tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-216387922024-03-13T14:28:46.335-04:00The Socialism of FoolsAntisemitism is the antiglobalism of fools.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.comBlogger75125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-29906960287418917432018-03-07T22:18:00.000-05:002018-03-24T20:06:43.514-04:00Status of SocFoolsHi!<br />
<br />
I've been transitioning into journalism more and more over the last few years, so this blog--with its additional shortcomings of style and functionality--is not likely to receive a lot of attention in the foreseeable future.<br />
<br />
Here's where you can find me.<br />
<br />
Social Media:<br />
<br />
Twitter: <a href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano" target="_blank">@johnpaulpagano</a><br />
Medium: <a href="https://medium.com/@johnpaulpagano" target="_blank">@johnpaulpagano</a><br />
Facebook: <a href="https://www.facebook.com/SocialismFools/" target="_blank">@SocialismFools</a><br />
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Media:<br />
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<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/john-paul-pagano/" target="_blank">The Atlantic</a><br />
<a href="https://www.algemeiner.com/author/john-paul-pagano/" target="_blank">Algemeiner</a><br />
<a href="https://forward.com/author/john-paul-pagano/" target="_blank">The Forward</a><br />
<a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/author/john-paul-pagano" target="_blank">Tablet Magazine</a><br />
<a href="http://www.thetower.org/author/john-paul-pagano/" target="_blank">The Tower</a><br />
<br />Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-78760596582525600872015-04-02T00:13:00.001-04:002015-04-02T22:49:00.006-04:00Talmud Anti-Semitism TodayI've been working sedulously on an article, so I haven't had time to say a lot about this, but I want to take a moment to note what nasty pieces of work are Max Blumenthal and his sidekick Rania Khalek. Their "beat" now is reviving the notion that Jews are a <i>special</i> kind of racist, and that Jewish racism is derivative of Judaism itself.
<p>There's an essay here. The bedrock of all anti-Semitism -- since the very origin in the ancient world of this "longest hatred" -- has been the idea that Jews are a misanthropic cult whose creed teaches them to regard non-Jews with abiding hatred. That, so the conspiracy theory goes, is why "international" Jewry enslaves and exploits the world -- because, in essence, <i>they are the world's worst racists.</i></p>
<p>This theme has been rehearsed a good many times throughout history. Its modern source is the Talmud anti-Semitism of the 17th Century Christian Hebraist, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Andreas_Eisenmenger" target="_blank">Johann Eisenmenger</a>. An Orientalist, Eisenmenger purported to expose the misanthropic teachings of the Talmud by cherry-picking scraps and publishing them as <i>Entdecktes Judenthum</i>, or <i>Judaism Unmasked</i>. These excerpts, shorn of context and cranked through a grinder of jaundiced interpretation, struck Gentiles as scary. Next was August Rohling, a German theologian and professional anti-Semite who rehashed Eisenmenger's work in <i>Der Talmudjude</i>, or <i>The Talmud Jew</i>, and retailed himself as an expert witness. In an adumbration of the Holocaust-denier <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_v_Penguin_Books_Ltd" target="_blank">David Irving's disgrace</a> by the scholar Deborah Lipstadt, Rohling was eventually embarrassed on the stand, himself exposed as a fraud who -- unlike his muse, Eisenmenger -- was almost entirely ignorant of Judaism.</p>
<p>After the Nazis brought this grimy business to its apex, the efforts of "learned" anti-Semites to expose the dark side of Judaism paused; but strangely and sadly a Holocaust survivor, Israel Shahak, defibrillated the project in the Sixties... in Israel of all places. Shahak claimed to have witnessed an orthodox Jew refuse to allow anyone to use his phone -- it was the Sabbath -- to call paramedics to help a dying man. This triggered a lot of publicity and soul-searching among Israeli Jews and even elicited commentary by high-profile rabbis. The tale was debunked later, but the damage was done. Shahak became celebrated as a rationalist critic of Judaism; even the great Christopher Hitchens, eager always to insult religion, touted him. In the 90s Shahak made a lasting contribution to Talmud anti-Semitism -- his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Jewish-History-Religion-Israel-Shahak/dp/074530818X" target="_blank"><i>Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight Of Three Thousand Years</i></a>. As with Eisenmenger's volume and along with <i>The Protocols</i>, <i>Jewish History</i> has become part of the modern anti-Semite's canon.</p>
<p>Max and Rania are the latest to run with this. I speculate that ultimately they've been inspired by Mondoweiss, which for some time has been dancing around the theme of misanthropic Judaism and its praxis in Israel and the occupied territories. They are also joined by cranks like Gilad Atzmon. Blumenthal's poorly titled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Goliath-Life-Loathing-Greater-Israel/dp/1568589514" target="_blank"><i>Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel</i></a> is his contribution to the canon. He's marginal and clearly sick, but as with Hitchens and Shahak, more worthy figures sometimes pick up and broadcast the ideas of such people. James Fallows, for example, has <a href="http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/afraid-of-free-speech-on-many-fronts-pen-google-china-em-goliath-em/282105/" target="_blank">promoted</a> Blumenthal's book.
<p>Max and Rania spent today on Twitter <a href="https://storify.com/NuritBaytch/historian-exposes-max-blumenthal-s-false-claims-ab" target="_blank">resuscitating</a> the old Soviet libel that Zionists collaborated with the Nazis. Zionists, so the conspiracy theory goes, are a <i>special</i> kind of racist, so extreme that they were kindred spirits of the Nazis who sought to destroy them and all Jews. This is the moral and intellectual hygiene of anti-Zionism. This is the latest reverberation of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Lethal-Obsession-Anti-Semitism-Antiquity-Global/dp/1400060974" target="_blank">longest hatred</a>.</p>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-20957886707355857772013-10-19T15:45:00.000-04:002015-03-29T12:54:53.068-04:00Norman Geras -- RIP <style type="text/css">
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Yesterday I was kicking cans in the junkyard of my 9-to-5 when it occurred to me, suddenly and without ostensible cue, that for some time I hadn't looked after the status of <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2013/05/from-a-window-on-nine-wells.html" target="_blank">ailing</a> Norman Geras. When I returned to my desk after lunch, I puttered around the Internet before visiting <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/" target="_blank">normblog</a> and there was the news that Norm had died that morning.<br />
<br />
Maybe the notion that someone might "let you know" that they're departing is desperate, or unseemly in a parlor-game way, but I think it serves here as a metaphor for the impact Norm had on so many of us, including and perhaps especially those like me who didn't know him in "real life". He was present, even if you didn't often actively think about him.<br />
<br />
I discovered Norm's blog in 2003 or 2004 and was impressed by it quickly. Norm was a series of things that were exotic to me back then: an anti-totalitarian Leftist, a European dissenter from <i>bien pensant</i> thinking on America and Israel, and above all a Marxist -- that strange and terrible thing -- whose writing I respected and very often strongly agreed with.<br />
<br />
There were other times over the years when Norm suddenly came to me. Once early on in an email, offering to exchange links. Another back-and-forth, when we discussed how he was from Bulawayo and my father from Cape Town. I wrote him a couple of dumb things, embarrassingly inchoate, about neoconservatism and the Left. Then the happy occasion when he offered to do a "Normblog Profile" on me. I was so proud to be number <a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2010/08/the-normblog-profile-361-johnpaul-pagano.html" target="_blank">361</a>.<br />
<br />
Now that I've lived a little, having rounded the startlingly acute bend of 40, I've learned that one of the worst things about death is the enervating sense of futility it imparts -- that straw dogs realization that the universe will trundle over you like the sub-sub-atomic particle you are by simply deleting the things that give your life meaning.<br />
<br />
So much of what Norm wrote was great. For a bracing tour, visit this <a href="http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2013/10/18/norm-1943-2013/" target="_blank">round-up</a> by <a href="http://engageonline.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Engage</a> of some of his best writings on anti-Semitism and Left-wing failure in response. For me, the piece of Norm's that struck me most forcefully was this -- a lapidary dismantlement of "root cause" apologetics called "<a href="http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/apologists_amon.html" target="_blank">Apologists among us</a>".<br />
<div class="padded quote">The root-causers always plead a desire merely to expand our understanding, but they're very selective in what they want us to 'understand'. Did you ever hear a Jenny Tonge who empathizes with the Palestinian suicide bomber also understanding the worries of Israeli and other Jews - after the Holocaust, after the decades-long hostility of the Arab world to the State of Israel and the teaching of hatred there against Jews, after the acts of war against that state and the acts of terrorism against its citizens? This would seem to constitute a potentially rich soil of roots and causes, but it goes unexplored by the supposedly non-excuse-making purveyors of a root-causism seeking to 'understand'.</div>
<br />
In this accessible but forensic essay -- so measured in tone that it belies the utter destruction it visits on useful idiots -- Norm gave us a brilliant, and <i>practical</i>, tool with which to understand and resist the ways in which we in the liberal-democratic West undermine ourselves.<br />
<br />
Illiberals will continue to come, in human wave attacks, and the irony of our humanistic civilization is our susceptibility to their vicious ideas. First Christopher Hitchens, now Norm is gone. I hope we have it in our DNA to continue their fight. I'm so tired.<br />
<br />
Norman Geras was a great man. We are all poorer for his loss.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-50009479643823130182013-06-15T18:46:00.000-04:002015-03-29T12:55:53.680-04:00Hassan Rohani: A Beginning Dossier <style type="text/css">
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<b>Updated</b><br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Hassan Rohani, who is being identified throughout world news media as a "moderate cleric," has won the 2013 Iranian Presidential election in a landslide.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">There is some basis for differentiating Rohani from outspoken hard-liners like Ahmadinejad. Rohani participated in a mid-90s Iranian-Israeli effort to "reduce tensions," going as far as meeting with an Israeli delegation in Finland in 1996, according to The Iran Brief. And in 2008 Rohani put Ahmadinejad <a href="http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5jsz9LRIuz_NRZdE6yylApdqKJvvg" target="_blank">on blast</a> for his reckless rhetoric on Israel. <span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">"Does foreign policy mean expressing coarse slogans and grandstanding," Rohani was reported to ask. </span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">"This is not a foreign policy. We need to find an accommodating way to decrease the threats and assure the interests of the country."</span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 18px;">However, IRNA reported in April, 1994 that Rohani's activities were more in line with those of traditional hard-liners. Rohani had just returned from multilateral talks in Damascus between Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian groups, in which they concluded that "</span><span style="background-color: white; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;">the current developments never allowed any prospect for peace in the region." They discussed parliamentary cooperation between Iran, Syria and Hezbollah.</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.15; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="padded quote">
TEHRAN (IRNA)--The Vice-Speaker of the Iranian Parliament (Majlis), Hassan Rowhani, here Thursday underlined that Syrian officials as well as the Lebanese and Palestinian groups believed, as Iran does, that the current developments never allowed any prospect for peace in the region.<br />
<br />
Upon his arrival from his visit to Damascus, he told the reporters at Tehran's International Mehrabad Airport that in addition to ranking Lebanese Ulema and Palestinian and Lebanese groups all parties that were themselves involved in the negotiations including the Syrian President Hafez al-Asad, Vice-President Abdel al-Halim Khaddam and Syrian Parliament speaker believed that what was going on under the pretext of peace negotiations was not but a mere plot.<br />
<br />
He further referred to parliamentary cooperation between Iran and Syria and Hizbollah's fraction group as other issues discussed during the meetings.<br />
<br />
He commented that in the present sensitive situation, all those confronting the West and not yielding to compromise should engage in more exchange of views and must cooperate with each other more than ever.<br />
<br />
Rowhani left Damascus Thursday night and was seen off at the Damascus airport by his Syrian counterpart, Adel Jamous.<br />
<br />
During his five-day stay there, he held talks with Syrian officials and Lebanese and Palestinian groups on regional and international developments, mutual ties and the ways to continue struggle against the Zionist regime.<br />
<br /></div>
<br />
<b>Update</b>: The BBC Middle East Monitoring Service has a more detailed summary of Rohani's diplomatic activity in April 1994. We find that he had a cordial meeting with Hezbollah's Hasan Nasrallah, in which Nasrallah praised Iran for its support. He met with what appears to be representatives of the PLO factions and told them that the Oslo Accords were "self humiliating"[sic]. And he affirmed ties between Iran and the Assad regime in Damascus.<br />
<div class="padded quote">
The deputy speaker of the Iranian Majlis, Dr Hasan Rohani, met the leaders of ten Palestinian groups and the secretary-general of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Shaykh Hasan Nasrallah, in Damascus on 4th April, Vision of the Islamic Republic of Iran Network 1 (Tehran, in Persian 1430 gmt 4 Apr 94) reported. The report said that Nasrallah thanked the Iranian people and leadership for their support.
<br />
<br />
IRNA news agency (Tehran, in English 1910 gmt 4 Apr 94) reported that Rohani, who is also the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, reiterated "Iran's firm support for Islamic resistance in southern Lebanon".
<br />
<br />
According to an IRNA news agency report (2036 gmt 4 Apr 94), Rohani told the leaders of the 10 Palestinian factions that "what Yasir Arafat has signed with the Zionist regime as an agreement is `self humiliating'and will not realize any of the goals and rights of the Palestinian nation".
<br />
<br />
IRNA news agency (2049 gmt 4 Apr 94) reported that in a speech to the leaders of the ten Palestinian groups, Rohani had said that the Hebron massacre had helped to strengthen "the jihad of the Palestinian people in occupied Palestine".
<br />
<br />
Syrian Arab Republic Radio (Damascus, in Arabic 1315 gmt 4 Apr 94) reported that on the same day Rohani met Abd al-Qadir Qaddurah, the speaker of the Syrian People's Assembly. IRNA news agency (2103 gmt 4 Apr 94) reported that during the meeting Rohani described ties between Tehran and Damascus as excellent.
