Iran and the Jews

My position on war with Iran has been the same for some time -- I am against it. An American, NATO or Western-coalition attack on Iran would be a humanitarian disaster; militarily useless; and a catastrophic signal to the large segment of Iranians who are pro-Western and anti-totalitarian that the mullahs were right all along.

This is not mitigated or refuted by acknowledging the genocidal nature of Iran's theocratic war party, which is stridently represented by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But where there is a war party, there is some kind of peace party, and Iran's is significant. Iran has never initiated a conventional assault on any state and appears to respond rationally to diplomatic and military pressure.

Still the threat posed by the mullahs' millenarian Islam to Middle East Jewry must be acknowledged. It is -- I state with stoical restraint -- of interest to people of liberal sentiment. Iran has long fought a war against the Jews and the state where they ingathered after the Holocaust. It does this through millenarian proxies such as Hezbollah and more recently Hamas. If Iran eventually manages to weaponize uranium meant for its sham civil energy program, its nuclear arsenal will either back traditional or comprise a new breed of attacks on the Jewish state.

These are key reasons to vigorously confront the efforts of putatively anti-war campaigners, armed with the pseudo-scholarship of Juan Cole, to minimize or falsify Ahmadinejad's call for Israel's destruction at the 2005 World Without Zionism conference in Tehran. These are lies of an illiberal segment of the Left that, for a complex set of ideological reasons, privileges the well-being of Muslims over Jews.

Sadly there are reverberations of this among the liberal elite. A week ago, the New York Times Sunday Book Review published a survey of working writers' book recommendations for the Presidential candidates. This was before Hillary Clinton bowed out. The writer Junot Diaz addressed this to her:


An exquisite pomposity inhabits allegorical writing as tone-deaf as this. Hillary’s promise to "obliterate" Iran was made in narrow reply to the hypothetical of its launching a nuclear attack on Israel. I shouldn't have to point out that this would result in the destruction of almost as many Jews as were killed by Nazi Germany. Diaz is oblivious to this. Robotically he likens Hillary to a golem -- mindless and bloodthirsty -- who targets innocent Iranians with her "genocidal impulses", and he does this by invoking Pharoah, Biblical captor of the Jews!

This is not the usual argument, in which people claim that irrespective of its ideological commitments and arsenal, Iran would not commit suicide by directly attacking Israel. Instead Diaz accepts that Iran has destroyed Israel and responds only by adducing the Armenians to speak truth to American power.

The Jews also know something about being obliterated, Mr. Diaz. It is knowledge that electrifies the machinery of real humanitarianism.

Labels: illiberal liberals, iran, islamism, israel, juan cole, new antisemitism

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The Anti-Totalitarian Future?

In the New York Times, Stephen Farrell reports there are only a handful of known Jews left in Iraq. What was presumably the last operating synagogue closed in 2003 when the chaos became too dire. Matthew Yglesias derives the following from the story:


That's precisely the upshot a "reality-based" liberal would take from it, but it's historically illiterate. To be fair Farrell's article encourages a hasty reader to make that interpretation, but in Yglesias' case this appears to be just anti-Bush snark. One is wrong, the other wrong-headed. In The Assassins' Gate, George Packer makes it clear that Saddam's "anti-Zionism" -- the euphemism used by both Yglesias and Farrell -- so thoroughly poisoned younger generations of Iraqis that Iraqi Jews had basically become cryptids by the time of the invasion. The synagogue that closed in 2003 must have been an outlier.

Gate also illuminates the quote at the end of Farrell's piece, in which the main interviewee's father laments that he "used to spend more time with Arabs than Jews". He, an octogenarian, is referring to comity with Iraqi Muslims of his generation, their children and their childrens' children. These are people who formed their opinions about Jews before the anti-Semitism of the Baathist regime corrupted the later generations.

Insofar as it's particular to them, the situation today for Jews in Iraq has only a little to do with the Gulf actions. Our invasion has inflamed the Baathist die-hards and Islamist conspirazoids, but those processes were well under way during the inter-war years. It's true the chaos resulting from the stupidity and incompetence of the occupation has accelerated and amplified all kinds of violence. But to fold up your Times, rest it beside your latte, tisk and tick this off as one more "upshot" of Bush's war is just dilettantism. It collapses the history of Iraqi anti-Semitism -- which replayed across the Arab and Muslim world -- and yokes it to a cheap, partisan point.

Neoconservatism is the mullet of American politics. If Obama becomes President, a "reality-based" liberalism will be in the ascendant. It's interesting to consider what these people choose to notice and when.

Postscript: An older, related post.

