On March 5th Sean Penn, who has been doing remarkably fine work in Haiti, appeared on Bill Maher’s HBO show, and, in defense of Hugo Chavez, said
Everyday this elected leader is called a … a dictator here, and we just accept it and accept it. And this is Main Stream Media who should … truly there should be a bar by which they … one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.
Apparently, Penn, who may be a Democrat, under the influence of Chavez, is diminisingly a democrat. Not to mention that one passionately righteous individual’s lie is another one’s mistake, or even different point of view, and how large a cell would Penn like?
Former Penn costar Maria Conchita Alonso, of Cuban birth, but raised in Venezuela, was moved yesterday to issue an open letter to Penn to reconsider his understanding of Chavez.
WHY do you support a government with close relationships with FARC, ETA, Cuban G-2, Government of Iran, Al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, among others, which are the most feared terrorist movements in the world?
The record grows of Chavez persecution of political opponents, media domination, and unholy alliances. And, of course, Chavez, who likes to rail against U.S. support of a coup against him, felt differently about coups when he made his first attempt to gain the presidency via his own coup attempt in 1992. Coup attempts, history instructs, are always the first sterling sign of great democratic leaders in politico utero, once they get out of prison.
Now, Shimon Samuels, in The Jewish Chronicle Online, drawing from the report of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) comments on anti-Semitism as state policy in Venezuela.
Since Hugo Chavez took power, antisemitic expression has grown exponentially: in government media; in the dissemination of the Protocols of Zion; in the accusation that “Semitic banks” are sabotaging the economy; in the fact that the Caracas Jewish school was raided twice by armed forces “searching for Mossad-supplied arms caches”; in the desecration of two synagogues; and in the closing of the Israeli Embassy. The Venezuelan ambassador to Moscow even alleged that Jewish citizens implicated in a 2002 anti-Chavez coup were “Mossad agents”.
In the present report, the Commission has identified that political intolerance; the lack of independence of the branches of the State in dealing with the executive; constraints on freedom of expression and the right to protest peaceably; the existence of a climate hostile to the free exercise of dissenting political participation and to monitoring activities on the part of human rights organizations; citizen insecurity; violent acts perpetrated against persons deprived of their liberty, trade union members, women, and farmers; and, above all, the prevailing impunity affecting cases of human rights violations are factors that seriously limit the enjoyment of human rights in Venezuela. With the aim of consolidating the democratic system, the State must increase its efforts to combat these challenges and achieve better and more effective protection of the rights guaranteed in the American Convention on Human Rights.
None of this is news, though, to those with only modest historical vision, who would not be the willing dupes of demagogues. The Penns, Belafontes, Glovers, Sarandons, and Oliver Stones who romance with Chavez as they still offer themselves virginally to the Castros, are not living in 1936. Just as those on the right with any political acuity should see in Limbaugh, Beck, and Palin the bombastic divisiveness, buffoonery, and ignorance they play upon the stage for the price of admission and autographs, anyone on the left with more will to see the truth than will to believe should recognize the god that failed each time he comes for communion.
I wonder how they all like each other’s company?
AJA
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Wednesday, March 31st, 2010 at
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The Israeli settlements, on the West Bank and in Gaza, were an historic error the cost of which Israel is now paying. Many people in both public and private life feared this to be so when the Likud government began its aggressive settlement policy in the 1970s, and time has proven them right. Israel acknowledged the error in Gaza when it unilaterally evacuated and abandoned the settlements there in 2005. Many people believe the unilateral process of that withdrawal was also an error.
Like many other acts by Israel for which it should have reaped rewards – in good will and reciprocity from its Palestinian antagonists, in the recognition by other nations of Israel’s original and ultimate desire to live in peace with its Arab neighbors, and in its willingness to compromise to make peace – in its contention with the Palestinians, Israel gained nothing from the Gaza withdrawal. It gained not progress toward peace, but Hamas as the rulers of Gaza and increased military assault from the Gaza strip. It gained wide condemnation for attempts to end and control the violence from Gaza. It gained unchanging accusations of occupation even when it no longer occupied. It gained from countries that are not surrounded nations deep on all sides by mortal and declared enemies – and that have not survived under existential threat by those enemies for all of their histories – condemnation for not freely opening borders so that yet another enemy territory might thrive to oppose it. And every time the sources of condemnation put pen to paper over Gaza, open mouths wide with complacent moral judgment over Gaza, they forget – they conveniently forget – that Egypt, too, borders Gaza and enforces on it, with little attention, a blockade more severe than Israel’s. No one mentions this. No one questions it. No one asks Egypt why it does what it does, what threat it sees in Gaza. No one rouses the world to condemn the dictatorial Egypt.
Why were the settlements an error? Because they violated a calculus without foundation, and a measure without consistency or exactitude, of what is equitable in the aftermath and resolution of conflict. For a variety of reasons the 1967 boundaries between Israel and the Palestinians became set in world consciousness as a determinative status quo ante, as if they had been a fixed and legal border between two existing states, which the armistice boundaries of 1948 were not. Far from the rote expressions of today, this consciousness was still already widespread when Likud initiated its policy. The policy was criticized by people and nations from its inception. Political supporters of the settlement policy believed they could institute “realities on the ground” that would ultimately supersede objections. For the most part, they will have been wrong. The price Israel has paid for this mistake – visible for all with long enough historical vision to see – is the loss, over three decades, of the perceived moral high ground in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the perception of the justness of Israel’s position.
The loss of this moral high ground in the world’s eyes – the judgment upon Israel – is a mistake greater by far than that of the settlements. Still, beyond the deepest causes of this historical change, which are anti-Semitism in multiple guises and the unremitting enmity toward Israel of the Arab and Muslim worlds, the immediate cause is the settlements.
