Wednesday, January 04, 2012
Ron Paul's "Holocaust of the Innocent"
The following are remarks Ron Paul made to Congress on June 24, 1980. He postulated a positive correlation between abortion and violent child abuse, entering into the record an article in support by Christian "abortion aftermath" psychiatrist Dr. Philip Ney. Ron Paul is a Republican candidate who enjoys crossover appeal among left-liberals owing to his non-interventionist and Israel-phobic ideas in foreign policy.
CONGRESSIONAL RECORD--HOUSE
June 24, 1980
ABORTION: A CASE OF CHILD ABUSE
(Mr. PAUL asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks and include extraneous matter.)
Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, child abuse has reached epidemic proportions. It is estimated that in the United States there will be 1.5 million children battered by their parents in the next 10 years, resulting in 50,000 deaths and 300,000 permanent injuries. These are frightening statistics, and even the most callous among us must cry out at this holocaust of the innocent.
For years some have argued that aborting the unwanted unborn would asure [sic] that each child allowed the prerogative of being born would be wanted and loved, and this would reduce or eliminate the battered child syndrome. Frankly, I was always baffled how a careless disregard for the sacredness of life under one condition would enhance the regard for life under another condition.
Logic has always told me that if a healthy, unwanted, not-yet-born life could be arbitrarily destroyed out of mere personal preference, then less than perfect life, of no seeming "social value," could not be safeguarded by arguing only that it deserves our protection because it passed through that fleeting moment in human development called birth.
The fear that many of us have for the introduction and promotion of infanticide and euthanasia as a consequence of our callous attitude toward the unborn, is well founded-philosophically, morally, and historically. A large amount of evidence in the medical literature now verifies that the attitude toward abortion has contributed
significantly to the rapid rise in child abuse.
I would like to call the following article from a medical colleague in Vancouver, British Columbia, to the House [sic] attention. Dr. Philip Ney explains this from a psychiatric point of view. This essay is so important for everyone to study, since many who champion the abortion ethic express moral indignation, and rightly so, at seeing a defenseless child beaten unconscious by its parents. Can we survive asa [sic] human race if we are so careless with the value and the dignity of life? I say we cannot. Tragically, world events today support my position. This subject deserves a moment of your thoughts.
The article is as follows:
Is ELECTIVE ABORTION A CAUSE OF CHILD ABUSE?
(By Philip o. Ney, M.D.)
A presumably plausible argument in favor of elective abortion is that it would make each child really wanted. What could be better, it is often argued, than preventing the birth of unwanted children who will be neglected and battered? Unfortunately for this seemingly cogent claim, there is now reason to believe that elective abortion has the reverse effect.
Child neglect, abuse and murder is increasing. Having to treat so many battered children, I began to worry that using abortion to make every child a wanted child might be backfiring. When I examined the evidence, I became convinced that most of the abused children resulted from wanted pregnancies and that elective abortion is an important cause of child abuse.
Early elective abortion became available in Canada in 1969. From then on there has appeared to be an increase in deaths of Canadian children from social causes. The provinces with the highest rates of abortion -- British Columbia and Ontario -- also have the highest rates of child abuse. Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick have low abortion rates. They also have low rates of child abuse.
DISQUIETING FIGURES
The figures on this relationship in the United States are equally disquieting. Since elective abortion became available in 1972, there has been a continuing increase in child battering as indicated by a report of 22,683 battered New York children in 1974, and 26,536 in 1975. V. J. Fontana and D. J. Bersharov, in their book, The Maltreated Child, estimated that there will be 1.5 million battered children in the United States during the next ten years, resulting in 50,000 deaths and 300,000 permanent injuries.
The following mechanisms might help explain how abortions can lead to child abuse:
Having an abortion can interfere with a mother's ability to restrain her anger toward those depending on her care. Abortion might also weaken a social taboo against harming those who are defenseless. With wholesale abortions discarding nondefective [sic] unborn children, the value of children might diminish, resulting in less care and protection.
Higher mammals respond with parental care to signals of distress from their young. An aborting person, having already repressed her instinctive caring for her unborn young, might be less Inhibited in giving vent to her rage at a whimpering child.