Labels: bush, iraq, liberalism, matthew yglesias, new antisemitism, reality-based community

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The Anti-War Conscience

Manouchehr Mottaki, the foreign minister of Iran, has echoed his president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for Israel's destruction:


This latter point is key. When Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be wiped off the map at the World Without Zionism conference in Tehran, Foreign Minister Mottaki was one of the Iranian government officials who came forward claiming that Ahmadinejad didn't really mean what he said. This fueled both the notions that the Iranian president was merely speaking metaphorically, and that no matter what he meant, Ahmadinejad is just a "puppet" whose opinions will not translate into government policy. Mottaki's defense was interpreted as a demurral to hard-line sabre-rattling by saner elements in the Iranian government.

Now, if we work within the framework set by Ahmadinejad's apologists in 2005, Iran's war party appears to have enlarged, but we need not do to be alarmed. Mottaki's foreign ministry also has been busy reassuring Hamas that a Syrian détente with Israel will not lessen Iran's support for its genocidal enterprise.

When Ahmadinejad trumpeted his desire to see Israel destroyed, a clutch of liars arose to retail the disinformation that he was mistranslated. They were led by Juan Cole and largely comprised left-wing foes of Israel. Minimizing or falsifying his words, they alternately claimed that he was expressing simple anti-Zionism, that he was calling for mere regime change, and, most risibly, in the words of Cole himself, that Ahmadinejad's statement was "in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem."

Insofar as Mottaki's echo of Ahmadinejad is noticed at all -- so far almost no one is reporting it -- it will be answered by the same apologists, who will do anything, even extenuate plainly genocidal decrees against Jews, to prevent a war against Iran. This is the "anti-war" conscience.

Labels: ahmadinejad, illiberal liberals, iran, israel, juan cole, mottaki, new antisemitism

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Illegal Wiretapping, Indeed

Glenn Greenwald's trial conduct found "unethical"

Glenn Greenwald is a self-made blogging phenomenon, for which you have to respect him, even though he is probably the single most obnoxious writer on the Internet. His prose style is a groaning Frankenstein of juvenile syntax -- Tourettic scare quotes, volume-11 hyperbole -- bolted onto sentences that have the grace of nose-diving zeppelins. And his ego is galactic.

The worldly avatar of Greenwald's ego takes the shape of the Jew who will ostentatiously disregard his Jewishness to defend our country's founding principles. His public career began with him defending in a series of civil suits the First Amendment rights of the leader of the World Church of the Creator, a white-supremacist named Matthew Hale, who is presently serving a 40-year sentence for soliciting the murder of "Jew rat" Judge Joan Lefkow. Of the plaintiffs in two of these suits -- the Center for Constitutional Rights, William Kunstler's legal advocacy group that focuses on human rights litigation, and the Reverend Stacy William Anderson, a pastor who was shot by a rampaging follower of Hale's -- Greenwald observed, "I find that the people behind these lawsuits are truly so odious and repugnant, that creates its own motivation for me."

Now he's on a crusade to prevent war with Iran, and he's sounding the reveille that "neocons" -- ahem -- and "the Israelis... [are] as transparent as they are dishonest and bloodthirsty."

And there's a whole bunch more in between, such as praise for Walt and Mearsheimer (their book was "important, richly documented") and Israel-hating spook journalist James Bamford (he's "superb"), outrage over Israel's refusal to welcome Norman "Holocaust Industry" Finkelstein, a falsification of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for Israel's destruction, and a decree that the Israeli occupation is the primary cause of radical foment in the Muslim world. He offers the latter diagnosis prescriptively, of course, as he is a Paulite non-interventionist dressed up as a Left Democrat, seeking to disentangle us from that shitty, little country.

On the other side of the coin, Greenwald can be spot-on when he's taking down right-wing hypocrisy, such as here, and especially when mocking the office pantomime of masculinity performed by that doughy chorus of pundits led by Jonah Goldberg and James Taranto. He's also voluminous on the subject of Constitutional Law and its antagonist in the Bush Administration. I'm not able to judge these writings, but I trust them a lot more than his flatulent emanations on foreign policy, as Greenwald is a former Wachtell litigator. In particular, he's had a lot to say about the Bush Administration's extensive, illegal wiretapping.

Which is why I note with a sense of irony that during his defense of Matthew Hale, Greenwald was found in court to have illegally recorded conversations he had with various of Hale's associates. I have no clue how to properly cite cases, but the document is entitled:


and in it we find the following


Greenwald and Hale lost both motions relating to Greenwald's misconduct, and lost again on appeal.


After disclosure was eventually made, the elaborateness of Greenwald's deceit came to light:


This hardly raises to the level of a Constitutional violation of privacy by the Executive, but Greenwald is never so strident as he is when exposing what he perceives to be hypocrisy. I suppose, though, we wouldn't receive the bounty of our self-anointed protectors if they were encumbered by the lofty sense of ethics they bear down on others.

Labels: glenn greenwald

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Obama, the Jews and Israel

There's a persistent, nasty notion that Barack Obama is bad for the Jews. It crests and falls rhythmically in public discourse, and I hear it expressed by Jews I know. The sense is Obama places somewhere on a spectrum between a latte-drinking, liberal milquetoast and a black anti-Semite. Wherever the dart sticks, it will be bad for Israel.