Why is the response to the settlements an even greater error than the settlements themselves? Forgotten in the uncritical historicizing of the Palestinian dispossession that resulted from the partition, and then immediately the 1948 war that followed from Palestinian rejection of the partition – Palestinian rejection of an Israeli state – is that Jews were dispossessed too. In addition to the expulsions or flight of Jews from their own historical homes in the Levant and North Africa, Jews had long lived in towns and cities of the West Bank. Before the partition, Jews held legal title to property on the West Bank, just as Palestinians held title to property in present day Israel. Yet it is of a Palestinian “right of return” we hear, not a Jewish. This is an Arab narrative that has prevailed. This narrative has prevailed, in part, because Israel, rather than offer a narrative of its own, used the advantage of its position simply to return to where it believed Jews had a right to be. Indeed, there are Jews who speak of continuing to inhabit the West Bank – as Jews, not as Israelis – after a Palestinian state is created.
The same rights Palestinians have to property in Israel, Jews have to property on the West Bank. The Palestinians, in negotiations with Israel, have never yet forsworn their claim to a right of return. Why, then, unilaterally, should Israel give up its claims?
But historical ignorance, characteristic of many who opine on the conflict, leaves many unaware of the equal claims. Historical ignorance and outright bias lead many to refer to the 1967 boundaries as borders and to claim that U.N. Resolution 242 requires an Israeli return to the ’67 “borders,” while, in fact, the precise meaning of 242 is moot until the end of time. However, in all the pretense of a fully functional international legal system with universal and universally recognized jurisdiction, why, in the historical regression to a status quo ante, stop at 1967? The ’67 boundaries for Israel were the consequence of its 1948 victory in war. They had not been earlier established by U.N. or any other international legal resolution as permanent borders. Why not revert to the partition lines? That would certainly please anti-Zionists. Ah, but recall, the Palestinians rejected those lines too, which is how six decades of conflict ensued.
I raise the issue of the partition lines to highlight the inconsistency and hypocrisy in so much discussion of the conflict and in the judgments upon Israel. Sometimes we resort to law, sometimes we quietly accept the realities of conflict and power and of victory and defeat, sometimes we operate from an amorphous sense of equity. That sense of equity long ago established in international consciousness something close to the 1967 boundaries as the shape of an ultimate resolution. This was clear to most people in the 1970s, and this is why the settlements were a mistake. However, it is this entire context, and the yet unmentioned context here of Palestinian behavior over six decades, that makes the reaction to the settlements an even greater mistake, and the currently evolving Obama administration policy a compounding of that mistake.
I will not review here the basic matter of the six decade Palestinian refusal. It should be apparent to all with unclouded eyes. I will reiterate what I wrote last week about Palestinian Jew hatred, Palestinian Authority and Hamas media incitement to hatred, and the educational indoctrination to hatred and conflict in the Palestinian schools. Why does the world focus so on settlements and speak only the occasional, muted, pro forma words – and seek no action – against the cultural institutionalization of this hatred? Every criticism one might ever read of inequality for Arab citizens of Israel is made mockery of by the fanatical hatemongering of Palestinian society toward Jews. Who can cite a single brokered peace agreement accepted by the Palestinians over the past decade? Who can cite one peace proposal developed by the Palestinians and offered to Israel? The record, of course, for Israel, is the very reverse.
Nonetheless, as I wrote last week, the Obama administration has accepted the “Israel-is-the-problem” narrative about the long failure to achieve peace. It appears to have accepted the notion (even as the standard encomia for Israel would state otherwise) of some emergent moral callousness in Israeli society that has been the demise of a widespread and effective Israeli “peace” movement. It appears not to have perceived what is manifestly, historically clear: the decline amongst Israeli “peace” forces was the consequence of two rejected peace agreements by the Palestinian Authority, and the full knowledge among Israelis that what they received in return for a decade long peace process and their own willingness to accept those two agreements, with much sacrifice entailed, was the barbarity of the second Intifada. What they received in return for constructing the barrier that ended the horrific suicide bombings of the Intifada were moral calumnies about apartheid and concentration camps.
Even so, in the fall of 2008, once more an Israeli prime minister offered the Palestinian president what no Palestinian has ever offered Israel – a peace proposal. In this proposal, as in the earlier two, at Camp David and Taba, the Israeli Prime proposed the creation of a Palestinian state on terms that would have meant almost a complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the establishment of the Palestinian capitol in Jerusalem. The Palestinian president rejected the proposal by simply not responding to it. Israel is even now willing to engage in direct, unconditional negotiations. The Palestinians refuse both. Yet the Obama administration formulates a policy to get tough with Israel.
There has been much recent speculation about the geostrategic thinking behind the emerging Obama administration stance. The grander strategy may be to settle the conflict to better contain Iran. In the shorter term, Obama may be seeking to destabilize Netanyahu’s governing coalition in the hope of bringing in more moderate Kadima leader Lipi Zivni. Keep in mind, though, that the still more left Labor Party is already in the coalition, and there is no indication that either Ehud Barak, who negotiated the Camp David and Taba agreements, or Labor icon, President Shimon Peres are at odds with the longstanding Jerusalem construction policy or the government’s position on negotiations. In any case, recent American behaviors to look tough with Israel and to angle into position in these strategies are very tenuous maneuvers toward very speculative outcomes. And in the meantime, at an unparalleled time of ill will and low sympathy for Israel, American positioning is now feeding the rampant misperceptions, even, as was too little recalled these past two weeks, the Netanyahu government had already agreed to a ten-month freeze in West Bank settlement growth.
It is difficult not to conclude that rather than Israel taking its U.S. ally for granted, it is the U.S. joining too much of the European continent in judging Israel by a double standard. Here is the Economist openly acknowledging what has long been known by Israel and its friends, that
criticism of Israel’s human-rights record has less to do with anti-Semitism than it does with the opposite. Western countries hold Israel to a different standard than they do Congo because they see in Israel a rich, Western-like, European-descended country. We in Europe and America judge Israel harshly not because Israelis are the Other, but because they’re unusually like us. Does Israel really want to be judged by the same standard we use to judge Omar al-Bashir? Now that would be anti-Semitism.