Having repressed that taboo, those people are more likely to be passive and indifferent to the distress of a battered child and more reluctant to intervene. What a contrast with the past when people did not stop to think about defending a child, even at the sacrifice of their lives.
The decline in the value of children (and I am not discussing attempts to limit population growth) has had some significant side effects. Only two decades ago parents were willing to suffer major deprivation to have and raise children. It seemed like a sacred obligation or a great privilege. Nowadays, people balance having children, with wanting a country house, another car, better vacations and early retirement.
This might be observed by children in such families. As a result they might feel less confidence in their parents' true concern for their welfare. They might then become so importunate in their demands for care and attention that their parents feel threatened. Not infrequently, the parental response to those attention-demanding children will be physical violence. What might cause children to question whether or not they were really wanted is that their mother had one or more abortions.
Society is beginning to believe that a child has no right to exist and is therefore valued only when it is wanted. If It is permissible to kill an unwanted, unborn child, then one can defend killing children already born when they are no longer considered to be valuable. Judging from the leninent [sic] attitude toward those who maim or kiil [sic] children today, children nowadays probably have a legal value similar to their value during the Middle Ages -- which was not very much.
Recent evidence indicates many women harbor strong guilt feelings long after their abortions. Guilt is one important cause of child battering and infanticide. Abortion also lowers women's self-esteem and there are studies reporting a major loss of self- esteem in battering parents.
Children who are aware of an abortion in the family might bring on themselves parental violence. As abortion survivors they experience a combination of guilt and anger.
These feelings could lead to behavior that appears disrespectful or aggressive to parents -- behavior that might trigger parental rage. Such guilty and angry children might turn on their siblings. The ensuing fighting might provoke parental battering. When these children mature, their unresolved guilt could lead to battering their own children.
Marital stress plays a strong role not only in the "battered-wife" syndrome, but also in the "battered-child" syndrome. Some women resent their male partners impregnating them and then coercing them to have an abortion. Fathers, on the other hand, might feel hostility toward women because they have no rights in decisions about which infant gets aborted and when. The "battle of the sexes" aggravated by elective abortion, can all too easily be turned violently against children.
There is increasing evidence that previously aborted women become depressed during a subsequent pregnancy. Depression interferes with a mother's early bonding with her infant, and children who are not bonded to their mothers are at a higher risk of being battered.
If these hypotheses are valid, then as abortion rates increase, child battering rates will increase proportionately. In separate studies, Schoenfeld and Barker have reported that women who have abused their children had higher rates of abortion. Preliminary results of our own study show a greater frequency of child abuse by women whose first pregnancy either miscarried or was aborted.
AN EVER-EXPANDING CYCLE
The argument that unwanted children will be abused, and should therefore be aborted, has been heard in varied guises throughout history. It has been a stock justification for doing away with those undesirable and those unwanted because they hampered the privileges and wants of those in power. But if the mechanisms here described are accurate, not only will abortion on request increase child battering, but the "abort and batter" syndrome will increase in an ever-expanding cycle in future generations.
I wonder why, when we are so interested in preserving nature's delicate balance, we do not have a similar concern for the long-reaching implications of elective abortion on the human species. What war, pestilence and famine could not do to us, medicine, In [sic] the name of humanism and emancipation might yet achieve. By helping to disrupt a major species-preserving mechanism -- the mother-infant bond -- medicine not only threatens the welfare and safety of large numbers of children, It [sic] might also be endangering the future of humankind.
June 24, 1980
ABORTION: A CASE OF CHILD ABUSE
(Mr. PAUL asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks and include extraneous matter.)
Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, child abuse has reached epidemic proportions. It is estimated that in the United States there will be 1.5 million children battered by their parents in the next 10 years, resulting in 50,000 deaths and 300,000 permanent injuries. These are frightening statistics, and even the most callous among us must cry out at this holocaust of the innocent.
