The Socialism of Fools

Ron Paul's "Holocaust of the Innocent"

2012-01-04T03:25:00.007-05:00

The following are remarks Ron Paul made to Congress on June 24, 1980. He postulated a positive correlation between abortion and violent child abuse, entering into the record an article in support by Christian "abortion aftermath" psychiatrist Dr. Philip Ney. Ron Paul is a Republican candidate who enjoys crossover appeal among left-liberals owing to his non-interventionist and Israel-phobic ideas in foreign policy.

CONGRESSIONAL RECORD--HOUSE
June 24, 1980

ABORTION: A CASE OF CHILD ABUSE

(Mr. PAUL asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks and include extraneous matter.)

Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, child abuse has reached epidemic proportions. It is estimated that in the United States there will be 1.5 million children battered by their parents in the next 10 years, resulting in 50,000 deaths and 300,000 permanent injuries. These are frightening statistics, and even the most callous among us must cry out at this holocaust of the innocent.

For years some have argued that aborting the unwanted unborn would asure [sic] that each child allowed the prerogative of being born would be wanted and loved, and this would reduce or eliminate the battered child syndrome. Frankly, I was always baffled how a careless disregard for the sacredness of life under one condition would enhance the regard for life under another condition.

Logic has always told me that if a healthy, unwanted, not-yet-born life could be arbitrarily destroyed out of mere personal preference, then less than perfect life, of no seeming "social value," could not be safeguarded by arguing only that it deserves our protection because it passed through that fleeting moment in human development called birth.

The fear that many of us have for the introduction and promotion of infanticide and euthanasia as a consequence of our callous attitude toward the unborn, is well founded-philosophically, morally, and historically. A large amount of evidence in the medical literature now verifies that the attitude toward abortion has contributed
significantly to the rapid rise in child abuse.

I would like to call the following article from a medical colleague in Vancouver, British Columbia, to the House [sic] attention. Dr. Philip Ney explains this from a psychiatric point of view. This essay is so important for everyone to study, since many who champion the abortion ethic express moral indignation, and rightly so, at seeing a defenseless child beaten unconscious by its parents. Can we survive asa [sic] human race if we are so careless with the value and the dignity of life? I say we cannot. Tragically, world events today support my position. This subject deserves a moment of your thoughts.

The article is as follows:

Is ELECTIVE ABORTION A CAUSE OF CHILD ABUSE?
(By Philip o. Ney, M.D.)

A presumably plausible argument in favor of elective abortion is that it would make each child really wanted. What could be better, it is often argued, than preventing the birth of unwanted children who will be neglected and battered? Unfortunately for this seemingly cogent claim, there is now reason to believe that elective abortion has the reverse effect.

Child neglect, abuse and murder is increasing. Having to treat so many battered children, I began to worry that using abortion to make every child a wanted child might be backfiring. When I examined the evidence, I became convinced that most of the abused children resulted from wanted pregnancies and that elective abortion is an important cause of child abuse.

Early elective abortion became available in Canada in 1969. From then on there has appeared to be an increase in deaths of Canadian children from social causes. The provinces with the highest rates of abortion -- British Columbia and Ontario -- also have the highest rates of child abuse. Newfoundland, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick have low abortion rates. They also have low rates of child abuse.

DISQUIETING FIGURES

The figures on this relationship in the United States are equally disquieting. Since elective abortion became available in 1972, there has been a continuing increase in child battering as indicated by a report of 22,683 battered New York children in 1974, and 26,536 in 1975. V. J. Fontana and D. J. Bersharov, in their book, The Maltreated Child, estimated that there will be 1.5 million battered children in the United States during the next ten years, resulting in 50,000 deaths and 300,000 permanent injuries.

The following mechanisms might help explain how abortions can lead to child abuse:

Having an abortion can interfere with a mother's ability to restrain her anger toward those depending on her care. Abortion might also weaken a social taboo against harming those who are defenseless. With wholesale abortions discarding nondefective [sic] unborn children, the value of children might diminish, resulting in less care and protection.

Higher mammals respond with parental care to signals of distress from their young. An aborting person, having already repressed her instinctive caring for her unborn young, might be less Inhibited in giving vent to her rage at a whimpering child.

Having repressed that taboo, those people are more likely to be passive and indifferent to the distress of a battered child and more reluctant to intervene. What a contrast with the past when people did not stop to think about defending a child, even at the sacrifice of their lives.

The decline in the value of children (and I am not discussing attempts to limit population growth) has had some significant side effects. Only two decades ago parents were willing to suffer major deprivation to have and raise children. It seemed like a sacred obligation or a great privilege. Nowadays, people balance having children, with wanting a country house, another car, better vacations and early retirement.

This might be observed by children in such families. As a result they might feel less confidence in their parents' true concern for their welfare. They might then become so importunate in their demands for care and attention that their parents feel threatened. Not infrequently, the parental response to those attention-demanding children will be physical violence. What might cause children to question whether or not they were really wanted is that their mother had one or more abortions.

Society is beginning to believe that a child has no right to exist and is therefore valued only when it is wanted. If It is permissible to kill an unwanted, unborn child, then one can defend killing children already born when they are no longer considered to be valuable. Judging from the leninent [sic] attitude toward those who maim or kiil [sic] children today, children nowadays probably have a legal value similar to their value during the Middle Ages -- which was not very much.

Recent evidence indicates many women harbor strong guilt feelings long after their abortions. Guilt is one important cause of child battering and infanticide. Abortion also lowers women's self-esteem and there are studies reporting a major loss of self- esteem in battering parents.

Children who are aware of an abortion in the family might bring on themselves parental violence. As abortion survivors they experience a combination of guilt and anger.

These feelings could lead to behavior that appears disrespectful or aggressive to parents -- behavior that might trigger parental rage. Such guilty and angry children might turn on their siblings. The ensuing fighting might provoke parental battering. When these children mature, their unresolved guilt could lead to battering their own children.

Marital stress plays a strong role not only in the "battered-wife" syndrome, but also in the "battered-child" syndrome. Some women resent their male partners impregnating them and then coercing them to have an abortion. Fathers, on the other hand, might feel hostility toward women because they have no rights in decisions about which infant gets aborted and when. The "battle of the sexes" aggravated by elective abortion, can all too easily be turned violently against children.

There is increasing evidence that previously aborted women become depressed during a subsequent pregnancy. Depression interferes with a mother's early bonding with her infant, and children who are not bonded to their mothers are at a higher risk of being battered.

If these hypotheses are valid, then as abortion rates increase, child battering rates will increase proportionately. In separate studies, Schoenfeld and Barker have reported that women who have abused their children had higher rates of abortion. Preliminary results of our own study show a greater frequency of child abuse by women whose first pregnancy either miscarried or was aborted.

AN EVER-EXPANDING CYCLE

The argument that unwanted children will be abused, and should therefore be aborted, has been heard in varied guises throughout history. It has been a stock justification for doing away with those undesirable and those unwanted because they hampered the privileges and wants of those in power. But if the mechanisms here described are accurate, not only will abortion on request increase child battering, but the "abort and batter" syndrome will increase in an ever-expanding cycle in future generations.

I wonder why, when we are so interested in preserving nature's delicate balance, we do not have a similar concern for the long-reaching implications of elective abortion on the human species. What war, pestilence and famine could not do to us, medicine, In [sic] the name of humanism and emancipation might yet achieve. By helping to disrupt a major species-preserving mechanism -- the mother-infant bond -- medicine not only threatens the welfare and safety of large numbers of children, It [sic] might also be endangering the future of humankind.

Memorial (10)

2011-09-11T00:34:00.001-04:00

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From Selma to Gaza

2011-07-31T21:02:00.000-04:00

Alice Walker reminds me of the grandmotherly "Oracle" in The Matrix series. You wait in her living room, foggy and frustrated by a world whose signs and symbols you can't decipher. She appears, sage and soft, with a warm plate of cookies and a down-home wisdom weathered by the years. She smiles, in earnest: "I think Israel is the greatest terrorist in that part of the world."

Walker is selling her involvement in Freedom Flotilla 2, the new, supernumerary mission to bring "aid" to the people of Gaza. While the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains dismal, things have improved since the Egyptian Revolution. The aid the new Flotilla intends to deliver is political, not practical.

There's a lot to behold in a human rights narrative that leads from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to the Free Gaza Movement. The moral transposition of Jews from victim to victor, the decay of authentic politics into gestural mimicries, the apparent inability of an icon to retire herself with the passing of her political moment -- there are many vectors of approach. Suffice it for now to say that running the Israeli sea blockade of Gaza is not your mother's political protest.

Actually, maybe it is: the anti-Zionist catechism was written in Soviet Moscow, and '68 revolutionaries helped pioneer anti-Jewish violent direct action on behalf of Palestine. The terrorist baton has passed from Marxist-Leninists to religious fanatics, but a Leftish rump survives to give aid and comfort to Muslim millenarians -- Hamas, Hezbollah and others they join in the solidarity of a broad "global Left".

The Free Gaza Movement, largely an accretion of Leftists, lunatics and Islamists, is the organ of this tendency behind the flotillas. One of its key constituents is the International Solidarity Movement, a "non-violent" groupuscule whose mission is to send young, idealistic Westerners to the Palestinian Territories to face life-threatening situations. Their injury or death can be laid at the feet of Israel; the holy grail is the death of a fresh-faced US citizen, which in addition to landing a body blow to Israel's image might sour relations between the Jewish state and its American benefactor.

The nucleus and driving force of the ISM is a married couple: Adam Shapiro, an apostate Jew from Brooklyn, and his wife Huwaida "Heidi" Arraf, a Palestinian-American. Arraf is striking: her individual features are beautiful -- big, blue-beryl eyes, a cupid's bow mouth, ropey, black-licorice hair -- but in a weird echo of her garbled peace activism, they crash together into a face that's just wrong. The eyes seem unmoored, parting from one another in a slow drift, as if into piscine placement. You can't engage the face.

Arraf emerged from the Detroit area's Arab community, where she cut her teeth shilling for Saddam in his struggle to evade UN sanctions, and moved on to Jerusalem, to join and then abandon a pro-Palestinian NGO for putting "too much emphasis on conflict resolution and peace". Things had moved too slowly for Heidi and her comrades during the Oslo era. These were somnolent years, trundling to a truncated Palestine. Then the suicide bombs of the Second Intifada hurried the human rights vanguard in a new direction. The focus on peaceful coexistence was replaced by Right of Return and implacable opposition to an increasingly elastic notion of "occupation". The ISM was founded. It was time to help shake things up, and faster, please.

What Howard Jacobson recently wrote of Walker and the flotilla describes the strategem hatched by the ISM: they began to recruit activists "... to blunder into where it isn't safe, clothed in the make-believe garments of the unworldly, speaking of children and speaking like children, half inviting a violence which can then be presented as a slaughter of the innocents." Rachel Corrie was crushed, Tom Hurndall was shot in the head, Brian Avery had his jaw shot in half. Others were maimed and killed. Heidi, now Huwaida in public, was responsible for recruiting the activists, and in the wake of the inevitable violence against them, she was like a fish-eyed angel of death, appearing for interviews, haunting the news, harvesting propaganda.

It's key to distinguish the ISM from the peace groups and humanitarian activists it mimics and cooperates with. Non-violent resistance has a hallowed history, enshrined in the Indian independence and American Civil Rights movements. The ISM traduces it by using the principle to shroud the practice of luring kids into a war zone to exploit their inevitable deaths. The median age of the eight ISM activists seriously injured or killed since 2002 is 24.* None had rank within the organization.

Another distinction worth making is the ISM is fundamentally different from, say, a group like B'Tselem. B'Tselem is a well-known Israeli NGO that monitors human rights in the territories occupied by Israel. It documents and publicizes abuses, mostly Israeli, because it is concerned about the moral hygiene of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Ultimately it wishes to see Israel disencumber itself of corrosive occupation so it can thrive among the community of nations.

By contrast, the background of the key founders of the ISM informs its nature. Arraf is a radical Arab-American who "came to see," as Martin Luther King wrote of Black Power ideologues in Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, "that in spite of progress... conditions were still insufferable" and despaired of "positive nonviolent power". Adam Shapiro is a Jew who trumpets his apostasy when it isn't convenient to lend his activism the imprimatur of his Jewishness.

I don’t identify as Jewish. I see it as a religion rather than an ethnicity and, as I have no religious feelings, I don’t regard myself as Jewish.

The ISM is uninterested in a settlement with a Jewish state. Rather, while they cloak it in balmy rhetoric about human rights, the ISM wishes to see Israel dismantled and reformed into a binational, Arab-majority state. This is made clear in the Points of Unity of the Free Gaza Movement. To join the Movement, one must accept the Points, which conclude with an affirmation of the Right of Return:

We recognize the right of all Palestinian refugees and exiles and their heirs to return without delay to their homes in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, to recover their properties, and to receive compensation for damage, dispossession and unlawful use of such property, in accordance with international law. This is in the first instance an individual and not a collective right, and cannot be negotiated except by the individual.

Implemented like this, Israel would be deleted, unless it could negotiate non-residency and compensation with over 4.75 million individual Palestinians. The intention is clear and it aligns with the end goal of Hamas, with which the ISM happily coexists in Gaza. That the ISM wishes to reach the goal "non-violently" is no redemption. They actively partner with the IHH, which uses violence, and passively partner with Hamas. In the real world, Velvet Genocide is genocide.

The ISM is not a "peace" group. If Alice Walker makes it to Gaza, she will have left the legacy of Martin Luther King back in Selma.

* Two other ISM activists, including Vittorio Arrigoni, have also been killed, but by Palestinians outside of the context of protest or combat.

Written between 6/26/11 and 7/8/11.

Nir Rosen and Totalitarian Stupidity

2011-02-16T12:41:00.002-05:00

One snowy day back in college, I was returning from class to my dorm and I began to cross a small intersection. A woman was waiting at the stop sign in a large, gray vehicle. As I began to pass in front of it, she suddenly drove forward into me. I banged on the hood, she came to and stopped, and I barked some remark about using her eyes. More startling than injurious, so I continued on.

I entered my dorm and saw my friend in the main gathering room, so I went to him and breathlessly unloaded what had just happened. While narrating I referred in my 21 year-old shorthand to the woman driver as "this chick". A girl I hadn't seen sitting nearby exploded: "CHICK? What the FUCK is THAT?" I marveled to myself: I was just nearly run over by a car, and her moral priority is to police my language.

As I've argued, a possibly clinical emotional idiocy underpins extremism. Conspiracy theories about America and the Jews, the embrace of "counterknowledge", an attraction to totalitarian thinking -- these are some criteria for diagnosis. Above all we have the moral stupidity, the bent priorities of the true believer, the eggs which need to be broken to make the omelet of the radiant tomorrow.

Out of today's noxious lineup of anti-war extremists steps Nir Rosen. During the celebration that erupted when Hosni Mubarak stepped down in the face of Egyptian popular revolt, Lara Logan, a CBS News correspondent, was ambushed, beaten and sexually assaulted. In response, Nir Rosen tweeted:

Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson. Where was her buddy McCrystal.

Yes yes its wrong what happened to her. Of course. I don’t support that. But, it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too

Jesus Christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger

A fuller log is available here.

Rosen is a war correspondent whose reductive anti-imperialism rivals Ward Churchill's. Yet he's been successful and celebrated, thanks to the comparative complexity of his subject matter and Bush's bungling of Iraq. Besides the acute viciousness of his attack on a woman who might have been gang-raped, what's interesting is this is hardly the first time Rosen has made vile public statements. It's just the first time he's been called out on it by more than a few people.

Predictably in pitch with his totalitarian stupidity, Rosen often targets Israel. Here are some examples from Twitter and his public Facebook "Wall".

new racist Israeli citizenship law should be celebrated. It exposes what Zionism really is, will further ostracize Israel, speed its demise

hopefully [Israel will] be part of greater syria in the future, which will include palestine of course

... all of Palestine, that is

@MaanNewsAgency Yes to a 3rd Intifada. This time hopefully with the support of the Palestinians citizens of "Israel"

Israel's existence is a blight unto the nations

Here in a Facebook Wall post entitled "Fuck Israel," Rosen links to a five year-old case in which a (non-Jewish) IDF soldier was acquitted of murdering a 13 year-old Palestinian girl. Rosen ignorantly mistook the tragic story as recent and intoned [emphasis mine]:

he shot a 13 year old girl, or ordered her to be shot, and was exhonerated [sic]. and nothing will happen because she isnt jewish. israel's existence is an abomination

And here Rosen lays it out in the Manichaean terms native to the totalitarian mind:

i have always opposed israel and supported anybody who is opposed to israel. just as anybody concerned with justice and freedom must.

Because it was individual, the odiousness of Rosen's attack on Lara Logan surpasses his public fantasizing about Israel's destruction. But the latter didn't provoke outrage, or much response at all, which shows how acceptable that line of thought has become. Trusted, popular writers like Marc Lynch and Glenn Greenwald have praised Rosen throughout.

Rosen is being crushed under the weight of tardy opprobrium. He's given a Michael Richards-style interview in which he doesn't do himself any favors, explaining:

A part of me was bothered by how celebrities, especially white ones, get so much attention, and before I realized it was a sexual assault I was sort of anticipating a return to the old theme about unleashed brown natives attacking a white woman. Another part of me was bothered by the knowledge that Arab victims would never get attention, that this would detract from everything else that was happening, and that most victims of sexual assault, whether in Egypt or the US will never get attention.

A woman was just beaten and sexually assaulted by a gang, and Rosen's moral priority is policing our emotional response, lest it be racist or focused on the wrong victim.

People lament the damage Twitter has done to the art of written communication, but I appreciate the economy of language it enforces. The great poet Richard Wilbur wrote, "The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle." Twitter proleptically forced Rosen into an apt summary of his downfall:

thanks to twitter i can destroy my career 140 characters at a time.

A Parochial Place

2010-09-12T17:18:00.055-04:00

More than the usual suspects are after Marty Peretz. The New Republic's Editor-In-Chief has long been accused of regarding Arabs and Muslims, and Palestinians in particular, with Orientalist disdain. But a week ago Peretz published a blog post in which he crossed his own rubicon:

... no one has shown that a single serious demonstration against Muslims and Arabs, against their beliefs and behavior can be raised in this country... In fact, there has not been a single rally or demonstration in America aimed at Muslim or Arab interests or their commitments to foreign governments and, more likely, to foreign insurgencies and, yes, quite alien philosophies.

As an indicator of the health of our liberal democracy, we might be heartened that horror at the spectacle of lunatic pastor Terry Jones roasting Korans stirred the unwise intervention of General Petraeus, Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates and the President of the United States. But while Peretz denounced Jones' plans as "satanic" in a follow-up post that reads like damage control, he initially mused that non-Muslims are less cowed in Europe, where people do protest the "Pakis".

I'm no fan of Edward Said, but the foppish apologist for Eastern illiberalism is consistently borne out in his observation that the modes of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia are the same. How precisely Peretz's charge of Muslim "commitments to foreign governments and, more likely, to foreign insurgencies and, yes, quite alien philosophies" echoes anti-Jewish boilerplate! I can't help thinking Peretz uses caesura -- the interrupting "yes" -- to intimate an impish awareness of this.

Now prestige commentators like Nicholas Kristof and James Fallows are calling him out. That's because, rather than sublimating his hostility into invidious delectation of rugs, Peretz is being too blunt about what he wants: protest "against Muslims and Arabs" -- not just radical Muslims and their ideas and beliefs. Peretz thinks we in the US are effete because we lack what he alludes to in another context as a "Walpurgisnacht" instinct -- the exuberant drive to protest "Pakis".

As is customary with ideological racism, this is fueled in part by corrupted concern for human rights. Peretz has long lamented illiberalism in the Third World, particularly among Muslims and Arabs and especially as it manifests in eliminationist hatred of Jews and Israel. And he is right to oppose this illiberalism as a coterminous defense of liberal democracy. At least as much as his Jewishness, that explains his view that "support for Israel is deep down, an expression of America's best view of itself." What is so odious about the neo-realist Left's embrace of Walt and Mearsheimer is the failure of these putative anti-fascists to see that American and Israeli interests unite in defense of the open society.

The problem is human rights obviously are a universalist concern. Violent intellectuals make Manichaean claims against people whose alterity threatens to corrode and destroy the society of which these ideologues appoint themselves the vanguard. In the words of Jack Shafer, Peretz envisions Muslims and Arabs as "an undifferentiated mass, consumed by antique tribal hatreds, fated to fratricide, torn asunder by their religious sectarianism." They must churn a ceaseless series of 9/11s. When humanism is scoped down to nationalism, it loses its humanitarian potential. You can't stake a claim against illiberal menace from a parochial place. That is not concern for the open society; it is concern for your own society. Peretz merely takes a side in a tribal contest.

Memorial

2010-09-11T22:10:00.001-04:00

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Liberal Masochism

2010-08-02T08:53:00.000-04:00

A recent rallying cry on the Tea Party Right is opposition to building a "Ground Zero mosque" near where the World Trade Center stood. The mosque will be part of "Cordoba House", an Islamic cultural center intended by its developers to improve relations between Muslims and the West. The crusade to shut it down is nasty and dumb on a number of levels -- Islam is not radical, political Islam; and how can (or dare) we fetter the free expression of religion on American soil? -- but the opposition does rest on resonant emotional logic.

Think of the extreme distastefulness of erecting a German cultural center near Auschwitz as a gesture of German-Jewish reconciliation. Before you get your Godwin up, it's not such an outlandish hypothetical. There are ethnic Germans in Poland, especially in the southern region containing Oświęcim; Poland is a secular republic that allows free expression; and few people other than Daniel Jonah Goldhagen believe German culture is synonymous with Nazism. But regardless of intentions, it would yield questionable benefit while constituting an extravagant offense to the victims of Nazism.

Some argue back that Al Qaeda doesn't represent a nation state. I think this comes from a conceptual bias in which it feels OK to hold the Germans of the time collectively responsible for Nazism, but thinking of Muslims and radical Islam in the same way feels "racist". This double standard is partly a product of the passage of time and the leftish lens through which educated people view these phenomena. But it's misguided. Al Qaeda and like groups embody a religious political movement that enjoys hard and soft support not just in the Muslim world, but throughout the "Global South" and in apologetic precincts at home. And although it was a more localized phenomenon, Nazism was admired and emulated outside the boundaries of Germany.