This attitude is a disgrace, simultaneously expressive of centuries-old colonial condescension toward non-European cultures, and perversely inverting anti-Semitism by discovering in the shine of admiration a new manner in which to treat Jews differently: they are almost like us, so we will judge them more harshly than their less admirable enemies. It has the stink of a rotting European corpse that should have been buried sometime between VE Day and the late afternoon that the last European flag was lowered over the last colony.
At the same time, the Sunday Times (UK) offers the latest elucidation of the festering prejudice against Israel at Human Rights Watch and UN Watch the same of the United Nations Human Rights Council. I gave some indication in Israel: Escaping the Image and Language Trap of the extent of the Palestinian culture of hate. There is, too, the odious BDS movement against Israel. And it is in this atmosphere that the Obama administration chose to “get tough” with Israel over the fiction of its resistance to negotiations and peace.
It is difficult not to conclude that the Obama foreign policy team, already confronting difficulties with the Muslim world, is reluctant to provoke more unsupportable accusations against it – by focusing a proper light on the Palestinian culture of hate and refusal – so, instead, offers up its democratic ally in an effort to curry favor with the Arab and Muslim worlds in its varied strategies. They think, they say, through all manner of leaks, they will win cooperation toward achieving a peace. They think this in contradiction of all evidence from the last ten years, the last twenty, the last sixty.
The settlements were a mistake, because they gave Israel’s enemies an opportunity to cast it in the wrong, rather than the people who for twenty-four years after the Six Day War refused to even speak of exchanging peace for land. But the settlements are there. The settlements should be dismantled, but not unilaterally. Nothing is gained unilaterally: that is established. They are bargaining chips, just as is every Palestinian demand on which the PA refuses to budge on its own. Bargaining chips – and Israel has demonstrated three times now that it is willing to put this one in the pot – are played in the game, not as a precondition for entering it. Preconditions are ruses for delaying the game, only another form of bargaining outside the game while offering nothing in return. No one plays poker like that.
Contrary to the Western tendency to believe that all conflict is the consequence of misunderstanding and the human frailty of miscommunication – that no side in conflict is ever, simply, wrong (unless it’s Israel) – the Palestinians have no genuine record of desiring an agreement to live in peace beside an Israeli state, and they continue to promote Israeli and Jew hatred and the hope that they can outlast Israel, even in the depths of their own suffering, and see its end. It has already been suggested in multiple places that what the developing Obama policy may counterproductively engender is greater Palestinian and Arab resistance – even more violence – as the Palestinians and their allies begin to believe the tide has turned in their favor.
What we may be witnessing is another historic error.
AJA
This entry was posted on
Monday, March 29th, 2010 at
12:30 pm by A. Jay Adler and is filed
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Julia and I have a very dear friend who, post divorce, and confronting the vagaries of life with determination – he began, this semester, an educational program aimed at a new career – has health insurance for his young daughter, but none for himself. A week ago he began feeling a “squeezing” pain in his chest, near his heart, and extending into his left shoulder and arm. It hurt. He took his daughter home to her mother and over the next two days debated with himself – much as my father did thirty-six years ago – whether what he was feeling merited action. Finally, he went to the emergency room at USC University Hospital – a public, county hospital – in Los Angeles. After waiting five hours without being seen, he went home. The pain did not go away. Two days later he returned, waited thirteen hours, and was checked into a room. Tests so far show enzyme levels indicating that he experienced some kind of cardiac “event.” He is waiting on more tests.
Had his face hit the floor, of course, he would have been seen immediately.
from The Sad Red Reporter (Sunday March 28, 2010 Edition, with thanks to the New York Times)
At the Tea Party Express rally in Searchlight, Nevada, Sarah Palin declared, ““We’re saying the big government, big debt, Obama-Pelosi-Reid spending spree is over, you’re fired!” she told the crowd. “We’re not going to sit down and shut up.”
“People huddled under blankets with their children and their coffee makers, and walked up the hills around the site carrying American and ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ flags.”
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s campaign tried to lure attendees to its own rally with doughnut holes and “herbal tea, because, a spokesman said, the Tea Party crowd did not seem to need more caffeine.”
“‘Liar, Thug, Traitor, Commie Usurper,’ read one woman’s homemade poster, next to a picture of President Obama as the devil.”
Speaker after speaker – including “Debbie Landis, the leader of Anger Is Brewing, a Nevada Tea Party group and local sponsor of the event” – “denounced Democrats for portraying Tea Party members as angry and violent.”
AJA
This entry was posted on
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I was going to post on Israel today. Recent developments are much in the news (Jeffrey Goldberg is even pausing to consider – “This is big stuff,” he says), and more than is generally the case, there is a sense of urgency, though nothing in particular is about to happen.
But this is the point.
There is never a sense of immediacy, do not conceive of urgency, about Native America or any indigenous peoples. But Indian Country Todayasks
Where do Indian nations go when United States’ courts have failed them, and justice is unattainable?
The Haudenosaunee Confederacy – the oldest continuous democratic government in North America – has long argued that Indian nations should not expect to win justice from colonizing governments, and instead must act as sovereign nations taking their quest for justice to the United Nations and its human rights mechanisms.
Though it claims to be a defender of human rights around the world, the United States is among the worst offenders of Native peoples’ rights, judging by statistics that indicate Indian women are the most raped and abused in the nation, while rampant poverty, disease, crime and unemployment are a way of life on reservations.
There’s also the inexplicably high number of Supreme Court cases decided against tribes that have led to the massive loss of Native lands and natural resources, most often without compensation.
The U.S. was even one of only four nations, along with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand – “countries with the largest indigenous populations who own vast amounts of land and natural resources” – not to ratify the 2007 U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Australia has since reversed its position, and Canada now indicates support.