</div>
<br />
In the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq, Rohani, who was then Secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, met with Algerian ambassador to Iran, Abdelkader Hadjar. He referred to a plot by which the United States and Israel were using 9/11 to justify their respective campaigns of terror against the Muslim world and Palestinians. Announcing that "The Muslims have never been involved in terrorism actions," he seemed to hint at 9/11 conspiracy theories.<br />
<span id="docs-internal-guid-39a1bcfe-4af4-c4d6-703d-31928f53c5c5"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"></span></span></span><br />
<div class="padded quote">
The SNSC secretary said that the United States has embarked on propaganda campaign against Islam since the 11 September terrorist attacks in the United States, while the US-backed Zionist regime has intensified its terrorist operations against Palestinians. The Muslims have never been involved in terrorist actions, while, Washington accuses Muslims of terrorism, he said. He said that the United States is seeking to exert influence over the Muslim world's vital and geopolitical centres especially in the Middle East, the Persian Gulf and the horn of Africa, adding that the Muslim nations are in pressing need of solidarity more than ever before.</div>
<br />
Archives also show that Rohani played an important role in the violent suppression of late 90s pro-democracy protests in Iran, in which he eagerly implemented the "revolutionary order to crush mercilessly and monumentally any move of these opportunist elements". According to an August 1999 <a href="http://www.iran.org/tib/public/6101.htm">edition of The Iran Brief</a>:
<br />
<br />
<div class="padded quote">
With Mr. Khatami firmly on board, the regime launched its counterattack on July 14, bussing tens of thousands of government employees to Tehran to stage a pro-regime rally. While no one was fooled as to the authenticity of the rally, it was an impressive show of force. Addressing the crowd, the Secretary of the National Security Council, Hassan Rouhani, known as a top aide to President Khatami, promised to arrest pro-democracy protesters and execute them. "Two nights ago we received decisive instructions to deal with these elements," he announced. "And at dusk yesterday we received a decisive revolutionary order to crush mercilessly and monumentally any move of these opportunist elements wherever it may occur. From today our people shall witness how in the arena our law-enforcement force and our heroic Bassij shall deal with these opportunists and riotous elements, if they simply dare to show their faces."</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-90776840143814060222013-04-16T17:54:00.000-04:002015-03-29T12:56:22.437-04:00Middle Class Radicalism & Its Discontents <style type="text/css">
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Two responses to the bombing of the Boston Marathon.
<br />
<br />
<div class="padded quote">
"What happened in Boston is undeniably important and newsworthy. But so is what happened in Iraq and Syria. It is not the American people’s fault that they have a capitalist news model, where news is often carried on television to sell advertising. The corporations have decided that for the most part, Iraq and Syria aren’t what will attract Nielsen viewers and therefore advertising dollars. Given the global dominance by US news corporations, this decision has an impact on coverage in much of the world."
<br />
<br />
-- <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2013/04/bombings-increase-sympathy.html" target="_blank">Middle East Studies professor Juan Cole</a>
<br />
<br />
“I’m not saying that the US is much better than China. But in the face of a bombing attack, they have absolute information transparency and absolute freedom of speech. There is no ban on reporting or block of information. All media are allowed to report, which will never happen in our country.”
<br />
<br />
-- <a href="http://offbeatchina.com/why-terrorist-attack-wont-work-in-china-chinese-netizens-reaction-to-boston-marathon-explosions" target="_blank">A Chinese "Netizen"</a></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-9504900216309396442012-12-23T23:57:00.000-05:002015-03-29T12:50:02.721-04:00The New Laocoon <style type="text/css">
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<span class="subtitle">Andrew Sullivan and Public Debate</span>
<br />
<div class="padded quote">
The mountain of words and pictures last week mirrored the piles of rubble in New York. Like the rescue workers there, one waded in trying to find something that was alive, that would illuminate and explain what had happened.
Noticeable was the reluctance throughout the media to contemplate the Israeli factor - the undeniable and central fact behind the disaster that Israel is now and has been for some time an American colony, sustained by billions of American dollars and armed with American missiles, helicopters and tanks.<br />
<br />
Such has been the pressure from the Israeli lobby in this country that many, even normally outspoken journalists, are reluctant even to refer to such matters. Nor would you find anywhere in last week's coverage, any reference whatever to things I have mentioned here in recent issues of The Observer: the fact, for example, that Mr Blair's adviser on the Middle East is an unelected, unknown Jewish businessman, Lord Levy, now installed in the Foreign Office; the fact that this same Lord Levy is the chief fundraiser for the Labour Party; unmentioned also would be the close business links with Israel of two of our most powerful press magnates, Rupert Murdoch and the newly ennobled owner of the Telegraph newspapers, Lord Conrad Black.<br />
<br />
When Mr Blair, supported by these gentlemen's papers, pledges his support for Mr Bush as he prepares for war with an as yet unidentified enemy, we ought to be prepared at least to incur the charge of anti-Semitism by giving these matters an airing before the balloon goes up.</div>
<br />
So wrote the English journalist Richard Ingrams five days after the 9/11 attacks. "Who will dare damn Israel?" he asked. An outraged Andrew Sullivan answered.
<br />
<div class="padded quote">
We should be grateful, I suppose, that those who seek the extinction of the Jewish state still feel somewhat hesitant to say so outright. But like all anti-Semites, Ingrams thinks he and the West are somehow victims of the Jewish people... After an event like last week, Ingrams wants to "damn" a country that has long been the victim of such horror. Dare? Oh, the bravery of Ingrams' prejudice! And then further in the piece, he casts the usual ugly slur of dual loyalty on Lord Lever [sic], a British citizen of impeccable patriotism... One phrase stands out: "unelected, unknown Jewish businessman." These are the code words of the worst kind of anti-Semitism...</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
Also five days after 9/11, Sullivan wrote a <a href="http://www.coastalpost.com/01/11/07.htm" target="_blank">piece</a> in The Sunday Times which identified a comparable force in America: "The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column." Sullivan celebrated the arousal by 9/11 of a "squeamish" and "appeasement"-oriented United States, that if not for the horror of that day might have "[abandoned] Israel to the barbarians who would annihilate every Jew on the planet." As much as his charge remains true of <a href="http://www.kersplebedeb.com/mystuff/s11/churchill.html" target="_blank">fringe figures</a> and is redolent of some <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,83002,00.html" target="_blank">thought</a> on the Left, it complemented Ingrams' mean paranoia. There is nothing he's written that he's walked back more emphatically, but that line stands as a measure of the public intellect of Andrew Sullivan.<br />
<br />
Like TED and Time Magazine, Sullivan is middlebrow. His blog is a piano roll of middle class amusements -- "<a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/12/mental-health-break-5.html" target="_blank">Mental</a> <a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/12/men.html" target="_blank">Health</a> <a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/12/mental-health-break-6.html" target="_blank">Breaks</a>," <a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/12/the-view-from-your-window-7.html" target="_blank">views</a> from our windows, <a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/12/face-of-the-day-2.html" target="_blank">faces</a> of the day, <a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/10/the-science-of-shaken-not-stirred.html" target="_blank">surface</a> <a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/07/what-the-hell-is-a-higgs-boson.html" target="_blank">encounters</a> with science that make us "go hmmm." This is the mortar into which quick takes on weighty issues are pressed. Sometimes he writes his own; other times he features excerpts by one-off commentators or a gallery of go-to guys. This is by careful design -- Sullivan is enamored of what he considers his key role in the digital democratization of media, which is itself of course a middlebrow concern. He designs his blog to make information easily accessible and emotionally evocative. He uses it to "think out loud."</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
The china shop starts rattling when he tackles sensitive topics. An intellectual tic guides Andrew Sullivan as a journalist: judging the importance of an issue and the value of its spokespeople by how much outrage they generate. Perhaps the most lurid example is the amount of time and space he donated to amplifying rumors that Bristol Palin was Trig Palin's mother. And if Sullivan detects that a debate is taboo, he doubles down and his hallmark hysteria becomes a kind of keening. That is what has led him to obsess over race and intelligence and to champion Charles Murray. As Editor of the New Republic in 1994, Sullivan shanghaied the center-Left magazine into serializing parts of <i>The Bell Curve. </i>Its whole editorial staff nearly quit. More recently, in meretricious penitence for his support of the Iraq war, he has focused on what he calls the "Greater Israel Lobby" and the work of Walt and Mearsheimer.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;">
Sullivan's self-perception as a maverick fostering the discussion of uncomfortable truths has a stylistic corollary. It gives him a penchant for sounding dogwhistles -- using language that is designed to be disparaging, invidious, provocative, which cunningly conjures from a distance themes that are thought over the line. Christian fundamentalists are termed "Christianists" in order to evoke images of Islamists executing people in football stadiums. Jews and Muslims <a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/06/germany-bans-circumcision.html" target="_blank">persist</a> in the "barbarism" of "Male Genital Mutilation," which likens them to primitives who hack away at girls' clitorises with can lids. And "many Jews" participating in our democracy make up the "Greater Israel lobby," which "has actively damaged the interests of the United States on behalf of... a foreign country."<br />
<br />
One effect is to draw more attention than he would otherwise get. Another, of course, is to summon the "smears" and silencing he laments in the first place, which has the tautologous use of reinforcing his narrative: Andrew Sullivan is a maverick opposing debate-squelching prigs. "I <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/daily-dish/archive/2010/07/on-walt-mearsheimer-weiss-greenwald-and-me/184368/" target="_blank">will not</a> be intimidated," he warns.<br />
<br /></div>
Better if he thought out loud less. Native to the middlebrow milieu are Sullivan's capacities for conventionality and enthusiasm. Long after Obama-mania peaked, he maintains a feudal <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/dorsey/andrew-sullivans-obama-meltdown-in-8-key-gifs" target="_blank">devotion</a> to the President that has led political scientists to <a href="http://plainblogaboutpolitics.blogspot.com/2012/10/was-it-debate.html" target="_blank">ridicule</a> him as an exemplar of unscientific analysis. And on other matters, Sullivan <a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/12/quo-1.html" target="_blank">sometimes</a> <a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/10/dissent-of-the-day-ctd.html" target="_blank">overshares</a>. That was the thing about Laocoon -- they might have listened to him if he hadn't diddled his wife in front of the statue of Apollo.<br />
<br />
Andrew Sullivan is zeitgeist Silly Putty. After 9/11 he became a strident neocon, and after Bush he became a neo-realist with Paulite undertones -- skepticism of intervention and distrust of Israel. This has kept him busy for several years, but when his middlebrow intelligence is no longer able to digest what he perceives to be an epochal issue, his hysteria becomes wholly unleashed, and when this emotional process reaches its apex, he identifies a "Fifth Column" threatening to tip us over the edge into perdition.<br />
<br />
Eleven years after 9/11, <a href="http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2012/12/sm.html" target="_blank">this</a> is what Andrew Sullivan has found:<br />
<div class="padded quote">
For many fanatically pro-Israel Jewish-Americans I know, it all comes down in the end to tribalism.<br />
<br />
But they project that onto others.<br />
<br />
I am not a tribal gay; I am a person before I am a gay person. I have attacked HRC in the past in a way that would simply be inconceivable for many Jewish Americans and AIPAC. I oppose hate crime laws; I challenged the priority for employment discrimination laws. I backed the Boy Scouts in their freedom. For the vast bulk of the American Jewish Establishment, this is simply incomprehensible. Why would I betray "your people" as one TNR colleague used to ironically call my fellow gays when talking to me. "My people?" It tells you so much about a mindset. The mindset affects all vulnerable minorities, of course, gays included. But the enforcement of it on Israel questions in Washington is striking. And it is profoundly illiberal. It reflexively and even at this point unconsciously puts tribal loyalty before any argument of any kind. It is why the Middle East is so fucked up. And why on the Israel question, Washington is so fucked up as well.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-84690782552338906412012-09-17T18:24:00.000-04:002013-01-04T11:10:48.012-05:00The Optics, or How It Works<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Xza2u3-Bryc/UFeiLXasAZI/AAAAAAAAAWI/v2m1imE8qpY/s1600/liberalism+today.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="195" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Xza2u3-Bryc/UFeiLXasAZI/AAAAAAAAAWI/v2m1imE8qpY/s320/liberalism+today.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<br />
Liberalism today, on Rosh Hashanah, 2012: the New York Times <a href="http://t.co/829SpXMM" target="_blank">runs</a> a protege of Rashid Khalidi, who reaches deep into the candy bag of Israel's crimes and dredges up the worst of them all -- the Sabra and Shatila massacre -- to depict the Jewish state as amoral, dishonest and hysterical so as to undercut its security concerns about Iran. While the stakeholders deliberate how to wring the most use out of this, Maureen Dowd's "Neocons Slither Back" pulses like a red lamp in the Most E-Mailed sidebar.<a class="twitter-timeline-link" data-expanded-url="http://nyti.ms/S4b0sG" dir="ltr" href="http://t.co/829SpXMM" target="_blank" title="http://nyti.ms/S4b0sG"><span class="js-display-url"></span></a>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-13528109615789076002012-08-01T15:48:00.000-04:002015-03-29T12:57:46.674-04:00Gore Vidal: Another Lodestar Dims <style type="text/css">
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As if to sweep Alexander Cockburn's cantankerous spirit along, Gore Vidal, one of the last known individuals of a functionally extinct species -- the patrician man of letters -- has died at 86.<br />
<br />
As with Cockburn, Vidal was a bracing stylist whose worldview drew from crusty precincts of the Left and Right. And as with Cockburn, Vidal nonetheless was revered as a progressive lodestar. This is especially peculiar in Vidal's case, as he was clearly an American nativist. It's easy to perceive a xenophobic overlap of far Right and Left in relation to Israel, but Vidal nursed a quaint obsession with the <i>Yellow Peril</i>. In 1986 in The Nation of all places, he volleyed abuse at Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter which began with the following "conclusion":<br />
<br />
<div class="padded quote">
... for America to survive economically in the coming Sino-Japanese world, an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity. After all, the white race is a minority race with many well deserved enemies, and if the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere don’t band together, we are going to end up as farmers–or, worse, mere entertainment–for the more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics.</div>
<br />
This isn't a literary curio. Vidal, the Left-intellectual author of a humane <i>bildungsroman</i> about male homosexuality (The City and the Pillar) and the Democratic Party mandarin who grappled with the likes of William F. Buckley, was a devout isolationist. Attending Phillips Exeter Academy in 1940, Vidal organized its chapter of the America First Committee. Later he described Charles Lindbergh as "the true white knight through and through" who was "the best that we are ever apt to produce in the hero line, American-style." In late life Vidal was also, of course, a conspiracy theorist about the 9/11 attacks.