You might reply that there aren't 1 billion Germans with whom reconciliation must urgently be sought. Fine, let's put aside the dubious utility of consecrating a mosque near Ground Zero to mollify Muslims. When Israel eventually relinquishes the West Bank, should Peace Now insist on setting up a Jewish community center by the Cave of the Patriarchs, where the messianic Jewish terrorist Baruch Goldstein gunned down 29 Muslim worshipers? There is a dire need for reconciliation between Jews and Muslims and Israelis and Arabs, and a JCC may serve as a resonant symbol demarcating Jewishness and Kahanism.

Or maybe it would be better to let the victims rest in peace. But Spencer Ackerman warns, "To not build the Ground Zero Mosque will be to play into Usama bin Laden’s hands." He is seconded by others, such as Jon Chait, Joe Klein, Adam Serwer and Robert Wright, who view Cordoba House as a quintessentially American answer to radical Islam. Maintaining a scrupulous distinction between Islam and the latter is morally and strategically key, and a thinking person's intellectual ECG is measured on reflexive opposition to anything endorsed by Sarah Palin. But also this is liberal masochism, a progressive impulse that heat-sinks toward the most self-flagellating remedy, identifying it as the primary or sole solution, a crucial expression of our values when they are fundamentally challenged.

An adjacent phenomenon is found in the arc that liberal discourse on democratization has traced in the last decade. What began as hostility to the neocon enterprise of exporting democracy was transformed by Hamas' 2006 sweep of the Gaza legislature into a "be careful what you wish for" object lesson followed by counsel about the need to diplomatically engage our worst enemies. A lot of this was good faith commentary, but for a few it became a masochistic spectacle, moving beyond repudiation of Bush into theatrical renunciation of American exceptionalism. This was complemented by a fringe defending Hamas' victory as an expression of democracy per se.*

Just as there are obvious alternatives to engaging Hamas -- discouraging Israel from recapitulating our Cuba mistake, and strengthening Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian National Authority by dismantling settlements -- there are many approaches to conciliation more appealing than Cordoba House. Ground Zero is sacrosanct, and liberals, more than anyone, should be alive to the war narrative. There is no political culture more grossly insulted by radical Islam than liberal democracy. But liberals offer up this creamy nonsense in which decorating lower Manhattan with a mosque is cast as an assertion of American values. Our values need not be ratified by meretricious self-effacement. We can assert them without tithing our integrity. We can win without losing ourselves.

--

* Readers of this blog are well aware that Glenn Greenwald is not a liberal -- he's a Paulite non-interventionist dressed up as a Left Democrat. However, most people, including too many able liberal commentators, mistake him for one, or a kindred spirit.

If the time URL to the YouTube video of Greenwald's grisly performance doesn't jump to the relevant part, it begins at 2:41.

Menace and Moral Inversion

2010-07-26T00:00:00.002-04:00

Hockney: You guys don't have a fucking leg to stand on.

Detective: You think so, tough guy? I could put you in Queens on the night of the hijacking.

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?

For me the dumbest moments in politics call up this bit from The Usual Suspects, 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 drooling viciousness with which this entirely id-driven movement is expressed reminds me of some of the more colorful chimpanzee attacks. The tribal perception of encroachment outrages an organic sense of entitlement. If I don't get my birthday cake, you don't get your face.

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 hateful crazy to call into question the wholesomeness of the whole. Our present political moment has seen the NAACP pass a resolution calling on the Tea Party to repudiate racism, and precisely on pitch, Mark Williams, a bombastic radio personality acting (no longer) as the national spokesman of Tea Party Express, responded with this hallmark of the genre:

We are dealing with people [the NAACP] who are professional race-baiters who make a very good living off this kind of thing. They make more money off of race than any slave trader, ever. It's time groups like the NAACP went to the trash heap of history where they belong along with all the other vile, racist groups that emerged in our history.

[emphasis mine]

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 moral dominion. One of its leitmotifs is the Arab and Muslim idée fixe of the West's sanctification of the Holocaust, which for example led to Tehran's Hamshahri newspaper staging an International Holocaust Cartoon Competition in retaliation for the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons. Another example, closer to home, is Norman Finkelstein's notion of a "Holocaust Industry" extorting blood money and bankrolling Israeli imperialism.

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 human rights 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.

Addendum: Back in May, Mark Williams referred to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer as "a Jewish Uncle Tom who would have turned rat on Anne Frank."

The Long Arc of Stupid

2010-07-11T21:35:00.012-04:00

At Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday celebration in December, 2002, Trent Lott delivered this show-stopper to the happy crowd:

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.

Lott was referring to Thurmond's 1948 run -- in the long American tradition of third-party moral idiocy -- 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, "TRENT LOTT MUST GO":

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?

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, tweeted:

Sad to hear of the passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah.. One of Hezbollah's giants I respect a lot...

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, "The Policing of the Discourse":

... 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.

It's amazing what 8 years and several wars for and by Israel can accomplish.

The 10 Books that Will Influence Me

2010-03-28T17:31:00.005-04:00

Tyler Cowen has sired 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 going to read 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!

Here are the books in no special order. Comments and suggestions are most welcome.

1) The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World by James Burnham

2) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism by Max Weber

3) The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford

Possibly, I'll follow up the Mumford with The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. I'm also wondering if Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses (The Power Broker) would serve as a contemporary and more topical follow-up.

4) The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen

5) The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer

6) Origins of Totalitarian Democracy by J.L. Talmon

7) Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders - The Golden Age - The Breakdown (three volumes) by Leszek Kolakowski

8) Utopian Thought in the Western World by Frank and Fritzie Manuel

9) Metapolitics: From Wagner and the German Romantics to Hitler by Peter Viereck

10) Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge by Karl Mannheim

If you are interested in books I've read that have influenced my understanding of geopolitics today, I offer the following tiny list:

1) The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War edited by Robert B. Strassler

2) Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam by John Nagl

3) Inside Terrorism by Bruce Hoffman

4) How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam by Gil Merom

And as for my sense of style, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Nabokov's Lolita and Martin Amis' Dead Babies have been the most forceful agents of influence.

Jewish Press Appearance

2010-03-03T21:10:00.003-05:00

Thanks to The Jewish Press for publishing an abridged and edited version of Tony Judt and the Velvet Genocide, my analysis of the Marxist patrimony of Judt's one-state proposal. This is my third piece for the paper.

To Harness History

2010-02-20T15:27:00.010-05:00

As an analyst of the ideas behind New Antisemitism, I spend a lot of time trawling the oily floors of anti-Israel seas in search of stinking treasures. A good deal of what I pull up is amateur opinion material that I completely ignore. It would be boring to dwell on childish and sub-literate screeds, and I don't want to turn this blog into a medium of complaint or disproportionate outrage.

I'll violate my policy in this case, not only because the prose is breathtakingly dumb -- a notable outlier in an already squalid medium; the author can't even spell "vagina" -- but more because it nicely exhibits an important feature of utopian thought.

Let us put the debate of "is homosexuality nature or nurture" aside for the moment. There is a need to protect all minorities; however, there is clear distinction between legal protection, and aggressively encourage something. It is difficult to fathom, why homosexuality is increasingly pushed in our heterosexual faces, to the detriment of the majority and more importantly, the danger it poses to the survival of human race. Similarly, why the constant noise about the suffering of Jews in 1945, as if they have a monopoly over this issue? It was the Japanese, the Germans and the Russians who suffered most during the Second World War. If the Israeli-Zionists were really victims of a holocaust, how can they murder innocent Palestinian civilians en masse? How can victims exhibit such heartless and cruel behaviour towards innocent civilians, who had no connection with Nazi Germany?

As stultifying as this stuff is, reading as much of it as you can take is helpful because it presents so many of the clinical signs of totalitarian stupidity. There is the embrace of counterknowledge in the form of Holocaust denial; there is the catatonic reflex of absurd historical analogy; there is the conspiracist thinking. And of course the piece is a breviary of Jew-hatred -- note the arcane reference to the "Talmudic ethos of ethnic cleansing".

What I especially want you to notice is how such a wicked and imbecilic screed masquerades as human rights rhetoric. This Yamin Zakaria stages a passion play whose drama unfolds locally and internationally. There is the intrinsic threat to Islam posed by the homosexual lobby. There is the extrinsic threat posed by the Jews. The Muslims are a people of light who are "[gagged]" by "[cabals]" that seek to control our thought. While "there is a need to protect all minorities," homosexuals and Jews have an unnatural and parasitical drive to spread "annihilation" and "servitude". The inversion of human rights ethics is fundamental to utopian politics -- read Mein Kampf, or Osama bin Laden's public writings. This is perhaps what is most perverse about the "anti-imperialist" collaboration between left-wing and Islamist groups.

Millenarian thought seeks to stop history. Left-wing millenarians wish to harness and drive it toward a future utopia. Right-wing millenarians wish to harness and drive it back to a glorious past. 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.

The Poverty of Rationalism

2010-02-15T11:29:00.003-05:00

Stephen Walt is a guy who probably shouldn't begin a blog post by admitting:

My copy of Mein Kampf sits on a shelf in my study...

But as I've taken pains to point out, Walt is an Israel-critical foreign policy realist; calling him an antisemite, as many do, is not only wrong but harmful. Walt ledes with this admission because he wishes to communicate his support for freedom of speech. He unfurls the truisms that bad ideas sink themselves in the marketplace of ideas, but censorship can plug holes in their hulls by conferring a mystique on them.

What I find interesting is this passage:

Books like Mein Kampf remind us that bizarre, incoherent, and hateful ideas can sometimes win over enough people to sway a nation and ultimately help lead to the deaths of millions. When you actually look at the the book, and read about the history of Nazism, it may be hard to believe that serious people in an advanced society could be persuaded by arguments of this sort. But they were.

Innumerable volumes have tried to crack the koan of what made ordinary Germans support the millenarian ideology of Nazism and genocide. There are a few rationalist theses based on the Versailles Effect and Marxist critiques of capitalism, but most analyses acknowledge a factor of irrationality -- an "unrealism" in German politics.

Walt concurs. He departs from his realist orthodoxy and admits that "hateful ideas" can become an engine of history, citing John Hagee as a possibly pending example. That's interesting, because in today's foreign policy debate, Walt bills himself as "a realist in an ideological age" -- i.e. the rational antipode to the idealistic neocons, who interpret the War on Terror as an epic battle between democratic good and totalitarian evil. In another, typical post, Walt writes:

... the real issue is to ask why groups like al Qaeda want to attack us in the first place... pundits just assume "terrorists" are inherently evil and that’s why they do evil things... But we really do need to spend some time asking why terrorists are targeting us, and whether we could alleviate (though not eliminate) the problem by adjusting some aspects of U.S. foreign policy."

Remarkably Walt is talking about Al Qaeda and other terrorists; he's not making the more standard appeal on behalf of the common people who may support them owing to Israeli violence. Maybe, as the unoriginality of Walt's piece on Mein Kampf suggests, the mandate to maintain a pulse of posts led him to publish without reflecting. But it's not a little weird that a commentator who acknowledges the irrationality of Nazi Germany has made a cottage industry out of depicting Islamists as rational actors -- that we might find an accommodation with them by lessening or breaking our alliance with Israel. Not to put too fine a point on it: Islamists often base their worldview on the insane belief that the Holocaust didn't happen.

A Freemasonry of Filth

2010-02-14T12:14:00.004-05:00

Modernityblog records lunatic Jew-hater Gilad Atzmon's latest low.

The Protocols is widely considered a forgery. It is a manual for a prospective new member of the “Elders”, describing how they will run the world through control of the media and finance, replacing the traditional social order with one based on mass manipulation. Though the book is considered a hoax by most experts and regarded as a vile anti-Semitic text, it is impossible to ignore its prophetic qualities and its capacity to describe both the century unfolding and the political reality in which we live I am referring here to: AIPAC, the Credit Crunch, Lehman Brothers, Neocon wars, interventionist ideology, a British Foreign Secretary listed as an Israeli Propaganda (Hasbara) author trying to amend Britain’s ethical stand, a Zionist by admission put on an inquiry panel to investigate why Britain launched a Zionist war and so on.

I wonder if Chomsky facsimile and Tourettic Israel-trasher Dennis Perrin knows whose authority he's appealing to in this lament about the growing sadism of the Jews.

Calling Bullshit -- The Pilot Episode

2010-02-13T17:42:00.011-05:00

I've been writing publicly since late 2002 about utopian and totalitarian ideas, mostly as they find expression in antisemitic reaction to Israel and Zionism. For unusual reasons I haven't fully articulated, I've tapped out an oeuvre that is largely consonant with the stance of the pro-Israel "community", as it were. You may not be awed by these credentials, but I hope they qualify me as someone who might briefly restore your interest in a tattered topic: the difference between criticism of Israel and abuse of Jews.

Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, has composed a leviathan libel of Andrew Sullivan, all but calling him an anti-Semite.

Criticism of Israeli policy, and sympathy for the Palestinians, and support for a two-state solution, do not require, as their condition or their corollary, this intellectual shabbiness, this venomous hostility toward Israel and Jews. I have striven for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, and territorial compromise, and two states, for many decades now, but Sullivan’s variety of such right thinking is completely repugnant to me. There are decent and indecent ways to advocate change. About the Jews, is Sullivan a bigot, or is he just moronically insensitive? To me, he looks increasingly like the Buchanan of the left.

Inevitably this has generated a lot of heat, earning angry responses from Matthew Yglesias, Brad DeLong, Gawker, of all things, and many others.

I have for a while been wanting to start a Calling Bullshit series about episodes like this, when oversensitive or oversearching friends-of-Israel decide to show-trial enemies-of-the-Jews. Otherwise perspicacious commentators, even brilliant ones like Wieseltier, can be seduced by the provocative crudeness of Israel's enemies, and the complex spectrum of ideological reaction to Israel, into launching McCarthyite counterattacks. And interpretation can be a carnivorous jungle when three political types, interrelated on the subject of Israel, overlap. These are the antisemite, the non-interventionist, and the foreign policy realist who has judged Israel harmful to the US.

It's important to combat confusion arising from these complexities, as well as callow and partisan accusations of antisemitism, and the effort should be led from within the ranks. New Antisemitism really does exist, and decreasing numbers of people believe that when non-antisemites are smeared. Also, real enemies of Israel or Jews use these moments to exonerate themselves, to immunize themselves against future criticism, and to enlist supporters among people offended by political correctness and identity politics.

Wieseltier's confusion is expressed in the last sentence of the passage I quoted above. He calls Sullivan a "Buchanan of the left". This seeming absurdity makes sense to those familiar enough with the material. Invoking Buchanan is often metonymy for isolationism*, and in the context of Israel one stained by Lindberghian anti-Semitism. Andrew Sullivan was a foreign policy neoconservative, and like most regretful true believers, he has been making up for it publicly by raking his scalp with conch shells. Predictably, his post-neocon writings on Israel have been a furnace of debate over the merits of Israel-critical foreign-policy realism and non-interventionism, stoked by outrage at Operation Cast Lead.

This returns us to an important topic I've written about. Non-interventionists and antisemites are implicated groups, but they are not the same. They both hate, or at least fear, Israel, but the former is not necessarily hostile to Jews. To the extent that the non-interventionist in public discourse is even identified, most people can’t distinguish him from uncomplicated Jew-haters on the subject of Israel. This is owing to some rhetorical overlap -- the very term "anti-Semite" was invented by Jew-haters wanting to sound respectable -- and also the figure of Charles Lindbergh, who combined both personas. So people default to branding as anti-Semites non-interventionist Israel-phobes like Glenn Greenwald, because the dogma that generates their vilification of Israel is not well understood.

Confusion is compounded by further rhetorical overlap of these with Israel-critical foreign policy realists. For many Israel advocates, it is beyond dispute that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have recapitulated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But again this is a mistake: Walt and Mearsheimer's critique is shoddy, dubious and above all illiberal, but it is not antisemitic. (Ironically, the Lobby portion of their critique is probably its least antisemitic element.) Wieseltier loses his grip on this distinction in another revelatory passage:

These days the self-congratulatory motto above his blog is ‘Of No Party or Clique,’ but in fact Sullivan belongs to the party of Mearsheimer and the clique of Walt (whom he cites frequently and deferentially), to the herd of fearless dissidents who proclaim in all seriousness, without in any way being haunted by the history of such an idea, that Jews control Washington.

Mearsheimer and Walt don’t believe the Jews control Washington; antisemites believe that. Mearsheimer and Walt believe the US is wrong to ally with Israel, because doing so brings us little benefit, and great harm in the form of terrorist blowback. Further, like all such analysts, they don't credit enough the power of irrationalism -- "unrealism", if you will -- in politics, and are indifferent to arguments based on the consanguinity of liberal democracies.

To muddy the waters one last time, non-interventionism is an illiberal doctrine that can be interpreted as antisemitic, and not only because of its anti-Israel excesses. The abiding theme of this blog is antisemitism is the engine of millenarian movements. So you do the math. Israel today is the Masada of the open society, under siege by Left, Right and especially genocidal Islamist forces. Moreover if Israel is compromised or destroyed, it is not only the Jews who will suffer. Complacency about antisemitism is a dangerous indulgence for all.

Maybe making these distinctions will be unsatisfying in a medium that is vexed by distance from Manichaean neatness. Inevitably, all organic and powerful movements produce a gestural simulacrum of themselves. This process is complete with the enterprise to identify and combat New Antisemitism. But it's too important to surrender it wholly to that historical imperative. Andrew Sullivan developed a touch of Israel-phobia during the hairshirt years of his anti-neocon penitence. He is not an antisemite.

* Isolationism comprises two related doctrines: military non-interventionism and economic protectionism. Even though the terms "isolationism" and "non-interventionism" are often used interchangeably, it is only the latter that is relevant to this piece.

Update: Here's Sullivan's cri de coeur.

Dead or Invisible?

2010-01-20T23:33:00.003-05:00

Men desire to have some share in the management of public affairs chiefly on account of the importance which it gives them. Upon the power which the greater part of the leading men, the natural aristocracy of every country, have of preserving or defending their respective importance, depends the stability and duration of every system of free government. In the attacks which those leading men are continuously making upon the importance of one another, and in the defence of their own, consists the whole play of domestic faction and ambition. The leading men of America, like those of all other countries, desire to preserve their own importance.

Adam Smith, describing in Wealth of Nations the practical underpinning of the American Revolution, and adumbrating today's Democratic fecklessness. But to be fair, Smith believed that self-interest is what animates the state -- enlightened self-interest.

The Future of a Negation

2010-01-14T11:50:00.002-05:00

"We continue to be concerned about a new environment in Turkey which permits and even encourages extreme expressions regarding Jews and Israel," Abraham H. Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League said in a statement. "While we have celebrated Turkey's history of coexistence with Jews and the protection Turkish society provides for its Jewish community, we cannot ignore this new atmosphere and its potential consequences."

Looks like selling out the Armenians, and the concept of remembrance, is paying real dividends.

A Moldovan Bouncer

2010-01-13T23:34:00.000-05:00

Spencer Ackerman reacts acidly to Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon's childish humiliation of the Turkish ambassador to Israel, Ahmet Oguz Celikkol:

A good relationship with a Muslim country that clearly accepts Israel’s right to exist is an unqualified diplomatic asset. To squander it through churlishness reflects a foreign policy run by a Moldovan bouncer. It’s like we’re living through the vulgar sequel of the Bush administration. Only Israelis are supposed to be more realistic.

Well said. I think Israel has been undergoing its own phase of “mugged-by-reality” machtpolitik, owing to the 9/11 attacks, but also and more to the second Intifada, Hezbollah and the ascendancy of Hamas. I’d answer Ackerman's closing sentence by arguing that foreign policy during the Bush years was a tension between the decidedly non-ideological Rumsfeld/Cheney faction and true believers like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Israel’s foreign policy is more "realistic" in the sense that it lacks this latter ideological dimension, and its liberal democracy is hardened by the considerable etatism that results from a short and violent history.

Ditch Israel Watch - III

2010-01-12T22:05:00.002-05:00

I defy anyone to find a political figure in either major party's leadership who has, in the context of discussing U.S. policy towards Israel, ever even mentioned the fact that undying, endless American support for Israel -- making all of their conflicts our own -- increases the risk of terrorist violence aimed at the U.S. But it so plainly does.

Awarding the third installment of the Ditch Israel Watch to Glenn Greenwald is like sneering at an octogenarian Norman Mailer -- that is to say, using a GAU-8 Avenger to shoot fish in a barrel -- but I'm constantly alarmed and saddened that writers -- especially knowledgeable ones of professed liberal sensibility -- credit this supersyllabic twit.

Tony Judt and the Velvet Genocide

2010-01-10T22:37:00.016-05:00

In the New York Review of Books in 2003, Tony Judt published his view that the Jewish state should be deleted. This was the predicate of his proposal to reanimate the corpse of the one-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict*. Cloaked with academic authority and writing during the overlap of the second Intifada with Bush's invasion of Iraq, Judt argued that Israel was a harmful anachronism. He was not the first to express an abolitionist anti-Zionism, but his prestige and timing led him to become the celebrity spokesman for the internationalist case against Israel.

This is a blog about ideas, and as such it treats them as living things that generate results. To reverse what he considered the moral decay of man during the Enlightenment, Rousseau recommended in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences that primitivism and an inchoate Luddism replace intellectual and technical** progress. This too was unoriginal, but it made Rousseau's fame. After being refined by two hundred years of illiberal thought, Rousseau's atavism was bolted like a gun turret to a totalitarian reading of his concept of democracy, and we entered upon the abattoir of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge.

But it is also important to resist the temptation to think of ideology as independent of practical influences. Consider the cluster of doctrines gathered under the construct of "socialism". Some early socialist thinkers had attitudes to race that would seem disqualifying today. These ranged from the conflation of Jews, Judaism and capital, most famously articulated by Marx and termed the "socialism of fools" by August Bebel, to racist determinism. Socialists like H.G. Wells, Jack London and Sidney and Beatrice Webb anticipated or prescribed eugenics and race war. Those strains of socialism that predominated by the time of the Second World War only then officially assumed an identity that featured anti-racism. This change was partly actuated by the showdown between Hitler and Stalin. The Fuhrer himself made pretenses of being "socialist", and in private once confessed Nazism's debt to Marx.*** Marxism-Leninism needed to sharply distinguish itself from its main anti-liberal competitor.