For years some have argued that aborting the unwanted unborn would asure [sic] that each child allowed the prerogative of being born would be wanted and loved, and this would reduce or eliminate the battered child syndrome. Frankly, I was always baffled how a careless disregard for the sacredness of life under one condition would enhance the regard for life under another condition.
Logic has always told me that if a healthy, unwanted, not-yet-born life could be arbitrarily destroyed out of mere personal preference, then less than perfect life, of no seeming "social value," could not be safeguarded by arguing only that it deserves our protection because it passed through that fleeting moment in human development called birth.
The fear that many of us have for the introduction and promotion of infanticide and euthanasia as a consequence of our callous attitude toward the unborn, is well founded-philosophically, morally, and historically. A large amount of evidence in the medical literature now verifies that the attitude toward abortion has contributed
significantly to the rapid rise in child abuse.
I would like to call the following article from a medical colleague in Vancouver, British Columbia, to the House [sic] attention. Dr. Philip Ney explains this from a psychiatric point of view. This essay is so important for everyone to study, since many who champion the abortion ethic express moral indignation, and rightly so, at seeing a defenseless child beaten unconscious by its parents. Can we survive asa [sic] human race if we are so careless with the value and the dignity of life? I say we cannot. Tragically, world events today support my position. This subject deserves a moment of your thoughts.
The article is as follows:
Is ELECTIVE ABORTION A CAUSE OF CHILD ABUSE?
(By Philip o. Ney, M.D.)
A presumably plausible argument in favor of elective abortion is that it would make each child really wanted. What could be better, it is often argued, than preventing the birth of unwanted children who will be neglected and battered? Unfortunately for this seemingly cogent claim, there is now reason to believe that elective abortion has the reverse effect.
Child neglect, abuse and murder is increasing. Having to treat so many battered children, I began to worry that using abortion to make every child a wanted child might be backfiring. When I examined the evidence, I became convinced that most of the abused children resulted from wanted pregnancies and that elective abortion is an important cause of child abuse.
Early elective abortion became available in Canada in 1969. From then on there has appeared to be an increase in deaths of Canadian children from social causes. The provinces with the highest rates of abortion -- British Columbia and Ontario -- also have the highest rates of child abuse. Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick have low abortion rates. They also have low rates of child abuse.
DISQUIETING FIGURES
The figures on this relationship in the United States are equally disquieting. Since elective abortion became available in 1972, there has been a continuing increase in child battering as indicated by a report of 22,683 battered New York children in 1974, and 26,536 in 1975. V. J. Fontana and D. J. Bersharov, in their book, The Maltreated Child, estimated that there will be 1.5 million battered children in the United States during the next ten years, resulting in 50,000 deaths and 300,000 permanent injuries.
The following mechanisms might help explain how abortions can lead to child abuse:
Having an abortion can interfere with a mother's ability to restrain her anger toward those depending on her care. Abortion might also weaken a social taboo against harming those who are defenseless. With wholesale abortions discarding nondefective [sic] unborn children, the value of children might diminish, resulting in less care and protection.
Higher mammals respond with parental care to signals of distress from their young. An aborting person, having already repressed her instinctive caring for her unborn young, might be less Inhibited in giving vent to her rage at a whimpering child.
Having repressed that taboo, those people are more likely to be passive and indifferent to the distress of a battered child and more reluctant to intervene. What a contrast with the past when people did not stop to think about defending a child, even at the sacrifice of their lives.
The decline in the value of children (and I am not discussing attempts to limit population growth) has had some significant side effects. Only two decades ago parents were willing to suffer major deprivation to have and raise children. It seemed like a sacred obligation or a great privilege. Nowadays, people balance having children, with wanting a country house, another car, better vacations and early retirement.
This might be observed by children in such families. As a result they might feel less confidence in their parents' true concern for their welfare. They might then become so importunate in their demands for care and attention that their parents feel threatened. Not infrequently, the parental response to those attention-demanding children will be physical violence. What might cause children to question whether or not they were really wanted is that their mother had one or more abortions.
