The Inside Assyria Discussion Forum #5

=> Fred Aprim File: VI

Fred Aprim File: VI
Posted by pancho (Guest) - Tuesday, February 20 2007, 16:19:13 (CET)
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The Slipshod Methodology Of Fred Aprim

Knowing Fred as I do and hearing and seeing him in action, in the flesh, I concluded long ago that he never read any of the books he likes to quote and use as source material…not all the way through and hardly ever with any comprehension but rather with an eye for what could be put to national use. I remember one tortuous post in which he used a rather heavy and hard slogging book titled “Hagarism” to prove, as he likes to say, his point…which is nothing more than that he is Assyrian and you’re not.

It so happened that I’d read that book as well and it left me with a longing to be dead and buried…how Fred could have gotten anything out of it was a mystery…except of course he hadn’t gotten anything out of it…nothing the authors put there anyway.

It was delightful therefore to come across, in Dr Joseph’s book, the following references to that murderous book and its popularity among Assyrian ‘writers”…in a footnote Dr Joseph, in dealing with a Mar Qardagh who traced his ancestry to ancient Assyrian kings, writes:

“See also “Hagarism”, p. 190 n. 71, where, in accordance with their methodology, authors Crone and Cook accept Qardagh’s descent from Assyrian kings as a believed fact by his contemporaries, making “Hagarism” a favorite source book of modern Assyrian writers. In a letter to the author (Dr Joseph, mine), dated June 11, 1997, Patricia Crone wrote that she and Cook “do not argue that that the Nestorians of pre-Islamic Iraq saw themselves as Assyrians or that this is what they called themselves. They called themselves Suryane, which had no greater connotation of Assyrian in their usage than it did in anyone else’s…We take it for granted that they got the modern Assyrian label from the West and proceeded to reinvent themselves…of course the Nestorians were Arameans”

…won’t touch that hot tater till later…but what’s interesting to note is that while Aprim and the rest call all scholars dumb who do not agree with THEM…they are willing to use and misuse and misinterpret such writings when they think they can turn a profit. I’m sure that when Fred realizes his error, if ever…he will say, “dumb scholar” with the best of them.

…further down there’s a delightful little footnote:

“For nationalist references to, and misinterpretation of, “Hagarism”, see Odisho Bet Ashur (pen name)…”

The following page has this:

“According to Odisho, the resurrection and rebuilding of Assyria (after the fall of empire, mine) were done by the ‘strong native Assyrian aristocracy’ that he believes flourished under the benign rule of the Parthians. A more careful reading of Roux, however, would have shown that there is no mention of any Assyrian involvement in the reoccupation and reconstruction of the ‘towns and villages which had been lying in ruins for hundreds of years.’ In the very next sentence following this quotation, LEFT OUT BY ODISHO (emphasis mine), Roux writes that it must be emphasized that the ‘revived settlements had very little in common with their Assyrian or Babylonian precursors.’”

In other words Odisho, seeing one sentence that he thought could prove useful “for national work”, left out the following sentence which nullified his fanciful interpretation of the first.

It’s that distasteful and scurrilous tendency which Fred Aprim has in abundance and which this Odisho fellow apparently shares with so many more taxi driving “experts”, of lifting only what seems to work for the point they’re trying to make, or forcing on their readers, whose trust should be respected instead of flagrantly abused…a serious scholar would not dream of such tricks unless he believed that his audience would be too stupid or lazy to read the source material for themselves and he was a scoundrel himself.

And anyone who thinks Dr Joseph is the one making things up has only to read the appropriate section in Roux and compare that to what Odisho wrote…and if the follow-up quote from Roux is missing in Odisho, then they’ll know more about Odisho than they ever will about the Assyrians.

One can’t help but recall the line from Dr. Joseph’s preface that:

“… a partisan history of their people, according to an Assyrian writer, ‘is paid little respect and eventually is undermined by trained historians’”.



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