The logic of Judt's Israel: The Alternative looms as the leftish auxiliary to the Islamist enterprise to destroy Israel. As with the Khmer Rouge and Rousseau's primitivism, the one-state proposal has a precursor: Judt creepily recapitulates a facet of Marx and Engels' thought, which Engels articulated in an 1849 essay called "The Magyar Struggle". This was the quasi-Darwinian idea that certain European ethnic groups had been orphaned by the historical-evolutionary process and would have to be exterminated to permit the onset of socialism.

There is no country in Europe which does not have in some corner or other one or several ruined fragments of peoples, the remnant of a former population that was suppressed and held in bondage by the nation which later became the main vehicle of historical development. These relics of a nation mercilessly trampled under foot in the course of history, as Hegel says, these residual fragments of peoples always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution and remain so until their complete extirpation or loss of their national character, just as their whole existence in general is itself a protest against a great historical revolution.

This view was part of a larger meditation on the short-term political failure of the revolutionary violence that had begun the previous year in France and resonated throughout Europe. Arrayed in opposition to the "historical" and "revolutionary" Germans, Poles and Magyars were "petty hidebound nations" of Slavs, such as Czechs, Slovaks, Croats and Serbs. These, in an absurd attempt to restore their national historicity, "put themselves at the disposal of Austrian reaction," i.e. the Habsburg Austrian Empire. Engels blamed these Slavs seeking self-determination for the eclipse of internationalism by nationalism and ensuring the failure of the Revolutions of 1848.

Judt begins by referencing these same national movements. Then he recasts this analysis as an internationalist lament about Israel's twilight attachment to its Jewish character.

The problem with Israel, in short, is not—as is sometimes suggested—that it is a European "enclave" in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a "Jewish state"—a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded—is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.

If you consider Israel's geography, this is a breathtaking passage. The Jewish state is situated in a region where the timbre of nationalism isn't exactly Scandinavian. Nonetheless Judt argues there is now a status quo of 'post-racial' states, if you will, whose peace is imperiled by the "hidebound [nation]" of -- curiously, only -- Israel. He cites Israel's nuclear weapons as the primary impediment to nonproliferation; he says Israel was a major reason for the US invasion of Iraq, with Syria on deck.

In an attenuated way, Judt reasserts the struggle of international and national socialism. Certainly he doesn't mirror Engels in advocating Israel's violent destruction, but this is rich ore from which to extract an imprimatur for the velvet genocide of Middle East Jewry. "What is to be done" is to undo the impediment to progress set up in 1948, even though the 1940s saw the success of other national separations in India, Pakistan, Burma and Laos.

But what if there were no place in the world today for a "Jewish state"? What if the binational solution were not just increasingly likely, but actually a desirable outcome? It is not such a very odd thought. Most of the readers of this essay live in pluralist states which have long since become multiethnic and multicultural.

As Leon Wieseltier observed, "Judt and his editors have crossed the line from the criticism of Israel's policy to the criticism of Israel's existence." It takes naivete reminiscent of the Iranian communists who aided the Islamic Revolution, and found themselves among its first victims, to expect peace and safety for a Jewish minority in a binational Palestine.

I won't pretend to predict the fortunes of nationalism, but it would seem that if anyone's ideas about the Arab-Israeli conflict are an anachronism, they are Judt's.

Epilogue: This post was inspired by Andrew Sullivan mentioning that Tony Judt is suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease. That's awful. Judt's initial account of his cruel infirmity is moving.

I feel like a shitheel for writing this now, but the truth is I'd been wanting to compose and publish this analysis since 2004, when I first filtered Judt's essay through the lens of George Watson's The Lost Literature of Socialism, to which I am indebted here, especially Chapters 7 and 8.

* In the most generous assessment, the one-state notion is properly identified as an ideal, not a solution.

** In Rousseau's time, the term "arts" roughly meant "manufacturing".

*** Otto Wagener, Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant, pg. 167, cited in Watson, op. cit., pg. 72.

Terrorism vs the Versailles Effect

2010-01-09T21:16:00.012-05:00

We've entered a more mature phase of "reality-based" examination of our foreign policy, and the major topic besides the wisdom of our alliance with Israel is terrorism and its causes. This is tied to recent events like the Fort Hood shooting, the underwear bomber and now the Camp Chapman attack by Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi. The rationalist analysis that jihadists are driven to violence by American foreign policy is being asserted frequently and loudly by the usual suspects, some of them bitter that their sense of American culpability for 9/11 was eclipsed by interpretations of the attacks that blamed only the perpetrators.

Here's Oliver Kamm taking a bat to the back of Stephen Walt's legs over this:

"My point is simply to reiterate that any serious effort to deal with our terrorism problem has to be multi-faceted, and has to include explicit consideration of the things we do that may encourage violent, anti-American movements. Only a complete head-in-the-sand approach to the issue would deny the connection between various aspects of U.S. foreign and military policy (military interventions, targeted assassinations, unconditional support for Israel, cozy relations with Arab dictatorships, etc.) and the fact that groups like al Qaeda keep finding people like al-Balawi to recruit to their cause."

How many times does this need to be said? There are errors, crimes and sins of omission and commission in Western foreign policy. But the cause of jihadist rage against our side is not what we have done but what we are: liberal, democratic, secular, pluralist societies with women's rights, universal education and reproductive freedom.

I don't defend Walt's point of view, and I'm a staunch opponent of the rationalist bias that attracts people to it on both the right and the left, but it would help if those opposing it would distinguish between jihadists, and the people jihadists purport to represent and whose support they seek. Jihadists surely are implacable, and as Kamm has argued, there is no reason for the West to seek accommodation with them. Proposing that American foreign policy generates al-Balawis and forming policy around that is a fool's errand. But there is an additional point that is suggested by this analysis.

To what extent can American foreign policy be calibrated to reduce the 'Versailles Effect' among the victimological masses of politically castrated Muslims? For example, in spite of our meddling with Mossadegh, installment of the Shah and support for Israel, the majority of Iranians are pro-American, pro-Western and pro-democracy. They are also susceptible to left-wing and Islamist appeals to anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, but these don't yet prevail. One of the reasons I oppose a military response to the Iranian nuclear weapons program is to prevent the Versailles Effect from turning popular pressure away from the mullahs.

I don't like the isolationist and other illiberal solutions to this problem. Our foreign policy should be conceived as a tension between expediency and morality in pursuit of our national interest, but it would be "head-in-the-sand" to think our actions don't resonate in ways that are lethally exploited.

Ditch Israel Watch -- II

2010-01-07T19:26:00.001-05:00

Ultimately Israel is a country that is of no particular worth to the United States.

... They have no resources we need. Their manpower is minimal. Their association with us is a negative for the United States. Now that's a fact. What you want to do about that fact is entirely different. But for anyone to stand up in the United States and say that support for Israel doesn't hurt us in the Muslim world is to just defy reality.

Ex-CIA analyst Michael Scheuer on C-SPAN, responding to a caller who complained about the people who "jewed us into Iraq".

Ditch Israel Watch - I

2010-01-06T19:25:00.014-05:00

It's not your father's isolationism. Such a consummate failure was Bush, it's hard to identify one nefarious group that didn't get a bumper crop out of his Iraq War. Anarchists dug up their balaclavas, half-dead hippies became Vietnam-era historical actors, street scholars and professors chattered on cue, Buchananites, Chomskyites, Islamists, Stalinists, red and green and Code Pink -- even Park Slope moms prowled the overstocked aisles of Mesopotamia for amazing glitter and value. It was a market with a fluidity and savoriness somewhere between a Blue Light Special and the fireworks-and-blow-jobs bazaar of Times Square, circa 1989. Even the Baathists did OK.

Readers of this blog know the post-Cold War convergence of right and left-wing isolationism -- actually, non-interventionism -- has accelerated and amplified since the neocon nakba. The mainstream US Left calls its attraction to this current "reality-based liberalism", implying that reason now prevails over ideals and ideology. And with it has come a wave of Cartesian doubt in the realm of foreign policy.

One of the big questions now is, "What has Israel done for us lately?" Why ally with that "shitty little country" if the alliance makes Muslims so mad? An affinity in liberal democracy? Matthew Yglesias would rather see planes blow up than "[poison] relations with 1.5 billion Muslims." Israel actually kills some of them! Exit Paul Wolfowitz, enter Stephen Walt.

It's a question we're beginning to hear more lately, and while it's still mostly voiced in right-wing and libertarian quarters, it's beginning to be asked outside of Antiwar.com, Glenn Greenwald's blog and the nativist cesspool of The American Conservative. I think it might be worthwhile to start tracking it, to see how much momentum it gains among liberals and centrists shocked by Israel's military overreactions and a renascent Likud.

Ex-neocon penitents ask the question with a special fervency. So it's sad but fitting that my blogfather, former warmonger Andrew Sullivan, having progressed from the hair shirt years of his fascination with Ron Paul to rhythmic denunciations of Israel, should lead us off.

And if Rahm Emanuel is sick of them all, one can imagine how the average American feels. My own view is moving toward supporting a direct American military imposition of a two-state solution, with NATO troops on the borders of the new states of Palestine and Israel. I'm sick of having a great power like the US being dictated to in the conduct of its own foreign policy by an ally that provides almost no real benefit to the US, and more and more costs.

Emphasis mine.

Against the Radiant Tomorrow

2009-11-23T20:06:00.007-05:00

I think an underrated success of the Obama administration has been the way he pulled us back from the brink of a pointless Cold War dynamic the Bush administration had landed us in in South America...

I would link to a Human Rights Watch report on Chavez’s impact on Venezuela’s political institutions but everyone knows that HRW is a non-credible group obsessed with unfair slams on Israel so their criticism of Chavez must somehow be part of their vast conspiracy.

This post has a synoptic elegance. In rehearsing again the anti-neocon leitmotif, Matthew Yglesias demonstrates the tone-deafness of "reality-based liberalism" to anti-totalitarian concerns. Rather than fretting about effete and academic notions like liberty and the open society, Obama "[focuses] on concrete issues", which duly reveals "... that for all the huffing and puffing, there’s really no actual conflict between the United States and Latin America’s leftists."

Never mind that Lula just cut in on Chavez's dirty dance with Ahmadinejad, an extended number that undermines the idea that Chavez now praising Idi Amin is "[pushing] the envelope". It also undermines Obama's threat of sanctions, which the Yglesias crowd might prefer to bombing Iran's nuclear sites. Never mind, move on, there's nothing to see here. Maybe tribal neocons will denounce Latin America's leftists in light of Israel's interests, but since Operation Cast Lead concern for our ally seems more misplaced than ever. And they dare to suggest that Human Rights Watch is blinkered. What do we need with Israel? A broader interest in the consanguinity of liberal democracies? "Reality-based liberals" have no interest in such talk. That's the preserve of the Trotskyites of Commentary magazine.

Punditry of the Flea

2009-11-10T13:23:00.028-05:00

On the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Robert Kaplan wonders:

What does the European Union truly stand for besides a cradle-to-grave social welfare system? For without something to struggle for, there can be no civil society--only decadence.

Thus, with their patriotism dissipated, European governments can no longer ask for sacrifices from their populations when it comes to questions of peace and war. Ironically, we may have gained victory in the Cold War, but lost Europe in the process.

I read this book: it's called Of Paradise and Power, and it was written by Robert Kagan. In this era of "reality-based" liberalism, it's hard not to be warmed by retrograde neoconservative disdain for Old Europe, but I strongly suspect that Kaplan is full of shit. Surely there is a post-Holocaust effeteness that stretches like a caul over much of Europe. One of its grotesquer products is the assessment that Israel is uniquely evil and its neighbors are innocuous. But this is hardly the whole story behind Europe's rejection of Bush's Iraq war.

The travel-weary thinker who is unafraid to draw ethnographic conclusions -- that's Kaplan's shtick. He's the closest thing we've got to Sir Richard Francis Burton. Yet he writes as if only conventional war matters. By that metric, yes, Europe has crouched in the protective shadow of the American military since 1945. But small wars matter too. In fact, they matter a lot more now than ever. Our war against totalitarian Islam is two small wars and a constellation of similar flash points. Europe, as the last, great locus of colonial power, has fought more of these conflicts than us. It's easy and satisfying to pillory the sick man across the ocean, but it ought to occur, especially to a writer like Kaplan, that Europe's chariness of military adventurism might in part come from hard-earned experience.

I'm all for humanitarian military intervention and totalitarian "regime change" -- when they are strategically appropriate and tactically sound. But those are exceedingly difficult conditions to meet. Nation-building can't be done quickly, cheaply or bloodlessly.

Ridicule of the French is the show stopper in the anti-Europe vaudeville, but perhaps they provide the best example. From 1954 to 1962, the French brought savage violence to bear on their Algerian problem: 700,000 dead Muslims and a torture regime that would have put a permanent wet spot on Dick Cheney's gimp suit. They lost Algeria. All they achieved was the erosion of French liberal democracy.

Pundits should come with little warning stickers, like prescription drugs. Expertise in one area is matched by frivolity in another. I've never shared the just-incidentally-self-promoting excitement about the potential of the "blogosphere". The main reason is when a premier journalist like Kaplan -- which is to say, an experienced professional with access to a deep well of resources -- publishes this kind of bong-smoking rhapsody, you have to wonder about the intellectual hygiene of most of what is written on blogs.

Update: Robert Kaplan is a Senior Fellow of John Nagl's Center for a New American Security! That's the cutting-edge counterinsurgency think tank, folks.

Understanding Glenn Greenwald

2009-03-08T21:40:00.013-04:00

Jeffrey Goldberg recently had a spat with the world's most obnoxious blogger, Glenn Greenwald. One of Greenwald's methods of self-aggrandizement is to poke big media bears, hoping to elicit a reaction he can pounce on. He's smart enough to know that most blogs combine overweening self-assurance with unlettered opinion, and this annoys real journalists, who are constantly under siege by them. So Greenwald tries to exacerbate the annoyance into outrage by launching over-the-top attacks from his Salon redoubt. The responses he gets are almost guaranteed to be curt and dismissive, which enables him to play maverick media critic on your behalf.

Goldberg, whose work I like, is the antithesis of Greenwald in relation to foreign policy: he's a reasonable proponent of humanitarian military intervention, and he morally favors open societies over tyrannies. But sadly Goldberg, like many others, fell into Greenwald's trap. So I sent him the following letter. I reproduce it here, because it covers themes central to this blog.

Greenwald is an instructive example of the Left/Right isolationist consensus that has been dangerously empowered by Bush's bungling of Iraq. In fact, the cause of their contretemps was Goldberg denouncing Greenwald -- who is often mistaken for a Left Democrat -- for writing for the Buchananite American Conservative. This consensus exerts itself more and more. We're seeing it now with the Chas Freeman controversy. Witness the Nabokovian farce of Robert Dreyfuss, an ex-Larouchie, trumpeting Freeman -- the "realist" analyst who mused that the Chinese government was too soft on the protesters at Tienanmen Square -- in the pages of The Nation! Think about that tangle of thorns. It's Freeman's perceived hostility to Israel that got all these people on the same page.

Dear Jeff,

Having appreciated your work for some time, and having just finished and enjoyed Prisoners, I was gratified to see you call out the singularly noxious Glenn Greenwald on your blog. I knew he would retaliate with a polyadjectival tsunami of snark -- have you noticed how putrid a writer he is? -- but I have to say your reply "Glenn Greenwald is Hysterical" left a couple of things to be desired. One, it was too dismissive, almost making it seem like you didn't have a counterargument with which to engage him. Two, implying that Greenwald is a Jewish Uncle Tom for writing for The American Conservative played into his hands. Like many people who make a pinata out of Israel, Greenwald wants everyone to believe he endures Galilean persecution for being brave enough to criticize the Jewish State. So calling Greenwald a patsy of anti-Semites and leaving it at that was throwing him red meat.

But most important is how you've misread Greenwald. I don't think Greenwald is an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew, and anyway, his psychology is unknowable. More discernible is his political psychology. You noted that anti-Semitism is a meeting point of the far Left and Right, but increasingly since the fall of the Soviet Union, so too has been isolationism, or more accurately, military non-interventionism. Maybe the first notable example of this was the Chomskyite Left's opposition to NATO "imperialism" in the Balkans, a position eagerly echoed by Pat Buchanan and his epigones. This grew into the colicky mass of "progressives", paleocons and "libertarians" (cf. Justin Raimondo) who made up a good chunk of the "anti-war" opposition to invading Iraq. It was much remarked at the time that these people didn't agree on much; but their isolationism inured them to the humanitarian potential of toppling Saddam and his demonic sons. Now Bush's multifaceted failures in Iraq have cemented their triumphalism, and sadly, convinced a lot of liberals of the wisdom of these illiberal politics.

The other thing these "anti-war" activists agree on is the peculiar evil of Israel and Zionism. Some of them are old-style Right-wing anti-Semites; some are "New Antisemites", Leftists who genuinely fixate on Zionism rather than use it as a merkin to hide an uncomplicated hatred of Jews; and still others are committed isolationists, people of the Left and Right, who decry foreign entanglements, and often exhibit a Lindberghian phobia of Jewish foreign entanglements, both real and imagined.

The latter is the school Glenn Greenwald comes from. This isn't the first time he's written for the American Conservative (see the 1/14/08, 6/18/07, 1/15/07 and 4/10/06 issues). Those other pieces aren't about Israel, but they do treat neocon hubris and the surveillance state -- topics, along with Israel-hatred, nativism and social conservatism, that animate Buchananite isolationists. Greenwald has also praised Ron Paul, whose non-interventionism sinks to crank levels and has always had a sturdy hard-on for Israel. Greenwald is a Paulite non-interventionist dressed up as a Left Democrat. This public Janus-face allows him to appeal to both the Left and Right sides of the coalition that is his audience. His non-interventionist Israel-phobia unites progressives and Buchananites.

It's not a savory job, but pick through the compost of Greenwald's blog, which furnishes ample evidence now that you know what you're looking for. You'll find truffles like Greenwald quoting George Washington on "entangling alliances" (1,2); speculating how George Washington would feel about an alliance with Israel (3,4); sounding the reveille that "neocons" and "the Israelis" are "as transparent as they are dishonest and bloodthirsty"(5); and praising The Israel Lobby, which argues, "the U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel"(6).

After the Gaza drubbing, Greenwald was finally emboldened to spell it all out: "The U.S. already pays a very substantial price for its decades-long, blind and one-sided support for Israeli actions... U.S. support for Israel has been particularly costly over the last several years... If, as it appears, the face Israel is now choosing for itself is that of Benjamin Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, then the cost to the United States of ongoing, one-sided support for Israel is going to skyrocket, and the need for serious change in U.S. policy towards Israel will be even more acute."(7)

Hopefully this will help you understand and handle Greenwald, should you choose to engage him again. I think he jumped the shark a while ago, and now that Bush his bete noire is gone, he'll spin himself out on the standard crank portfolio of Israel, neocons, MSM malfeasance and the surveillance state. But I do think it's important to analyze and expose him, because Greenwald is a neat example of the post-Cold War phenomenon of Left/Right isolationism, and if people begin to properly view him in that light, maybe it will help undo some of the damage done by Bush to liberal interventionism.

Yours,

John-Paul Pagano
The Socialism of Fools
http://socfools.blogspot.com

I edited the original for clarity.

Nota bene: This American Footprints blogger believes Freeman might have been misinterpreted in relation to Tienanmen Square.

Be Careful What You Wish For

2009-03-07T21:22:00.020-05:00

You might accuse me of splitting hairs in specifying that Chas Freeman is "not so much anti-Israel as pro-Saudi", but there are good reasons for recalibrating the focus on Freeman.

If Freeman is still a Saudi shill, if anything that means he will bring a stronger anti-Shiite than anti-Israel bias to his post. That's because, while ideologically the Saudis would love to see the Jewish state destroyed, practically they are terrified by the Shiite risorgimento we've created by bungling Iraq. (To be sure, they hate the Shiites ideologically too.) The Saudis know Israel doesn't pose a threat to them. Iran is a different matter.

The most recent milestone on the road leading to an American denouement with Iran due to its nuclear ambitions was the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate. That document concluded that Iran had halted its nuclear weapons program in 2003. National Intelligence Estimates are summary approximations of the opinions of all the US intelligence agencies on a security issue. They are released by the Director of National Intelligence, who is currently Dennis Blair. The chair of the National Intelligence Council oversees the process. Dennis Blair has picked Chas Freeman to chair the NIC.

If Freeman is in thrall to the Saudis, then he might feel compelled to do one of two things with respect to Iran. Out of anti-Israel animus, he might be inclined to underestimate Iranian nuclear prospects in a Lindberghian gesture to prevent our going to war with Iran on behalf of Israel. In fact, in remarks to the 14th Annual US-Arab Policymakers Conference, Freeman snarked:

Some of the same people who neoconned the United States into invading Iraq are now arguing for an attack on Iran as a means of ensuring that it does not eventually acquire nuclear weapons.

But because of the regional playing field, it's more likely that Freeman will be inclined to overestimate Iranian nuclear prospects, so as to leverage American power in favor of his Sunni paymasters.

This could contribute to a devastating outcome, one that again underscores the absurdity of the argument of anti-anti-Israel partisans that the Freeman pick spells an end to The Lobby's subordination of American interests.

It would also be brutally ironic for the liberals among these partisans who are clamoring in favor of Freeman. These same anti-warriors who found it so hard to believe Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meant it when he called for Israel to be wiped off the map -- or that he even said it at all -- are now agitating for the appointment of an intelligence chief who might oppose Iran more than the Jewish state.

Not So Much Anti-Israel as Pro-Saudi

2009-03-01T21:34:00.054-05:00

The case that Charles "Chas" Freeman is a fanged Israel-hater is weak so far. It hinges largely on his being an Arabist ex-foreign service officer, his think tank being generously funded by the Saudis, and on several comments he made calling out Israel in straightforward terms. Here's one that's been shofar-blown around the web:

"Demonstrably, Israel excels at war; sadly, it has shown no talent for peace."