<br />
<br />
So it is not surprising that like Alexander Cockburn, and Pat Buchanan and contemporary epigones like Glenn Greenwald, Gore Vidal was ardently phobic of Israel. As Christopher Hitchens observed:<br />
<br />
<div class="padded quote">
... I always knew, as one had to know - and it was in his writing too -- that [Vidal] had this mean streak in him, of a kind of paranoia -- a conspiracy-based paranoid view of the world, and particularly of American history, which leads to isolationism and what I call Lindberg-ism, because he was a great admirer of [Charles] Lindberg, because this stuff is indissoluble from a very tiny stain of Judaeo-phobia which he could never dispel. He had it in under control - but it's quite hard to keep it under control.</div>
<br />
Vidal was less controlled than Cockburn. He contributed a <a href="http://www.codoh.com/library/document/63" target="_blank">Foreword</a> to Israel Shahak's notorious "Jewish History, Jewish Religion", in which he claimed of the Jews that "no other minority in American history has ever hijacked so much money from the American taxpayers in order to invest in a ‘homeland’". Beloved by hardcore anti-Semites, Shahak's book sources Israel's political pathology in a fundamentalist interpretation of Judaism.
<br />
<br />
And Vidal wrote the following Nation essay, which contains his quote about "Asiatics" and demonstrates that for him, there wasn't a clear distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I've added highlighting in <span style="color: red;">red</span>, in case you wish to skip to the really piquant parts.
<br />
<br />
<div class="padded quote">
<b>The Empire Lovers Strike Back</b><br />
<i>March 22, 1986</i><br />
<br />
<i>Gore Vidal lives in Los Angeles and Rome. His coruscating essays on the U. S. giobal role always inflame as well as enlighten. Vidal has taken this occasion lo respond to two of his critics, but he uses the sparks of this clash to illuminate his larger preoccupation: the changing image and reality of <br />the American Empire.</i>
<br />
<br />
<b>GORE VIDAL</b>
<br />
<br />
Recently, Norman Mailer and I chatted together at the Royale Theatre in
New York, under the auspices of PEN American Center. Part of what I said
was reprinted in these pages on January 11, under the title, not mine, “<a href="http://www.thephora.net/forum/showthread.php?p=832151" target="_blank">Requiem for the American Empire</a>.” I gave a bit of a history lesson about our empire’s genesis, and I brooded on its terminus last fall, when Tokyo took over from New York as the world’s economic center.
<br />
<br />
My conclusion: for America to survive economically in the coming
Sino-Japanese world, an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity.
After all, the white race is a minority race with many well deserved
enemies, and if the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere don’t
band together, we are going to end up as farmers–or, worse, mere
entertainment–for the more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics.
In principle, Mailer agreed.
<br />
<br />
As expected, that wonderful, wacky couple, Norman (Poddy) Podhoretz and
his wife, Midge Decter, checked in. The Lunts of the right wing (<span style="color: red;">Israeli Fifth Column Division</span>), they are now, in their old age, more and more like refugees from a Woody Allen film: The Purple Prose of West End
Avenue.
<br />
<br />
Poddy was the first to respond. He is the editor of Commentary (circulation 55,000, and allegedly falling; paid for by the American Jewish Committee). He is best known–and by me loved–for his autobiographical “novel,” Making It, in which he tells us that he has made it because he has become editor of Commentary and might one day be a guest at the White House, as he has already been a guest of Huntington Hartford in Nassau.
<br />
<br />
Over the years, Poddy has, like his employers, the A.J.C., moved from those liberal positions traditionally occupied by American Jews (and me) to the far right of American politics. The reason for that is simple. In order to get Treasury money for Israel (last year $5 billion), pro-Israel lobbyists must see to it that America’s “the Russians are coming” squads are in place so that they can continue to frighten the American people into spending enormous sums for “defense,” which also
means <span style="color: red;">the support of Israel in its never-ending wars against just about everyone</span>.
<br />
<br />
To make sure that nearly a third of the Federal budget goes to the Pentagon and Israel, it is necessary for the pro-Israel lobbyists to make common cause with our lunatic right. Hence, the virulent propaganda.
<br />
<br />
Poddy denounced Mailer and me in the pages of the New York Post. According to him, we belong to that mindless majority of pinko intellectuals who actually think that the nation spends too much on the Pentagon and not enough on, say, education. Since sustained argument is not really his bag, he must fall back on the ad hominem attack, a right-wing specialty–and, of course, <span style="color: red;">on our flag, which he wears like a designer kaftan </span>because “the blessings of freedom and prosperity are greater and more widely shared [here] than in any country known to human history.” Poddy should visit those Western European countries whose per
capita income is higher than ours. All in all, Poddy is a silly billy.
<br />
<br />
<span style="color: red;">Significantly, the one Yiddish word that has gained universal acceptance in this country is chutzpah.</span> Example: In 1960, Mr. and Mrs. Podhoretz were in upstate New York where I used to live. I was trying out a play at the Hyde Park Playhouse; the play was set during the Civil War. “Why,” asked Poddy, “are you writing a play about, of all things, the Civil War?” I explained to him that my mother’s family had fought for the Confederacy and my father’s for the Union, and that the Civil War was–and is–to the United States what the Trojan War was to the Greeks, the great single tragic event that continues to give resonance to our Republic.
<br />
<br />
“Well, to me,” said Poddy, “the Civil War is as remote and as irrelevant
as the War of the Roses.” <span style="color: red;">I realized then that he was not planning to become an “assimilated American,” to use the old-fashioned terminology;
but, rather, his first loyalty would always be to Israel. </span>Yet he and Midge stay on among us, in order to make propaganda and raise money for Israel–a country they don’t seem eager to live in. Jewish joke, circa 1900: A Zionist is someone who wants to ship other people off to Palestine.
<br />
<br />
Midge was next to strike. But before she launched her attack, in something called Contentions, she put on her thinking cap and actually read what I wrote. I give her high marks for that. Unfortunately, she found my history lesson hard going. But then, <span style="color: red;">like most of our Israeli fifth columnists, Midge isn’t much interested in what the goyim were up to before Ellis Island.</span> She also likes the ad hominem attack. When I noted that our writers seldom speak out on matters of war and peace because so many of them are paid for by universities that receive money from the garrison state, Midge tartly retorted, “He, after all, is not
paid by a university but by those great centers of independence, the film companies.” Since my last Hollywood film, The Best Man, was made in 1964, I have been “paid” by that American public that buys my books about the American past, a subject of no demonstrable interest to Midge and Poddy and their friends.
<br />
<br />
Midge was amazed by my description of how we seized territories from Mexico, including California; annexed Hawaii and Puerto Rico and, of course, the Philippines, where we slaughtered between 100,000 and 200,000 of the inhabitants. Interesting note: American imperialists froth if the figures for those murdered are ever in excess of 60,000 men, women and children, the acceptable statistical minimum for genocide. Then Midge, with that magisterial gooniness that marks her polemical style, told us, “that three of these conquered territories are now states of the United States, and a fourth an independent republic, is evidently beside the point–as, we cannot resist remarking...”
<br />
<br />
Oh, Midge, resist. Resist! Don’t you get the point? We stole other people’s land. We murdered many of the inhabitants. We imposed our religion–and rule–on the survivors. General Grant was ashamed of what we did to Mexico, and so am I. Mark Twain was ashamed of what we did in the Philippines, and so am I. Midge is not because <span style="color: red;">in the Middle East another predatory people is busy stealing other people’s land in the name of an alien theocracy.</span> She is a propagandist for these predators (paid for?), and that is what all this nonsense is about.
<br />
<br />
Since spades may not be called spades in freedom’s land, let me spell it all out. In order to get military and economic support for Israel, a small number of American Jews, who should know better, have made common cause with every sort of reactionary and anti-Semitic group in the United States, from the corridors of the Pentagon to the TV studios of the evangelical Jesus-Christers. To show that their hearts are in the far-right place, they call themselves neoconservatives, and attack the likes of Mailer and me, all in the interest of supporting the likes of Sharon and Israel as opposed to the Peace Now Israelis whom they disdain. There is real madness here; mischief too.
<br />
<br />
“Well, one thing is clear in all this muddle,’’ writes Midge, adrift in her tautological sea, “Mr. Vidal does not like his country.” Poor Midge. Of course I like my country. After all, I’m its current biographer. <span style="color: red;">But
now that we’re really leveling with each other, I’ve got to tell you I don’t much like your country, which is Israel.</span>
<br />
<br />
Although there is nothing wrong with being a lobbyist for a foreign power, one is supposed to register with the Justice Department. Also, I should think that tact would require a certain forbearance when it comes to the politics of the host country. But tact is unknown to the Podhoretzes. Joyously they revel in the politics of hate, with plangent attacks on blacks and/or fags and/or liberals, trying, always, to outdo those moral majoritarians who will, as Armageddon draws near, either convert all the Jews, just as the Good Book says, or kill them.
<br />
<br />
All in all, the latest Podhoretz diatribes have finally convinced me that the time has come for the United States to stop all aid not only to Israel but to Jordan, Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. The Middle Easterners would then be obliged to make peace, or blow one another up, or whatever. In any case, we would be well out of it. After all, the theological and territorial quarrels of Israel and Islam are as remote to 200 million Americans as–what else?–the War of the Roses.</div>
<br />
<br />
It should be noted that a "kaftan" is a garment symbolic of the Middle East. I think this is what The Nation meant when it referred to Vidal's "coruscating essays".
<br />
<br />
<b>Postscript</b>: Today, The Nation <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/169182/remembering-gore-vidal#" target="_blank">commemorates</a> Vidal, offering this comment on "The Empire Lovers Strike Back":
<br />
<br />
<div class="padded quote">
The Asiatics didn’t complain, but two months later, some Jews did, after Gore wrote that Norman Podhoretz’s “first loyalty would always be to Israel,” and that he and his wife Midge Decter therefore constituted “an Israeli Fifth Column Division" inside the United States.
