith Pamela Butler is an American philosopher and gender theorist whose work has influenced political philosophy, ethics, and the fields of third-wave feminist, queer, and literary theory. In 1993, Butler began teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, where they have served, beginning in 1998, as the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory. They are also the Hannah Arendt Chair at the European Graduate School.