Jeffrey Goldberg argues that an "analyst-in-chief", as opposed to a polemicist, would acknowledge the "complex truth" that "quite often it's been the case that both sides in the conflict have shown no talent for making peace". That's true, but many have been less thoughtful. The Joseph Trumpeldors of Contentions speculate: "Had the public (and specifically Jewish voters, who voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama) known that Obama would appoint the Saudi-funded, Israel-bashing, analytically-disabled Chas Freeman to a key national security position, I wonder if he would have cleared the bar of acceptability for commander-in-chief."

Actually Dennis Blair, the National Intelligence Director, picked him. And it's silly to elide Obama and Freeman. Freeman's role will be to oversee the collection and editing of intelligence for Blair, who in turn will brief the President. Freeman will surely have influence, but this involves a lot of different people. He's not going to be Rasputin.

There is a tendency to exaggerate the influence of individual government officials, ignoring -- in a conspiratorial fashion that, not for nothing, is favored by the far Left and Right -- that most everyone is merely a cell in the vast hive of politics. That's not to say people don't have influence, some a lot more than others; but Freeman, especially as chair of the National Intelligence Council, isn't going to torpedo American government support for Israel. And as others have recognized, it will be constructive for idealist forces to engage opponents in the Obama administration. Freeman is known to be an articulate and fearless polemicist, perhaps to a fault by the standards of politicians. James Fallows (or more precisely, Fallows' "friend") clarifies and elaborates:

"... as head of the National Intelligence Council... [Freeman] would be exactly right. While he would have no line-operational responsibilities or powers, he would be able to raise provocative questions, to ask 'What if everybody's wrong?', to force attention to the doubts, possibilities, and alternatives that normally get sanded out of the deliberative process through the magic known as 'groupthink.'"

But Freeman need not hate Israel to undermine it and America. He need only have excessive admiration for the Saudis, with whom he was intimate as Ambassador to Saudi Arabia from 1989 to 1992, and for whom he shilled before and during his tenure as president of the Middle East Policy Council, a think tank founded in 1981 by another ex-foreign service officer named Richard H. Curtiss (more later about Curtiss).

In a post-Iraq and Iran-ascendant Middle East, the Saudis are shaping up to be the Sunni Arab vanguard, in play against the Shiites of Iraq and Iran, and the Israelis, among others. As such, it's troublesome that Freeman has accepted $1 million from Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal to bankroll the Middle East Policy Council. Practically, that seems to be the cause or effect of the fact that Freeman's public statements about Israel and 9/11 express the Saudi line.

In 2002 Freeman asked during a symposium held by The Washington Institute:

And what of America’s lack of introspection about September 11? Instead of asking what might have caused the attack, or questioning the propriety of the national response to it, there is an ugly mood of chauvinism. Before Americans call on others to examine themselves, we should examine ourselves.

In a speech in 2006 to the 15th Annual US-Arab Policymakers Conference, Freeman observed:

We have paid heavily and often in treasure in the past for our unflinching support and unstinting subsidies of Israel's approach to managing its relations with the Arabs. Five years ago we began to pay with the blood of our citizens here at home.

These are just a more straightforward version of the rider Prince Abdullah attached to his $10 million gift to the city of New York to help rebuild after 9/11, which Rudy Giuliani rightly spat on and sent back:

However, at times like this one, we must address some of the issues that led to such a criminal attack. I believe the government of the United States of America should re-examine its policies in the Middle East and adopt a more balanced stance toward the Palestinian cause. While the UN passed clear resolutions numbered 242 and 338 calling for the Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip decades ago, our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of the Israelis while the world turns the other cheek.

The practical drivers of Abdullah and Freeman's statements include a desire to divert attention from the fact that Osama bin Laden, while hardly phlegmatic about the Arab-Israeli conflict, cited American military presence in and cooperation with Saudi Arabia as the main reason Al Qaeda undertook jihad against America. (American support for Israel was the tertiary reason.)

Bin Talal's refocus on Israel was the classic regional despot's diversion. Freeman echoing it doesn't speak well for his analytical powers or objectivity. That he would slap America in the face with it on behalf of Saudi Arabia, the country that has done so much to nourish the filthy ideology that produced 9/11, and provided the manpower for the attacks, says a lot about the premise that Freeman is an antidote to those who would subordinate American interests to foreign concerns.

Iran and the Jews

2008-06-08T15:07:00.004-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

Hillary: What to recommend to a driven, brilliant, flawed woman who has no problem threatening to obliterate Iran, should they attack Israel? I recommend Peter Balakian’s “Black Dog of Fate,” in an attempt to cure her of her genocidal impulses. Armenians know all about being “obliterated,” and perhaps that nation’s suffering and miraculous survival will crack Pharaoh’s heart. But don’t bet on it.

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

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

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

The Anti-Totalitarian Future?

2008-06-02T15:06:00.007-04:00

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

... the upshot of the factoid about the synagogue seems to be that the U.S. invasion actually turned Iraq into a less hospital [sic] place for Jews than was Saddam Hussein's rabidly anti-Zionist rapacious dictatorship.

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

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

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

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

Postscript: An older, related post.

The Anti-War Conscience

2008-06-01T16:57:00.016-04:00

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

TEHRAN (AFP) — Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki called on the world's Muslims on Sunday to work to "erase" Israel, in the latest verbal attack by Tehran against the Jewish state.

"As the Imam Khomeini said, if each Muslim throws a bucket of water on Israel, Israel will be erased," Mottaki told a conference in Tehran, recalling a saying by Iran's late revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has sparked international outrage for his repeated attacks against Israel, which he has predicted is doomed to disappear and described as a "stinking corpse" and a "dead rat".

His most notorious attack was in 2005 when he repeated another saying from Khomeini calling for Israel to be "wiped from the map".

Mottaki added: "More than ever, the Zionist regime is disintegrating from within. Today, the Islamic resistance in this region has shattered the regime's legend of invincibility."

While Ahmadinejad and top military commanders reguarly predict the demise of Israel, such virulent attacks from the foreign ministry are relatively unusual.

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

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

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

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

Illegal Wiretapping, Indeed

2008-05-27T20:04:00.017-04:00

Glenn Greenwald's trial conduct found "unethical"

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVEREND STEPHEN TRACY ANDERSON, Plaintiff, vs. MATTHEW F. HALE, THE WORLD CHURCH OF THE CREATOR, an unincorporated association, and THE ESTATE OF BENJAMIN NATHANIEL SMITH, Defendants.

No. 00 C 2021

UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF ILLINOIS, EASTERN DIVISION

159 F. Supp. 2d 1116; 2001 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 13001

and in it we find the following

I. Background

On October 13, 2000, Defendants' counsel's telephone rang. [**3] To Defendant's counsel's apparent pleasure, Kenneth Dippold, one of Plaintiff's witnesses, was on the line. Dippold voluntarily called Defendants' counsel in New York from a location in Illinois to answer any questions regarding Dippold's involvement in the underlying litigation. Dippold had received a subpoena from Defendants' counsel earlier that day.

Defendants' counsel served the subpoena on Dippold immediately upon discovering his identity on October 7, 2000. At that time, Plaintiff identified Dippold as the sole witness to support the allegation that Hale encouraged Smith to engage in the July 1999 shooting spree. Before that date, Plaintiff [*551] had not identified a witness to support this allegation.

Seizing the opportunity, Defendants' counsel hit the record button and commenced surreptitiously taping the conversation with Dippold. The conversation lasted for some time, covering in detail Dippold's contacts with Hale, the WCOTC, and various other parties having an interest in the underlying litigation. Dippold never asked if Defendants' counsel was taping the conversation. Nor did Defendants' counsel make any representations to Dippold suggesting that the conversation was or [**4] was not being taped.

The existence of the tape remained undiscovered by Dippold and Plaintiff until Dippold's deposition approximately two months later. After three hours of questioning, and allegedly a few too many inconsistent statements, Defendants' counsel revealed that the October telephone conversation was surreptitiously taped. Because Defendants' counsel proceeded to use a transcript of the tape to impeach Dippold, Defendants' counsel immediately provided Plaintiff's counsel with a copy of the tape. Any work-product protection no longer applied.

Approximately one month later, Plaintiff discovered the existence of another tape. This tape pertained to a conversation between Defendants' counsel and Ian Sigel, another witness in the case. Similar to the circumstances surrounding Dippold's tape, Sigel was in Illinois at the time of the telephone conversation, while Defendants' counsel was in New York. Sigel had also received a subpoena from Defendants' counsel.

In view of Defendants' counsel's tactics, Plaintiff served a Fourth Request for the Production of Documents and Things on Defendant. Among other things, Plaintiff requested "any and all audio tapes and/or written transcripts [**5] reflecting any conversation(s) between [Defendants] and/or [Defendants] attorney(s) and any third-party referring or relating to the [underlying lawsuit]." (Pl.'s Consolidated Mem. Supp. Mot. Compel & Protective Order at 4.) Days later Defendants responded, asserting the work product doctrine and refusing to produce any tapes.

...

As it turned out, Plaintiff quickly determined that it was necessary to brief the issue. More tapes, in fact, existed. Moreover, Defendants' counsel refused to discontinue making additional tapes...

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

Plaintiff moved to compel disclosure of these tapes, arguing that this conduct was unethical and therefore vitiated any attorney work-product privilege that may have attached to these recordings, and sought a protective order prohibiting any further recordings. The magistrate judge granted both motions, finding defense counsel's conduct unethical under two separate rules: Local Rule 83.58.4(a)(4), prohibiting "dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation;" and Local Rule 83.54.4, stating "a lawyer shall not … use methods of obtaining evidence that violate the legal rights of [another] person." [Emphasis mine]

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

A 52-page transcript of one conversation showed defendants' counsel steered the conversation by eliciting particular responses to detailed questions, leading to more detailed questions, to lure the witness into damning statements for later use.

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

Obama, the Jews and Israel

2008-05-13T12:34:00.001-04:00

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

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

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

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

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

Look, we don’t do nuance well in politics and especially don’t do it well on Middle East policy. We look at things as black and white, and not gray. It’s conceivable that there are those in the Arab world who say to themselves, “This is a guy who spent some time in the Muslim world, has a middle name of Hussein, and appears more worldly and has called for talks with people, and so he’s not going to be engaging in the same sort of cowboy diplomacy as George Bush,” and that’s something they’re hopeful about. I think that’s a perfectly legitimate perception as long as they’re not confused about my unyielding support for Israel’s security.

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

So when I became more politically conscious, my starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves. And obviously it’s something that has great resonance with the African-American experience.

One of the things that is frustrating about the recent conversations on Israel is the loss of what I think is the natural affinity between the African-American community and the Jewish community, one that was deeply understood by Jewish and black leaders in the early civil-rights movement but has been estranged for a whole host of reasons that you and I don’t need to elaborate.

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

Israel Turns 60

2008-05-11T17:16:00.006-04:00

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

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

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

Oliver Kamm:

My position on this is not complex. I have no interest in the fortunes of Judaism but a great interest in the resilience of persecuted peoples. There is no people more historically persecuted than the Jews, and a Jewish state is their guarantor. It also represents the intrusion of Western constitutional principles into a region where these are not widely observed. Though there are organised religious extremists in the Israeli political system, they have never attained power - unlike, say, their counterparts in Iran.

I am no uncritical supporter of Israeli government policies. Some - such as the attempt to implement regime change in Lebanon in the 1980s - I have strongly opposed. I hope for, without expecting any time soon, a pacific two-state territorial settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the fact and the independence -- not merely, in the demeaning phrase grudgingly advanced by her enemies, the "existence" -- of Israel, a Jewish state and a vibrant democracy, are causes for celebration.

Marko Attila Hoare:

So far as Israel is concerned, its record of democracy and human rights concerning its own citizens compares very favourably with most other Middle Eastern countries, but very badly with just about any West European country, because its stage of national development more closely resembles Turkey or Greece than France or the Netherlands. The two deformations resulting from the nature of Israel’s birth are, firstly, a failure to embrace the concept of a multi-ethnic citizenry and accord equal rights to all its citizens regardless of ethnicity, resulting in suffering and injustice for Israeli Arabs; and, secondly, a continued policy of colonisation in the West Bank, resulting in massive suffering for the occupied Palestinians. These deformations are, of course, linked to the behaviour of the Arab states and the refusal of most of them to recognise Israel, as well as to the Palestinians’ own behaviour - but this is not ultimately a question of apportioning blame. Like every nation-state, Israel needs to develop a post-nationalist national ideology if it is to complete its national and democratic development. This means becoming a genuinely Israeli nation-state, i.e. a state of the Israeli nation; a state of the citizens of Israel - rather than simply a Jewish state in which non-Jews are second-class citizens. Jews would still form a comfortable majority in Israel, thereby guaranteeing Jewish national self-determination. But a Jewish ethnic majority can comfortably exist with a concept of citizenship blind to ethnicity - as all concepts of citizenship should be, from the US and France to Israel and the Arab states. And as the American and French models show, a concept of citizenship blind to ethnicity rests upon identification with the state’s legal borders - hence no colonisation projects directed against neighbouring peoples.

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

Teen Vermin Attack Lubavitcher

2008-03-29T16:55:00.008-04:00

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

Police are investigating what they called a possible bias attack in Brooklyn in which a Jewish man was robbed and beaten before one of his attackers was hit by a car.

Uria Ohana, 25, an assistant rabbi, said Thurday that he entered the Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street subway station in Park Slope on his way to a lecture in Manhattan on Tuesday evening when a young man, one of a group on the platform, grabbed his yarmulke from his head and ran for the exit.

Ohana said he chased the man to the street, where the man darted between two parked cars and was struck by a passing vehicle.

As a crowd formed around the injured man, two of his attackers' acquaintances ran up and confronted him, Ohana said.

"When they saw him injured, they started screaming, 'Look what you did' and they punched me in the head," he said.

The two men who attacked him and a handful of others then jumped into a sport utility vehicle and fled, he said.

Ohana, who grew up in Israel and lives in Wellesley, Mass., said he believes the men targeted him because he is Jewish. "They were yelling 'Allahu akbar' which literally means 'God is great.' But it was the symbolic meaning that frightened me," he said.

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

Nietzsche and Nazism

2008-03-29T14:42:00.010-04:00

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

Two gravestones stand side by side in the churchyard of the little village of Röcken, south of Leipzig: one belongs to Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the greatest and most misunderstood philosophers; the other marks the grave of his sister Elisabeth, a lifelong anti-Semite who hijacked her brother's writings after his death and used them to serve the cause of Nazism, leaving a stain on his philosophy that has never been fully erased.

Today, bulldozers belonging to a power company are preparing to dig up the town where Nietzsche and his sister were born and buried, to get at the seam of coal that runs beneath. Nietzsche and his sister may have to move. His followers are enraged; villagers say exhuming their famous son would be sacrilege; environmentalists, quoting Nietzsche's epithet “Be true to the soil”, wonder why yet more coal is being excavated to poison the world's atmosphere. I would be delighted to see Nietzsche dug up, if only for the symbolic opportunity to rescue him from the clutches of his appalling sister.

Before insanity struck him down in 1889, at the age of 44, Nietzsche lived in fear of being misunderstood. “Above all,” he wrote in Ecce Homo, “do not mistake me for someone else.” He was a conservative elitist, an aphorist of brilliance championing individual greatness in the midst of mediocrity. His writing is explosive and apocalyptic, dense and complex, and often shocking in its violence.

But Nietzsche was no Nazi. He vigorously opposed German nationalism, as he rejected all mass movements; he had no time for ideologues, mocked the notion of a Teutonic master race and loathed anti-Semitism in all its forms.

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

In adult life, Nietzsche journeyed from ivory tour academic to ailing grand tourist. It is highly doubtful whether he would have felt any affinity with the working-class, unintellectual side of "proletaryan" Nazism. Many have stressed that Nietzsche criticized German nationalism and biological theories of race, but this argument needs probing more carefully. Nietzsche's critique of German nationalism was essentially twofold. First, he believed that it was diverting attention from more general European problems, especially the rise of decadence. Second and related to this first point, he saw modern German culture as too materialist, too philistine. But this did not mean that there was nothing about Germany that Nietzsche admired. He had a great respect for Frederick the Great and celebrated a more ancestral, heroic German spirit. Nor was his thinking completely opposed to racism. Central to his beliefs was a desire to save Europe from decadence and from the threat of newer and more virile nations. Ultimately, it is impossible to be sure how Nietzsche would have reacted to the development of the main fascist regimes. On balance, the evidence points to the idea that he would have opposed them -- though some who shared many of Nietzsche's views, for instance the major philosopher Martin Heidegger, were to support the Nazis on the grounds that they offered the best vehicle for creating a new world.

The main difference between Nietzsche's philosophy and fascism was not so much nationalism or racism as his pessimistic view of the possibilities of imminent change.

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

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

Me on Sirius Radio

2008-03-18T18:22:00.003-04:00

I just got done being interviewed by Joe Salzone for the Blog Bunker, a blog-centric talk radio show on Indie Talk, Sirius 110. Joe was great and I had a lot of fun. We discussed Ron Paul and his defunct campaign in light of my writings about the strange convergence of the antiwar Left with the isolationist Right, here and here. The program will rerun tomorrow morning at 8:00 AM and afternoon at 1:00 PM; I appear in the last twenty minutes of the hour-long show. Check it out if you're a subscriber.

Update: If you're coming by after having listened, feel free to leave some comments.

French Jew Kidnapped and Terrorized

2008-03-10T03:20:00.011-04:00

In a gratefully limited reprise of the gang murder of Ilan Halimi, French authorities have arrested six banlieue thugs in connection with the kidnapping and humiliation of Mathieu Roumi, a French Jewish teenager. Roumi was terrorized in the same suburb as Halimi by tormenters professing membership in the "Barbarians", the gang that did Halimi in.

For two hours the attackers tortured the young man. One shoved cigarette butts into his mouth, another took issue with Roumi's Jewish origin, grabbed correction fluid and scrawled "dirty Jew" on his forehead. The six men proceeded to scream at him and threaten that he would die the way Halimi did.

They identified themselves as members of the "Barbarians," the same gang that kidnapped Halimi from his store, demanded ransom for his release, and when that was not forthcoming, tortured the 23-year-old over the course of three weeks. Moments after he was dumped on the street, Halimi died.

Roumi told police investigators that throughout his ordeal, his assailants employed measures with sexual and sadistic connotations. When the issue of his sexual orientation arose, one of them placed a condom on the tip of a stick and shoved it in Roumi's mouth.

"We admire Youssouf Fofana!" they shouted at him, referring to the leader of the gang that murdered Halimi.

As is customary, Sammy Ghozlan has been commenting on the case. You can read about Ghozlan and the problem of Jewish persecution in the banlieues in Marie Brenner's France's Scarlet Letter, a Socialism of Fools bellwether essay.

Update: All of this said, 2007 was the quietest year for French anti-Semitism since the start of the second Palestinian Intifada in 2000.

The year 2007 was the quietest year the French Jewish community has known since 2000. In October 2000, after the second intifada broke out, French Jews were hit by a wave of anti-Semitic attacks the likes of which had not been seen since World War II. In 2007, fewer than 200 anti-Jewish incidents were recorded, a scale akin to the number of attacks recorded in just one month in 2001.

There was a drop across the board in attacks, curses, threats, bullying and harassment.

Knave's Gambit in the Jewish Press

2008-03-05T11:58:00.004-05:00

My apologies for the break in posting. I do have a good reason: besides my 9-to-5, I've been working on refining the original Knave's Gambit for publication in the Jewish Press. A 50%-condensed version appears on the front page of today's issue. Enjoy.

Jews Stoned on Holocaust Memorial Day

2008-02-06T12:33:00.000-05:00

Last week on Holocaust Memorial Day Bangladeshi yobs stoned Jews who were taking a walking tour of London's East End.

The Holocaust Memorial Day marking the genocides of the 20th century was marred on Sunday when a gang of youths stoned Jewish tourists on a guided tour of London's East End.

A group of 96 visitors looking at sites of Jewish interest were attacked by youths hiding behind a fence in a back street in Whitechapel.

Two were struck by the missiles, an American woman just starting a new post at London's Metropolitan University and a Canadian lecturer.

The woman had blood pouring from her head and needed hospital treatment.

...

An eye-witness said: "Stones started to come down on us and some in the group were scared and ducked.

"I looked over the fence and saw four Asian youths throwing stones. They were laughing, then ran away."

What's Cookin' in the "Global South"

2008-02-04T19:42:00.000-05:00

In Knave's Gambit, I excerpted bits of Bobby Fischer's 9/11 Bombo Radyo interview to explore the irony of his being considered crazy for making statements you often hear from far-Leftists, albeit usually in less profane form. One example was Fischer's belief that the Jews were leading the world to its destruction like a steer by its nose ring. He said:

That's the big danger, that the Jews, that this lunatic people, are gonna take us all with them. But I'm hoping, as I say, for a Seven Days in May scenario, where [unintelligible] sane people will take over the US now.

I chose Jose Saramago's 2002 El Pais piece about the warlike racism inherent in Judaism as the "sane" Leftist's echo of Fischer. I could have cited a closer and much more current example. On January 7, Arun Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Ghandi and President and co-founder of the M.K. Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, reminded readers of On Faith, a joint-venture blog between the Washington Post and Newsweek, that "Jewish Identity Can't Depend on Violence":

Jewish identity in the past has been locked into the holocaust experience -- a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. But, it seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews. The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger.

The Jewish identity in the future appears bleak. Any nation that remains anchored to the past is unable to move ahead and, especially a nation that believes its survival can only be ensured by weapons and bombs...

Apparently, in the modern world, so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept. You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity.

Mostly I'll leave it at that, but I do want to say that Arun Gandhi's comments are drearily predictable, coming as they are from a herald of Third World liberation. Israel and Jew-hatred are a powerful engine of revolutionary politics in the "Global South", as they are everywhere. Desmond Tutu, for instance, has been saying stuff like this for years.