That leaves the United States and New Zealand standing alone, refusing to support the basic human rights of the world’s 370 million indigenous peoples.
If there is some dream, then, of a higher moral, if not governing, authority, who can wonder that American Indians would seek assistance there?
The United Nations Human Rights Council has a recently (2006) created process called the Universal Periodic Review.
The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a unique process which involves a review of the human rights records of all 192 UN Member States once every four years. The UPR is a State-driven process, under the auspices of the Human Rights Council, which provides the opportunity for each State to declare what actions they have taken to improve the human rights situations in their countries and to fulfil their human rights obligations. As one of the main features of the Council, the UPR is designed to ensure equal treatment for every country when their human rights situations are assessed.
This, Native America thinks, is an opportunity.
Against that backdrop, the Human Rights Council is conducting a year-long Universal Period Review of the United States’ human rights record, holding “listening sessions” around the country, with two devoted to concerns of Native peoples.
A national report will be compiled and presented to the 47-member Human Rights Council that will make recommendations on how America can improve its compliance with international human rights obligations.
More than 100 people came to the University of New Mexico Law School to hear and present testimony from tribes and individuals about discriminatory and illegal tactics historically used by the federal government to confiscate land, natural resources, even children, and to suppress their rights to self-determination.
Among them were at least nine top-level officials from the Obama administration who were sent from the departments of Justice, Housing, Health, Education and Agriculture to listen and help formulate solutions for Indian country.
But like the dream of justice for indigenous peoples, moral clarity – moral consensus – can be a vision sought on the face of moving waters. Among the current member nations of the HRC with appalling records in human rights and democracy are China, Cuba, Egypt, Nigeria, and Russia. Many others are problematic to lesser degrees. In the matter of indigenous populations, the Taino of Cuba suffered one of the most complete genocidal destructions of an indigenous population in history. Of course, the communist government of the Castros claims to have risen above such colonial crimes, but just weeks ago dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo died in prison as the long-term consequence of racial discrimination in Cuba against Afro-Cubans. The HRC has amply demonstrated its pathological bias against Israel, most recently in the mockery of international human rights investigations that was the Goldstone Report, and, like the Commission on Human Rights before it, which it replaced for just this reason, has served for non-Western, Arab, Muslim, and often undemocratic nations as a vehicle through which to wield human rights values against democracies.
Yet why should Native America concern itself with these problematics of postcolonial contention and international governance? The greatest instances, by far, of genocidal destruction and conquest of indigenous populations were carried out by the Western nations. Even today, Johnson v. M’Intosh, the Supreme Court’s 1923 Dred Scot decision for American Indians, is still prevailing law – the decision justifying the conquest of Native America by right of “discovery,” through extension of the Discovery Doctrine proclaimed by the colonizing European powers, and traceable to Pope Nicholas V’s papal bull Romanus Pontifex in 1452.
Though individual Indians and Indian communities are often deeply proud of their patriotism and wartime service – visit the veteran’s cemetery on the Navajo Reservation in Window Rock, Arizona and be struck by the sea of American flags set against the sky off Route 12 – what argument can possibly be made that Native America should deny itself recourse to the organization that made its declaration of indigenous peoples’ rights, while the nation they inhabit still denies them so much justice and accepts as law a court decision that declares them “an inferior race of people, without the privileges of citizens, and under the perpetual protection and pupilage of the government”?
So the Period Review will find, without doubt, historical, pervasive, and deeply troubling violations of Native rights. And those inclined to excuse and deny the history and the violations, and who are probably opponents, even in principle, of the U.N., even before the HRC, will use the genuine weakness of the former, and the taint of the latter, to reject the findings.
The hope for some continued redress, following upon the Obama administration’s settlement of the thirteen-year Individual Indian Money Trust Fund suit, may rest only on the continued genuine good will of the current president. Two years ago, when I wrote “Aboriginal Sin” for Tikkun, I addressed, along with IIM trust suit, the Supreme Court’s 1980 finding for the Sioux regarding the theft of the Black Hills of South Dakota.
Chairwoman Theresa Two Bulls of the Oglala Sioux, accompanied by Lakota attorney Mario Gonzalez, recounted the many treaty violations that led up to the “legalized theft” of more than 48 million acres of their homeland under the Indian Claims Commission….
The Lakota leadership of treaty chiefs and elected officials have long refused to accept money for the Black Hills, a sacred place….
“We’ve come to the realization that the courts of the United States are not designed to protect the Oglala Sioux’s interests in our claims to ancestral lands and resources. Rather, they are designed to protect the interests of non-Indians who have settled on tribal lands,” Two Bulls said. “The only viable remedy we have to settle our land claims is through negotiating with Congress.”
She was encouraged by President Barack Obama’s statement regarding the Sioux land claims indicating he did not believe the courts or federal government should force Sioux tribes to take settlement money for the Black Hills.
“He said he was open to bringing together all parties through government-to-government negotiations to explore innovative solutions to this long-standing issue,” she said, giving her people hope that the tribe will be able to obtain the return of federally held lands….
and compensation for the denial of the “exclusive use and occupation of the Black Hills as guaranteed by the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.”
Elections, as the truism states, have consequences. So far, in this last, for those without heath care protection. Maybe, slowly, slowly, for American Indians too.
AJA
This entry was posted on
Friday, March 26th, 2010 at
11:00 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed
under Indian Country.
Of course, the Pubs despise her. More, less than Obama? Is she Goering? Goebbels? (How did we ever revile people before we had Nazi references? I know – anti-Christ.) And, of course, Tom Delay was so much more attractive a figure. The truth is – one more “of course” – were she doing what she does for them, for their ideas, they’d put her lipstick on a pig and frolic in the trough.