<br />
<br />
Many of us took that as another satiric barb, but Podhoretz had his associate editor at <i>Commentary</i> write to thirty people on the<i> Nation</i> masthead who had Jewish-sounding names asking whether they had protested the magazine’s publication of “the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst in an American periodical since the Second World War.” (Nobody on the masthead resigned.) Arthur Carter, the Wall Street figure who had recently become publisher of the magazine, told Victor that the head of the Anti-Defamation League had complained to him about Gore’s piece. Carter replied, “What do you think we are? It’s <i>The Nation</i>, not the Jewish Federation Newsletter.” Victor called that “passing the Gore test.”</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-62400842537125528842012-07-23T02:00:00.001-04:002015-03-29T13:00:38.849-04:00Commemorating Alexander Cockburn <style type="text/css">
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The Irish New Left journalist and stylist Alexander Cockburn is dead. I don't like dissing the just-deceased, but I have a standard response to the passing of people like Cockburn: I'm not happy that he's dead, and I'm not happy that he lived.<br />
<br />
You won't see a lot of straight talk about Cockburn just now. To the extent that anyone still notices his long-dimmed star, it's mainly New Left mandarins and their admirers who are staggering to commemorate him. <a href="https://twitter.com/KathaPollitt/status/226767407153303553" target="_blank">Katha Pollitt</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/KatrinaNation/status/226581420137664512" target="_blank">Katrina vanden Heuvel</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/Greg_Palast/status/226774258154618880" target="_blank">Greg Palast</a> are stunned. <a href="https://twitter.com/georgegalloway/status/226699730007248896" target="_blank">Gorgeous George</a> is lugubrious. The Nation, which doesn't <a href="http://www.thenation.com/article/put-out-no-flags" target="_blank">fly flags</a>, is at <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/168996/alexander-cockburn-and-radical-power-word" target="_blank">half-mast</a>. Assorted <i>padawans</i> are <a href="https://twitter.com/LilianaSegura/status/226672250093457409" target="_blank">performing</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/EdgeofSports/status/226664397542682626" target="_blank">homage</a>. Even the Paulite non-interventionist <a href="https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/226800399913455616" target="_blank">Glenn Greenwald</a>, who moves usually in less rarefied circles, has observed the occasion, and aptly, as we will see.<br />
<br />
Cockburn was edgy, ballsy and in some ways brilliant. As a stylist and polemicist, he was a meet peer of Christopher Hitchens, whom he was close to but came to despise. I don't think Cockburn had quite the same level of talent, but he was formidable and was Hitchens' perfect foil.<br />
<br />
It goes deep downhill from there. Cockburn was the son of a Stalinist shill, the journalist Claud Cockburn, who according to <a href="http://brockley.blogspot.com/2008/06/alexander-cockburn-and-counterpunch.html" target="_blank">Bob Gordon</a>, "worked closely [in Spain during the Spanish Civil War] with the Soviet agents who orchestrated both acts of violence against the anti-Stalinist left and the propaganda which whitewashed those acts." Orwell himself documented Cockburn's disinformation in Homage to Catalonia.<br />
<br />
Alexander seems to have inherited his father's character and the core of his politics, though he went on to become a New Left icon. Along with Jeffrey St. Clair, he came to edit a political newsletter called Counterpunch, which was admired alternately by International ANSWER types, 60s radicals, libertarians and nativists. As such Counterpunch isn't garden variety radical flora. Its politics comprise global warming denial, pro-NRA and pro-Pinochet positions, as well as paranoid anti-banker populism, hysteria about the surveillance state and Palestinian solidarity. You might be thinking what some have remarked -- that Counterpunch is in some ways more far-Right than Left. Oliver Kamm rightly <a href="http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/12/friends_of_pino.html" target="_blank">sources</a> its harlequin politics in
<br />
<div class="padded quote">
convergence between what may reasonably be termed anti-American instincts on both wings of politics. During Labour's fractious debates in the 1980s, Denis Healey memorably described neutralism - then a vibrant sentiment on the British Left - as "isolationism with an inferiority complex". The identity is by now almost complete.</div>
<br />
On Israel, Zionism and Jews, far Right and Left also find common ground, and Counterpunch in this vein is unambiguously anti-Semitic. It's not just over-the-top or an Asperger's affair like Mondoweiss. Counterpunch actually published a blood libel. This is Alexander Cockburn's <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2009/08/28/israeli-organ-harvesting/" target="_blank">wicked accomplishment</a>.<br />
<br />
<div class="padded quote">
The fact is... that substantiated evidence of public and private organ trafficking and theft, and allegations of worse, have been widely reported for many years. Given such context, the Swedish charges become far more plausible than might otherwise be the case and suggest that an investigation could well turn up significant information.<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
Israel’s organ donor problems<br />
<br />
Israel has an extraordinarily small number of willing organ donors. According to the Israeli news service Ynet, “the percentage of organs donated among Jews is the lowest of all the ethnic groups… In western countries, some 30 per cent of the population have organ donor cards. In Israel, in contrast, four percent of the population holds such cards. (17)<br />
<br />
“According to statistics from the Health Ministry’s website, in 2001, 88 Israelis died waiting for a transplant because of a lack of donor organs. In the same year, 180 Israelis were brain dead, and their organs could have been used for transplant, but only 80 of their relatives agreed to donate their organs.”<br />
<br />
According to Ynet, the low incidence of donors is related to “religious reasons.” In 2006 there was an uproar when an Israeli hospital known for its compliance with Jewish law performed a transplant operation using an Israeli donor. The week before, “a similar incident occurred, but since the patient was not Jewish it passed silently.”<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
Palestinian disappearances increase<br />
<br />
Bostrom, who earlier wrote of all this in his 2001 book Inshallah, (20) reports in his recent article:
<br />
<br />
<div class="padded quote2">
“While the campaign was running, young Palestinian men started to disappear from villages in the West Bank and Gaza. After five days Israeli soldiers would bring them back dead, with their bodies ripped open.<br />
<br />
“Talk of the bodies terrified the population of the occupied territories. There were rumors of a dramatic increase of young men disappearing, with ensuing nightly funerals of autopsied bodies.”<br />
<br />
“... On an assignment from a broadcasting network I then travelled around interviewing a great number of Palestinian families in the West Bank and Gaza – meeting parents who told of how their sons had been deprived of organs before being killed.”</div>
He describes the case of 19-year-old Bilal Achmed Ghanan, shot by Israeli forces invading his village.<br />
<br />
<div class="padded quote2">
“The first shot hit him in the chest. According to villagers who witnessed the incident he was subsequently shot with one bullet in each leg. Two soldiers then ran down from the carpentry workshop and shot Bilal once in the stomach. Finally, they grabbed him by his feet and dragged him up the twenty stone steps of the workshop stair… Israeli soldiers loading the badly wounded Bilal in a jeep and driving him to the outskirts of the village, where a military helicopter waited. The boy was flown to a destination unknown to his family.”</div>
Five days later he was returned, “dead and wrapped up in green hospital fabric.” Bostrom reports that as the body was lowered into the grave, his chest was exposed and onlookers could see that he was stitched up from his stomach to his head. Bostrom writes that this was not the first time people had seen such a thing.<br />
<br />
...<br />
<br />
<div class="padded quote2">
It’s time to bring clarity to this macabre business, to shed light on what is going on and what has taken place in the territories occupied by Israel since the Intifada began.</div>
</div>
Cockburn, in publishing the ruminations by Alison Weir on Israeli organ harvesting, was the last notable First-World purveyor of blood libel. Weir's work is based on an earlier blood libel by Donald Bostrom appearing in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet. She folds into it the research of anthropologist and organ trade investigator Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who documented sporadic unethical and illegal organ harvesting of Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers in the 1990s by staff at the National Legal Medical Institute in Tel Aviv. The staff "said that they believed they were helping to save lives, and that this was more important than trying to procure the consent of ill-informed and grieving family members." Chief Pathologist Dr. Yehuda Hiss was fired for these improprieties, which ended by 2000, though he stayed with the Institute.<br />
<br />
Weir, and Counterpunch, want you to believe a broader, darker narrative: that Israel maintains the occupation of the Palestinians in part to shore up its reserves of organs for Jews in need of donations. This is necessary, the conspiracy theory goes, because Israel, owing to the religious compunctions of devout Jews, has a very low supply of donor organs.<br />
<br />
This isn't like the case with Ron Paul and his newsletters, which were ghost-written and which Paul indirectly benefited from. Counterpunch was Cockburn's primary project, to which he contributed writing, and his sentiments elsewhere are congruous. "It's supposedly the third rail in journalism even to have a discussion of how much the Jews do control the media," Cockburn observed, and published a book called The Politics of Anti-Semitism on the supposed misuse of the charge to silence people like him. About conspiracy theories fingering Israel for the 9/11 attacks or for having foreknowledge of them, Cockburn was noncommittal: "I don't know there's enough exterior evidence to determine whether they are true or not."<br />
<br />
While the progressives grieve, consider all this and the following tweets and links that lead to a breviary of other anti-Semitic quotes and their primary sources at Counterpunch. Also see if you can obtain the latest issue -- it features a piece called "THE DREYFUS CASE, REVISITED" by the Holocaust-denier Israel Shamir, who asks "... was [Dreyfus] really a victim of anti-Semitism?"<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>Alexander Cockburn: "... when it comes to agents of influence the [1940s] USSR couldn’t hold a candle to Israel today" <a href="http://t.co/YW4c0TCO">http://t.co/YW4c0TCO</a></p>— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/227152851179282432">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Alison Weir in Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch - the Lubavitcher Rebbe is a Svengali leading Jews to child-murder: <a href="http://t.co/YDNHw5BK" title="http://bit.ly/MgsEEO">bit.ly/MgsEEO</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T02:24:12+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/226865196143104001">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Alison Weir in Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch - IDF shoots them in the head; now Gabrielle Giffords may switch sides <a href="http://t.co/0YxF3KIb" title="http://bit.ly/MSxwOR">bit.ly/MSxwOR</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T02:41:17+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/226869497603166210">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Alison Weir in Alex Cockburn's Counterpunch - USS Liberty attack was a "false flag" operation by Israel against Egypt: <a href="http://t.co/JykxE0zD" title="http://bit.ly/O7p2Yg">bit.ly/O7p2Yg</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T03:12:52+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/226877445951877121">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Holocaust-denier Israel Shamir in Cockburn's Counterpunch - "Jewish lesbian" is mean to Putin, "relief" he rules Russia <a href="http://t.co/Tk5rnqLM" title="http://bit.ly/MuyS6M">bit.ly/MuyS6M</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T03:21:24+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/226879590084276224">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Saul Landau quotes Marc Ellis in Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch - "We live in the Golden Age of Empire Judaism": <a href="http://t.co/SvhCUthZ" title="http://bit.ly/SNZmkI">bit.ly/SNZmkI</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T03:26:17+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/226880822349807617">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Gilad Atzmon in Counterpunch: "[maybe] Hitler developed some of his anti-Semitic arguments after reading... [Zionists]" <a href="http://t.co/fpZQyv1Z" title="http://bit.ly/NHGPWv">bit.ly/NHGPWv</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T03:42:20+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/226884858511765504">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Gilad Atzmon in Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch - Hezbollah "heroic", Western leaders are "Zionised", IDF = Wehrmacht <a href="http://t.co/AfU2w8y7" title="http://bit.ly/MzSNPL">bit.ly/MzSNPL</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T03:56:16+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/226888366640209920">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Gilad Atzmon in Counterpunch: "Israelis & Zionists are very unusual creatures that do not follow any recognized human pattern of empathy"<br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T04:33:36+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/226897759343616002">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Gilad Atzmon in Counterpunch - Israel sends Israelis to "'Shoah' tourist attractions" to teach them how to be Nazis: <a href="http://t.co/fpZQyv1Z" title="http://bit.ly/NHGPWv">bit.ly/NHGPWv</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T04:39:07+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/226899150342598656">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Gilad Atzmon, leading Jewish anti-Semite, writes in Cockburn's Counterpunch about the "Zionification of our universe" <a href="http://t.co/6JlhtHRy" title="http://bit.ly/LExxWL">bit.ly/LExxWL</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T17:54:25+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/227099292505083905">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Alan Cabal defends Holocaust denial icon Ernst Zundel in Counterpunch - "[Zundel] is a 64 year-old painter & pacifist": <a href="http://t.co/bkV2hYoY" title="http://bit.ly/MD1TPB">bit.ly/MD1TPB</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T22:42:34+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/227171810028953602">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
"The issue... in the Bush admin. is dual loyalties... officials... who can't distinguish US... from Israeli interests" <a href="http://t.co/d5ud0OJa" title="http://bit.ly/OSv3ob">bit.ly/OSv3ob</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-23T03:05:09+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/227237887916244994">July 23, 2012</a></blockquote>
<br />
Also:
<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/01/29/holocaust-history/" target="_blank">Lenni Brenner</a>, the American Trotskyist who is the leading Western amplifier of the Soviet lie that Nazis and Zionists were kindred collaborators: "The slaughter of between 5 and 6 million Jews has become history’s best known black hats/white hats movie."</li>
<li>Alison Weir on that same <a href="http://t.co/MCoxgzNx" target="_blank">lie</a></li>
<li>Gilad Atzmon, the leading Jewish anti-Semite, was a favorite at Counterpunch, which liked to run him and articles defending him. <a href="http://t.co/fpZQyv1Z" target="_blank">Here</a>'s Atzmon at Counterpunch: "...there is good reason to believe that Hitler developed some of his anti-Semitic arguments after reading early Zionist texts"</li>
<li>Recall Bashar Assad told Pope John Paul II that the Jews continue to afflict Christians and Muslims the way they betrayed Jesus and Muhammad. 8 years later, Cockburn published an article called "<a href="http://t.co/uIJuORpY" target="_blank">Israeli Bodysnatchers</a>" by Bouthaina Shaaban, Political and Media Advisor to the Assad Presidency. The piece carries on about the Bostrom blood libel.</li>
</ul>
Philosophy professor Michael Neumann is a frequent Counterpunch contributor. The hate site Jewish Tribal Review admired Neumann's writings and tried to recruit him for collaboration. Neumann demurred and JTR published their email exchange, in which Neumann wrote: "If an effective strategy [of helping Palestinians] means that some truths about the Jews don't come to light, I don't care. If an effective strategy means encouraging reasonable anti-Semitism... I also don't care. If it means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism, or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care."