Branding Jew-Hatred

2008-02-04T00:13:00.000-05:00

Holocaust-denier David Irving's nemesis Deborah Lipstadt posts about some especially rancid Jew-hating kitsch. This was the design for a postcard sold by Boomerang, a Dutch T-shirt and postcard company.

Classy. This could well serve as New Antisemitism's brand icon.

The Constancy of Conspiracy

2008-02-03T00:00:00.000-05:00

In the course of gathering quotes by Left-wingers that mirrored the supposedly 'crazy' utterances of Bobby Fischer, I came across this gem from Arundhati Roy, speaking "in conversation" with Howard Zinn at the Lensic Performing Arts Center in Sante Fe, 18 September 2002. I didn't use it in Knave's Gambit, as it didn't have an immediate analog in Fischer's 9/11 radio interview. I'll reproduce it here:

As the War Against Terror casts its net wider and wider, America's corporate heart is hemorrhaging. For all the endless, empty chatter about democracy, today the world is run by three of the most secretive institutions in the world: The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization, all three of which, in turn, are dominated by the U.S. Their decisions are made in secret. The people who head them are appointed behind closed doors. Nobody really knows anything about them, their politics, their beliefs, their intentions. Nobody elected them. Nobody said they could make decisions on our behalf. A world run by a handful of greedy bankers and CEOs whom nobody elected can't possibly last.

This is worth quoting in a separate post because it demonstrates a key intellectual feature of anti-globalization: so much of it rests on conspiracy theory. This is true of all the far-Left and far-Right movements, which are always utopian and thus empirically resistant. Facts threaten the party line, and when they do the propagandist patches tears in the ideological tapestry by blaming remote but all-powerful forces. Totalitarian states systematize this approach on a grand scale. The elements of conspiracy theory become the gears of the propaganda machine.

Although I can't have any readers obtuse enough to require it, I will note that Arundhati Roy appears here to have lifted a passage about Jewish financiers from Der Sturmer and rewritten it with reference to Americans. I don't mean this as a literal methodological claim, of course, but Roy's remarks about American "bankers and CEOs" are identical to conspiratorial blather about international Jewish finance and its war machine.

Anti-Semitism is itself a conspiracy theory, and in turn it is the prevailing conspiracy theory of two great totalitarian movements -- Nazism and radical Islam. It was also an increasingly luminous fixture in the constellation of Soviet Communism, but not its primary driver. Roy shows that anti-globalization, which borrows many Soviet tropes, exhibits a similar intellectual hygiene. While her target is Americans, and never so far as I know Jews, she shows why the far-Left naturally trends toward anti-Semitism, and why it sees an ally in radical Islam despite major ideological incompatibilities.

Mark Strauss explains this with greater depth in Antiglobalism's Jewish Problem, a Socialism of Fools bellwether essay.

Postscript: That Roy is considered one of anti-globalization's lodestars, and can utter such a cartoonish analysis in the promotion of its viewpoint, must be, even granting the intellectual infirmity of that movement, a pitiable product of the "soft bigotry of low expectations".

Knave's Gambit

2008-01-31T13:56:00.002-05:00

The Totalitarian Stupidity of Bobby Fischer

Recent history may offer no purer example of August Bebel's socialism of fools than Bobby Fischer. Arguably the best chess player ever, Fischer, who was born Jewish in Brooklyn, was an anti-Semite and anti-American whose passion for these hatreds was surpassed only by the straightforwardness with which he frequently expressed them. On September 11th, 2001, with bodies still smoldering in the rubble of the World Trade Center, Fischer called Bombo Radyo, a talk radio station in the Philippines, to say:

I applaud the act... The U.S. and Israel have been slaughtering the Palestinians, just slaughtering them for years. Robbing them and slaughtering them. Nobody gave a shit. Now it's coming back to the U.S. Fuck the U.S. I want to see the U.S. wiped out.

A lot of people saw this as yet more evidence of Fischer's storied lunacy, but most people refused to give him a pass. Perhaps that's because what he said was being echoed in ostensibly respectable quarters. Fischer's shout out to the Palestinians perfectly expressed the kind of "anti-globalization" that, for instance, drove Christopher Hitchens away from The Nation, a rightward trajectory toward basic morality and common sense that many of us followed. Fischer's bluntness and timing may have seemed 'crazy', but his statement is a catechism of a familiar Left-wing politics: the conflation of America and Israel, their demonic evil set in Manichean opposition to a celebrated victim group, and the vulgar calculus that such evil must rationally be answered by mass murder.

Now that Fischer is dead, people are again contemplating how such a brilliant person could have sunk so far. The obits, lamentations and celebrations persist: Fischer was nuts. Some people leave it at that; others try to answer how and why. A common theme is the intensity of Fischer's dedication to chess, and the fathomless complexity of the game, removed him from reality. Steven Zaillian, the screenwriter and director of Searching for Bobby Fischer, writes:

The film Searching for Bobby Fischer, despite its title, wasn't really about him, but rather what he represented to the chess world... and to us: the distance that is sometimes narrow between art and science, success and failure, genius and madness, and the great price one often has to pay for great talent.

There may be some truth to this -- I don't know any chess stars -- but the "narrow [distance] between... genius and madness" is a cliché. Fischer helps us reconceptualize intelligence and insanity in ways that aren't being considered in the public reactions to his death.

We tend to think of intelligence as monolithic -- either you're intelligent, or you're not; and we tend to think of it only in terms of raw, cognitive ability -- the ability, say, to memorize countless chess moves and deploy them in real time under pressure. In turn, we mostly view sanity (as opposed to "mental health") in binary terms -- either you're deranged or aware. Fischer is compelling because he showed so clearly why these conceptions are wrong. His singular persona comprised three unrecognized features: great genius and profound stupidity coexisted in him; his stupidity was emotional rather than cognitive; and the profundity of his emotional retardation lent Fischer a false air of psychosis.

Rene Chun published a definitive Fischer profile in The Atlantic in 2002. It contains clues to understanding the Yin and Yang of his intellect. Fischer wasn't born great; until the age of 13, "he was essentially a hotshot club player—a prodigy, to be sure, but not obviously world-championship material." Then he "made a colossal leap... [becoming] the youngest player ever to win the U.S. Junior Championship." Fischer spent more than a decade in chess monomania, inexorably razing the competition and establishing himself as the top U.S. player.

The other aspects of his life, social and scholastic, withered on the vine. Sensing this, and provoked by his arrogant challenge to their supremacy, his Soviet nemeses began calling him nyekulturni -- Russian for "without culture". Fischer knew he was just that: an urban rube, without any education to speak of. He reacted to this lack of nurture in a way that suggested a deeper problem: an impoverished nature.

The answer, Fischer thought, was to upgrade his wardrobe. So at sixteen, using his chess winnings, he traded in his uniform of sneakers, flannel shirt, and jeans for luxurious bespoke suits. He reveled in his new Beau Brummell image. When he traveled abroad for tournaments, he frequently visited local tailors and had suits cut for his gangly, broad-shouldered physique. He liked to brag that he owned seventeen such suits, which he rotated to ensure even wear. "I hate ready-made suits, button-down collars, and sports shirts," he once said. "I don't want to look like a bum. I get up in the morning, I put on a suit."

This boosted his self-esteem, but Fischer was entering more into a public world of wealth and refinement and he couldn't keep up.

Those close to Fischer knew that when it came to art, politics, or anything else the cosmopolitan set talked about, he was at a total loss. "If you were out to dinner with Bobby in the sixties, he wouldn't be able to follow the conversation," says Don Schultz, a former friend. "He would have his little pocket set out and he'd play chess at the table. He had a one-dimensional outlook on life."

Outside of chess, he had little to draw on. His mother, Regina, was a left-wing activist who was "cuckoo... an intelligent neurotic full of far-fetched ideas." Fischer dropped out of high school, which he was passing only on the indulgence of his teachers, in the middle of his junior year. He didn't maintain friendships or go near girls, adopting instead a "Spartan", 14-hour-a-day training schedule in which he would read chess literature and continually play multiple games against himself.

Fischer's game was top shelf, but his social acumen diminished commensurately. He became increasingly weird in public. The pressure of competitive chess, worsened by analytic tag-teams of unscrupulous Soviet tournament players, drove Fischer into several years of isolation in California. It is here where his brittle emotional intelligence germinated the public face of the later man.

Although he wasn't playing in many tournaments, his work ethic never wavered: he continued studying chess during most of his waking hours. But late at night, Arnold Denker recalls, Fischer began prowling parking lots, slipping white-supremacist pamphlets under windshield wipers. He began studying anti-Semitic classics such as Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He became obsessed with German history and the Third Reich, and collected Nazi memorabilia. It was rumored that he slept with a picture of Adolf Hitler hanging over his bed. Larry Evans says that Fischer's admiration for the Führer had less to do with anti-Semitism than with insatiable ego. "We once went to see a documentary on Hitler," Evans recalls. "When we came out of the theater, Bobby said that he admired Hitler. I asked him why, and he said, 'Because he imposed his will on the world.'" (Fischer has never made an effort to conceal his distaste for Jews. As early as 1962, in the Harper's interview, he expressed his prejudice, mentioning what he perceived to be a growing problem affecting the upper ranks of his profession. "Yeah, there are too many Jews in chess," he said. "They seem to have taken away the class of the game. They don't seem to dress so nicely. That's what I don't like.")

The contours of Fischer's degradation are revealing. He admired Hitler because he saw in him an exhilarating will to power, one that complimented his approach to chess.

He didn't just beat people—he humiliated them. The thing he relished most was watching his opponents squirm. "I like the moment when I break a man's ego," he once said...

Later in life, Fischer became a Hitlerian herald, but he came to the regenerative hatred of the Nazis for simple, personal reasons. Ultimately utopian movements are not about the belief systems they promote. They are first and foremost a means for aggrandizing the demagogues who ride them to power. This in turn is sensed by acolytes like Fischer, who hope to attain a similar apotheosis.

Utopian creeds are also less about what they say and who they hate than the way in which they are constructed. Classically, totalitarian mythology pits a chosen people against cosmic forces of evil that manifest themselves both within the state and without. The way to defeat these forces is through spectacular slaughter, of one's enemies and oneself, the courting of Armageddon. This sort of Manichean passion play fundamentally appeals to the emotionally retarded, the empirically resistant, the lazy seekers of nirvana.

And so often the antagonist is the Jews. Fischer presented much pseudo-intellectual justification for his new weltanschauung -- his pamphlets and his study of Mein Kampf and the Protocols in place of chess journals -- but of course little in the way of intellectual substance. Fischer denigrated Jews for succeeding in chess, and risibly for dressing poorly, a contravention of his own shallow contrivance of sophistication -- the bespoke suits. Emotional stupidity and an impoverishment of character are the greatest opportunities for recruitment available to totalitarians. That Fischer was Jewish himself is a testament to the desperation with which he was a seeker.

But none of this is evidence of insanity. Examining more of Fischer's interview with Bomba Radyo, of which I've made a partial transcript, makes this clear. His effusions represent the fullness of his totalitarian stupidity, but they aren't crazy. They are merely profane echoes of commentators on the far-Left who are often reviled, but never considered insane.

As quoted earlier, Fischer saw 9/11 as revenge on behalf of the Palestinians. Just before expressing that, he had this to say:

You know I heard on the BBC a few months ago a very profound but simple statement. And it really stunned me, I couldn't believe the guy was saying it. You know, talking about some of the crimes of the US, you know of the horrible behavior that the US is committing all over the world, and then the BBC guy just said it, I couldn't believe my ears, he said, "This just shows you that what goes around comes around, even for the United States". That is what has happened tonight. What goes around comes around, even for the United States.

This immediately puts one in mind of another celebration of "anti-imperialist" revenge, Ward Churchill's hideous essay, "Some People Push Back" On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.

Churchill's disgusting relish exactly mirrors Fischer's. And the gleeful "fuck the US" bravado?

True enough, [the World Trade Center dead] were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to "ignorance" – a derivative, after all, of the word "ignore" – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.

Now Ward Churchill is a lot of things, but no one believes he's psychotic (though you could make a good case he's psychopathic, in the sense of sociopathic). There is no significant difference between Fischer's and Churchill's reactions to the fall of the Twin Towers.

Fischer's comments are also reminiscent of the Nicholas de Genova affair. Just before the Iraq invasion, the historian Eric Foner organized a "teach-in" at Columbia University meant to air and encourage anti-war perspectives. De Genova, an Assistant Professor in Anthropology and Latino Studies, was invited as a last-minute speaker. His performance was mortifying.

A Columbia University professor told an anti-war gathering that he would like to see "a million Mogadishus" -- referring to the 1993 ambush in Somalia that killed 18 American servicemen.

At Wednesday night's "teach-in" on the Columbia campus, Nicholas De Genova also called for the defeat of U.S. forces in Iraq and said, "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military." And he asserted that Americans who call themselves "patriots" are white supremacists.

Indecent, to be sure, but no one questions de Genova's sanity. He still teaches at Columbia.

Fischer moves on to an arresting outburst, in which he calls for a new Jewish genocide.

Bobby: Well, you know what I'm really hoping for, Pablo? You... did you ever see that movie "Seven Days in May"?

Pablo: Yes, yes.

Bobby: Uh, that's a movie about a general who tries to take over the US. You remember that?

P: Yes, I do.

...

B: I was rooting for the generals, you know. But uh, in the end the President, you know the so-called Democracy won. But I'm hoping for some kind of a Seven Days eh... in May scenario, where the country will be taken over by the military, they'll close down all the synagogues, arrest all the Jews, execute hundreds of thousands of Jewish ringleaders, and uh you know, apologize to the Arabs, kill off all the Jews over there in the bandit state, you know, of Israel.

P: uh yeah, yeah

B: I'm hoping for a totally new world.

I don't wish to accuse the Left of advocating the violent genocide of Jews (the Velvet Genocide of the fantasy of the "secular bi-national state" is another story). Even the far-Left seems to have mostly or totally abandoned this aim since Ulrike Meinhof expired in a German prison. The notion of Jewish "ringleaders" steering America down a demonic path, however, is commonplace among both democratic and revolutionary Leftists. In April 2004, Kalle Lasn, founder of Adbusters, published an editorial in that magazine outing Jewish neocons and their pernicious influence on American foreign policy.

Deciding exactly who is a neocon is difficult since some neocons reject the term while others embrace it. Some shape policy from within the White House, while others are more peripheral, exacting influence indirectly as journalists, academics and think tank policy wonks. What they all share is the view that the US is a benevolent hyper power that must protect itself by reshaping the rest of the world into its morally superior image. And half of the them are Jewish.

As Fischer says, "Bush... he's told what to say of course by Cheney, and his father and the Jews..." Lasn's editorial was published alongside a roster of neocons with little marks (in place of yellow stars) ticking off the Jews among them. From the realization that Jewish "neocons" are helming the juggernaut of violent imperialism, the logic of purgation necessarily follows.

Later in the interview, Fischer laments that the U.S. response to 9/11 will not be contrite, as it should and must be, but stupidly and reflexively martial. He attributes this in part to the influence of the Jews.

The notion of congenitally crazy Jews leading the rest of us to destruction was echoed by Nobel Literature Prize winner Jose Saramago in 2002. Writing in El Pais, the international Spanish-language paper of record, Saramago sourced Israel's brutal oppression of the Palestinians in Judaism itself.

Intoxicated mentally by the messianic dream of a Greater Israel which will finally achieve the expansionist dreams of the most radical Zionism; contaminated by the monstrous and rooted 'certitude' that in this catastrophic and absurd world there exists a people chosen by God and that, consequently, all the actions of an obsessive, psychological and pathologically exclusivist racism are justified; educated and trained in the idea that any suffering that has been inflicted, or is being inflicted, or will be inflicted on everyone else, especially the Palestinians, will always be inferior to that which they themselves suffered in the Holocaust, the Jews endlessly scratch their own wound to keep it bleeding, to make it incurable, and they show it to the world as if it were a banner. Israel seizes hold of the terrible words of God in Deuteronomy: 'Vengeance is mine, and I will be repaid.' Israel wants all of us to feel guilty, directly or indirectly, for the horrors of the Holocaust; Israel wants us to renounce the most elemental critical judgment and for us to transform ourselves into a docile echo of its will.

Fischer next jumps to a harangue about the Japanese during World War II.

Nobody gave a shit about the Japanese... how many millions, how many hundreds of thousand of people did the United States kill with atom bombs, justifying it with the most ridiculous excuse that it saved a million American soldiers?

The gratuitousness of our destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is an old saw on the Left, originating among Soviet apologists who sought to morally equate America to the USSR (and sometimes even the Nazis). Howard Zinn is a foremost practitioner of this historical legerdemain. For example, in the Bombs of August, he writes:

The bombing of Hiroshima remains sacred to the American Establishment and to a very large part of the population in this country... as I explained why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unforgivable atrocities, perpetrated on a Japan ready to surrender, the audience was silent.

... to see it as a wanton act of gargantuan cruelty rather than as an unavoidable necessity ("to end the war, to save lives") would be to raise disturbing questions about the essential goodness of the "good war."

Fischer next mentions a modern Hiroshima, which he alleges took place in the former Yugoslavia due to NATO's use of depleted uranium munitions against Milosevic's forces.

B: I mean look what the US did in Yugoslavia recently, in just 1999. Bombed the Kosovo and other parts of Yugoslavia with depleted uranium.

P: Mm-hmm

B: Now to me that is worse than atom bomb. You know why?

P: Why?

B: When you drop an atom bomb... you're dead, your suffering's over, right?

P: That's right.

B: This... this depleted uranium, you'll have a lingering death for the next ten, twenty, thirty, forty years. Or maybe just two or three years, depends on how much of it you get. But you are never gonna be the same, you see? You just have like a low-level sickness and your life is is a misery, you understand?

Far-Left polemicists, such as John Pilger and Robert Fisk, have taken concerns about the use of depleted uranium in munitions manufacture to the level of a blood-libel. They peddle the pseudo-science that depleted uranium has been proven to increase rates of cancer and birth defects, and has done so to vast extent among American servicemen and the victims of American bombing campaigns. Here's Pilger:

The truth is that the US and Britain are engaged in a form of nuclear warfare in the Balkans. In 1996, the United Nations Human Rights Tribunal called depleted uranium a WMD. Like the Agent Orange babies of Vietnam, the deformed and cancer-stricken children of southern Iraq, where depleted uranium was tested by British and American forces during the 1991 Gulf war, bear witness to the true nature of righteous Western crusades. Civilised people should speak out urgently before the latest noble cause claims more expendable victims and beckons a world war.

Next Fischer offers a quick summary of American history.

B: Take, kill. Then you rob -- they... they invaded the country, robbed the land of the American Indians -- killed almost all of them off. Brought over slaves to work the... the uh fields, to build up the country, from Africa, right? Now why didn't the white man come to America like in a civilzed manner, and say, 'We're being persecuted in Europe, we don't have freedom of religion, we'd like to come here, we'd like to assimilate, we'd like to marry your women', and... and... and so on, right?

P: Yeah

B: But errrr, but no, they come, they said we're coming in here to take your land and to kill you off. Right? That's the history of the United States.

P: Mm-hmm

B: A despicable country. You know, even as a boy, you know, I never had the slightest interest in American history. Never!

University of Texas journalism professor and white guilt gadfly Robert Jensen makes a similar interpretation.

How does a country deal with the fact that some of its most revered historical figures had certain moral values and political views virtually identical to Nazis? Here's how "respectable" politicians, pundits, and professors play the game: When invoking a grand and glorious aspect of our past, then history is all-important...

But when one brings into historical discussions any facts and interpretations that contest the celebratory story and make people uncomfortable -- such as the genocide of indigenous people as the foundational act in the creation of the United States -- suddenly the value of history drops precipitously and one is asked, "Why do you insist on dwelling on the past?"

Fischer counseled American contrition in response to 9/11, but instead he expected stupid retribution by the American behemoth.

But uh, well the US will hit back, of course... The US just will not do what they have to do. The US has to say, "We're sorry, our whole foreign policy has been wrong for the last several hundred years. We are going to uh pull back all our troops from all over the world. We're going... No we're going to stop supporting Israel," uh and so on, you see? And they're not going to admit that. No, they're going to say, 'These terrorists, these criminals, this cowardly act will be punished." You know, and I expect soon there's going to be a new President, after the White House is blown up, he'll be in the Colorado Mountains, you know, hundreds of feet underneath the... the Rocky Mounts there, saying, "This dastardly act of blowing up the White House will be punished!" you know, just be constantly talk about punishing these cowardly people until the United States is destroyed. The United States is not going to be reasonable, you know? It's not going to admit that it's the bad guy and it's always been the bad guy. It was the bad guy in World War II, it was the bad guy in World War I, it was the bad guy when it robbed [unintelligible] and invaded the Philippines from from Spain, it was the bad guy when it came eh... eh when... when the white man came and killed the American Indians, when it brought the black people to uh as slaves from Africa, it's always been the bad guy.

This was also foremost in the mind of Noam Chomsky, as well as Robert Fisk, whom Chomsky quoted in an essay written immediately after the attacks:

As to how to react, we have a choice. We can express justified horror; we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators. If we choose the latter course, we can do no better, I think, than to listen to the words of Robert Fisk... Describing "The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed and humiliated people," he writes that "this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps." And much more. Again, we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.

Three of Britain's major Left-wing political cartoonists, Dave Brown, Martin Rowson and Steve Bell, also took up the theme of dumb American vengeance within a week of the attacks (1, 2). Brown did so twice (1, 2), actually. (Unsurprisingly, he later went on to depict Ariel Sharon as a cannibal eating Palestinian babies.)

Fischer's Bomba Radyo interview is remarkable not for its supposed insanity, but rather for the fidelity with which it replays the views of far-Left pundits. Its contemporaneity with several of the examples I cite belies the notion that Fischer was just crazily parroting things he had heard in the past. Trawl through Fischer's other interviews, or his web site, and you'll see him rehearse these themes ceaselessly. Fischer was not mentally disorganized.