Maybe, after all, Russia and American can be, should be, and are strategic partners. And maybe the U.S. should trust Russia on its Iranian policies, taking into consideration such facts as that Russia has a five-century-long (!!!) intelligence presence in Iran, that Iran’s every nuclear-related facility is flooded with Russian experts and spies, and that an Islamic nuclear-armed nation on Russia’s border is the last thing Russian leadership and people would ever want.
The federal government took all the risk of the loans, the “free market” banks reaped the fees and profits. This should have made neither liberal nor conservative happy.
Ending one of the fiercest lobbying fights in Washington, Congress voted Thursday to force commercial banks out of the federal student loan market, cutting off billions of dollars in profits in a sweeping restructuring of financial-aid programs and redirecting most of the money to new education initiatives.
The revamping of student-loan programs was included in — if overshadowed by — the final health care package. The vote was 56 to 43 in the Senate and 220 to 207 in the House, with Republicans unanimously opposed in both chambers.
According to the CBO, this direct lending will save $61 billion over ten years, “directing $36 billion over 10 years to Pell grants, for students from low-income families.” The legislation does not place any legal bar on banks offering their own student loan products, programs through which the banks, operating as true free enterprises, might assume the risk and receive any profits. What’s to complain?
“The Democratic majority decided, well look, while we’re at it, let’s have another Washington takeover,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and a former federal education secretary. “Let’s take over the federal student loan program.”
In other words, “Keep your federal hands off our federal student loan program.” Incoherence, Republican is thy name.
AJA
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Friday, March 26th, 2010 at
5:51 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed
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No, what Democrats should do is try to cover up the political psychosis that has gripped elements of the GOP and conservative movements. There are two defining elements of political extremism. One is the loss of judgment, the broken mental scale by which phenomena are analyzed and evaluated, in themselves, in their analogical relation to other phenomena, and in their significance. The other is the self-justifying mechanism by which excessive behavior, the breaking of boundaries of behavior – even to the point of violence – finds its ground in the faulty judgment. A war with which one disagrees and a level of social inequity that one, in one’s own mind, judges, literally, to be intolerable, justifies Weather Underground violence. Abortion justifies the murder of doctors. We’re killing the animals: we have to throw blood in people’s faces. We’re polluting the air with auto emissions: we have to blow up Hummers. The extreme manifestations of anti-Obamaism (which have now displayed themselves far too long and in too many instances and varieties to be dismissed as the meaningless flotsam and jetsam of vigorous democratic debate) justify a whole lot of ugly and ignorant behavior, so far, that clearly has violent inclinations among some, and that is encouraged by conservative voices. All that macho verbal posturing: lock and load.
“Let’s beat the other side to a pulp!” Rep. Steve King, Republican of Iowa, shouted to the last stand of Tea Partiers on Sunday night. “Let’s chase them down! There’s going to be a reckoning.”
Yesterday on this blog, a commenter insisted, responding without embarrassment to the embarrassing Harris Poll, that Obama is like Hitler because – are your ready? – Hitler pursued health care reform too. And he was interested in – the environment. For which those fuel guzzling Panzers and the crematoria proved a healthful balm.
Of course, if one would, which one won’t, one would hardly know where to begin. But for now, here are two places to end.
If I thought the president of the United States was in any measure at all like Hitler (we don’t have anti-Christ’s in my world – might just as well call him a big doodie) – I mean, really – really – really, like Hitler – I know what I’d be doing, and it wouldn’t be attending tea parties or flaming on blogs.
If you are an individual of cosmopolitan inclination, yet native affections, you are bound to have moments that rupture your sensibilities. On the eve of the new millennium, Julia and I were in Venice with our dear friends Ashley and Mark, all of us marveling at how an event long anticipated in the far horizon of our lives had arrived so quickly. One day we wandered the Piazza San Marco, my mind traveling among cultural associations both sublime and sublimely ordinary, and decided to ascend the campanile, or bell tower. Julia and Ashley descended before us, as Mark and I lingered over the view. When at last Mark and I entered the elevator for our own return to ground, we found ourselves with two companions – two other Americans, as traveling fate will have it. In fact, they were a couple from New York, an Italian-American couple. Practically homies to us, Mark being a native New Yorker also, the two were making their first visit to the ancestral home. I felt that warmth one feels encountering another person from home while traveling in a foreign land. It was only when Mr. Homie asked, “Where youze guyz from?” that I realized I was sharing an elevator with Paulie Walnuts.
We told him.
“L.A.?” Paulie declared. “Everybody in L.A.’s whacked –”
He pointed his index finger to his head, his thumb cocked.
“They’re all whacked.”
Clinical diagnosis? Prediction of the largest rub out on record? He was a master of ambiguity, that Paulie.
Sometimes one engages in analysis, and there will be analysis for decades to come of what happened to American conservatism in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and the various forces – political hacks, politicians, think tanks, media personalities and organizations, and some purported intellects – that produced this dreadful phenomenon.
Other times one needs to be allowed to be stopped by wonder, to stand in dread and amazement. The wonder? How anyone who is not so untethered from reality as to believe any of these things, who might actually hold cogent and respectable conservative political views, does not cringe with embarrassment at the possibility of any association with this catastrophe. I suggested some months back that the GOP had gone of Prozac. It begins to appear antipsychotics are more like it.
AJA
This entry was posted on
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at
9:50 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed
under The Political Animal.
So, post the Biden-visit contretemps, the Quartet, including the United States, has a second time condemned Israel’s housing construction plans in East Jerusalem, and the Netanyahu government has offered, privately, to take “confidence-building” measures to further the path of negotiations via the current “proximity talks” proposal. Where does that leave matters?
People who know internal Israeli politics and government processes far better than I have offered scenarios by which the housing start announcement during the Biden visit could have occurred without any intended insult. The intentional insult makes no sense in any analysis anyway, except one habitually hateful toward Israel and intended itself to promote the impression of Israeli arrogance. Unfortunately, appearances during a hateful period cooperate in reinforcing this general impression. Widespread and growing Israeli disgust and dismissal of the international bias against it, and a millennially-seasoned sense of beleaguered Jewish resistance, serve to reinforce the prevalent perception. The disgust is justified. The dismissal proves repeatedly to be counterproductive.