Here are a few of Neumann's Counterpunch writings:
<br />
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Mike Neumann in CPunch: ".. we should almost never take antisemitism seriously, & maybe we should have some fun w/ it" <a href="http://t.co/oA5uxrSZ" title="http://bit.ly/QdaHgt">bit.ly/QdaHgt</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T18:12:06+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/227103741852151809">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Michael Neumann in Cockburn's Counterpunch: "Drop everything. Someone spray-painted antisemitic slogans on a synagogue" <a href="http://t.co/oA5uxrSZ" title="http://bit.ly/QdaHgt">bit.ly/QdaHgt</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T18:21:00+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/227105983237877760">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Michael Neumann in Cockburn's Counterpunch: "the real scandal today is not antisemitism but the importance it is given" <a href="http://t.co/oA5uxrSZ" title="http://bit.ly/QdaHgt">bit.ly/QdaHgt</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T18:21:45+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/227106173415989248">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Counterpunch: "[Arab] antisemitism... is utterly inexcusable. So was your failure to answer Aunt Bee’s last letter." <a href="http://t.co/oA5uxrSZ" title="http://bit.ly/QdaHgt">bit.ly/QdaHgt</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T19:02:54+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/227116529035141120">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet">
Counterpunch: "Israel has committed war crimes... This has provoked hatred against Jews. Why not? ... who cares?" <a href="http://t.co/oA5uxrSZ" title="http://bit.ly/QdaHgt">bit.ly/QdaHgt</a><br />
— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a data-datetime="2012-07-22T18:23:44+00:00" href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/227106671753842688">July 22, 2012</a></blockquote>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-41797378908357013482012-06-29T17:57:00.001-04:002015-03-29T13:03:09.523-04:00Iran Vice President Rahimi on the Jews <style type="text/css">
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Mohammad-Reza Rahimi, the Vice President of Iran and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's number two, gave a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/27/world/middleeast/irans-vice-president-rahimi-makes-anti-semitic-speech.html?_r=2&smid=tw-share" target="_blank">speech</a> in Tehran on June 26 at the UN-sponsored International Day Against Drug Abuse and Illicit Trafficking 2012 annual event. It was disfigured all over by anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and is a fine specimen of the form. Rahimi is not as well known as Ahmadinejad, but he surpassed his President by explicitly indicting Jews and Judaism rather than precision-targeting "Zionists".<br />
<br />
It is frustrating and regrettable that so far no verbatim transcript of the speech has emerged in English. I have worked hard over the last couple of days to find one or anything close -- an English-language summary or a verbatim transcript in Farsi. All I can find are assorted quotes in several English-language news reports.<br />
<br />
On a <a href="https://twitter.com/GEsfandiari/status/218113724681170944" target="_blank">tip</a> by Golnaz Esfandiari, I was able to <a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:mS93LQYqmaQJ:isna.ir/fa/news/91040603532/%D9%85%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%88%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%88%D9%84-%D8%B1%D9%8A%D9%8A%D8%B3-%D8%AC%D9%85%D9%87%D9%88%D8%B1-%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%AF%D9%85-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D9%88%D8%AC%D9%88%D8%AF-%D8%AA%D8%AD%D8%B1%D9%8A%D9%85-%D9%87%D8%A7%D9%8A+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" target="_blank">disinter</a> from the Google Cache a <a href="http://isna.ir/fa/news/91040603532/%D9%85%D8%B9%D8%A7%D9%88%D9%86-%D8%A7%D9%88%D9%84-%D8%B1%D9%8A%D9%8A%D8%B3-%D8%AC%D9%85%D9%87%D9%88%D8%B1-%D9%85%D8%B1%D8%AF%D9%85-%D8%A8%D8%A7-%D9%88%D8%AC%D9%88%D8%AF-%D8%AA%D8%AD%D8%B1%D9%8A%D9%85-%D9%87%D8%A7%D9%8A&hl=en&gl=us&prmd=imvns&strip=1" target"_blank">now-unavailable</a> Farsi-language report on the speech that appears to be an eyewitness paraphrase of Rahimi's remarks. It provides a clear and lengthy summary of what he actually said and serves as a better record than anything out there now. Therefore I've labored to translate the document into English and present it here.<br />
<div class="padded quote">
<i>"The Vice President announced that the Iranian people, despite intense sanctions, are stalwart and content.”</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<b>The Mehr News Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA)</b> Mohammad Reza Rahimi, celebrating the anniversary of the global fight against narcotics, said: the trafficking of drugs and glass [<i>“shisheh”, which means "glass", is a Persian idiom for crystal-meth -ed.</i>] are rooted in the teachings of the Zionist Talmud. This book teaches them how to destroy non-Jews so as to nourish a fetus in the womb of a Jewish mother.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">معاون
اول رييس جمهور اعلام كرد كه مردم ايران با وجود تحريمهاي شديد قناعت
ميكنند و ايستاده اند. به گزارش خبرنگار خبرگزاري دانشجويان ايران
(ايسنا)، محمدرضا رحيمي در مراسم سالروز جهاني مبارزه با مواد مخدر گفت:
توسعه و گسترش مواد مخدر و شيشه ريشه در آموزههاي تلموت صهيونيستها
دارند. در اين كتاب آموزش داده شده كه غير يهود را چگونه نابود كنند و
چگونه يك جنين در بطن يك مادر يهود پرورش داده شود.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span> <br />
He added: Eighty percent of American wealth is in the hands of 6 percent of the Jewish world and a U.S. researcher says that in order to reduce the population of American Indians a Jewish doctor of obstetrics and gynecology rendered 8000 of them sterile -- all of these teachings are in the Talmud.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">وي
افزود: هشتاد درصد ثروت آمريكا در دست شش درصد از يهوديان دنياست و يك
محقق آمريكايي ميگويد يك پزشك زنان و زايمان يهود براي كاهش نسل سرخپوستان
هشت هزار نفر از آنها را عقيم كرده است و همه اين مباحث در آموزههاي
تلموت است.</span><br />
<br />
Rahimi clarified: the Talmud's teachings are against Christianity and against Muslims. <span style="color: blue;">They think God has created the world so that all other nations can serve them.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">رحيمي تصريح كرد: آموزههاي تلموت هم بر ضد مسيحيت و هم عليه مسلمانان . يهود ديگران را در خدمت خود ميداند.</span><br />
<br />
He continued: what happened in Russia [<i>the Bolshevik Revolution -ed.</i>] and the labor movements were all due to the actions of orchestrating Jews, but later research showed that none among the victims were Jews.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">وي
ادامه داد:آنچه در روسيه اتفاق افتاد و همچنين تحركات كارگري همه ناشي از
اقدامات يهود و سردمداران آنها بود اما تحقيقات بعد نشان داد كه يك نفر از
كشته شدگان نيز از بين يهود نبوده است.</span><br />
<br />
The Vice President stated: Wherever blood is spilled there is a Muslim and located behind the scenes is the Jew.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">معاون اول رييس جمهور بيان كرد: هر كجا خوني ريخته ميشود يك مسلمان آنجا حضور دارد و در پشت صحنه آن يهيود قرار دارد.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: blue;">The Zionists spread destruction not only by drugs, but also by [attacking] cultures </span>and they do this in a way that no son and daughter knows their parents. Rahimi said: Jews dominate the media world to disseminate Jewish thought and plunder the resources and wealth of their countries. He said: they create differences between Shiite and Sunni nations and wear away their understanding, to destroy peace and security and comfort is their main goal.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">وي
ادامه داد: تخريب فقط به مواد مخدر نيست، بلكه با مسائل فرهنگي است و آنها
به گونهاي مسائل فرهنگي را رواج ميدهند كه هيچ پسر و دختري خود را
فرزندان والدينشان نميدانند. رحيمي اظهار كرد: تسلط بر رسانههاي جهان
براي القاي تفكر يهود است و كار آنها غارت منابع و ثروت فرهنگي كشورهاست.
وي گفت: آنها با ايجاد اختلاف بين ملتها شيعه و سني درست ميكنند و زدودن
آرامش و امنيت و از بين بردن آرامش هدف اصلي آنهاست.</span><br />
<br />
Rahimi continued: Since [<i>United States -ed.</i>] forces entered Afghanistan poppy cultivation has increased by 60%; alternatively the Islamic Republic of Iran might have bought all poppy produced in Afghanistan and turned it into morphine and medical drugs. He also noted that Iran could take money from the Afghan transit route of drugs to Europe, and open up the way to this income for the country, but this is immoral and contrary to our religion.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">رحيمي
ادامه داد: از زماني كه نيروهاي آنها وارد افغانستان شده كشت ترياك 60
افزايش پيدا كرده است و گرنه جمهوري اسلامي ايران ميتوانست تمام توليدات
كشور افغانستان را يكجا بخرد و آنرا تبديل به مرفين كرده و به مصرف دارويي
برساند. وي همچنين اذعان كرد ما ميتوانيم با گرفتن پول از افغانستان مسير
ترانزيت مواد مخدر به اروپا را باز كنيم و از اين راه درآمدي براي كشور كسب
شود، اما اين خلاف اخلاق و خلاف مكتب ماست.</span><br />
<br />
He pointed out: 13 percent of European addicts are opium users, but they get their liquor elsewhere. Despite the fact that we have respect for the followers of the Prophet Moses, we are opposed to the international Zionists. He announced that the Zionists are the main element of the drug trade, saying their aim is narcotics, while among the addicts you cannot even find one Zionist, and <span style="color: blue;">the Islamic Republic of Iran will pay for anybody who can research and find one single Zionist who is an addict.</span> The Vice President stressed: worldwide 210 million people will try a drug, there are 27 million people in the world that are addicted and this is most relevant to Asian countries. Rahimi said: based on laws and regulations concerning drugs mandating that each drug lord is to be executed in Iran, they will make noise. Our question is, if we execute drug dealers and don’t promote drugs, what is the fuss for? He attributed these recent discussions in our country to Zionist propaganda, and thieves and robbers in this country.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">وي
خاطر نشان كرد: 13 درصد از معتادان اروپا را ترياكيها به خود اختصاص
ميدهند، اما آنها در جاي ديگري شراب ميل ميكنند. ما عليرغم اينكه براي
پيروان حضرت موسي احترام قائل هستيم، اما مخالف صهيونيست جهاني هستيم. وي
تجارت مواد مخدر را كار صهيونيستها اعلام كرد و گفت: هدف آنها مواد مخدر
است، اين در حالي است كه حتي يك صهيونيست معتاد هم نميتوان پيدا كرد و ما
ميخواهيم از محققان و سازمانهاي بين المللي خود را معرفي كنند كه چرا
صهيونيستها ترويج و گسترش دهنده مواد مخدر هستند، اما خود آنها معتاد
نيستند. معاون اول رييس جمهور تصريح كرد: در دنيا 210 ميليون نفر يك بار
مواد مخدر را تجربه ميكنند و 27 ميليون نفر در دنيا معتاد وجود دارد كه
بيشتر آنها مربوط به كشورهاي آسيايي است. رحيمي با بيان اينكه هر معتاد 5
نفر را درگير ميكند گفت: در حال حاضر 70 درصد از زندانيان ايران را مواد
مخدريها تشكيل ميدهند و 300 هزار پرونده مواد مخدر در قوه قضاييه وجود
دارد كه باعث شده قوه قضاييه را به خود مشغول دارد. رحيمي اظهار كرد: بر
اساس قوانين و مقررات هر باره كه سردسته مواد مخدري در ايران اعدام ميشود
آنها سر و صدا ميكنند. سوال ما اين است شما مواد مخدر را ترويج ميكنيد و
ما اعدام ميكنيم پس سر و صدا براي چيست. وي ادامه داد: به اين گونه مباحث
تبليغات صهيونيستي گفته ميشود كه اخيرا در كشور ما هم باب شده و دزدان در
اين مملكت آي دزد آي دزد راه انداختهاند.</span><br />
<br />
Rahimi said the spread of drugs has occurred mostly in Asian countries because in Africa there is no money to buy drugs.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">به گفته رحيمي گسترش مواد مخدر بيشتر در كشورهاي آسيايي اتفاق افتاده چرا كه در آفريقا پولي براي خريد مواد مخدر وجود ندارد.</span><br />
<br />
He also pointed out: 10 percent of Americans are addicted to drugs but the Zionists are behind the whole story. The Vice President also stated that three million immigrants are in their country for years and it is possible to call Iran the largest immigrant country. If these numbers are taken out of the country the number of unemployed in our nation of Iran will reach zero.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">وي
همچنين خاطر نشان كرد: 10 درصد از آمريكاييها معتاد هستند اما پشت پرده
همه ماجراي مواد مخدر صهيونييستها قرار دارند. معاون اول رييس جمهور
همچنين بيان كرد سالهاست كه سه ميليون مهمان افغانستاني به كشور ما تحميل
شده است و گفته ميشود ايران بزرگترين كشور مهاجر پذير است. اگر اين تعداد
از كشور خارج شوند بيكاريمان به صفر ميرسد چون به همين تعداد بيكار در
كشور داريم.</span><br />
<br />
Elsewhere in his remarks about America, he claimed that via satellite they monitor certain events such as in prison camps and military bases, he said: "So why do you not see all the poppy fields in Afghanistan? Are you blind?”<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">وي
در بخش ديگري از اظهارات خود درباره اينكه امريكا ادعا ميكند از طريق
ماهواره اتفاقات فلان پادگان يا زندان را ميداند گفت: پس چرا آن همه مزارع
ترياك در افغانستان را نميبينيد؟ كوريد؟</span><br />
<br />
He said wherever Iran shows independence and freedom there are manifestations of global arrogance and World Zionism. Why should the Islamic Republic of Iran give 4000 martyrs for fighting drugs, but there should not even be blood from the nose of one of them?<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">وي
گفت: هر كجا مظاهر استقلال و آزادي ايران است استكبار و صهيونيست جهاني
آنجا را ميكوبد. چرا بايد جمهوري اسلامي ايران چهارهزار شهيد براي مبارزه
با مواد مخدر بدهد اما از دماغ يك نفر از آنها هم خون نيايد.</span><br />
<br />
The Vice President said: if a carpenter from the Secretary-General headquarters to fight drug trafficking built a wall around Iran to stop opium from entering the country, what to do with industrial materials? Who will organize this material? The hands behind the curtain.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">معاون
اول رييس جمهور گفت: اگر دبير كل ستاد مبارزه با مواد مخدر (نجار) دور
ايران را ديوار بكشد تا ترياك وارد كشور نشود با مواد صنعتي چكار كنيم. چه
كسي اين مواد را سازماندهي ميكند. پس دستهايي پشت پرده وجود دارد.</span><br />
<br />
Rahimi said: A United States Senator has said they will poison Iranians via cigarettes so we must tell the people and in the schools what kind of people they are. Rahimi said in another part of his speech: Doctors say there are enough drugs in the body and when someone is smoking all the time God has put enough of this in the body to discipline the body. This is why drug addiction affects the body with pain.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">رحيمي
اظهار كرد: سناتور امريكا گفته است ما ايرانيان را از طريق مسموم كردن
سيگار از پا در ميآوريم پس بايد به مردم و مدارس بگوييم كه اينها چه كساني
هستند. رحيمي در بخش ديگري از سخنان خود گفت: پزشكان ميگويند به اندازه
كافي مخدر در بدن وجود دارد و خداوند اين مواد را به اندازه كافي در بدن
قرار داده است زماني كه كسي مواد مصرف ميكند تمام نظم و انضباط بدن را به
هم ميريزد به همين دليل است معتادان در زمان ترك اعتياد به انواع دردهاي
بدن دچار ميشوند.</span><br />
<br />
He emphasized that the Zionists are behind all the stories of drugs and said that Iran is willing to pay the price of the research so all countries in the world know that Zionism is the main drug. He said that the Iranian people, despite intense sanctions, are stalwart and content. He stressed: there is no way except by making people ready to fight drugs and we shouldn't fill prisons with drugs.<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">وي
با تاكيد بر اينكه پشت همه ماجراهاي مواد مخدر صهيونيستها قرار دارند
گفت: جمهوري اسلامي ايران حاضر است هزينه اين تحقيق را بپردازد تا همه
كشورها بدانند كه صهيونيسم عامل اصلي مواد مخدر در جهان است. وي گفت: مردم
ايران ايستادهاند و با وجود تحريمهاي شديد قناعت ميكنند. وي تاكيد كرد:
هيچ راهي به جز آماده كردن مردم براي مبارزه با مواد مخدر وجود ندارد و
نبايد زندانها را از مواد مخدر پر كنيم.</span><br />
<br />
End of messages<br />
Journalist Code: 71 199<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">انتهاي پيام</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">کد خبرنگار: 71199 </span><br />
<br />
</div>
<br />
<b>Notes: </b>
<br />
<br />
Unlike Juan Cole, who if Rahimi's remarks become more infamous will arise to tell us they are merely whimsical references to a <a href="http://www.juancole.com/2006/05/hitchens-hacker-and-hitchens.html" target="_blank">medieval Persian poem</a>, I do not "command" Farsi. Therefore, my translation has been an interesting travail whose product is imperfect. It is made up of five sources: 1) Google Translate; 2) the Babylon <a href="http://translation.babylon.com/english/to-persian/" target="_blank">English-to-Persian Translation</a> tool; 3) Google Web and Images (for when dictionary lookups failed or produced confusing results); 4) Rahimi's quotes reported in English-language media, which I correlated to their referents in the Farsi transcript which I then replaced (<span style="color: blue;">in blue</span>); and most of all, 5) the considerably gracious help of a <i>tehrooni</i> Farsi-speaker, who fought through her annoyance and embarrassment to sort out the most difficult passages. Let me say again that the Farsi transcript is a paraphrase, not verbatim.<br />