He was instead a base and, partly, stupid man. Cognitively, he was a genius. His intellectual deficit was emotional. Fischer was aware of and profoundly insecure about this, and in conjunction he developed what might have been a clinical paranoia. This, and the profundity of his stupidity, helped confuse the issue by giving him a false air of psychosis. Fischer's moonbat salvos about America and the Jews, his embrace of "counterknowledge", his attraction to totalitarian thinking, were a direct result of his emotional retardation. They were not symptoms of lunacy. If they were, a whole dimension of politics would become clinical.

Correction: Bobby Fischer was born in Chicago, and grew up in Brooklyn.

Regressive Progressives

2008-01-17T17:05:00.001-05:00

Kevin Drum nails it with respect to the Ron Paul racism controversy.

It's plain that Paul knew what was being published in his newsletters. It's plain that he was familiar with the well-developed strategy that inspired the early-90s turn to racist demagoguery. It's plain that he knew it was a key part of his fundraising appeal. Paul can weasel all he wants, but it's plain that he endorsed a strategy of overt appeals to racist sentiment in order to build support for his political career. If he's given all that up since then, it's only because he no longer needs it.

This whole affair highlights one of the reasons that I wish everyone would stop swooning over minor candidates who play the part of bold truthteller. When you have no chance of winning and therefore nothing to risk, it's cheap and easy to stick to your guns. But as Ron Paul has shown, back when it actually mattered he was willing to do whatever he needed to raise money and rekindle his political career. I don't doubt that he'd do it again if anything serious were on the line.

I wrote about this here, in light of the irony of so-called progressives flocking to Paul because of his "bold [truth telling]" about Iraq (and, inevitably in the penumbra of Iraq, our alliance with Israel). There have always been self-styled progressives who are really reactionaries, favoring isolationism, conspiratorial superstition and the scapegoating of Jews, among other intellectual pathologies. French socialist suspicion of Leon Blum and the Jews in the lead-up to war with Hitler is a good historical analogue. Cognate forces were at work prior to American involvement in World War II, and now the Iraq War has again separated regressive progressives from their comrades of better conscience and driven them into alliance with the far-Right fringe they mirror.

Letter to Pajamas Media

2008-01-13T23:53:00.000-05:00

I've sent the following letter to Pajamas Media in care of the editor:

To the Editor:

I note with concern your decision to hire Alyssa A. Lappen to write for Pajamas Media (Does Sharia Libel Law Now Apply in the U.S.? and Shari'a Finance: Cordless Bungee Jumping).

Lappen wrote a December 28, 2004 piece for FrontPage Magazine that should give any editor pause. Entitled The Israeli Crime That Wasn't(1), she described in it the October 2000 lynching of two IDF soldiers who had strayed beyond army checkpoints deep into Ramallah. Lappen wrote they had "their innards eaten by hysterical and frenzied [Palestinians] screaming Allah Akbar..."

As brutal as that lynching was, this is of course a fantastic claim. A Nexis search of all foreign and domestic English-language media between 2000 and 2004 produces nothing to corroborate cannibalism in Ramallah. A Google search, however, reveals a 2001(2) web page(3) by a break-away faction of the JDL (the Jewish Task Force), which may have been Lappen's source, although it only describes the lynching as "cannibalistic", stopping short of giving details. There are two possibilities: Lappen made the claim up out of whole cloth, or she embellished the JTF account without sourcing it.

Either way, Lappen's piece is a gross violation of journalistic ethics. The claim is a vicious lie meant to portray Palestinians as subhuman. The JDL, described by the FBI in Congressional testimony as a "violent extremist Jewish Organization"(4), was active in terrorism in the United States between 1968 and 2001(5). The Jewish Task Force broke away from the JDL additionally to oppose "emigration from the Third World" to America, which was "transforming this once great nation into a banana republic"(6).

Pajamas Media's "intention [is] to provide a significant alternative to mainstream media", partly by providing "exclusive news and opinion". If so, you might be alarmed to learn you have hired a writer who authored a blood libel whose likely inspiration was a propaganda site run by dormant terrorists.

Sincerely,

John-Paul Pagano
The Socialism of Fools
http://socfools.blogspot.com
guanubian@gmail.com

(1) Ref.
(2) Ref.
(3) Ref.
(4) Ref.
(5) Ref.
(6) Ref.

Anatomy of a Blood Libel

2008-01-08T18:40:00.002-05:00

The Internet sweepstakes for epic idiocy would be carried away by Charles Johnson, whose bigoted and insane Little Green Footballs, and its outsize popularity, stand in gaudy glory as a kind of totalitarian monument to the failed promise of the blogosphere. For this reason, I enjoy reading Dennis the Peasant's hilarious take-downs of Pajamas Media, the pompous and silly flagship enterprise of Johnson*, his comrade Roger Simon, and the whole smug sprawl of Cheeto-eating, Black Helicopter retards who compose the worthless Glenn Reynolds' "Army of Davids".

The other day Mr. Peasant noted a new milestone in the mouldering of Pajamas: Simon's decision to add Alyssa A. Lappen and Patrick Poole, a couple of transparently inept, pseudo-journalists, to its stable of writers. Pajamas was founded in a spirit of meretricious triumphalism emanating from LGF's success with Rathergate. Its content strategy was to sign incisive, maverick journalists -- both promising newcomers like Michael Totten and established figures like Ron Rosenbaum -- to provide the leading alternative to the "MSM", or "Mainstream Media". So using unknown tinfoil hatters is a significant step down, even from Pajamas' modest level of achievement.

I started blogging, mostly about issues pertaining to left-wing anti-Semitism, in late 2002. Due to the obscure and often squalid nature of the subject, I've spent a lot of time rooting through the compost of the Internet doing research. I remembered Lappen's name, as she was a frequent contributor to David Horowitz's horrible Frontpage Magazine. Like Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch, which is its far-Left echo, Frontpage is a genuinely crazy patchwork of sub-scholarly sub-journalism, mostly by self-invented pundits and third-rate professors writing on subjects in which they have no training.

Lappen has done editorial work and a smidgen of writing for business publications. As a reporter, she boasts seven pieces for the Connecticut Weekly regional section of the Sunday edition of the New York Times between 1977 and 1980. On Frontpage, she stands out for a 2004 article entitled The Israeli Crime That Wasn't. It's about the relationship of the martyrdom of Mohammad al-Durrah (al-Dura) to the late-2000 lynching of IDF reservists Vadim Nurzhitz and Yosef Avrahami in Ramallah. In its opening paragraphs, Lappen summarizes what befell them:

Two weeks after the Al Durrah tapes aired, two Jewish soldiers lost their way in Ramallah, where they were savagely beaten to death, their innards eaten by hysterical and frenzied crowds screaming Allah Akbar -- God is great -- and seeking revenge for the supposed death of the boy.

Sadly there has been much Arab violence since the Second Intifada, of which the Ramallah lynching is a pièce de résistance, but Lappen's claim that the Ramallah mob ate the innards of Nurzhits and Avrahami was a red flag... flying on top of a tractor trailer speeding downhill toward the capacity for belief. I looked in vain for any source that might support her account. As I expected, the details of the lynching were horrendous, and all those Lappen mentioned that were plausible -- including the Allahu Akbars that adumbrated the butchery of Nick Berg by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- checked out. But of course I found nothing about cannibalism, besides notably (warning: goreporn) one scribbles-and-clip-art web page that described "cannibalistic mutilations" in which the reservists were "literally disemboweled and dismembered with the attackers' bare hands".

This looked like the work of the JDL, and sure enough, the page has undergone a series of transformations since it first appeared on JTF.org, the web site of Victor Vancier's Jewish Task Force, a JDL splinter group. The JDL is the most successful North American Kahanist sect, an openly fascist and formerly terrorist organization.

The best real account of the Ramallah lynching is by Deborah Sontag in the New York Times. It's grisly.

In a second-story office, visible to the chanting crowd below, men beat and stabbed one of the soldiers. Witnesses said they then hurled his body into the frenzied group below. The crowd stomped his body and beat it with sticks. His clothing was set on fire. Two men grabbed his feet, two his wrists, and they marched him through the thronged streets to Al Manara Square. Men rode on one another's shoulders, whistling and clapping.

...

... Palestinian youths danced on the bloody spot where one Israeli was tossed through floral curtains into the mob below. In a call and response, they chanted: ''Here is where we gouged his eyes! Here is where we ripped off his legs! [IDF photos of the bodies show no dismemberment. -ed.] Here is where we smashed in his face!'' One teenage boy joyously thrust in the air the oil dipstick from the charred carcass of the soldiers' car, which had been burnt by the mob and lay curled beneath a billboard that said, ''Rule of Law Project.''

There is no shortage of animalistic horror in what happened in Ramallah. So why would Lappen embellish this already horrendous murder with the absurd and vicious lie that Nurzhits and Avrahami were cannibalized? Since she's now one of Pajamas Media's maverick, non-MSM journalists, it pays to reevaluate her report.

A LexisNexis Academic full-text search of all English news sources for "(ramallah OR ramalla) AND (vadim OR ((yosef OR yossi) AND avrahami))) AND (entrails OR innards OR intestines OR organs OR cannibalism OR disembowel)" between October 10, 2000 and the present returns four results. Only three actually mention the Ramallah lynching, and only one partially supports Lappen's claim. It is a 2002 piece by Lawrence Kelemen in the online edition of the Jewsweek newsletter called "Learning from Sadism" (reprinted in slightly different form here). In it he writes:

Vadim Novesche and Yosef Avrahami, two Israeli reserve officers abducted by Palestinian police, were beaten until their heads were unrecognizable pulp and were then disemboweled by a waiting crowd outside the Palestinian Authority's Ramallah headquarters who then danced, entrails in hand, through the city's streets.

No mention of cannibalism, but now the claim of disembowelment has reached a comparatively mainstream source, one archived by Nexis, and we find Palestinians dancing through the streets with entrails in their hands. Nexis finds no account between 2000 and 2002 to corroborate any of this. Like Lappen later, Kelemen, an Orthodox rabbi who doesn't appear to care about the Ninth Commandment, might simply have looked at the (warning: goreporn) IDF photographs of the soldier's bodies. He chose instead to invent a claim of disembowelment.

Whether she was inspired by Internet Kahanists or Kelemen, two years later Lappen upped the ante with a charge of cannibalism. Why? You'd be right to guess it's because she's a terrible journalist and far-Right Zionist who hates Arabs, but there's more to observe. Lappen's lie about Palestinian cannabalism is, in form and substance, a blood libel.

A blood libel is a false and sensational accusation of ritual murder, often of children, usually involving cannibalism. The most famous example is the periodic claim that Jews kill gentile children and use their blood to make matzo. Few historical lies have been so vicious, and its wages are always baleful. The Nazis republished Martin Luther's blood libels to justify their extermination of Jews, and hoping for a recap, Baathists like Mustafa Tlass recycle it presently.

It appears some right-wing Jews want to turn it around on Arabs. I cringe to find Edward Said being vindicated, who wrote in Orientalism:

The transference of popular anti-Semitic animus from a Jewish to an Arab target [has been] made smoothly, since the figure was essentially the same.

In Lappen, it appears the methodology has transfered as well, and passed from her on to others. On August 29, 2007, Joanna Chandler, another Frontpage "journalist", published A New Dreyfuss Affair. Clearly cribbing Lappen, she also one-ups her:

Two weeks after the Al Durah hoax was publicized as fact, garnering worldwide condemnation of Israel in diplomatic, media, religious and human rights circles, two IDF soldiers made a wrong turn and inadvertently wandered into Ramallah, an Arab enclave under the control of the Palestinian Authority. The consequences of their fatal error are well known: they were tortured and beaten to death in the Palestinian Authority police station, and their lifeless bodies thrown out of the station’s second story window to a throng of men howling, Allahu-Akbar—God is great! They commenced to dismember and disembowel the soldiers’ corpses, and then passed the entrails on a platter to a hysterical mob numbering in the thousands who rejoiced as they literally chewed and swallowed the remains of their hated Jews. What is lesser known is that while eating the flesh and blood of their victims, in satisfaction and triumph, the good citizens of Ramallah chanted, not only, Allah hu-Akbar -— but the name of Mohamed al Durah! The supposed “death” of the child had become a pretext for revenge.

Now we've got a trifecta: dismemberment, disembowelment and cannibalism! (And apparently Palestinians, when performing ritual murder, come prepared with crockery.) The prolixity reminds you of a college student writing about sex for the first time. The hysterical gore reads literally like the screenplay for the conclusion of George Romero's (warning: goreporn) Day of the Dead. But neither fazed British journalist Melanie Phillips, a columnist for the Daily Mail and blogger for the Spectator, who cited Chandler's account on her web site. And just days before, Morton A. Klein, the President of the Zionist Organization of America, sent out a press release which cobbled together bits of Kelemen and Chandler's accounts. It claimed Nurzhitz and Avrahami "were murdered, their bodies disemboweled beyond recognition and their entrails passed around and literally chewed and swallowed at a PA police station in Ramallah."

The bedrock of nouveau conservatism is the use of righteous anger against jihad as a merkin for the simple hatred of Arabs and Muslims. In her use of a blood libel against Arabs, Lappen emulates the worst tormentors of Jews. Pajamas Media has abandoned any pretense to quality alternative journalism, because it can be no more than the sum of its parts.

* As of December 1, 2007, Johnson is "no longer affiliated with Pajamas Media in a management position".

Kuntzel on the Islamist-Nazi Nexus

2008-01-01T21:22:00.000-05:00

Matthias Kuntzel's Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 has won the 2007 award of the London Book Festival. Kuntzel's book first appeared in 2002 in German and has now been updated and translated into English. It examines the influence of European fascism on Islamic ideologies (read: Baathism and Islamism). I'm excited to add it to my library. My only exposure to Kuntzel's work was an article he penned for the New Republic in 2006 called Ahmadinejad's Demons, which appraised the messianism of Iran's hizbollahi and made a baleful forecast for the safety of Israel.

Thanks to Engage.

No Longer Strange Bedfellows

2007-12-26T12:34:00.000-05:00

Ron Paul and Progressives

Since Ross Perot's breakout performance in 1992, the spectacle of a curious, lurching Third Party candidacy has been a significant feature of each Presidential campaign. 2008's Gimp Who Makes You Go Hmmm is Ron Paul, and commentators have dutifully been pressing finger to temple trying to spin filaments of his quixotic campaign into a broader tapestry of meaning.

I did this in 2004 with Ralph Nader, whose just-silly reprise of his 2000 campaign struck me as an apt, American expression of the cul-de-sac in which events after the Cold War had driven the Left. Since then, with the Iraq debacle, neoconservatism has turned itself into the mullet of political ideologies. It's tempting to see in that a vindication of the do-little liberalism of the '90s, its fetishization of multilateralism and the UN, and even Oslo. For me, it's merely a vindication of the aphorism: "If your opponent is committing suicide, get out of the way". '90s liberalism looks good now only because it had no active role in creating the Middle East nightmare we face.

It's also played no active role in formulating an alternative. This is a byproduct of a bigger problem. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, liberals have been struggling with an existential question: where do we go from here in foreign policy? Liberal analysis-paralysis led smarter and better people to cede the anti-totalitarian enterprise in Iraq to the cabal of dreamers, incompetents, bigots and losers who took down Saddam and then the country of Iraq with him. Rumsfeld's statue has since fallen, but this hasn't shaken the idea tree. Every day you wade through swamps of Netroots dudgeon about the Bush Administration and the harm it has wrought, much of it right and all of it rightful. You get a lot of opposition, but little in the way of policy prescription.

One of the more striking places in which the moribundity of left-liberal thought on the Middle East is located is in the convergence of "reality-based" talk and the kind of right-wing isolationism associated with people like Pat Buchanan. Ron Paul reminds us of this. His foreign policy campaign is marked by Lindberghian riffs on our Middle East foreign policy. Paul's campaign so far has seen some outsize success, at least on the Internet, and this is due in no small part to support by "progressives". What is singular is to the extent that Paul is embraced by Left-leaners, it is because of his call for immediate and total disengagement from the Middle East.

This is interesting, because while Paul has seasoned his message with guilty suggestions that 9/11 was the rational and inevitable response to American foreign policy, his call for us to get out of Iraq has nothing to do with any Leftish reading of the Middle East narrative. Rather, it is a basic result of his Libertarian beliefs. Paul feels we have violated the individual rights of Iraqis by attacking their country unprovoked, and like a good Jeffersonian he seeks to relieve us of foreign entanglements.

This is lost on progressives, who feel the Democrats have dropped the ball on opposing the war in Iraq. There has been a backlash on the Left as signs and symbols of Paul's views on race, and ties to lunatic groups on the far-Right, trickle into view. Sara Robinson, a freelance journalist who has written for the New York Times, sums up Paul's appeal to progressives while warning them away from him:

Straight talk is powerful. Americans are addicted to it -- and, too often, addled by it. We've seen this before with Ross Perot and John McCain, two other right-wing candidates who charmed us with their apparent penchant for telling us uncomfortable but necessary truths. (And to give [Ron Paul] his due: pointing out that 9/11 was the inevitable outcome of decades of monstrous US foreign policy was a very necessary truth.)

While that vulgar calculus makes sense to Robinson, with Paul it is simply an expression of dogmatic isolationism. Just as Jerry Falwell thought (or loudly pretended to think) America brought 9/11 upon itself because of its embrace of sin, Paul thinks our abandonment of Jeffersonian principles made us the target of radical Islamists.

There is no small irony in progressives flocking to Paul because of his guilty isolationism, and then recoiling from him when, as Dave Niewert says, they realize "he carries with him a whole raft of positions well to the right of even mainstream conservatives." That raft of positions is cognate with his total hands-off approach to foreign entanglements, including his calls to immediately cease all aid to Israel. Disengagement from Iraq and cutting off Israel appeal to progressives, so now they are now seeking out a libertarian crank to represent them.

Update: It's no wonder that Glenn Greenwald has found a home at Pat Buchanan's American Conservative magazine (1, 2).

Update: Another turn: progressives will join Charles Lindbergh's modern avatar, the Jew-phobic Justin Raimondo, in fleeing from this:

Correction: Sara Robinson of Orcinus, who I quoted in this post, writes to correct my misidentification of her as "a freelance journalist who has written for the New York Times". She is a journalist, but...

While there is a Sara Robinson who is a math and science writer for the NYT, I'm not her (though you're far from the first one to mix us up).

Apologies to her and you for the error.

Another Letter to Glenn Greenwald

2007-10-07T23:25:00.000-04:00

Even leaving aside the manipulative mis-translations [sic] by neoconservatives of Ahamdinejad's [sic] statements -- even if one accepted their mis-translations...

Glenn,

This is extraordinary. Do you seriously believe that Ahmadinejad's exhortation -- "The regime currently occupying Jerusalem must be wiped from the pages of time" -- means something substantially different from the common translation that "Israel should be wiped off the map"? You may believe that neither phrase indicates bellicose intent on the part of a Holocaust denier who has called for Middle Eastern Jewry be relocated to Europe, but you can hardly claim the map phrase is a "manipulative mis-translation [sic]" by "neoconservatives". Even the Bronner article you cite but apparently didn't read concludes the same thing:

"So did Iran's president call for Israel to be wiped off the map? It certainly seems so."

Bronner does go on to wonder whether Ahmanidejad's words "amount to a call for war", and here you join a minority fringe -- Juan Cole, Jonathan Steele -- seeking to "[traduce] the meaning of ordinary words" to prevent, even by transparent mendacity, if necessary, our going to war with Iran. But it wasn't always this way. Back in June, you wrote:

"I don't think anyone can reasonably dispute the perception of the Israelis of Iran as a potential threat to its security."

So what's changed?

Your relentless calls for us to resist "Endless War on behalf of Israel" are rooted, at least, in the sensible proposition that we maintain a sober and proportionate view of our national security in relation to Israel's. Agreed. But your about-face into running cover for Ahmadinejad, a millenarian, Jew-hating crank, is appalling. It amounts to a meretricious display of unconcern for the security of Israeli Jews, in spite of your own Jewishness. You may not be quite the same journalistic force, but this is reminiscent of the New York Times' decision during World War II to back-page the stories it printed about the Final Solution, in order to combat the perception that it was a "Jewish" newspaper. The difference is the New York Times didn't plainly lie to accomplish this.

Please consider ceasing to smear those of us who are alarmed by genocidal anti-Semitism as "neoconservatives" and warmongers.

Letter to Glenn Greenwald

2007-09-23T22:08:00.000-04:00

Virtually all of the swirling war dances towards Iran are rooted in [the belief that Israel's enemies are our enemies], but advocates of war with Iran are too dishonest to acknowledge it openly.

Glenn,

I support your call for honesty in foreign policy debate. Attacking Iran would be a humanitarian catastrophe and anyone advocating it should clearly say so and why.

While we're on the subject of full and honest disclosure, don't you think it's time that you spell out your analysis of Israel in the Middle East and its relationship to our role there? Let's be frank: you, and the class of political bloggers you inhabit, blame Israel for the lion's share of the trouble in the region. You feel that Israel was formed in original sin -- the displacement of the Palestinians -- and its settlement policy and hawkish replies to Arab aggression create a justifiable and growing rage among Arabs and Muslims worldwide. Terrorism, border attacks and thriving Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism are the lamentable but logical consequences.

Following from this, you support the following Walt-Mearsheimer thesis: "the U.S. has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel".

I think this is why you, the people you emulate (Digby, Yglesias), and your own epigones, are so exercised about the "smearing" of Walt and Mearsheimer as anti-Semites. This isn't some soulful protest of the muzzling of their (now best-selling) voices or chagrin over the cheapening of the word "anti-Semite". Walt and Mearsheimer's calling out of The Lobby(TM) is important to you, but la femme here is the vital truth, as you see it, that The Lobby suppresses: nasty Israel's radioactivity to the US.

I don't want to debate the quality of your analysis. Doing so is tedious and off-topic. I think there's a kernel of truth to it -- the settlements are deplorable and provocative, and our silence on that issue is bewildering. But it's also predicated on a retrograde and illiterate pan-Muslim nationalism, insofar as it accepts that it's rational, say, for Iranians to antagonize and attack Israel in solidarity with the Palestinians. One recalls the polyadjectival tsunami of snark you unload in response to the mirror image of these politics, for example Joe Lieberman's stupid courting of evangelical Christians on behalf of broader Zionism.