This last point should not be overstated. Even when Israel shows its best face, there is little if any reward in the public playhouse. The hate mongers were all over the low channels of media disparaging with anti-Semitic paranoia the extraordinary Israeli contribution in Haiti. The video below offers its own symbolic representation, in microcosm, of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren confronts organized disruption of his recent speech at UC Irvine. In what is now the time-honored tradition of self-righteously preening student activists of all eras since the 60s, the students stand according to a choreography of ugly and cowardly denunciation even as it has been made clear to them by their Irvine hosts and by Oren himself that an actual exchange of ideas would be welcome. In the end, the students exit en masse, and Oren remarks sadly to the supportive audience that remains that he is happy to have them, but it is those who left to whom he needed and wished to speak. Substitute the Israeli acceptance of the 1948 partition, and a willingness to live in peace beside a new Arab neighbor, met by sixty plus years of rejection, war, and terror, and you have not a video short, but the full-length film.
Still, circumstances are what they are, and Jews have been masters at adapting to them.
There has been much speculation, too, about the motivations and strategy of the Obama administration. Two groups view the administration’s course very negatively. One is the Israelis themselves. Another is hawkish elements in the U.S. who despise Obama anyway and who project upon him an antipathy for Israel that is only a projection of their own for him, reinforced by his mishandling of Israel and the Palestinians.
The Israelis feel no favor on more reasonable grounds. What exactly has been the Obama plan? The focus on a blanket suspension of “settlement” activity, framed to include housing construction in East Jerusalem – which the U.S. well and long knew, and previously accepted, that Israel categorized differently from the West Bank – in effect mandated the Palestinians do the same and set such a suspension as a precondition for direct talks. A wasted year, and more, has ensued. That could have been no one’s plan.
In addition to simple bungling, two other broad considerations are reasonable, not exclusive of that first. It is reasonable to perceive that uncritical support – love, let us say – of the kind the Bush administration demonstrated, may have done its job, as has lengthier U.S. support in general, in helping to maintain Israeli security, but it has achieved nothing since the Camp David accords in delivering peace or a final settlement. It may well be – I believe it is so – that the Obama administration wants to achieve a peace, and it is willing, in appearance, to love Israel a little less, and be loved back less by Israelis, in order to accomplish it. Foreign policy is, after all, not a love fest, even with allies. It is about pursuing national interests, and American national interests are neither served by Israeli settlements on the West Bank nor by exactly how much of Jerusalem Israel may retain after a final peace.
The second broad consideration, again not exclusive of the others, is that the Obama administration – and that must mean Obama himself – rather than perceive the consistent historical truth of The Refusal, has accepted the currently conventional Israel-Palestinian narrative, the “Israel-is-the-problem” narrative. That narrative assumes and even states outright the usual encomiums for Israel and the Jewish people, acknowledges all of the historical justifications for a Jewish state in Israel, but spins a tale that six decades of conflict-induced callousness, and over three decades of Biblically-driven acquisitiveness for the full extent of the ancient land, have made Israel – the party with the apparent power to give, in contrast to the Palestinians, who have so little – as much, or more, the obstacle to peace as the Palestinians.
How this narrative became conventionally accepted has been addressed by many, but to the degree that there was ever an element of truth, Barry Rubin has reminded us that such a storyline is already two decades out of date.
Among Palestinians, as more broadly with almost all of the public in the Muslim-majority world and a lot of the elite classes in Europe, there exists a mythical Israel, reminiscent of the fabricated antisemitic stereotypes of the past, that has little to do with reality. They believe Israel isn’t interested in peace, doesn’t offer the Palestinians anything, opposes any real Palestinian state, intends to keep the West Bank (until Israel’s withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip they would have added that territory as well), and is led by intransigent hardliners. Such a conception was comprehensible–if not fully accurate–describing the situation in parts of the 1980s but has nothing to do with the last 20 years.
In 2010 they have no idea what Israel actually offered in the 1990s’ peace process, or at the Camp David summit in 2000, or what President Bill Clinton offered with Israel’s agreement in December 2000, or what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proffered in 2008, or what is in the current Israeli government’s peace offer in 2010. All proposed the creation of an independent Palestinian state, the first three in close to 100 percent and the last three as equivalent to 100 percent (with some small, equal land swaps) in size to the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip.
Lacking any knowledge of these offers, or at least knowing only very distorted ones, they can maintain that Israel has offered “nothing” and that therefore the continuation of the conflict is not due to Palestinian intransigence but Israel’s alleged opposition to the creation of a real independent Palestinian state.
Remarkably, particularly so with Hilary Clinton as secretary of state, this is the storyline from which the Obama administration is attempting to write a final chapter.
Now consider, against the backdrop of the history Rubin briefly recapped – the several proposals over a near twenty-year period, far from its deepest wishes, that Israel has made or been ready to accept, against none by the Palestinians but their extreme starting position – consider how the Palestinians behave while the Quartet concentrates on longstanding housing policies in East Jerusalem.
The unremitting, and well-known educational indoctrination in anti-Semitic hate via Palestinian schools and media, reported on most recently by the British Taxpayer’s Alliance, which is tracking British and European Union financial support for these activities.
The glorification of inarguable murderers through public dedications and memorials, even as Israel is roundly being excoriated for constructing apartments, as soon as Vice-President Biden leaves the territories.
In a forty-eight hour period beginning on Christmas Eve 2008 the Christian fundamentalist Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) killed, dismembered and burned at least 200 Congolese civilians. Soldiers raped women and girls, twisted the heads off babies, and cut the lips and ears off those they did not kill. They hacked the rest to death using machetes or axes. Child soldiers helped abduct other children.