Society is beginning to believe that a child has no right to exist and is therefore valued only when it is wanted. If It is permissible to kill an unwanted, unborn child, then one can defend killing children already born when they are no longer considered to be valuable. Judging from the leninent [sic] attitude toward those who maim or kiil [sic] children today, children nowadays probably have a legal value similar to their value during the Middle Ages -- which was not very much.
Recent evidence indicates many women harbor strong guilt feelings long after their abortions. Guilt is one important cause of child battering and infanticide. Abortion also lowers women's self-esteem and there are studies reporting a major loss of self- esteem in battering parents.
Children who are aware of an abortion in the family might bring on themselves parental violence. As abortion survivors they experience a combination of guilt and anger.
These feelings could lead to behavior that appears disrespectful or aggressive to parents -- behavior that might trigger parental rage. Such guilty and angry children might turn on their siblings. The ensuing fighting might provoke parental battering. When these children mature, their unresolved guilt could lead to battering their own children.
Marital stress plays a strong role not only in the "battered-wife" syndrome, but also in the "battered-child" syndrome. Some women resent their male partners impregnating them and then coercing them to have an abortion. Fathers, on the other hand, might feel hostility toward women because they have no rights in decisions about which infant gets aborted and when. The "battle of the sexes" aggravated by elective abortion, can all too easily be turned violently against children.
There is increasing evidence that previously aborted women become depressed during a subsequent pregnancy. Depression interferes with a mother's early bonding with her infant, and children who are not bonded to their mothers are at a higher risk of being battered.
If these hypotheses are valid, then as abortion rates increase, child battering rates will increase proportionately. In separate studies, Schoenfeld and Barker have reported that women who have abused their children had higher rates of abortion. Preliminary results of our own study show a greater frequency of child abuse by women whose first pregnancy either miscarried or was aborted.
AN EVER-EXPANDING CYCLE
The argument that unwanted children will be abused, and should therefore be aborted, has been heard in varied guises throughout history. It has been a stock justification for doing away with those undesirable and those unwanted because they hampered the privileges and wants of those in power. But if the mechanisms here described are accurate, not only will abortion on request increase child battering, but the "abort and batter" syndrome will increase in an ever-expanding cycle in future generations.
I wonder why, when we are so interested in preserving nature's delicate balance, we do not have a similar concern for the long-reaching implications of elective abortion on the human species. What war, pestilence and famine could not do to us, medicine, In [sic] the name of humanism and emancipation might yet achieve. By helping to disrupt a major species-preserving mechanism -- the mother-infant bond -- medicine not only threatens the welfare and safety of large numbers of children, It [sic] might also be endangering the future of humankind.
Labels: ditch israel, isolationism, libertarians, ron paul
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Sunday, September 11, 2011
Memorial (10)
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Sunday, July 31, 2011
From Selma to Gaza
Alice Walker reminds me of the grandmotherly "Oracle" in The Matrix series. You wait in her living room, foggy and frustrated by a world whose signs and symbols you can't decipher. She appears, sage and soft, with a warm plate of cookies and a down-home wisdom weathered by the years. She smiles, in earnest: "I think Israel is the greatest terrorist in that part of the world."
Walker is selling her involvement in Freedom Flotilla 2, the new, supernumerary mission to bring "aid" to the people of Gaza. While the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dismal, things have improved since the Egyptian Revolution. The aid the new Flotilla intends to deliver is political, not practical.
There's a lot to behold in a human rights narrative that leads from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Free Gaza Movement. The moral transposition of Jews from victim to victor, the decay of authentic politics into gestural mimicries, the apparent inability of an icon to retire herself with the passing of her political moment -- there are many vectors of approach. Suffice it for now to say that running the Israeli sea blockade of Gaza is not your mother's political protest.
Actually, maybe it is: the anti-Zionist catechism was written in Soviet Moscow, and '68 revolutionaries helped pioneer anti-Jewish violent direct action on behalf of Palestine. The terrorist baton has passed from Marxist-Leninists to religious fanatics, but a Leftish rump survives to give aid and comfort to Muslim millenarians -- Hamas, Hezbollah and others they join in the solidarity of a broad "global Left".