What I want, like you, is honesty in advocacy. For all of the high dudgeon on liberal blogs about the silliness of the "serious" foreign policy community, you guys rarely articulate a full foreign policy in opposition to the one in place. Now's your opportunity to start. Follow your own advice and "make [your] case expressly".

Update: Greenwald responds:

Before I began blogging, I never would have believed that there are people who think it's a clever tactic to (a) invent arguments, (b) baselessly attribute them to other people, and then (c) demand that those people "admit" that they believe those things.

Congratulations on being the latest example proving that such people do exist.

Glenn,

Although it is merely a dismissal, I appreciate you taking the time to reply. I am not engaging in a "tactic" -- one wonders what overall strategy I'm pursuing -- I'm trying to make sense of your writings on the Middle East, Israel and the neocons in relation to those things.

In characterizing your view, I wrote you "blame Israel for the lion's share of the trouble in the region," that you feel Israeli policy stokes terrorism and that you agree with Walt and Mearsheimer that our affiliation with Israel causes terrorism to rebound to us.

In this post, entitled Dick Cheney's warped vision of the world, you write:

Jordan's King Abdullah delivered an extremely important though almost completely ignored address to Congress last week in which he implored the U.S. to stop blindly supporting Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians and instead work towards a resolution, precisely because nothing fuels anti-American hatred and Islamic radicalism as much as Israel's ongoing occupation...

Everyone knows that the Bush administration's explicit abandonment of any pretense of objectivity or broker role in the Israel-Palestinian conflict -- replaced by our virtual participation on the side of Israel in that conflict -- has done as much, if not more, than any single other factor to fuel the Islamic radicalism which we claim we are so eager to defeat...

Please explain, then, how I've "[invented] arguments" and "baselessly [attributed]" them to you. Thanks.

Higher Justice

2007-01-02T02:10:00.000-05:00

Saddam's execution has been an occasion for hand-wringing, by some who are opposed to the death penalty on principle, and others who point to the lack of due process in Saddam's trial and execution, and furthermore, the squalidness and brutality of the latter. Broadly I am in favor of capital punishment, although I respect the opposition; and I acknowledge the considerable shortcomings of official Iraqi justice. However, I am struck by what seems to be the effeteness of these protests of Saddam's fate.

My view is the precision with which such an end suits Saddam is justice. Poetic justice, to be sure, in the shabby vengeance meted out to him by a Shiite death squad, born from a population he satanically abused; and also what seems like a higher justice, although I may be indulging myself here. Catholic theologians considering the death penalty have written about its being used in rare cases to reestablish the "right order of things". I'm not sure if they had this in mind. They make a distinction between "just retribution" and "reprehensible vindictiveness" that I don't understand, and fear I'm on the wrong side of. I wonder: aren't there some criminals who necessitate the kind of punishment given to Saddam, and might not vindictiveness play a key role in it?

I'm also torn between my perceptions of Western and Iraqi society. The Iraqi people were subject to 24 years of totalitarian nightmare by Saddam, something I still think we don't -- and can't -- properly appreciate. I understand one of the basic premises of occupying Iraq was remolding its society into something remotely after our own image. But how dare we tell them what to do with Saddam? I think it's right that we handed him over to Maliki, however banal or hastily considered were the Bush Administration's reasons for doing so. We would be obstructing higher justice by interfering. If the Iraqis wanted truth and reconciliation, then great, we should have been on board with that. But Baghdad isn't Nuremberg. People scoff at WWII comparisons deployed to justify the idea of invading Iraq, but now the Nuremberg comparison is in vogue. It doesn't seem right.

Western society is liberal-democratic, and as such, it is fundamentally rationalist. Instead of recognizing the fundamental irrationality of the political psychology that gives rise to phenomena like Baathism, Islamofascism and their precursors, we search for rational reasons why these movements happen. It must be the Versailles Treaty, or US bombing in Cambodia, or the Israeli occupation, that drives people mad. The flip side of this is the notion that punishment must serve some narrow, rational end. Punishment is about rehabilitation, not retribution, and in cases where rehabilitation is not feasible, retribution must not take the form of capital punishment.

I can't accept that. It's not good enough for someone like Saddam. It doesn't address the nature of what he did. It doesn't restore the "right order of things". Saddam existed in a realm beyond which rationalism can triumph. Iraqi society did not want to be Western with respect to Saddam. It could not have been. We were right not to force it to.

Update: I agree with Jeff Weintraub that David Hirst's summary of Saddam's career is superb.

Snapshots of the Holy Land

2006-02-15T11:21:00.000-05:00

Hamas announces candidates for parliament speaker, faction chair:

Hamas announced Wednesday that it intends to appoint Abed al-Aziz Duaik to head the new Palestinian parliament.

Duaik is considered one of the most senior members of the organization in the West Bank and a member of the movement's more pragmatic wing.

Earlier Wednesday, the group announced that Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahar, a senior Hamas member in Gaza and one of its leading radicals, would serve as the Hamas faction chairman in the new parliament.

Zahar had been considered a contender for the prime minister's job, and Wednesday's appointment meant he was no longer in the running.

Hamas sources said they expect the group to soon announce that the most senior Hamas man in Gaza and No. 1 on the party's parliamentary list, Ismail Haniyeh, will serve as prime minister.

These moves give the impression that the organization is appointing its more moderate members to the important positions, and giving hardliners like al-Zahar more peripheral roles.

Hamas Video: We will drink the blood of the Jews:

The Hamas website this week presented the parting video messages of two Hamas suicide terrorists. One message was for Jews, whose blood Hamas promises to drink until Jews "leave the Muslim countries," and the second to a mother, as she helps dress her son for battle prior to his suicide terror mission.

To view the Hamas' Drink Jew's blood video click here

Each terrorist had a separate message for Jews. This [sic] first said,

"My message to the loathed Jews is that there is no god but Allah, we will chase you everywhere! We are a nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews. We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood, and our children's thirst with your blood. We will not leave until you leave the Muslim countries."

The second terrorist said the following:

"In the name of Allah, we will destroy you, blow you up, take revenge against you, [and] purify the land of you, pigs that have defiled our country... This operation is revenge against the sons of monkeys and pigs."

One of the terrorists saw his death as a wedding with the Maidens of Paradise:

"I dedicate this wedding [i.e. death for Allah] to all of those who have chosen Allah as their goal, the Quran as their constitution and the Prophet [Muhammad] as their role model. Jihad is the only way to liberate Palestine - all of Palestine - from the impurity of the Jews."

The message to one of the terrorist's mother was instruction for her to be joyous over his death and his "wedding" with the "Maidens of Paradise."

"My dear mother, you who have cared for me, today I sacrifice my life to be your intercessor [on Judgment Day]. O my love and soul, wipe your tears, don't be saddened. In the name of Allah, I've achieve all that I've aspired. Don't let me see you sad on my wedding day with the Maidens of Paradise. So be happy and not sad, because in the name of Allah, after death is merciful Allah's paradise."

Included in the clip is the farewell scene between the mother and terrorist son while she helps him don his military vest. In the background one can hear the lyrics, "My dear mother, don't cry over us."

El Al Airlines installs anti-missile systems on passenger aircrafts:

El Al Israel Airlines has installed anti-missiles systems on its passenger aircraft, completing an overhaul launched after a 2002 attempt to shoot down a plane, security sources said on Wednesday.

They said the "Flight Guard", an Israeli-made system costing around $1 million per unit, was operational on the entire El Al fleet. It was not immediately clear if this applied to five planes leased by El Al as well as its own 29 aircraft.

El Al, Israel's national carrier and largest airline, declined to comment, saying it did not discuss security issues.

Hamshahri's Cartoon Jihad

2006-02-13T10:08:00.000-05:00

The Iranian establishment rag Hamshahri has released its call for cartoon jihad.

As usual, freedom of expression is used to serve as an excuse for westerners to attack sanctities of the Muslims in blatant disregard for moral principles and respect for opinions of others. The attack comes despite the fact that it is an unforgiven crime in the West to debate and critique many issues including the domineering system, looting and crimes perpetrated by the US and Israel as well as alleged historical events like the Holocaust.

Many thinkers express doubt about the accuracy of the Holocaust. However even expressing doubt in this regard entails prosecution.

In the wake of the publication of the profane cartoons in several European newspapers, Hamshahri is going to measure the sanctity of freedom of expression among the westerners. Thus, it is co-sponsoring with the Caricature House a competition on the Holocaust.

Politicized Ignorance

2006-02-10T23:27:00.000-05:00

Sol of Solomonia draws attention to this post by David Bernstein of the The Volokh Conspiracy. Bernstein writes about a review of Spielberg's Munich by Edward Said's most earnest epigone, Columbia professor Joseph Massad. The rhetorical device around which the review turns is an analogy between Munich and Exodus, the 1960 Otto Preminger film based on Leon Uris's novel of the same name. The novel is a fictional treatment of the founding of Israel that includes a dramatization of the ordeal faced by Jewish Holocaust survivors on the ship Exodus 1947, who were fleeing European Displaced Persons camps to settle in Palestine.

Here is Massad's take on this event in post-Holocaust Jewish history:

Exodus was the major cinematic achievement of the Zionist movement. The film popularized the Zionist cause and remains inspirational to young American and European Zionists. The film was most effective in staging the determination and desperation of the Zionist leadership, which was depicted as having no choice but to conquer Palestine and make it the Jewish State.

Others have pointed out Massad's intellectual limitations, not the least of which is the violence (see POSTSCRIPT) he does to language. And surely the thesis he develops -- that like Exodus, "Munich is already having the same impact on American audiences and is playing the same role as Exodus did in legitimizing Israeli policies and the Zionist project" -- will strike any reasonable person who's seen the film as a blinkered reading. But Bernstein refers to the Massad piece as "lunatic", which isn't quite right, as it implies Massad is inured to reality.

The truth is that both the Uris novel and the movie can be accused of distilling and embellishing Zionist history in that era. So in this narrow sense, Massad, in pursuing the tack that these fictionalizations amount to propaganda, is not "lunatic". Instead, where I believe he fails, both analytically and morally, is in his utter lack of concern for the Jewish historical narrative. To reduce this short but brutal chapter of Jewish history to a mere furtherance of "the Zionist project" is criminal. Such an extreme brand of myopia is troubling in an Ivy League Middle East Studies professor.

I'm no Martin Kramer, but most of what I learn about Middle East Studies reaffirms a suspicion of mine. That is: in the wake of Edward Said, the discipline, beyond being thoroughly politicized, is in itself a political statement about the relationship of Jews to the Middle East.

Consider the stars today of Middle East Studies -- people like Massad and Juan Cole. They (at least putatively) have a general knowledge of the region, they have their areas of cultural specialization, and they are of course steeped in postcolonial, that is Saidian, theoretics. You also have the sundry scholars of Islam. But is there any one of them whose area of cultural specialization is Jews? Any one who is a scholar of Judaism? A historian of Israel, or even a fluent Hebrew speaker? Any one who learned the Bernard Lewis/Chatham House ouevre before rejecting it?

Clearly then, for the Saidian set of Middle East scholars, a political statement about the relationship of Jews to the Middle East is being made: that there is no relationship between the two besides that of Zionist-colonial depredation. Jews are mere interlopers, fanged colonists, European bagmen, even Nazis. They are not -- cannot -- be indiginous to the region, and worthy of study themselves.

It is therefore not "lunacy", or merely sub-par scholarship and political indoctrination, that results in pablum like Massad's review, but a studied disengagement from anything authentically Jewish. It is, in short, politicized ignorance.

Addendum: This post is an adapted expansion of comments I made on Solomonia. Bernstein seems to have come across those original comments, and in an update to his post, quoted me at length. In preparing this post, I took Bernstein's editorial suggestions and added "A historian of Israel, or even a fluent Hebrew speaker?" to my series of rhetorical questions in the antepenultimate paragraph.

Being Alone

2006-01-29T14:50:00.002-05:00

As with Marjan the lion, although with a palliative Neil Simon undertone, the story of Zablon Simintov and his erstwhile nemesis Ishaq Levin is about survival. Simintov is literally the last Jew left in Afghanistan.

When Zablon Simintov found Ishaq Levin sprawled on the cement synagogue floor last week, he immediately realized two things: His housemate and archnemesis of nearly seven years was dead, and he was now in all likelihood the last Afghan Jew still living in the country.

"I'm not sad about that," Simintov said with a frown Wednesday. He acknowledged dryly that he would not miss Levin, an octogenarian who apparently died of natural causes. Simintov, 44, had feuded bitterly with him for as long as the two men occupied separate rooms in the ruins of the only remaining synagogue in Kabul.

...

The Taliban government, which was in power when Simintov returned to Kabul in 1998 after working for several years in Turkmenistan, did not look kindly on his faith. On many occasions, he said, Taliban officials carted him and Levin off to jail, where they were beaten with electric cables and rifle butts for days.

"The Taliban would shout at me, 'Why don't you convert to Islam?' And I would say, 'Not if you paid me one million dollars,' " Simintov recalled.

The Taliban was ousted by U.S.-led forces in 2001. The fact that both remaining Jews survived the Taliban's five-year reign is something of a miracle. Taliban authorities, determined to stamp out practices they considered un-Islamic, outlawed music, whipped men who failed to grow long beards and demolished two enormous Buddha statues that were carved into a cliff 13 centuries ago.

...

Now Simintov is alone in this two-storey complex of empty rooms. His carpet shop long gone, he lives in penury, asking visitors for whisky and phone cards. Down the hall, tattered religious texts are piled in a cupboard and thick dust coats the altar along with globs of excrement from birds which nest in the light fittings.

Levin's apartment is directly underneath. It has been sealed by police but through paint-splattered windows can be seen broken furniture, clothes spilling from a chest, and stacks of useless banknotes from the former regime piled on the carpet.

He would join his wife and daughters, who left for Israel six years ago, he said. But soon the issue of the synagogue ownership will be reopened, when Levin's son arrives from Israel to collect his father's belongings. In Kabul's soaring property market, the building is worth several million dollars.

Simintov has appealed to Israel to fund its rehabilitation, but as he is the last Jew standing in Afghanistan it is unclear for what purpose.

From Normblog.

Separated at Birth?

2005-12-24T20:42:00.000-05:00

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Disgruntled Macaque

Airbrushing Anti-Semitism

2005-11-17T01:29:00.001-05:00

Emma Brockes has interviewed Noam Chomsky for al Guardian, in light of his being named today's top public intellectual in a poll of Foreign Policy magazine's readership. In an avuncular moment early in their exchange, Chomsky rebuffs Brockes' suggestion that his memory might be photographic:

It's the other way round. I can't remember names, can't remember faces. I don't have any particular talents that everybody else doesn't have.

Through the rest of the interview, Chomsky debunks this assertion by showing that his mendacity is preternatural. It is often discussed whether Chomsky is some sort of Holocaust-denier. This is fallout from his bizarre decision in 1979 to add his name to a petition defending Robert Faurisson, a vicious French anti-Semite and practitioner of this dark art. The petition lamented the "crude attempt to silence" Faurisson's "research into the 'Holocaust' question." Chomsky then added an avis to Faurisson's Memoire en defense that described him as a "relatively apolitical liberal of some sort." This, about a man whose "findings" (as they're called in the petition Chomsky signed) include the observation that in requiring Jews to wear the yellow star from the age of six, "Hitler was perhaps less concerned with the Jewish question than with ensuring the safety of German soldiers" (Faurisson, Vérité, p. 190).

In spite of this, Chomsky is not a Holocaust denier. He has explicitly affirmed its existence, referring to it as "the most fantastic outburst of insanity in human history". But although he is not a capital-H Holocaust revisionist, Chomsky has long vacillated between the minimization and denial of lower-case holocausts. His infamous attempts to downplay and delete the Khmer Rouge autogenocide are the piece de resistance of this disgusting pattern. His subordination of the 9/11 atrocities to Bill Clinton's silly decision to bomb Sudan's Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant is a lesser but still outrageous example (see Hitchens on this).

In the Brockes interview, we have a real treat: Chomsky's revisionist reflex fires repeatedly. Take this lunatic passage about Bosnia and Serbian national socialism:

These days, [Chomsky's wife] Carol accompanies her husband to most of his public appearances. He is asked to lend his name to all sorts of crackpot causes and she tries to intervene to keep his schedule under control. As some see it, one ill-judged choice of cause was the accusation made by Living Marxism magazine that during the Bosnian war, shots used by ITN of a Serb-run detention camp were faked. The magazine folded after ITN sued, but the controversy flared up again in 2003 when a journalist called Diane Johnstone made similar allegations in a Swedish magazine, Ordfront, taking issue with the official number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre. (She said they were exaggerated.) In the ensuing outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising Johnstone's "outstanding work". Does he regret signing it?

"No," he says indignantly. "It is outstanding. My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough. It may be wrong; but it is very careful and outstanding work."

How, I wonder, can journalism be wrong and still outstanding?

"Look," says Chomsky, "there was a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in western culture which was very much like a passionate religious conviction. It was like old-fashioned Stalinism: if you depart a couple of millimetres from the party line, you're a traitor, you're destroyed. It's totally irrational. And Diane Johnstone, whether you like it or not, has done serious, honest work. And in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they think something they reported was false, is outrageous."

They didn't "think" it was false; it was proven to be so in a court of law.

But Chomsky insists that "LM was probably correct" and that, in any case, it is irrelevant. "It had nothing to do with whether LM or Diane Johnstone were right or wrong." It is a question, he says, of freedom of speech. "And if they were wrong, sure; but don't just scream well, if you say you're in favour of that you're in favour of putting Jews in gas chambers."

Chomsky's performance here, and its chilling recollection of the Faurisson affair -- the petition or letter in defense, the eager legitimation of a pseudo-scholar with evil motives, the navel-gazing about an unthreatened freedom of speech -- will be ably explored by other commentators, in particular the indefatigable Oliver Kamm, who has made a cottage industry out of incisive and readable critiques of Chomsky. I would rather focus on another part of the interview, in which Chomsky further succumbs to his revisionist reflex. I can only guess that he felt the comparative obscurity of the topic would enable him to so grossly distort it.

Brockes renders some biographical detail about Chomsky, in which his Jewish origins are discussed. It contains the following passage, which concludes with Chomsky making a startling aside:

Chomsky's activism has its roots in his childhood. He grew up in the depression of the 1930s, the son of William Chomsky and Elsie Simonofsky, Russian immigrants to Philadelphia. He describes the family as "working-class Jews", most of whom were unemployed, although his parents, both teachers, were lucky enough to work. There was no sense of America as the promised land: "It wasn't much of an opportunity-giver in my immediate family," he says, although it was an improvement on the pogroms of Russia, which none the less Chomsky can't help qualifying as "not very bad, by contemporary standards. In the worst of the major massacres, I think about 49 people were killed."

Chomsky is referring to the First Kishinev pogrom of 1903, which indeed killed between 47-49 Jews in what is modern-day Moldova. It is true that by ancient or contemporary standards of slaughter, this is not a high body count. But taken all together, the pogroms were probably the most devastating phenomenon in Jewish history besides the Holocaust. And as with many historical phenomena, they came to be associated with a signal event whose peculiar character positioned it to represent the whole. Although it shouldn't (you'll see why a few paragraphs later), Kishinev has filled this role. An account in the April 28, 1903 New York Times gives an idea why:

The anti-Jewish riots in Kishinev, Bessarabia, are worse than the censor will permit to publish. There was a well laid-out plan for the general massacre of Jews on the day following the Russian Easter. The mob was led by priests, and the general cry, "Kill the Jews," was taken-up all over the city. The Jews were taken wholly unaware and were slaughtered like sheep. The dead number 120 and the injured about 500. The scenes of horror attending this massacre are beyond description. Babes were literally torn to pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob. The local police made no attempt to check the reign of terror. At sunset the streets were piled with corpses and wounded. Those who could make their escape fled in terror, and the city is now practically deserted of Jews.

New York Times reporters had accuracy issues then too -- the numbers are off -- but there is no doubt that this account is representative of the greater bloody ouevre. The randomness and savagery of these attacks on Jews, and the great length of time over which they were carried out, were major factors in both the spread of Zionism and the pioneering Jewish involvement in socialism. The impact of the pogroms on Jews was seminal.

Chomsky distorts the historical narrative by atomizing and thus decontextualizing a single event. This is a common feature in his argumentation, and perhaps not for nothing, a key technique used by professional revisionists like Faurisson. But Chomsky is also wrong in the particular claim that Kishinev was the "worst of the major massacres" in its harvest of dead. Consider these statistics:

Bialystock, Russian-controlled Polish territory, 1906: A pogrom possibly inspired by the Okhrana kills 70-100 Russian Jews
Odessa, Russian-controlled Ukraine, 1905: 299 dead
Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917-20:

75,000 killed in the Ukraine (Bernard Lewis)
150,000 killed in Russia and the Ukraine (Orlando Figes)

During the years 1917-1920 (assuming 1095 days), if 49 Jews were killed by mobs every day the number of dead would amount only to 53,655. You would need at least 137 per day to reach the Figes figure. A daily tally of Chomsky's "worst" estimate doesn't even attain the Lewis number for the Ukraine.

On pages 677-679 of A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891-1924 (Penguin), Orlando Figes describes the kind of violence that claimed those 150,000 Jews. An excerpt:

On seizing a town from the Reds, it was common for the White officers to allow their soldiers two or three days' freedom to rob and kill the Jews at will. This was seen as a reward for the troops and a just retribution for the part played by the Jews in supporting the Reds. There were no recorded cases of a White officer ever halting a pogrom, but several cases where even senior generals, such as Mamontov and Mai-Maevsky, ordered them. One of the worst pogroms took place in Kiev, right under the noses of the White authorities. From 1 to 5 October the Cossack soldiers went around the city breaking into Jewish homes, demanding money, raping and killing. The officers and local priests urged them on with speeches claiming that 'The Yids kill all our people and support the Bolsheviks.' Even Shulgin, an ardent anti-Semite was disturbed by the climate of 'medieval terror' in the streets and by the 'terrifying howl' of the 'Yids' at night 'that breaks the heart'. Yet General Dragomirov who ruled the city, did not order a stop to the pogtrom until the 6th, the day after the orgy of killing had finally burned itself out.