During the same period the Israeli government and Hamas officials entered the final stages of failing ceasefire talks. War was on the horizon, but had not yet begun. An errant Hamas rocket killed two Gazan sisters; otherwise there were no cross-border casualties.
According to AlertNet’s World Press Tracker, the two-day Israeli-Palestinian stand-off was reported in the global media forty times.[i] There were no reports on the LRA massacre in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Over the next three weeks Israel’s incursion into Gaza left 926 Palestinian and three Israeli civilians dead. The global media reported these events 2896 times. In the same period, Joseph Kony’s LRA killed 865 civilians and abducted 160 children. The media reported these events a total of twenty times.
The Western media’s fascination with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has long overshadowed death and oppression in other parts of the world. Gilad Shalit and the Qassam rocket are known to many; the death of 5.9 million in the eight-nation Second Congo War is not. Recent Israeli and Palestinian elections were covered worldwide in real-time, while images of genocide in Rwanda and Sudan did not surface until it was too late. Countless articles argue media bias in favour of Israel or the Palestinians, yet few address the media bias towards the conflict itself.
These are all merely among the most up-to-the-minute representations of a complex of intellectual, ideological, and moral misalliances that constitute or contribute to anti-Zionism, even by many who do not think themselves anti-Zionist, who claim to be supporters of Israel. One contributing factor is the truism, repeated to the point of near triteness, that Israel has an “image” problem. But only the language can become trite, not the problem itself, and language cannot only be, but be made to be part of the problem.
To even speak of an “image” problem is to engage the superficial, to appear to be concerned only with appearance, and not the underlying substance. To be perceived as engaging appearances – appearances that, of course, can determine how people perceive substance (and this is why public relations exists) – is thus already to undermine a PR effort aimed, perhaps, only at more successfully disseminating the truth. The language of appearance, the language of influence, becomes part of the problem, a tool to be turned against Israel as a weapon. Note how Israel’s public diplomacy efforts, its public relations, expressed in Hebrew as hasbara, are turned against Israel via an almost invisible, instrumentally racialist linguistic campaign, in the persistent use, by non-Hebrew speakers, of the insidious foreign word – hasbara – which in its foreignness, its cognitive unfamiliarity, conveys the sinister concealment of true meaning and motive.
This quality of sinister concealment is not inherent in a word or a language. It is, in its foreignness, simply other, so the foreignness is appropriated as a vehicle for an attitude. The very reverse occurs in the standardized use of Intifada by non-Arabic speakers, a term that in its own foreignness, beyond its literal meaning, tends further to ennoble and hallow. In the reverse, again, how convenient for anti-Zionists and racists of all kinds that Jewish nationalism had its own word, Zionism. The very word is made unattractive through persistent labeling. It is not, certainly in English, a euphonic word. It shares that insidious “z” phoneme with – how curious, some must think – Nazi, which makes it easy to conjure the sinister in the voicing of it, an effect not lost on formative and progressive young political minds longing to be humane and just. Easy, then, in the shameful yet renascent past, to pass a U.N. resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism, like Nazism. Phonetic guilt by association helps poison the well.
What, then, to do? We can only speak in language, and we cannot regulate its use and misuse by free agents everywhere. What can be done, however, is to attach substance to substance, unyieldingly connect action to action. Whatever conditions for negotiations are placed on Israel by outside parties or demanded of it by the Palestinian authority, these conditions should be answered not simply by defensive explanation – as that the current policy of construction in East Jerusalem is the same as it has been for forty-two years, and that conditioning the policy now does not seek to clear the way to negotiations, but, in fact, to raise to obstacles to it. These conditions should, further, be consistently and unvaryingly linked to counter conditions.
The PA and the Quartet should be reminded without cessation that Israel is always ready to negotiate unconditionally, as it is now, but that for every condition placed on it, a condition in return will be demanded. Every demand on Israel should be countered by demands for systematic and verifiable alterations in Palestinian school curricula and textbooks and bans on media incitement to Jew hatred. Every time a PA representative or an EU or UN or even U.S. official mentions settlements or housing construction as an obstacle to peace, an Israeli official should speak publicly in response of hate education and anti-Semitic Palestinian media broadcasts. There should no official reference to one without official reference to the other.
Let the condemnation of settlements be faced page to opposing page with the glorification of martyrdom to children, and let’s find out how that story ends.
…I did not wonder, as I did before leaving, whether the world might spin askew in consequence of my bloglessness. (I was, I confess, guiltlessly schlepping, nesting and playing.) Consider, then, my total shock and no little dismay at discovering that our fragile planet has, indeed – according to measurements from the International Society of Bloggers’ own Earth Gyration Observatory (EGO) – developed a micro-wobble.
Conclusion?
This is a job for – Superblogger!
What I noted along the way, now (oh, thank goodness) commented upon.
and his provocative Red Tory ideas. It’s worth recalling, though, what we regularly forget once convinced of a present excess – that its opposite, shining ideally in its apparent absence, also has flaws. Toward overturning centralized market power, Blond makes the call, in Brooks’ words, to “remoralize the market.” Difficult to do, since the market, of course, has never functioned in any era significantly more moral than the current, and its moderations have always been the product of regulations by a central, not decentralized, authority. To counter centralized social power, Blond calls, like those oh, so compassionate American conservatives, for greater reliance on private charities. But it is beyond easy for post-Depression era generations to forget to recall the nature of poor and elderly life in the U.S. before Social Security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, and Medicaid and Medicare, and one tends not to hear too greatly much of the social evil of these programs from those whose lives bounced off the net because of them.
Since inequalities of privilege are greater than could possibly be defended rationally, the intelligence of privileged groups is usually applied to the task of inventing specious proofs for the theory that universal values spring from, and that general interests are served by, the special privileges which they hold.
I think there’s something to be said about political correctness on the Left, about hate crimes legislation, about affirmative action etc. But these are problems that American conservatives don’t have to answer for, in large measure, because they’ve been utter cowards in the face of some of the greatest moral issues of our time.