<br />
Each paragraph is followed by the original Farsi text. Reader edits are most welcome. Based on them or my own efforts, I may be able to improve the translation in the coming days or weeks. I'll make my own changes inline without notification, as that seems most efficient and ethically unproblematic. However, if a reader helps out and I can confirm the new text I'll update this post with an acknowledgement.<br />
<br />
Annoyingly, Blogger's GUI won't allow you to format text right-to-left, which one must when writing Farsi, unless you change your whole blog to be an Arabic, Hebrew or Persian-language blog. (American global arrogance!) Because I shudder to imagine the effect that might have on the rest of my posts, which incorporate a lot of custom HTML, I'm not going to bother. So my apologies for the ill-formatted Persian text.<br />
<br />
There are two significant, if not precisely crucial, differences between the Rahimi quotes circulating and the Farsi transcript. First, Rahimi was quoted claiming the Talmud teaches Jews "how to destroy non-Jews so as to protect an embryo in the womb of a Jewish mother." According to the transcript, he didn't use a Farsi verb meaning "protect". I felt the closest English interpretation of the verb he was reported to have used -- پرورش داده -- which might unite the means (destroying non-Jews) with the ends (conferring some benefit on Jewish fetuses), was "nourish". But yeah, it's still batshit crazy.<br />
<br />
Second, Rahimi was reported to have said Jews kill "black babies" on the orders of "the Zionists". The transcript says Rahimi claimed that in order to control the population of <i>Native Americans</i>, Jewish doctors <i>sterilized</i> Native American <i>women</i>. The Farsi phrase used is "red-skinned" and as it once was here in rougher times, Iranians use it to refer to Native Americans. They do not use it to refer to black people.<br />
<br />
Thomas Erdbrink, whose New York Times report on the speech (linked above) is the most heavily cited, <a href="https://twitter.com/ThomasErdbrink/status/218612346183094273" target="_blank">told me</a> he witnessed the event and ran quotes that were rendered into English by an official Iranian government translator. The transcript I translated was made by the <a href="http://isna.ir/en" target="_blank">Iranian Students' News Agency</a>.<br />
<br />
Though the ISNA transcript appears to be an eyewitness rendering, it's been secreted away and I'll never find "Journalist 71199" to ask after the methods he or she used.<br />
<br />
I've made requests of Ahmadinejad's office and relevant departments of the United Nations to obtain a verbatim transcript in any language of Rahimi's speech. I'll update if I receive fruitful responses.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-46778517360445506802012-04-07T19:45:00.032-04:002012-04-08T16:01:52.977-04:00Two on TerrorismI.<br /><br />Glenn Greenwald's <a href="http://socfools.blogspot.com/2012/03/pulse_27.html" target="_blank">opinion</a> that terrorism studies doesn't exist is based on his perception that its scholars focus disproportionately on their ideological enemies. (That isn't true -- Greenwald, a dilettante, assumes the talking heads on US TV news are the key scholars in the field.) Thus the Western analysts who populate terrorism studies focus on terrorism by Muslims and ignore Christian, Jewish and "state terrorism". The field is so polluted by bias as to be nugatory.<br /><br />This fronts a broader concern held largely by left-of-center people -- that Muslim terrorism has become a lightning rod for racist malice against Arabs, Muslims, the dusky Easterner. Concern about terrorism is a merkin for Orientalist hostility.<br /><br />Pair with this another of Greenwald's key themes, that Western foreign policy is by equal turns stupid and counterproductive, because visiting violence on Muslims in order to fight terrorism produces more terrorists than it destroys. If that is true, then given our unipolar power and multiple campaigns in Muslim lands, wouldn't by necessity the vast majority of terrorists today be Muslims? Wouldn't that explain the academic bias Greenwald alleges, as well as exonerate the average person, who when first hearing about a new mass murder, wonders if its perpetrators were Muslims?<br /><br />If not, then what are the other root causes of terrorism, and how many terrorists are created by the Greenwald method versus the others? Shouldn't Greenwald attempt to answer, if he wants us to give his analysis weight?<br /><br />II.<br /><br />Related is the lament that we blame Muslims <i>en bloc</i> for the tiny minority of extremists among them. But those who most conspicuously carry this concern -- again, left-of-center people -- often offer a systemic analysis of how non-Muslim terrorism comes about. Consider this recent Nation blog <a href="http://www.thenation.com/blog/167226/ignoring-domestic-terrorism-wisconsin" target="_blank">post</a> by Jessica Valenti, who in the course of chiding the media for "ignoring domestic terrorism" -- the bombing of a Planned Parenthood in Wisconsin -- warns that the attack was "a foreseeable result of a conservative culture that uses violent rhetoric and lies" to "rile up" its constituency. The Gabrielle Giffords shooting (not really terrorism, but close) produced a similar response. Peter Daou sententiously <a href="http://peterdaou.com/2011/01/gabrielle-giffords-and-the-rightwing-hate-machine/" target="_blank">announced</a> -- "We do not yet know whether the Arizona massacre was directly fueled by rightwing [sic] rhetoric" -- while summarizing left-wing efforts to pin the shooting on Sarah Palin and the Tea Party.<br /><br />If this -- a systemic analysis in which mainstream right-wing discourse roils until it actuates fanatical violence -- is fair game, then isn't it also fair game to surmise that the millions of Muslims who aren't violent themselves but endorse violence against Israel, entertain anti-American and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and long to extirpate Western troops and influence from Muslim lands, are the engine of a social machine that produces terrorism?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-41442595133953416372012-03-27T21:54:00.008-04:002015-03-29T13:08:40.816-04:00The Pulse <style type="text/css">
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Today in idiocy:
<br />
<ul>
<li>The Park Slope Food Coop <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/park-slope-brooklyn-coop-votes-boycott-israeli-products-article-1.1051776" target="_blank">devolves</a> into chaotic debate on whether to boycott Israeli products. Around 2000 said to attend meeting. No word yet on Jewish Leftist awakening to the hostility of their milieu.</li>
<li>Glenn Greenwald decides terrorism studies <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/ggreenwald/status/184443993784979456" target="_blank">doesn't exist</a> and <a href="http://www.salon.com/2012/03/27/what_npr_means_by_reporting/singleton/" target="_blank">cites</a> a virtually unknown post-doc in support of his flat-earth deletion of a body of scholarship. Andrew Exum <a href="http://www.cnas.org/blogs/abumuqawama/2012/03/terrorism-experts.html" target="_blank">explains</a> why that's wrong. I explain why that's dumb:</li>
</ul>
<br />
<script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>This is reminiscent of global warming denialists who paraded Bjorn Lomborg around in defense of their conspiracy theory. (2/2) @<a href="https://twitter.com/abumuqawama">abumuqawama</a></p>— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/184815277261856768" data-datetime="2012-03-28T01:32:50+00:00">March 28, 2012</a></blockquote>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" lang="en"><p>The root of Greenwald's compaint is a Chomskyan shell-game. Terrorism studies can't exist b/c they don't focus on "state terrorism" (the US)</p>— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/184815747229429761">March 28, 2012</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
<script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p>When a scholar does focus on state terrorism -- and they do -- then THAT is terrorism studies, and worth citing (without sardonic capitals)</p>— John-Paul Pagano (@johnpaulpagano) <a href="https://twitter.com/johnpaulpagano/status/184816101144788994" data-datetime="2012-03-28T01:36:06+00:00">March 28, 2012</a></blockquote><br /><script src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>What is the very essence of a dilettante? Someone who mobilizes the work of one unremarked scholar in a field in order to dismiss the field.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-86437794127238916822012-03-19T21:24:00.010-04:002012-03-19T22:05:12.211-04:00The PulseToday's items of interest:<br /><ul><li><a href="http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=262549" target="_blank">Gunman kills four Jews outside French school</a></li><li><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-france-anti-semitism-isnt-usually-violent-but-often-lurks-just-below-the-surface/2012/03/19/gIQAWEvhNS_story.html" target="_blank">AP reports that Antisemitism in France "often lurks just below the surface"</a></li><li><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/19/opinion/to-save-israel-boycott-the-settlements.html?_r=1&ref=opinion" target="_blank">Peter Beinart says boycott "nondemocratic Israel"</a></li><li><a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/03/19/the-beinart-solution-punish-the-israelis-to-change-the-palestinians.html" target="_blank">David Frum calls Peter Beinart a fascist prat</a></li></ul><br />Today in idiocy:<br /><ul><li><a href="http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/03/18/peter-beinart-represents-zionism-like-a-black-kkk-member-represents-african-americans/" target="_blank">Beinart "Represents Zionism Like a Black KKK Member Represents African-Americans"</a></li><li>Brooks Bayne <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/jstrevino/status/181811945731653632" target="_blank">continues</a> to defend <a href="http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/94209/10-am-sandra-luke-post/" target="_blank">this</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/jstrevino/status/181560952297234432" target="_blank">threatens</a> Josh Trevino</li><li><a href="http://www.lineofdeparture.com/2012/03/17/a-defense-of-nir-rosen/" target="_blank">Speaking of Trevino, the world anxiously waits for Nir Rosen's lawsuit</a></li></ul>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-48108533595490517122012-03-05T21:03:00.010-05:002015-03-29T13:04:52.888-04:00Netanyahu Goes to Washington <style type="text/css">
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<font class="subtitle">Assessing a nuclear Iran</font><br /><br />The polyphony of punditry about Netanyahu’s <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/obama-focuses-unity-netanyahu-sovereignty-15850866#.T1WLonlsPTo" target="_blank">visit</a> to the White House shows that the debate about a nuclear Iran remains flawed. I’ll try to correct what I think are the two main problems with it, but even after calibrating our instruments the problem stays out of focus. Perhaps that’s because the exigency of Iranian nukes is underscored by our lack of good military options to prevent them.<br /><br />The case against using force to prevent a nuclear Iran settles on the alternative policy of containment. For reasons that will become clear, I think doves conjure the "containment" of today’s illiberal regimes with the same carelessness as hawks speak of "appeasement". We know what they mean. In a "don’t take my word for it" rhetorical tic, war opponents adduce Ehud Barak’s opinion that, "[the Iranians] are radical but not totally crazy. They have a quite sophisticated decision-making process, and they understand reality." We find these critics confident in the rationality of the Mullahcracy, which they think is comparable to that of the Soviets, the original nuclear <i>bête noire</i>. Robert Wright <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/could-we-live-with-a-nuclear-iran/253969/" target="_blank">says</a> Iran simply won’t attack, because "Iranian leaders have no desire to be annihilated along with their families, friends, and Persian civilization."<br /><br />Here’s the first flaw in the debate. The Iranian government is not a uniform and single -- rational or irrational -- actor. It doesn't work that way. All organizations have what Thucydides called a "war party" and a "peace party". Complex factors, including historical and economic context, culture and national values, and systems of law and politics, decide the relative power and influence of each group. Iraq war opponents, who have monitored the fates of war and peace parties in Muslim states in relation to Bush and Obama, understand this. Iran’s government has both rational actors, like Khatami, the reformist, and irrational actors, like Ahmadinejad, the Jew-hating millenarian conspiracy theorist. I don't have to spell out why a nuclear Iran is a worse place than a non-nuclear Iran for the war party to find itself in the ascendant.<br /><br />I agree that doesn’t mean the war party is suicidal, and here let me join Wright in opposing an attack on Iran. For questionable tactical gain, it will visit destruction and humiliation on a society with a significant demographic for which Persian history and culture are paramount. Theirs is a proud, pre-Islamic, pluralist tradition that stands out regionally by not being absolutely infested by victimology, irredentism, conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism. We make a big mistake effacing these Persians -- the peace party’s constituency -- by exaggerated focus on the war party and its constituency, the <i>hezbollahi</i>. However, Wright makes the opposite mistake: he claims “Iranian leaders have no desire to be annihilated.. <i>along with Persian civilization.</i>” This is wrong: Iran’s highest leaders and its war party are committed to the Iranian Revolution, which considers “Persian civilization” to be its antagonist.<br /><br />I get what Wright means, but his language shows there is a fog on the lens he is looking through. I don’t mean to say that Iranian Islamists seek to anneal the Revolution of its Persian impurities in a nuclear inferno. I mean they consider Persian civilization separate and undesirable, to be assimilated or discarded. The Mullahs have a self-preservation instinct, but that is not the same as a regard for Persian civilization. These Shia zealots are violent, paranoid conspiracists triply encircled: they are Muslims beset by Crusaders and Zionists; they are Shia beset by other Muslims; and they are revolutionaries beset by Persian reactionaries. Attached to the body, Persian civilization is both a stabilizing and destabilizing element, something to protect and fear, especially in times of duress.<br /><br />Iran has a war party and a peace party, divided along these lines. Remember the images of the Green Revolution to learn what Iran’s leaders think of Persian civilization. But bombing or invading Iran would send secular Persians running into the arms of raging Shia millenarians.<br /><br />Bringing focus back to us, Peter Beinart <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/PeterBeinart/status/171713892962140160" target="_blank">asks</a>, "Are Palestinians worried about being nuked by Iran? In a small country, they're at much at risk as Jews. If not, why not?"<br /><br />Weigh the apparent answer against your sense of the US and Israeli perspectives. A companion exercise is to consider the unconcern for Palestinian well-being among liberators who wish to visit destruction on the Zionist entity. Palestinian perspective, other than that which is projected onto them, is so often superfluous.<br /><br />Beinart's question is thought-provoking, but in the confines of the debate's second flaw. It's natural for both those who support and oppose attacking Iran to dwell on the "wipe Israel off the map" scenario -- Iran firing nukes into Tel Aviv. But Iran won’t do that, except possibly, if it can, in retaliation for an invasion or first strike. Much more realistic, and challenging, is the danger of a nuclear Iran pursuing its aims via terror proxies. Bruce Hoffman, the eminent terrorism scholar and Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, observes that the Iranian Revolution is defined in part by <i>terrorism as foreign policy</i>. Revolutionary Iran sired modern religious terrorism with an "Islamic terrorist campaign" seeking to spread:<br /><div class="padded quote">... the fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law espoused in Iran to other Muslim countries. "We must strive to export our Revolution throughout the world," the Ayatollah Khomeini declared on the occasion of the Iranian new year in March 1980, just over a year after the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran, "and must abandon all idea of not doing so, for not only does Islam refuse to recognize any difference between Muslim countries, it is the champion of all oppressed people..."