The Free Gaza Movement, largely an accretion of Leftists, lunatics and Islamists, is the organ of this tendency behind the flotillas. One of its key constituents is the International Solidarity Movement, a "non-violent" groupuscule whose mission is to send young, idealistic Westerners to the Palestinian Territories to face life-threatening situations. Their injury or death can be laid at the feet of Israel; the holy grail is the death of a fresh-faced US citizen, which in addition to landing a body blow to Israel's image might sour relations between the Jewish state and its American benefactor.
The nucleus and driving force of the ISM is a married couple: Adam Shapiro, an apostate Jew from Brooklyn, and his wife Huwaida "Heidi" Arraf, a Palestinian-American. Arraf is striking: her individual features are beautiful -- big, blue-beryl eyes, a cupid's bow mouth, ropey, black-licorice hair -- but in a weird echo of her garbled peace activism, they crash together into a face that's just wrong. The eyes seem unmoored, parting from one another in a slow drift, as if into piscine placement. You can't engage the face.
Arraf emerged from the Detroit area's Arab community, where she cut her teeth shilling for Saddam in his struggle to evade UN sanctions, and moved on to Jerusalem, to join and then abandon a pro-Palestinian NGO for putting "too much emphasis on conflict resolution and peace". Things had moved too slowly for Heidi and her comrades during the Oslo era. These were somnolent years, trundling to a truncated Palestine. Then the suicide bombs of the Second Intifada hurried the human rights vanguard in a new direction. The focus on peaceful coexistence was replaced by Right of Return and implacable opposition to an increasingly elastic notion of "occupation". The ISM was founded. It was time to help shake things up, and faster, please.
What Howard Jacobson recently wrote of Walker and the flotilla describes the strategem hatched by the ISM: they began to recruit activists "... to blunder into where it isn't safe, clothed in the make-believe garments of the unworldly, speaking of children and speaking like children, half inviting a violence which can then be presented as a slaughter of the innocents." Rachel Corrie was crushed, Tom Hurndall was shot in the head, Brian Avery had his jaw shot in half. Others were maimed and killed. Heidi, now Huwaida in public, was responsible for recruiting the activists, and in the wake of the inevitable violence against them, she was like a fish-eyed angel of death, appearing for interviews, haunting the news, harvesting propaganda.
It's key to distinguish the ISM from the peace groups and humanitarian activists it mimics and cooperates with. Non-violent resistance has a hallowed history, enshrined in the Indian independence and American Civil Rights movements. The ISM traduces it by using the principle to shroud the practice of luring kids into a war zone to exploit their inevitable deaths. The median age of the eight ISM activists seriously injured or killed since 2002 is 24.* None had rank within the organization.
Another distinction worth making is the ISM is fundamentally different from, say, a group like B'Tselem. B'Tselem is a well-known Israeli NGO that monitors human rights in the territories occupied by Israel. It documents and publicizes abuses, mostly Israeli, because it is concerned about the moral hygiene of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Ultimately it wishes to see Israel disencumber itself of corrosive occupation so it can thrive among the community of nations.
By contrast, the background of the key founders of the ISM informs its nature. Arraf is a radical Arab-American who "came to see," as Martin Luther King wrote of Black Power ideologues in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, "that in spite of progress... conditions were still insufferable" and despaired of "positive nonviolent power". Adam Shapiro is a Jew who trumpets his apostasy when it isn't convenient to lend his activism the imprimatur of his Jewishness.
I don’t identify as Jewish. I see it as a religion rather than an ethnicity and, as I have no religious feelings, I don’t regard myself as Jewish.
The ISM is uninterested in a settlement with a Jewish state. Rather, while they cloak it in balmy rhetoric about human rights, the ISM wishes to see Israel dismantled and reformed into a binational, Arab-majority state. This is made clear in the Points of Unity of the Free Gaza Movement. To join the Movement, one must accept the Points, which conclude with an affirmation of the Right of Return:
We recognize the right of all Palestinian refugees and exiles and their heirs to return without delay to their homes in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, to recover their properties, and to receive compensation for damage, dispossession and unlawful use of such property, in accordance with international law. This is in the first instance an individual and not a collective right, and cannot be negotiated except by the individual.