Many pogroms were accompanied by gruesome acts of torture on a par with those of the Red Terror. In the town of Fastov the Cossacks hung their victims from the ceiling, releasing them just before they choked to death: if their relatives, who watched this in terror, could not pay up the money they had demanded, the Cossacks repeated the operation. The Cossacks cut off limbs and noses with their sabres and ripped out babies from their mothers' wombs. They set light to Jewish houses and forced those who tried to escape to turn back into the fire. In some places, such as Chernobyl, the Jews were herded into the synagogue, which was then burned down with them inside. In others, such as Cherkass, they gang-raped hundreds of pre-teen girls. Many of their victims were later found with knife and sabre wounds to their small vaginas. One of the most horrific pogroms took place in the small Podole town of Krivoe Ozero during the final stages of the Whites' retreat in late December. By this stage the White troops had ceased to care about world opinion and, as they contemplated defeat, threw all caution to the winds. The Terek Cossacks tortured and mutilated hundreds of Jews, many of them women and young children. Hundreds of corpses were left out in the snow for the dogs and pigs to eat. In the midst of this macabre scene the Cossack officers held a surreal ball in the town post office, complete with evening dress and an orchestra, to which they invited the local magistrate and a group of prostitutes they had brought with them from Kherson. While their soldiers were killing Jews for sport, the officers and their beau monde drank champagne and danced the night away.

Very bad, by contemporary standards. There's more. Most people refer to an erroneously truncated epoch when they mention "the pogroms" -- roughly the years 1881-1917. They also focus on Russia. It is more accurate, however, to date and source the phenomenon in mid-17th Century Ukraine. At the time, that country was under a feckless and dying Polish rule. A local Cossack leader, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, led a successful rebellion with Muslim Tatar allies against the Poles. The ensuing chaos permitted the subjugation of Ukraine by Sweden and Russia. Jews had comprised a class of middlemen that interfaced between the Ukrainian peasants and their Polish masters, and were thus widely reviled. Seizing the opportunity, Khmelnytsky goaded his European forces on to the slaughter of between 50,000 and 200,000 Jews in Europe's first series of pogroms. (Khmelnytsky's Tatars were more inclined to sell their Jews into slavery.)

The first two years of this decade-long epoch (1648-58) were the most ferocious, suggesting that per-incident body counts were rather more than ~50. 6,000 Jews were killed in Nemirov alone by Cossacks disguised as Poles. As formative in Jewish history as the late 19th Century slaughters, the Khmelnytsky pogroms in no small part provided the psychological impetus for the birth of Hasidism.

Pogroms took place leading up to and during the Holocaust. Around two weeks after the Nazis took the northern Polish town of Jedwabne from the Soviets, its Gentile inhabitants rose up and beat, drowned and burned to death 1,600 of their long-time Jewish neighbors in a single day (the Polish Institute of National Remembrance disputes this figure, offering an alternative count of ~800). Jan Tomasz Gross, the Polish-born Princeton professor who wrote the definitive account of this episode, explicitly called it a pogrom.

Chomsky's belittlement of Kishinev and the phenomenon of the pogroms is a continuation of a tendency to minimize the importance of anti-Semitism. As far as I know, Chomsky began doing this in a talk he gave to the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign about "Anti-Semitism, Zionism and the Palestinians" (again, see Oliver Kamm). In it, Chomsky described the status of anti-Semitism in American society today:

By now Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of the population. You find occasional instances of anti-Semitism but they are marginal. There's plenty of racism, but it's directed against Blacks, Latinos, Arabs are targets [sic] of enormous racism, and those problems are real. Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem, fortunately. It's raised, but it's raised because privileged people want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control. That's why anti-Semitism is becoming an issue. Not because of the threat of anti-Semitism; they want to make sure there’s no critical look at the policies the US (and they themselves) support in the Middle East.

Chomsky is right that religious and racist-Right anti-Semitism are marginal in American society. Of course, he omits mention of the left-wing variety rife among intellectuals of whom he is a cynosure. Notice the callowness of his argument, reminiscent of his cheap facsimile Norman Finkelstein, that anti-Semitism, the one mirage among plenty of "real" racism today, is merely an arrow in the quiver of the ruling claque of Jews and their supporters!

The minimization of Jewish suffering and the traducement of Israel and Zionism combine to form a pattern wearily recognizable on the Left. Chomsky's revision of the pogroms is useful to this enterprise, because it blurs the historical record of the exigency driving the spread of Zionism. The pogroms might otherwise serve to arouse sympathy for the Jewish pioneers, or at least broaden the ambit of the Arab-Israeli conflict beyond the Manichaean passion play with which Chomsky seduces his followers. Over the pogroms, one can now easily patch the paleo-Left thesis that Israel is just an imperial cancer, a Middle East metastasis of the West, of America, of international finance and the Jews.

One might also consider this latest episode in Chomsky's troubled relationship with mainstream Jews in light of his psychology. Oliver Kamm, whose analyses of Chomsky have been helpful in the composition of this piece, rails against "adducing psychological explanations for political views". I understand and respect this position; as Kamm rightly points out, it is uncivil to force people to respond to unfalsifiable charges. On the other hand, I think psychology is the substrate of politics, and it would be dishonest and harmful to ignore this on principle.

I'll compromise by leaving the reader to make up his mind about what fuels Chomsky's animus against Israel (one that has expanded lately to include the notion of Jewish/Zionist control of American politics). I will conclude, however, with an observation. For a man who thinks Bill Clinton's bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant in which one person died is worse than 9/11 -- because the downstream damage of lost medicine and monies theoretically resulted in "killing unknown numbers of people" -- it is telling that he views the Kishinev massacre in such an absurdly discrete fashion.

Airbrushing Anti-Semitism

2005-11-17T01:29:00.000-05:00

It's the other way round. I can't remember names, can't remember faces. I don't have any particular talents that everybody else doesn't have.

Bialystock, Russian-controlled Polish territory, 1906: A pogrom possibly inspired by the Okhrana kills 70-100 Russian Jews
Odessa, Russian-controlled Ukraine, 1905: 299 dead
Russian Revolution and Civil War, 1917-20:

75,000 killed in the Ukraine (Bernard Lewis)
150,000 killed in Russia and the Ukraine (Orlando Figes)

A Miniature Manifesto

2005-06-11T17:44:00.000-04:00

Harry's Place, a British blog run by Real Leftists, is one of my must-reads. A key reason why is this post, which alerts us to MEMRI's recent outing of an anti-Semitic screed (transcript here) given to Qatar TV by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Al-Qaradawi is an Islamist cleric who, among many retrograde things, endorses Female Genital Mutilation and the murder of pregnant Israeli women (lest their babies grow up to be IDF soldiers). Earlier this year, and predictably, Ken Livingstone, the socialist Mayor of London, found in al-Qaradawi a kindred spirit. This didn't sit well with Harry and company.

Qaradawi's interview is a real gem. He pronounces the entire Jewish people (save a negligible remainder) "Zionist", and therefore unclean. "May they choke on their food," he says, and rather than shake hands with a Jew, one should "wash his hands seven times, once with earth", a reference to a hadith, or reported saying, of Muhammad, in which the Islamic prophet described the way in which one must purify one's bowl if a dog should lick it (Sunan Abu-Dawud, Book 1, Chapter 38, 73; Sahih Bukhari, Volume 1, Book 4, 173).

From time to time, I find myself on other blogs writing little executive summaries of why I invest so much energy in analyzing the New Anti-Semitism. I wrote the following in response to Benjamin, a Harry's Place commenter who, seemingly inured to the tragic irony of someone like Livingstone rallying behind someone like al-Qaradawi, questioned Harry's frequent concern with bigotry against Jews. I think it serves well as a miniature manifesto for what I do at FWG.

This blog seems concerned almost exclusively concerned [sic] about prejudice against Jews. I was always taught that the fight against anti-racism and prejudice is broad one and that's how it should be fought.

I won't speak for the authors of this blog, but I will explain my own intense interest in a particular prejudice against Jews, which judging from the attention they pay the issue, may overlap with the motivations of Harry and company.

I think the world is extremely well trained to discern and combat anti-Semitism of the colloquially "right-wing" variety. That is to say, it is very easy for us to recognize the Christian anti-Semitism of a Hutton (and, to a lesser extent, Mel) Gibson; and it is similarly simple to clock the Jew-hatred of the febrile "racialist" type. What is new (or New, as people like me would have it), is the articulation and propagation of a left-wing, or New, anti-Semitism, a political iteration of the "oldest hatred".

Some of us (including Harry and company) come from a left-liberal tradition, and as such we are alternately fascinated and appalled that history finds us combating, in our own ideological milieu, a "human rights" animus against Israel and Jews. This is not something I would ever have anticipated when I was a young altruist eager to carry the left-liberal torch into the 21st Century.

In light of the Holocaust, that apotheosis of illiberal inhumanity, I can think of no more liberal cause than opposing the sorts of fascism that have trundled over Jews. And I find it perverse that the strongest enablers today of the legatees of Hitler in the Third World -- the Iranian mullahs, Hamas, al Qaeda -- are to be found among the ranks of "progressives".

At least in my case, that is why I focus disproportionately on this particular prejudice against Jews (not "prejudice" against them, as you broadly conceive it). I care about the Jewish people tremendously, but in some ways there are even deeper truths to unearth for the human stake in the "fight against anti-racism and prejudice". Determining why we're losing this round may give us the key to winning the overall battle.

Illiberal Liberals

2005-02-13T02:26:00.001-05:00

Consider the following juxtaposition

"There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East - the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States."

-- Pat Buchanan (1990)

"Just as the Israelis and their American amen corner helped drag the US into the Iraq war, so they also have inflamed Iraqi sentiment against the US by spectacular uses of state terror against Palestinians."

-- Juan Cole (2004)

for concise and dispositive proof of the illiberal nature of so much modern "liberalism".

Professor Alam and the Western Chimera

2004-12-31T04:33:00.001-05:00

In perhaps the most loathsome display of academic animus against America since the Nicholas de Genova affair, M. Shahid Alam, a professor of Economics at Northeastern University, writes that the 9/11 hijackers were like the American Revolutionaries.

On April 19, 1775, 700 British troops reached Concord, Massachusetts, to disarm the American colonists who were preparing to start an insurrection. When the British ordered them to disperse, the colonists fired back at the British soldiers. This "shot heard 'round the world" heralded the start of an insurrection against Britain, the greatest Western power of its time. And when it ended, victorious, in 1783, the colonists had gained their objective. They had established a sovereign but slave-holding republic, the United States of America.

The colonists broke away because this was economically advantageous to their commercial and landed classes. As colonists, they were ruled by a parliament in which they were not represented, and which did not represent their interests. The colonies were not free to protect and develop their own commerce and industries. Their bid for independence was made all the more attractive because it was pressed under the banner of liberty. The colonial elites had imbibed well the lessons of the Enlightenment, and here in the new world, they had an opportunity to harness liberty in the service of their economic interests. Backed by the self interest of their landed and commercial elites, and inspired by revolutionary ideas, the colonists had a dream worth pursuing. They were prepared to die for this dream - and to kill. They did: and they won.

On September 11, 2001, nineteen Arab hijackers too demonstrated their willingness to die - and to kill - for their dream. They died so that their people might live, free and in dignity. The manner of their death - and the destruction it wreaked - is not merely a testament to the vulnerabilities that modern technology has created to clandestine attacks. After all, skyscrapers and airplanes have co-existed peacefully for many decades. The attacks of 9-11 were in many ways a work of daring and imagination too; if one can think objectively of such horrors. They were a cataclysmic summation of the history of Western depredations in the Middle East: the history of a unity dismembered, of societies manipulated by surrogates, of development derailed and disrupted, of a people dispossessed. The explosion of 9-11 was indeed a "shot heard 'round the world."

Exploring Professor Alam's ouevre gives us more than mere occasion for an orgy of outrage. It affords us an anatomy of the Red-Green alliance, the working relationship between Islamic radicals and the anti-globalization Left.

It has been much remarked (1,2) that Islamic anti-Semitism has borrowed many of the topoi of its European predecessor. To be sure, we need go no farther for corroboration than the web site on which Professor Alam published. Iviews.com (the name presumably parses to "Islamic Views dot com"), is replete with anti-American and anti-Israeli material. Particularly striking is its collection of political cartoons, which are identical to some of the worst, Der Sturmer-like caricatures to appear in modern Islamic media. Some examples (the titles are mine):


Sharon as Cannibal	Sharon's Kosher Meats

Pointed Pinocchio Reference	Jewish World Conspiracy

Jews, Hollywood and the Holocaust	Jewish "Neighborhoods"

Zionist Occupied Government 1	Zionist Occupied Government 2

Iviews is connected to Islamicity.com, a radical Islamist recruitment site whose viciousness caused the US government embarrassment last May when it unwisely deployed one of its administrators, Mohammed Aleem, as a witness against an alleged terrorist shill. From Islamicity.com, you can purchase one of the most venerable modern anti-Semitic texts, Henry Ford's The International Jew. Just follow the link in the Products pane in the bottom-right of the Iviews.com homepage.

Moving on to Professor Alam's own web site, we are immediately greeted with an image advertising one of Alam's products, a book called Is There an Islamic Problem? The book's cover reengages the theme expressed in the latter Iviews cartoons of cognate Israeli-American evil. (At FWG, we know this to be a fundamental Leftist theme, one which forms a vital ideological bridge between Islamists and their Leftist fellow travelers.) In the Preface to Islamic Problem? we read:

Only a few years back, Francis Fukuyama had announced to the world that man had finally reached the 'end of history,' that Hegel's Zeitgeist, after successively wrestling and defeating the fascist and communist challenges to freedom, had delivered history into the long-awaited Valhalla of liberal capitalism. The American model, combining free markets and democracy, had triumphed. There might be a few road bumps ahead, but henceforth, it would be a straight and narrow path, paved with peace, prosperity, and, not to forget, unchallenged American supremacy.

Perhaps, the attacks of September 11 have ended this end-of-history fantasy. At least, some oracles are now proclaiming that history could not be sent into retirement; not just yet. Sorry, there is one more dragon to slay. A new fascism has reared its ugly head. It is fascism in its Islamic variant. Saint George must again sharpen his lance to slay the Islamic dragon. Why this unseemly retreat from a triumph that seemed complete just a few years back?

...

Notwithstanding its horror, September 11 was a symbol that spoke unmistakably of the manifold connections that tie the United States - through Zionism, through its messianism, through its links to an older past, through wars, through sanctions, through tens of billion of dollars in military aid, through coups, through partnerships with corrupt monarchies, through vetoes at the Security Council, through demonization of Islam, through the brothels of corporate media - to Palestinians, to Iraqis, to the Arab world, to the Islamicate world, to Africa, Asia and Latin America: in a word, to the Periphery. September 11 was a souvenir from the dark dungeons of our secret history, a digitized, televised image from the lost and forgotten Abu Ghraibs of decades past.

Here Alam interestingly stands the modern history of totalitarian ideas on its head. We no longer find the West, having born and purged the salvationist creeds of Communism and Nazism, battling a religious fascism snatched from the waning fires of its own secular eschatology. Rather we detect in Alam's gloating prose that America, simultaneously a Crusader-like oppressor of Muslims and a callous bastion of capitalism, is edging toward the conclusion of its own millenarian endgame. From his Marxist grab-bag, Alam produces a familiar historical determinism and weds it to the 9/11 hijackers in the service of destroying the capitalist/Orientalist chimera.

The reimagining of Michael Moore's minutemen as Mohammed Atta and his thugs is the main thrust of Alam's vile Iviews essay. In the acknowledgements section of the Preface to Islamic Problem?, we clock a source of this Third-Worldist hatred of a hegemon:

My final acknowledgement is paternal. It goes to my son, Junaid, from whom I have learnt far more than he has from me, at least in the years during which he was negotiating his rites of passage. Instead of writing poetry, as I did to ease my passage, he was reading Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. I think it all started when a teacher gave him a copy of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. I may have helped it along by giving him access to my copy of Aimé Césaire.

Césaire and Fanon were Third Worldist demagogues. Fanon, a Martiniquais psychiatrist, was a violent purgationist whose writings were formative for the French-educated founders of the Khmer Rouge (see Karl D. Jackson's Ideology of Total Revolution, reprinted in Jackson's Cambodia, 1975-1978: Rendezvous with Death, pg. 73). Alam seems to have drunk deeply:

"For the native, life can only spring up again out of the rotting corpse of the settler... for the colonized people this violence... invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in a great chain, a part of the great organism of violence... (Fanon 1963:93)"

-- taken from Intellectual Origins of the Khmer Rouge, by Karl D. Jackson, reprinted in Jackson's Cambodia, 1975-1978: Rendezvous with Death, pg. 248)

The autogenesis of a people through revolutionary violence is redolent of the writings of Fanon-precursor Georges Sorel, the proto-fascist, anti-Semitic (see Zeev Sternhell's The Birth of Fascist Ideology, pp. 83-86) father of revolutionary syndicalism. And of course, in Professor Alam the coterminous hatred of America and Israel is mirrored by a complimentarity of anti-Semitism and revolutionary fervor.

Despite being a member of the modern academe, in Zionist Thesis and Anti-Thesis, Professor Alam is not above riffing on the junk-science Khazar Pseudo-Fact to divorce modern Jews from any historical connection to the Holy Land.

"Apart from the legal questions, it would be a little hard proving that European Jews, those who demanded the right to emigrate to Palestine, were in fact descended from Abraham. Even the world’s leading geneticists would feel challenged, trying to establish a connection between a present population and a putative ancestor whose existence has never been established historically. What if this connection was tenuous, or a stronger connection was discovered between Abraham and the Arabs?"

Further down and throughout, in a display of more traditional anti-Semitism Alam is gripped by the simultaneous loathing and admiration of Jews.

Israel has drawn, and continues to draw, upon the world’s most sophisticated pool of manpower-the Jewry of United States, Europe, and Russia.

...

Our Martian observer also had little notion of the resources commanded by the Jews. Already, by the sixteenth century, the Jews had established themselves as Europe’s leading bankers, since the Church banned Christians from usurious activities. In turn, the European Enlightenment brought equal rights for all citizens, allowing Jews to move out of the ghettoes, and rise to distinction in various professions. Far from being an "inferior race" -- as the Goyims [sic] claimed -- the Jews demonstrated that they had enormous gifts.

As with the hardy anti-Semite ex-Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia, Alam invests the Jews with mystical, collective talents and outsize power while seeking to undercut them. In another example, Alam argues in A Predatory Orientalism, that "the Jews, as junior partners of the imperialist powers, would seek to deepen the Orientalist project in the service of Western power".

Indeed, conspiratorial Jews everywhere besiege the edifice of "anti-Zionism", even Alam's own contribution. In response to an e-mail by LGF reader Dean Levitt, sent in protest of his Iviews essay, Professor Alam asked:

Why is it that the only hateful mail I have received is signed by Levitt, Hoch or Freedman?

Alam's writings comprise a kind of anatomical model demonstrating the ideological nexus between Marxism and Islamism. They illustrate the fluidity with which one set of theories informs the other. And, as Alam hints in the Preface to Is There an Islamic Problem?, in the passing of the ideological baton from father to son we discern the practical need to combat this totalitarian hybrid in its earlier stages.

From Jihad Watch.

Postscript: In a Faurisson-lite gesture, the always-dependable Noam Chomsky donates this quote to the bookjacket of Is There an Islamic Problem?:

The analysis is careful and serious, and will be of considerable value to anyone concerned with the crucial and timely issues Alam addresses, whether they come to agree with the conclusions or not.

The Triune Demon

2004-07-19T00:27:00.000-04:00

Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs links to an article by Rob Foot in Australia's Quadrant magazine discussing a facet of the New Antisemitism -- its coterminousness with anti-Americanism.

I was stirred to comment on it, so I'll reproduce that here (minorly edited), as both the article and my response examine the rot at the heart of contemporary Leftism, and the history of ideas that led to it.

This is a sometimes inadequate and sometimes brilliant article about a complex topic, so it merits a lot more commentary than this. One thing that watchers of Leftist anti-Semitism have long noticed, however, is the irony embodied in an incorrect assertion of Foot's:

Yet nowhere did socialism fail to fail. Nowhere was it tried - and I mean real socialism, not welfare statism - where tyranny, misery, poverty, fear and oppression failed to follow.

Putting aside whether Social Democracy is actually socialism, and acknowledging that all other socialist experiments have indeed failed, one must note that in not every case did socialism bring about tyranny, misery, fear and oppression. In the case of the kibbutz movement of Israel, socialism died (or is dying), but entirely outside of the context of Stalinist or Hitlerian insanity to which Foot alludes.

This is more than an academic point. Why? Because where Foot is brilliantly on target is in illustrating the complimentarity of Jew-hatred and anti-Americanism in modern Leftism. Socialist anti-Americanism is a relatively new phenomenon, but revolutionary or utopian anti-Semitism spans centuries. If one studies the history of revolutionary anti-Semitism, one sees that invariably it conflates things like modernity, progress, paper money, the city, and increasing isolation from God with Jews and Judaism. Indeed, in a sick inverse of Catholicism, it can be said that revolutionary anti-Semites revile a triune demon: modernity, capitalism, Jews/Judaism.

So, to Foot's point that Leftists loathe America and its compliment, an empowered and international Jewry, our correction produces a vital irony: The one historical flirtation with socialism that saw a measure of success was conducted by Jews as an integral component of their nationalist experiment.

Now imagine some of the Indymedia kids chewing on that, if any of them were vaguely capable figuring any of this out. I don't think the irony escapes people like Chomsky, though.

Who Am I?

2002-11-03T20:15:00.000-05:00

My name is John-Paul Pagano. I'm a Systems Engineer at a Fortune 500 media company in New York City. In my shadow life, I double as a writer on politics, culture and intellectual history.

This blog examines history and current events to advance a thesis. Since the Enlightenment, utopian movements have crucially relied on anti-Semitism. Today's New Antisemitism is both a product and producer of a similarly utopian response to modernity.

I grew up in the Boston area and have been living in Brooklyn for almost a decade now. I also like photography, mom-and-pop ethnic food and down-home die-like-a-dog jazz.