</div><br />This is especially salient to Iran's indirect war against Israel. It seems the logic of containment is not dispositive in the quasi-military realm of terrorism. Israel has had nukes for about four decades and Iran has supported hostilities against Israel for about half that long (and also Jews, if we join the Argentine government in blaming Iran and Hezbollah for the 1994 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_AMIA_bombing" target="_blank">bombing</a> of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, which killed 85 people). While Hezbollah and Hamas take cues from Iran, they are also independent actors, which is to say Iran can't precisely tune their aggression. Effective missiles are much easier to obtain than nukes. If Hezbollah, Hamas, or a group like them pulls off a large-scale attack on Israel -- say, rocketing a hospital and killing ~300 doctors, staffers and patients -- the situation could devolve very quickly into a devastating exchange between Israel and Iran. Look at how we’ve reacted to the terrorist murder of ~3000 Americans, then consider what Israel has done in response to ineffectual rocket attacks and the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. Israeli policy has a consistent flavor of <i>machtpolitik</i>. Wright, and many like him, <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/netanyahus-latest-affront-to-obama/253901/" target="_blank">say</a> the US is confronting Iran "on Israel’s behalf," hoping to taint the hawks’ position by distilling it to a war for Israel. Do they believe a 9/11 in Israel backed by a nuclear Iran will remain a regional affair?<br /><br />To get an idea what an Iranian war party under siege might do, review the following statistics, enumerated in Hoffman's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Terrorism-Professor-Bruce-Hoffman/dp/0231114699" target="_blank">Inside Terrorism</a>.<br /><div class="padded quote">Although religious terrorists committed only 6 percent of recorded terrorist incidents between 1998 and 2004, their acts were responsible for 30 percent of the total number of fatalities recorded during that time period... Although Shia groups committed only 8 percent of all international terrorist incidents between 1982 and 1989, they nonetheless were responsible for 30 percent of the total number of fatalities arising from those incidents. And while al Qaeda perpetrated only 0.1 percent of all terrorist attacks between 1998 and 2004, it was responsible for nearly 19 percent of total fatalities from terrorist attacks during that time period.</div><br />There are three main flavors of terrorist: the national-separatist, or right-wing secular terrorist; the Marxist-Leninist, or left-wing secular terrorist; and the religious, or millenarian, terrorist. (The latter doesn't refer only to Islamic terrorists; also think Timothy McVeigh and Baruch Goldstein.) Hoffman shows that religious terrorists take a far greater toll than their secular counterparts, and that among them, Shia terrorists are the most lethal. That makes sense given the Iranian provenance of modern religious terrorism.<br /><br />Hoffman also notes that in recent times, the ratio of non-religious to religious terrorists has skewed steadily in favor of the latter.<br /><div class="padded quote">In 1994, for example, a third (sixteen) of the forty-nine identifiable international terrorist groups active that year could be classified as religious in character and or motivation; and in 1995, their number grew yet again, to account for nearly half (twenty-six, or 46 percent) of the fifty-six known active international terrorist groups. A decade later, it is perhaps not surprising to find that this trend not only continued but solidified. In 2004, for instance, nearly half (fifty-two, or 46 percent) of the terrorist groups active that year were religious, while thirty-two (28 percent) were left-wing groups, and twenty-four (21 percent) were ethno-nationalist/separatist organizations.</div><br />It's hard to account for the escalation in brutality, because explanatory models seek to be rational, but these phenomena are quintessentially irrational. A clue may be found in the distinct way in which each type of violent extremist seeks to stop history. As I’ve <a href="http://socfools.blogspot.com/2010/02/to-harness-history.html" target="_blank">written</a>, left-wing extremists wish to harness and drive history toward a future utopia. Right-wing extremists wish to harness and drive it back to a glorious past. And religious millenarians wish to destroy us and themselves to create paradise in place of the worldly purgatory. In this they are more dangerous than their totalitarian antecedents.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-62670947647012572322012-01-04T03:25:00.007-05:002015-03-29T13:09:18.282-04:00Ron Paul's "Holocaust of the Innocent" <style type="text/css">
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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 <a href="http://campaign2012.washingtonexaminer.com/article/ron-paul-benefits-democrat-crossovers/290071" target="_blank">crossover</a> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/turnstyle/why-young-liberals-like-m_b_1181427.html" target="_blabk">appeal</a> among left-liberals owing to his non-interventionist and Israel-phobic ideas in foreign policy.<br /><br /><div class="padded quote">CONGRESSIONAL RECORD--HOUSE<br />June 24, 1980 <br /><br />ABORTION: A CASE OF CHILD ABUSE<br /><br /><i>(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.)</i><br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /> <br />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.<br /><br />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<br />significantly to the rapid rise in child abuse.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The article is as follows:<br /><br /><i>Is ELECTIVE ABORTION A CAUSE OF CHILD ABUSE?<br /><i>(By Philip o. Ney, M.D.)</i><br /><br />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.<br /> <br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />DISQUIETING FIGURES<br /><br />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.<br /><br />The following mechanisms might help explain how abortions can lead to child abuse:<br /> <br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />AN EVER-EXPANDING CYCLE<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.</i></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-42565697473803683392011-09-11T00:34:00.001-04:002011-09-11T00:34:36.294-04:00Memorial (10)[]Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-64601061267071301432011-07-31T21:02:00.000-04:002015-03-29T13:09:49.594-04:00From Selma to Gaza <style type="text/css">
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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: "<a href="http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/06/23/interview_alice_walker?page=full" target="_blank">I think Israel is the greatest terrorist in that part of the world.</a>"<br />
<br />
Walker is selling her involvement in <a href="http://www.freedomflotilla.eu/" target="_blank">Freedom Flotilla 2</a>, the new, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/world/middleeast/26gaza.html" target="_blank">supernumerary</a> 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
Actually, maybe it is: the anti-Zionist catechism was written in Soviet Moscow, and '68 revolutionaries helped pioneer <a href="http://www.telospress.com/main/pub/Herf_Telos144.pdf" target="_blank">anti-Jewish violent direct action</a> 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 "<a href="http://radicalarchives.org/2010/03/28/jbutler-on-hamas-hezbollah-israel-lobby/" target="_blank">global Left</a>".<br />
<br />
The Free Gaza Movement, largely an accretion of Leftists, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_O%27Keefe" target="_blank">lunatics</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHH_%28Turkish_NGO%29" target="_blank">Islamists</a>, 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 <a href="http://www.rachelcorrie.org/" target="_blank">death</a> 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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 <a href="http://www.haaretz.com/nonviolent-direct-action-is-mantra-of-new-pro-palestinian-group-1.54071" target="_blank">moved on</a> 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 <a href="http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=qOcwAAAAIBAJ&sjid=ft0FAAAAIBAJ&pg=1261,1491739&dq=heidi+arraf+of+detroit+scuffles&hl=en" target="_blank">faster, please</a>.<br />
<br />
What Howard Jacobson recently <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/06/24/howard.jacobson.flotilla/" target="_blank">wrote</a> 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 <a href="http://www.time.com/time/quotes/0,26174,1907640,00.html" target="_blank">inviting a violence</a> which can then be presented as a slaughter of the innocents." Rachel Corrie was crushed, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hurndall" target="_blank">Tom Hurndall</a> was shot in the head, <a href="http://i139.photobucket.com/albums/q318/lutonlionheart/AVERY2.jpg?t=1255229925" target="_blank">Brian Avery</a> 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 <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/huwaidaarraf/status/40499977784524800" target="_blank">interviews</a>, haunting the news, harvesting propaganda.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
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 <i>Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?</i>, "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.<br />
<br />
<div class="padded quote">
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.</div>
<br />
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:<br />
<br />
<div class="padded quote">
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.</div>
<br />
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 <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU12KW-XyZE&feature=player_embedded" target="_blank">violence</a>, and passively partner with Hamas. In the real world, <a href="http://socfools.blogspot.com/2010/01/tony-judt-and-velvet-genocide.html" target="_blank">Velvet Genocide</a> is genocide.<br />
<br />
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.<br />
<br />
<br />
<i><b>*</b> Two other ISM activists, including Vittorio Arrigoni, have also been killed, but by Palestinians outside of the context of protest or combat.</i><br />
<br />
<i>Written between 6/26/11 and 7/8/11.</i>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-81650792994570413562011-02-16T12:41:00.002-05:002015-03-29T13:10:11.736-04:00Nir Rosen and Totalitarian Stupidity <style type="text/css">
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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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />As I've <a href="http://socfools.blogspot.com/2008/01/knaves-gambit.html" target="_blank">argued</a>, 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.<br /><br />Out of today's noxious lineup of anti-war extremists steps <a href="http://www.nirrosen.com/blog/" target="_blank">Nir Rosen</a>. 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 <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/US/lara-logan-hospitalized-sexually-attacked-egypt-protesters-celebration/story?id=12925235" target="_blank">sexually assaulted</a>. In response, Nir Rosen <a href="http://soupsoup.tumblr.com/post/3314614733/nir-rosen-a-fellow-at-the-new-york-university" target="_blank">tweeted</a>:<br /><div class="padded quote">Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson. Where was her buddy McCrystal.</div><br /><div class="padded quote">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</div><br /><div class="padded quote">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</div><br />A fuller log is available <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2011/02/15/nir-rosen-trashes-lara-logan-dismisses-her-sexual-assault/" target="_blank">here</a>.<br /><br />Rosen is a war correspondent whose <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/nirrosen/status/29460853592" target="_blank">reductive anti-imperialism</a> rivals <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Justice_of_Roosting_Chickens" target="_blank">Ward Churchill's</a>. 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.<br /><br />Predictably in pitch with his totalitarian stupidity, Rosen often targets Israel. Here are some examples from Twitter and his public Facebook "Wall".<br /><div class="padded quote"><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/nirrosen/status/26938291174" target="_blank">new racist Israeli citizenship law should be celebrated. It exposes what Zionism really is, will further ostracize Israel, speed its demise</a></div><br /><div class="padded quote"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/permalink.php?story_fbid=157174590971242&id=611682558" target="_blank">hopefully [Israel will] be part of greater syria in the future, which will include palestine of course<br /><br />... all of Palestine, that is</a></div><br /><div class="padded quote"><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/nirrosen/status/27379886324" target="_blank">@MaanNewsAgency Yes to a 3rd Intifada. This time hopefully with the support of the Palestinians citizens of "Israel"</a></div><br /><div class="padded quote"><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/nirrosen/status/27069448159" target="_blank">Israel's existence is a blight unto the nations</a></div><br /><a href="http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/permalink.php?story_fbid=155757954436577&id=611682558" target="_blank">Here</a> 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]:<br /><div class="padded quote">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. <b>israel's existence is an abomination</b></div><br />And here Rosen lays it out in the Manichaean terms native to the totalitarian mind:<br /><div class="padded quote"><a href="http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/permalink.php?story_fbid=112829105428963&id=611682558" target="_blank">i have always opposed israel and supported anybody who is opposed to israel. just as anybody concerned with justice and freedom must.</a></div><br />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 <a href="http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/12/15/best_books_on_the_middle_east_2010" target="_blank">Marc Lynch</a> and <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/radio/2010/12/13/rosen" target="_blank">Glenn Greenwald</a> have praised Rosen throughout.<br /><br />Rosen is being crushed under the weight of tardy opprobrium. He's given a Michael Richards-style <a href="http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/apologies-from-dubai-nir-rosen-i-feel-like-shrinking-now_b31302" target="_blank">interview</a> in which he doesn't do himself any favors, explaining:<br /><div class="padded quote">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.</div><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/nirrosen/status/24200992400" target="_blank">summary</a> of his downfall:<br /><div class="padded quote">thanks to twitter i can destroy my career 140 characters at a time.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-60440994584398694982010-09-12T17:18:00.055-04:002015-03-29T13:10:34.605-04:00A Parochial Place <style type="text/css">