Implemented like this, Israel would be deleted, unless it could negotiate non-residency and compensation with over 4.75 million individual Palestinians. The intention is clear and it aligns with the end goal of Hamas, with which the ISM happily coexists in Gaza. That the ISM wishes to reach the goal "non-violently" is no redemption. They actively partner with the IHH, which uses violence, and passively partner with Hamas. In the real world, Velvet Genocide is genocide.
The ISM is not a "peace" group. If Alice Walker makes it to Gaza, she will have left the legacy of Martin Luther King back in Selma.
* Two other ISM activists, including Vittorio Arrigoni, have also been killed, but by Palestinians outside of the context of protest or combat.
Written between 6/26/11 and 7/8/11.
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Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Nir Rosen and Totalitarian Stupidity
One snowy day back in college, I was returning from class to my dorm and I began to cross a small intersection. A woman was waiting at the stop sign in a large, gray vehicle. As I began to pass in front of it, she suddenly drove forward into me. I banged on the hood, she came to and stopped, and I barked some remark about using her eyes. More startling than injurious, so I continued on.
I entered my dorm and saw my friend in the main gathering room, so I went to him and breathlessly unloaded what had just happened. While narrating I referred in my 21 year-old shorthand to the woman driver as "this chick". A girl I hadn't seen sitting nearby exploded: "CHICK? What the FUCK is THAT?" I marveled to myself: I was just nearly run over by a car, and her moral priority is to police my language.
As I've argued, a possibly clinical emotional idiocy underpins extremism. Conspiracy theories about America and the Jews, the embrace of "counterknowledge", an attraction to totalitarian thinking -- these are some criteria for diagnosis. Above all we have the moral stupidity, the bent priorities of the true believer, the eggs which need to be broken to make the omelet of the radiant tomorrow.
Out of today's noxious lineup of anti-war extremists steps Nir Rosen. During the celebration that erupted when Hosni Mubarak stepped down in the face of Egyptian popular revolt, Lara Logan, a CBS News correspondent, was ambushed, beaten and sexually assaulted. In response, Nir Rosen tweeted:
Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson. Where was her buddy McCrystal.
Yes yes its wrong what happened to her. Of course. I don’t support that. But, it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too
Jesus Christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger
A fuller log is available here.
Rosen is a war correspondent whose reductive anti-imperialism rivals Ward Churchill's. Yet he's been successful and celebrated, thanks to the comparative complexity of his subject matter and Bush's bungling of Iraq. Besides the acute viciousness of his attack on a woman who might have been gang-raped, what's interesting is this is hardly the first time Rosen has made vile public statements. It's just the first time he's been called out on it by more than a few people.
Predictably in pitch with his totalitarian stupidity, Rosen often targets Israel. Here are some examples from Twitter and his public Facebook "Wall".
Here in a Facebook Wall post entitled "Fuck Israel," Rosen links to a five year-old case in which a (non-Jewish) IDF soldier was acquitted of murdering a 13 year-old Palestinian girl. Rosen ignorantly mistook the tragic story as recent and intoned [emphasis mine]:
he shot a 13 year old girl, or ordered her to be shot, and was exhonerated [sic]. and nothing will happen because she isnt jewish. israel's existence is an abomination
And here Rosen lays it out in the Manichaean terms native to the totalitarian mind:
Because it was individual, the odiousness of Rosen's attack on Lara Logan surpasses his public fantasizing about Israel's destruction. But the latter didn't provoke outrage, or much response at all, which shows how acceptable that line of thought has become. Trusted, popular writers like Marc Lynch and Glenn Greenwald have praised Rosen throughout.
Rosen is being crushed under the weight of tardy opprobrium. He's given a Michael Richards-style interview in which he doesn't do himself any favors, explaining:
A part of me was bothered by how celebrities, especially white ones, get so much attention, and before I realized it was a sexual assault I was sort of anticipating a return to the old theme about unleashed brown natives attacking a white woman. Another part of me was bothered by the knowledge that Arab victims would never get attention, that this would detract from everything else that was happening, and that most victims of sexual assault, whether in Egypt or the US will never get attention.