Moreover they have used a skepticism of change, to mask a defense of institutional evil. In the South in 1860, the conservative position was to defend slavery. It was, after all, an ancient institution, with seemingly Biblical sanction. It was the “Radical” Republicans who gave the franchise to black people, while conservatives embraced phrenology and racist psuedo-science.
In the 20th century, it was conservative intellectual William Buckley who defended white supremacy in the South. I hear people talking about how National Review–a magazine that speculated that the Birmingham bombing was the work of a “crazed Negro”– has, of late, betrayed its holy intellectual roots and I wonder what planet they’ve been living on. People mournfully claim that conservatism has “died,” and I wonder if they’ve forgotten what “conservatism” had to say to black people in apartheid South Africa. Meanwhile, conservative intellectuals are attacking gay marriages because it might reinforce “black social failure.” These are the intellectuals.
There is a fundamental problem here, one that can’t be elided by pointing out the differences between “true” conservatism and Republicans. A bias toward time-tested, societal institutions almost necessarily means a bias toward institutional evil. Likewise, a skepticism of change almost necessarily means a skepticism of those who seek to expand democracy beyond property-owning white men. Taken in sum you have an ideology, whatever its laudable merits, that will almost always, necessarily, look charitably upon those with power, or those who control the institutions, and skeptically upon those without power, or those who seek to change those institutions.
Ron Paul’s Pot Pissed In
The latest in Adam Holland’s ongoing exploration of the crackedness of Paul’s pot.
Clarence Thomas – Wrong for the Court Then, Wrong Now
Linda Greenhouse notes an anniversary in Clarence Thomas’s long and loud silence on the Supreme Court. Worth noting, too, is that as recently as Safford United School District #1 v. Redding, Thomas demonstrated again that he cannot reason in the manner one should anticipate of a jurist in a post-enlightenment democracy. When school administrators could find no pharmaceuticals on the person of a 13 year-old middle school student, rather than conclude it both reasonable and proper for administrators to presume and, as well, induce the probability, that the student, in the absence of any other evidence, had no drugs on her, Thomas, alone among the nine justices, thought this all the more reason to strip search her. Growing evidence of the falsity of a proposition was, for Thomas, further, radical argument for its truth. However, as long ago as 1992’s Hudson v. McMillian, Greenhouse tells us, Thomas, along with the more nimble, but no more enlightened Antonin Scalia, was arguing for meaningful distinction between a prisoner’s sentence, and the prisoner’s treatment during incarceration after the sentence. The persistence of an event, for Thomas, is entirely separable in nature from the initiating occurrence of the event, i.e. beating and rape as a sentence – cruel and unusual; beating and rape during incarceration – not so cruel, not so unusual (well, yeah), not what concerned the framers. A medieval casuist trying Galileo, sure. A twenty-first century legal mind, no.
In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.
The book is causing a stir. I probably won’t read it. Shields and I, it appears, operate off different motherboards. In the twenty-first century Celebritorium, when publicly-made lives – lives made for the public – are vacuities seeking to suck mind and soul from those who gaze too long, the people who actually earn our attention, and real people living off the notorious grid, the kind imaginatively captured in, say, my current read, Alice Munro’s Too Much Happiness, may be our only salvation.
In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”
No shit? Back to the hive, but in bytes? That’s what it’s all been about? Hey, I lived for it. Sample your own anonymous ass, mutherfucker.
Unless, of course, you can get me on a Grecian Urn…
The father of the thought, of course, is J. V. Cunningham, whose “Logic and Lyric,” originally published in Modern Philology in 1953, argues that the structure of the syllogism is one means to organize a poem, “a way of disposing of, of making a place for, elements of a different order.” His example, which changed the course of its interpretation, is Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress with its clear argument:
Major premise Had we world enough, and time,
This coyness, Lady, were no crime. . . .
Minor premise But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near. . . .
Conclusion Now, therefore,
. . . . . . . .
Now let us sport us while we may. . . .
Adam Kirsch Reviews Derek Wolcott Perusing Yeats’ “Foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” in White Egrets
…the drumming world that dampens your tired eyes
behind two clouding lenses, sunrise, sunset,
the quiet ravages of diabetes.
Accept it all with level sentences,
with sculpted settlement that sets each stanza,
learn how the bright lawn puts up no defences
against the egret’s stabbing questions and the night’s answer.
Nick Cohen Tells a Tale of Ian McEwan’s Tale of Martin Amis’s Encounter with Liberal Cowardice
The process by which one ill-tempered meeting in the autumn of 2007 has come to stand for a whole compromised intellectual culture, must also seem to the ICA to be so random as to be incomprehensible. If Reidy had not been in the audience, if Arena had not commissioned me to write a profile of Amis, if McEwan had not been Amis’s friend, then the meeting would have been forgotten….
If supposed liberals refuse to oppose movements that are “irrationalist, misogynist, homophobic, inquisitional, totalitarian, imperialist and genocidal,” it is always worth condemning them wherever and however they do it.
Read it all. Follow all the links. It is rich – very, very rich.
And then there was that kerfuffle in Jerusalem, but on that, tomorrow.
“Thanks, Superblogger. You saved the world!”
AJA
This entry was posted on
Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at
1:00 am by A. Jay Adler and is filed
under The Political Animal.
be a bar by which they … one goes to prison for these kinds of lies.
Hezbollah, among others, which are the most feared terrorist movements in the world?
and Oliver Stones who romance with Chavez as they still offer themselves virginally to the Castros, are not living in 1936. Just as those on the right with any political acuity should see in Limbaugh, Beck, and Palin the bombastic divisiveness, buffoonery, and ignorance they play upon the stage for the price of admission and autographs, anyone on the left with more will to see the truth than will to believe should recognize the god that failed each time he comes for communion.