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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 <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/77475/the-new-york-times-laments-sadly-wary-misunderstanding-muslim-americans-really-it-sadly-w" target="_blank">blog post</a> in which he crossed his own rubicon:<br /><div class="padded quote">... 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.</div><br />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 <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-spine/77577/robert-gates-and-pastor-jones" target="_blank">post</a> that reads like damage control, he initially mused that non-Muslims are less cowed in Europe, where people do protest the "Pakis".<br /><br />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.<br /><br />Now prestige commentators like <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/12/opinion/12kristof.html" target="_blank">Nicholas Kristof</a> and <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2010/09/a-harsh-thing-i-should-have-said-martin-peretz-dept/62613/" target="_blank">James Fallows</a> are calling him out. That's because, rather than sublimating his hostility into invidious delectation of <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/the-spine/freedom-morocco" target="_blank">rugs</a>, 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".<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.jackshafer.com/misc_columns/20091128_perfervid_peretz.php" target="_blank">Jack Shafer</a>, 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.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-19378584346547854242010-09-11T22:10:00.001-04:002010-09-11T22:10:26.100-04:00Memorial[]Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-81234138002279980242010-08-02T08:53:00.000-04:002010-08-02T09:30:00.339-04:00Liberal MasochismA recent rallying cry on the Tea Party Right is <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/109441-palin-calls-planned-mosque-near-ground-zero-a-provocation" target="_blank">opposition</a> to building a "Ground Zero mosque" near where the World Trade Center stood. The mosque will be part of "<a href="http://www.cordobainitiative.org/?q=content/cordoba-house-new-york-city" target="_blank">Cordoba House</a>", 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 <a href="http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local-beat/Palin-Refudiates-Mosque-Near-Ground-Zero-98749919.html" target="_blank">dumb</a> 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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-Willing-Executioners-Ordinary-Holocaust/dp/0679772685" target="_blank">Daniel Jonah Goldhagen</a> 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.<br /><br />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 <i>and soft</i> 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.<br /><br />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 <a href="http://www.peacenow.org.il/Site/en/homepage.asp" target="_blank">Peace Now</a> insist on setting up a Jewish community center by the Cave of the Patriarchs, where the messianic Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_the_Patriarchs_massacre" target="_blank">gunned down</a> 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.<br /><br />Or maybe it would be better to let the victims rest in peace. But Spencer Ackerman <a href="http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2010/05/28/build-the-ground-zero-mosque/" target="_blank">warns</a>, "To not build the Ground Zero Mosque will be to play into Usama bin Laden’s hands." He is seconded by others, such as <a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-chait/76355/palin-takes-islam-and-the-english-language-the-same-time" target="_blank">Jon Chait</a>, <a href="http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2010/05/28/build-the-mosque/" target="_blank">Joe Klein</a>, <a href="http://blog.prospect.org/blog/adam_serwer/2010/07/building_while_muslim_content.html" target="_blank">Adam Serwer</a> and <a href="http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/20/a-mosque-maligned/" target="_blank">Robert Wright</a>, 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.<br /><br />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" <a href="http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/16267051/detail.html" target="_blank">object lesson</a> 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 <a href="http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1971?page=110" target="_blank">became</a> a masochistic <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-04-14-1625098321_x.htm" target="_blank">spectacle</a>, moving beyond repudiation of Bush into theatrical renunciation of American exceptionalism. This was complemented by a fringe <a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/israel-and-gaza-rhetoric-and-reality" target="_blank">defending</a> Hamas' victory as an expression of democracy <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j3XHHn1yWs#t=2m41s" target="_blank"><i>per se</i></a>.*<br /><br />Just as there are obvious alternatives to engaging Hamas -- discouraging Israel from recapitulating our <a href="http://www.military.com/opinion/0,15202,217980,00.html" target="_blank">Cuba mistake</a>, 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.<br /><br />--<br /><br /><b>*</b> 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.<br /><br />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.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-27301029313911051042010-07-26T00:00:00.002-04:002010-07-26T18:09:45.387-04:00Menace and Moral Inversion<div class="padded quote">Hockney: You guys don't have a fucking leg to stand on.<br /><br />Detective: You think so, tough guy? I could put you in Queens on the night of the hijacking.<br /><br />Hockney: Really? I live in Queens. Did you put that together yourself, Einstein? What do you got, a team of monkeys working around the clock on this?</div><br />For me the dumbest moments in politics call up this bit from <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLcWMGCLHa0#t=2m44s" target="_blank">The Usual Suspects</a>, in which Kevin Pollak's character, the con Todd Hockney, marvels at the ineptitude of his NYPD interrogators. With the Tea Party nonsense, the simian reference is especially apt: the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRU1pjqQpP0" target="_blank">drooling</a> <a href="http://washingtonindependent.com/73036/n-word-sign-dogs-would-be-tea-party-leader" target="_blank">viciousness</a> with which this entirely id-driven movement is expressed reminds me of some of the more colorful <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2005-03-04-chimp-attack_x.htm" target="_blank">chimpanzee attacks</a>. The tribal perception of encroachment outrages an organic sense of entitlement. <i>If I don't get my birthday cake, you don't get your face.</i><br /><br />The Tea Party rallies are a mirror image of the antiwar protests of 2002-2004. The movement that opposed Bush was a diverse and confused congee of the aggrieved, and it was garnished with enough <a href="http://www.zombietime.com/hall_of_shame/" target="_blank">hateful crazy</a> to call into question the wholesomeness of the whole. Our present political moment has seen the NAACP pass a <a href="http://www.naacp.org/news/entry/naacp-delegates-vote-to-repudiate-racist-elements-within-the-tea-pary/" target="_blank">resolution</a> calling on the Tea Party to repudiate racism, and precisely on pitch, Mark Williams, a bombastic radio personality acting (<a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/2010/07/18/2010-07-18_tea_party_express_leader_mark_williams_expelled_over_colored_people_letter.html" target="_blank">no longer</a>) as the national spokesman of <a href="http://www.teapartyexpress.org/" target="_blank">Tea Party Express</a>, responded with this hallmark of the genre:<br /><div class="padded quote">We are dealing with people [the NAACP] who are professional race-baiters who make a very good living off this kind of thing. <i>They make more money off of race than any slave trader, ever.</i> It's time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong along with <i>all the other vile, racist groups</i> that emerged in our history.<br /><br /><i>[emphasis mine]</i></div><br />This is interesting to readers of this blog because it's a mode of moral inversion which is marshaled routinely by Israel and Jew-haters. Consider the worldwide polyphony of claims that Jews, Israelis and Zionists deploy the Holocaust to deflect attention from Israeli crimes, to profit personally, and to maintain generally a kind of <a href="http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=83891§ionid=351020101" target="_blank">moral dominion</a>. One of its leitmotifs is the Arab and Muslim <i>idée fixe</i> of the West's sanctification of the Holocaust, which for example led to Tehran's Hamshahri newspaper staging an <a href="http://www.irancartoon.com/120/holocaust/" target="_blank">International Holocaust Cartoon Competition</a> in retaliation for the Jyllands-Posten <a href="http://eavis.jp.dk/Arkiv/30-09-2005/demo/JP_04-03.html" target="_blank">Muhammad cartoons</a>. Another example, closer to home, is Norman Finkelstein's notion of a "<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-Industry-Reflections-Exploitation-Suffering/dp/1859843239" target="_blank">Holocaust Industry</a>" extorting blood money and bankrolling Israeli imperialism.<br /><br />Williams' claim that the NAACP is made up of race-hucksters who have profited more than any slave-driver has the same sleazy, vicious goal: to transmogrify the victim into a worse version of the oppressor. Antagonists, who range from uninterested in racism to actively racist, raise a facade of outrage at civil or <a href="http://socfools.blogspot.com/2010/02/to-harness-history.html" target="_blank">human rights</a> abuses and stage attacks from behind it on groups they wish to re-victimize. The stratagem is to pose alternately as victims and victims' advocates, defrock the moral legatees of historical crimes and refocus the opprobrium of decent people onto them.<br /><br /><b>Addendum:</b> Back in May, Mark Williams <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/05/25/2010-05-25_tea_party_drip_bags_on_stringer.html" target="_blank">referred</a> to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer as "a Jewish Uncle Tom who would have turned rat on Anne Frank."Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-70494264112146807272010-07-11T21:35:00.012-04:002010-07-11T23:32:19.780-04:00The Long Arc of StupidAt Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday celebration in December, 2002, Trent Lott delivered this show-stopper to the happy crowd:<br /><div class="padded quote">I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.</div><br />Lott was referring to Thurmond's 1948 run -- in the long American tradition of <a href="http://www.ronpaul.com/welcome.php" target="_blank">third-party moral idiocy</a> -- as a Dixiecrat on a segregationist platform, promising that "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches." A pandemic of outrage followed Lott's remarks, with pressure mounting to strip him of his status as Senate Majority Leader. Lott apologized, explaining that a "poor choice of words" had distorted his meaning, and that he was thinking of Thurmond's strong ideas on national defense when he praised him. This didn't impress Andrew Sullivan, who responded in a post on his blog entitled, "<a href="http://sullivanarchives.theatlantic.com/index.php.dish_inc-archives.2002_12_01_dish_archive.html#390029180" target="_blank">TRENT LOTT MUST GO</a>":<br /><br /><div class="padded quote">After his disgusting remarks at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party, it seems to me that the Republican Party has a simple choice. Either they get rid of Lott as majority leader; or they should come out formally as a party that regrets desegregation and civil rights for African-Americans. Why are the Republican commentators so silent about this? And the liberals? (Josh Marshall, to his credit, states the obvious. And Bill Kristol, to his great credit, expressed disbelief.) And where's the New York Times? Howell Raines is so intent on finding Bull Connor in a tony golf club that when Bull Connor emerges as the soul of the Republican Senate Majority Leader, he doesn't notice it. And where's the president? It seems to me an explicit repudiation of Lott's bigotry is a no-brainer for a "compassionate conservative." Or simply a decent person, for that matter. This isn't the first piece of evidence that Lott is an unreconstructed racist. He has spoken before gussied-up white supremacist groups before. So here's a simple test for Republicans and conservative pundits. Will they call Lott on this excrescence? Or are they exactly what some on the Left accuse them of?</div><br />In the shadow of the 2010 World Cup, the spiritual lodestar of Hezbollah, Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, died. Octavia Nasr, a long-time Middle East correspondent and editor with CNN, <a href="http://twitter.com/octavianasrCNN/status/17708145427" target="_blank">tweeted</a>:<br /><div class="padded quote">Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot...</div><br />Fadlallah was a millenarian Islamist who afflicted secular democracy in Lebanon, applauded terrorist attacks on Americans and Israelis, wished for the destruction of Israel and denied the Holocaust. A pandemic of outrage followed Nasr's tweet, with pressure mounting on CNN to fire her. Nasr apologized, explaining that Twitter's brevity distorted her meaning, and that she was thinking of Fadlallah's comparatively liberal religious attitude to women when she praised him. This was good enough for Andrew Sullivan, who responded on his blog in a post entitled, "<a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/07/the-policing-of-the-discourse.html" target="_blank">The Policing of the Discourse</a>":<br /><div class="padded quote">... Octavia Nasr is fired for offending the pro-Israel lobby over a tweet expressing sadness at the death of a Hezbollah leader. Nasr subsequently elaborated on her tweet in a nuanced piece that ran on CNN.com. It reads like an honest piece of journalism to me.</div><br />It's amazing what 8 years and several wars <a href="http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/02/a-false-premise.html" target="_blank">for and by Israel</a> can accomplish.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-1757202372508345462010-03-28T17:31:00.005-04:002010-03-28T18:13:21.498-04:00The 10 Books that Will Influence MeTyler Cowen has <a href="http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2010/03/books-which-have-influenced-me-most.html" target="_blank">sired</a> a spreading meme: what are the top 10 books that have influenced you? Being sufficiently (pathologically) bookish, I'm tempted to play along; however, I'm more interested in listing the 10 books I'm <i>going to read</i> in the next year or two that I believe will remake my mind. I do this arming my enemies with documentary evidence of my ignorance, but hey, I take risks for my readers!<br /><br />Here are the books in no special order. Comments and suggestions are most welcome.<br /><br />1) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Managerial-Revolution-What-Happening-World/dp/0837156785" target="_blank">The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World</a> by James Burnham<br /><br />2) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Protestant-Ethic-Spirit-Capitalism-Editions/dp/048642703X" target="_blank">The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism</a> by Max Weber<br /><br />3) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/City-History-Origins-Transformations-Prospects/dp/0156180359">The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects</a> by Lewis Mumford<br /><br />Possibly, I'll follow up the Mumford with <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-American-Cities-Modern-Library/dp/0679600477" target="_blank">The Death and Life of Great American Cities</a> by Jane Jacobs. I'm also wondering if Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses (<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Power-Broker-Robert-Moses-Fall/dp/0394720245" target="_blank">The Power Broker</a>) would serve as a contemporary and more topical follow-up.<br /><br />4) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Theory-Leisure-Oxford-Worlds-Classics/dp/0199552584" target="_blank">The Theory of the Leisure Class</a> by Thorstein Veblen<br /><br />5) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/True-Believer-Thoughts-Movements-Perennial/dp/0060505915" target="_blank">The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements</a> by Eric Hoffer<br /><br />6) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Origins-Totalitarian-Democracy-Talmon-Jl/dp/0393005100" target="_blank">Origins of Totalitarian Democracy</a> by J.L. Talmon<br /><br />7) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Main-Currents-Marxism-Founders-Breakdown/dp/0393329437" target="_blank">Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders - The Golden Age - The Breakdown (three volumes)</a> by Leszek Kolakowski<br /><br />8) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Utopian-Thought-Western-World-Manuel/dp/0674931866" target="_blank">Utopian Thought in the Western World</a> by Frank and Fritzie Manuel<br /><br />9) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Metapolitics-Wagner-German-Romantics-Hitler/dp/0765805103" target="_blank">Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler</a> by Peter Viereck<br /><br />10) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ideology-Utopia-Introduction-Sociology-Knowledge/dp/0156439557" target="_blank">Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge</a> by Karl Mannheim<br /><br />If you <i>are</i> interested in books I've read that have influenced my understanding of geopolitics today, I offer the following tiny list:<br /><br />1) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Landmark-Thucydides-Comprehensive-Guide-Peloponnesian/dp/B001OW5OQ8" target="_blank">The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War</a> edited by Robert B. Strassler<br /><br />2) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Eat-Soup-Knife-Counterinsurgency/dp/0226567702" target="_blank">Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam</a> by John Nagl<br /><br />3) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Terrorism-Bruce-Hoffman/dp/0231126999" target="_blank">Inside Terrorism</a> by Bruce Hoffman<br /><br />4) <a href="http://www.amazon.com/How-Democracies-Lose-Small-Wars/dp/0521008778" target="_blank">How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam</a> by Gil Merom<br /><br />And as for my sense of style, Herman Melville's <i>Moby Dick</i>, Nabokov's <i>Lolita</i> and Martin Amis' <i>Dead Babies</i> have been the most forceful agents of influence.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21638792.post-76500443466656778232010-03-03T21:10:00.003-05:002010-03-03T21:14:23.554-05:00Jewish Press AppearanceThanks to The Jewish Press for publishing an abridged and edited <a href="http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/42759" target="_blank">version</a> of <a href="http://socfools.blogspot.com/2010/01/tony-judt-and-velvet-genocide.html" target="_blank">Tony Judt and the Velvet Genocide</a>, my analysis of the Marxist patrimony of Judt's one-state proposal. This is my third piece for the paper.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13462062002788326042noreply@blogger.com0