A woman was just beaten and sexually assaulted by a gang, and Rosen's moral priority is policing our emotional response, lest it be racist or focused on the wrong victim.
People lament the damage Twitter has done to the art of written communication, but I appreciate the economy of language it enforces. The great poet Richard Wilbur wrote, "The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle." Twitter proleptically forced Rosen into an apt summary of his downfall:
thanks to twitter i can destroy my career 140 characters at a time.
Labels: anti-imperialism, israel, nir rosen, totalitarian stupidity
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Sunday, September 12, 2010
A Parochial Place
More than the usual suspects are after Marty Peretz. The New Republic's Editor-In-Chief has long been accused of regarding Arabs and Muslims, and Palestinians in particular, with Orientalist disdain. But a week ago Peretz published a blog post in which he crossed his own rubicon:
... no one has shown that a single serious demonstration against Muslims and Arabs, against their beliefs and behavior can be raised in this country... In fact, there has not been a single rally or demonstration in America aimed at Muslim or Arab interests or their commitments to foreign governments and, more likely, to foreign insurgencies and, yes, quite alien philosophies.
As an indicator of the health of our liberal democracy, we might be heartened that horror at the spectacle of lunatic pastor Terry Jones roasting Korans stirred the unwise intervention of General Petraeus, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and the President of the United States. But while Peretz denounced Jones' plans as "satanic" in a follow-up post that reads like damage control, he initially mused that non-Muslims are less cowed in Europe, where people do protest the "Pakis".
I'm no fan of Edward Said, but the foppish apologist for Eastern illiberalism is consistently borne out in his observation that the modes of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are the same. How precisely Peretz's charge of Muslim "commitments to foreign governments and, more likely, to foreign insurgencies and, yes, quite alien philosophies" echoes anti-Jewish boilerplate! I can't help thinking Peretz uses caesura -- the interrupting "yes" -- to intimate an impish awareness of this.
Now prestige commentators like Nicholas Kristof and James Fallows are calling him out. That's because, rather than sublimating his hostility into invidious delectation of rugs, Peretz is being too blunt about what he wants: protest "against Muslims and Arabs" -- not just radical Muslims and their ideas and beliefs. Peretz thinks we in the US are effete because we lack what he alludes to in another context as a "Walpurgisnacht" instinct -- the exuberant drive to protest "Pakis".
As is customary with ideological racism, this is fueled in part by corrupted concern for human rights. Peretz has long lamented illiberalism in the Third World, particularly among Muslims and Arabs and especially as it manifests in eliminationist hatred of Jews and Israel. And he is right to oppose this illiberalism as a coterminous defense of liberal democracy. At least as much as his Jewishness, that explains his view that "support for Israel is deep down, an expression of America's best view of itself." What is so odious about the neo-realist Left's embrace of Walt and Mearsheimer is the failure of these putative anti-fascists to see that American and Israeli interests unite in defense of the open society.
The problem is human rights obviously are a universalist concern. Violent intellectuals make Manichaean claims against people whose alterity threatens to corrode and destroy the society of which these ideologues appoint themselves the vanguard. In the words of Jack Shafer, Peretz envisions Muslims and Arabs as "an undifferentiated mass, consumed by antique tribal hatreds, fated to fratricide, torn asunder by their religious sectarianism." They must churn a ceaseless series of 9/11s. When humanism is scoped down to nationalism, it loses its humanitarian potential. You can't stake a claim against illiberal menace from a parochial place. That is not concern for the open society; it is concern for your own society. Peretz merely takes a side in a tribal contest.
Labels: anti-semitsm, edward said, human rights, illiberalism, liberal democracy, liberalism, marty peretz
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Saturday, September 11, 2010
Memorial
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Monday, August 02, 2010
Liberal Masochism
A recent rallying cry on the Tea Party Right is opposition to building a "Ground Zero mosque" near where the World Trade Center stood. The mosque will be part of "Cordoba House", an Islamic cultural center intended by its developers to improve relations between Muslims and the West. The crusade to shut it down is nasty and dumb on a number of levels -- Islam is not radical, political Islam; and how can (or dare) we fetter the free expression of religion on American soil? -- but the opposition does rest on resonant emotional logic.