As someone who has spent years writing about foes of Israel, subtle and overt, and specifically these two types that supposedly bookend Obama, I'd like to go on record saying this is top-shelf, triple-distilled horseshit.

Over the next months, we'll come to see the fullness of Obama's foreign policy vision. We already have a fairly good sense of what it will be like. Some of it strikes me as vaporous, some of it seems groan-inducingly soft. Some of it makes sense. Most of it -- even stuff I don't agree with -- is fair enough after seven years of calamity at home and abroad.

As a policy package, it may ultimately fail, but none of it will be inimical to the Jews or Israel. Understandably, a lot of Obama supporters wanted to brush aside the Jeremiah Wright kerfuffle, but I thought it was fair to ask why the hell he would associate himself with a half-crazy demagogue like that. However, I'm satisfied that Obama was simply trying to shore up his cred with African-Americans, understand their milieu better, and above all find his faith. I simply don't think he has the slightest time for the victimology, the street-scholarship or the Jew-baiting buffoonery of the incredibly selfish man who was his pastor.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the New Yorker staff writer, is one of the more interesting working journalists. He's got a new Atlantic blog that I'll be reading (link added, left). Here's Obama speaking to him about this issue.


Obama also says some considerably heartening things about the complimentarity of the African-American and Zionist narratives. Think about that for a moment. This blog's abiding theme is that for a variety of reasons, utopian politics lead algorithmically to anti-Semitism. Victimology and identity politics are powered off that grid. This is the marrow of Jew-hatred among African-Americans, who can see themselves as domestic Palestinians, preyed upon by owner-Jews or upstaged by the moral legatees of the Holocaust. Obama, however, invokes a classic, American liberalism:


Obama, in his perspicacious and articulate way that is an elixir after 8 years of Bush's cud-chewing, rhetorical chyme, has turned this precisely on its head. This is no accident. If Obama becomes President, his foreign policy might fail, but he's no enemy of the Jews or Israel.

Labels: barack obama, israel, new antisemitism, war on terror

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Israel Turns 60

As you must expect, I could not be more gratified by Israel reaching its 60th anniversary, in spite of its bringing many unanswered questions and unresolved dangers to the celebration.

In contrast to the good will, an array of opposition masses in the middle distance. There is the soulful concern of the Tony Judt class of left-liberals, whose embarrassment by even the mildest Jewish particularism resounds in their rush to amplify Israeli Arabs' feelings of disenfranchisement. And there is the naked hatred of those who gleefully anticipate the destruction of the Jewish state, to borrow Oliver Kamm's apposite phrase.

Speaking of Kamm, here are two reactions to the anniversary, by him and the historian Marko Attila Hoare. Kamm's mostly communicates my own feelings (unlike him, I am concerned with the fortunes of Judaism, although this is unrelated to my concern for Israel). Hoare, who is no less celebratory than Kamm, shows concern about current Israeli nationalism, but with a view toward evolving the Jewish state rather than guiltily slouching toward its disintegration into a secular binational war zone.

Oliver Kamm:



Marko Attila Hoare:



Postscript: I wish neither to suggest that the Israeli Arab reaction is not newsworthy, nor to pass judgment on it. I am not an Israeli Arab living in Israel. It's just instructive what people choose to notice and when.

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Teen Vermin Attack Lubavitcher

Just a few blocks from where I live, petty criminals have proven once again they are the stupidest stratum of society, and therefore why the New Antisemitism appeals to so many of them.



I've lived in Brooklyn for ten years. I started on Fourth Avenue a little ways down from that train station. It hasn't been terribly dangerous in that time, and it gets less and less so, but there has always been a surplus of teen vermin on that strip.

Labels: new antisemitism, the sub-intellectual roots of Jew-hatred

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Nietzsche and Nazism

On Times Online, Ben McIntyre seeks to cleanse Nietzsche of the posthumous stain of Nazism:


This happens to coincide with a passage from a book I've just dipped into: Fascism: A History, by Roger Eatwell, one of the star historians of the various forms of that political movement. Eatwell acknowledges the Elisabeth Nietzsche/Bernard Forster problem, but doesn't think it's quite as simple as McIntyre makes it:


Eatwell points out that Nietzsche's conservatism, as well as the inspiration in Nietzsche conservatives have historically found, underscore the silliness of measuring fascism on a right-left spectrum. It's most likely his elitism and pessimism about the prospects of revolutionary action that would have distanced Nietzsche from the Nazis. In turn, people like Jonah Goldberg are absurd (and cynical) to try to link fascism to liberalism, but its particular incompatibility with Nietzsche underscores the "progressive" nature of what the Nazis envisioned.

The Eatwell excerpt is found on page 12 of the 1995 Penguin softcover edition.

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