Think of the extreme distastefulness of erecting a German cultural center near Auschwitz as a gesture of German-Jewish reconciliation. Before you get your Godwin up, it's not such an outlandish hypothetical. There are ethnic Germans in Poland, especially in the southern region containing Oświęcim; Poland is a secular republic that allows free expression; and few people other than Daniel Jonah Goldhagen believe German culture is synonymous with Nazism. But regardless of intentions, it would yield questionable benefit while constituting an extravagant offense to the victims of Nazism.
Some argue back that Al Qaeda doesn't represent a nation state. I think this comes from a conceptual bias in which it feels OK to hold the Germans of the time collectively responsible for Nazism, but thinking of Muslims and radical Islam in the same way feels "racist". This double standard is partly a product of the passage of time and the leftish lens through which educated people view these phenomena. But it's misguided. Al Qaeda and like groups embody a religious political movement that enjoys hard and soft support not just in the Muslim world, but throughout the "Global South" and in apologetic precincts at home. And although it was a more localized phenomenon, Nazism was admired and emulated outside the boundaries of Germany.
You might reply that there aren't 1 billion Germans with whom reconciliation must urgently be sought. Fine, let's put aside the dubious utility of consecrating a mosque near Ground Zero to mollify Muslims. When Israel eventually relinquishes the West Bank, should Peace Now insist on setting up a Jewish community center by the Cave of the Patriarchs, where the messianic Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein gunned down 29 Muslim worshipers? There is a dire need for reconciliation between Jews and Muslims and Israelis and Arabs, and a JCC may serve as a resonant symbol demarcating Jewishness and Kahanism.
Or maybe it would be better to let the victims rest in peace. But Spencer Ackerman warns, "To not build the Ground Zero Mosque will be to play into Usama bin Laden’s hands." He is seconded by others, such as Jon Chait, Joe Klein, Adam Serwer and Robert Wright, who view Cordoba House as a quintessentially American answer to radical Islam. Maintaining a scrupulous distinction between Islam and the latter is morally and strategically key, and a thinking person's intellectual ECG is measured on reflexive opposition to anything endorsed by Sarah Palin. But also this is liberal masochism, a progressive impulse that heat-sinks toward the most self-flagellating remedy, identifying it as the primary or sole solution, a crucial expression of our values when they are fundamentally challenged.
An adjacent phenomenon is found in the arc that liberal discourse on democratization has traced in the last decade. What began as hostility to the neocon enterprise of exporting democracy was transformed by Hamas' 2006 sweep of the Gaza legislature into a "be careful what you wish for" object lesson followed by counsel about the need to diplomatically engage our worst enemies. A lot of this was good faith commentary, but for a few it became a masochistic spectacle, moving beyond repudiation of Bush into theatrical renunciation of American exceptionalism. This was complemented by a fringe defending Hamas' victory as an expression of democracy per se.*
Just as there are obvious alternatives to engaging Hamas -- discouraging Israel from recapitulating our Cuba mistake, and strengthening Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian National Authority by dismantling settlements -- there are many approaches to conciliation more appealing than Cordoba House. Ground Zero is sacrosanct, and liberals, more than anyone, should be alive to the war narrative. There is no political culture more grossly insulted by radical Islam than liberal democracy. But liberals offer up this creamy nonsense in which decorating lower Manhattan with a mosque is cast as an assertion of American values. Our values need not be ratified by meretricious self-effacement. We can assert them without tithing our integrity. We can win without losing ourselves.
--
* Readers of this blog are well aware that Glenn Greenwald is not a liberal -- he's a Paulite non-interventionist dressed up as a Left Democrat. However, most people, including too many able liberal commentators, mistake him for one, or a kindred spirit.
If the time URL to the YouTube video of Greenwald's grisly performance doesn't jump to the relevant part, it begins at 2:41.
Labels: liberal masochism, tea party
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John-Paul
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