Augean Stables

John McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin has certainly thrown the political and journalistic worlds for a loop. Initially, the coverage of Palin reflected the astonishment and the degree of unpreparedness of the MSM in McCain’s selection. Then, as the media recovered, and went about its work of covering the heretofore little-known Palin. Does their coverage of Palin reflect something about the media in this country? What can we learn? (more…)

It is not news to any observers of European Jewry that the situation in France is extremely worrying. In addition to the vicious anti-Israel atmosphere, or perhaps partially because of it, there have been a number of violent anti-Semitic attacks. These attacks can be fatal, as in the brutal kidnapping, torture, and killing of Ilan Halimi, a 23 year-old French Jew.

This past Saturday, another attack occured in Paris (read a full description of the attack here). Three 17- and 18-year old Bnei Akiva boys were on their way home from afternoon Minha prayers when they were set upon by a group of Muslim youths. The three have since been released from the hospital, and the police are still looking for the attackers.

In all likelihood, the situation will only worsen, especially if a new intifada or war breaks out in the Middle East.  

After Sen. Joe Lieberman’s speech at the RNC, I predicted that there would be attacks on the blogs, especially in the comments section, that vilify him in anti-Semitic terms. Lieberman would be portrayed as really representing Israel’s interests in the more subtle attacks, and as a treacherous Jew in the more direct. Here is some of what I found-

From the comments on Ben Smith’s Politico post, “Gibbs Slams Lieberman“ 

Leiberman beleives that McCain’s policy of keeping troops in the M.E. indefinately is better for Israel’s security. That is the reason, the one and only reason that Leiberman supports McCain. So, you have to ask yourself, what is it when someone puts another nation’s interests above ours? Treason.

Lieberman should just cut out the middleman and go run for Israeli PM.

How can you question Joe Lieberman’s patriotism? He clearly loves his country. The only question is which country?

Lieberman (I-Israel) is the most pathetic figure in American politics. You can have him Repugs! Enjoy!

I hear Liebs may run as Bob Barr’s veep now unless Israel calls offers this clown a cabinet poosition as Secretary of War. It’s all he cares about.

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A follow-up to our recent discussion of the preferences and identity of Israeli Arabs-

A popular introductory workbook to American students of Arabic, Alif Baa with DVDs, is published by Georgetown University Press. As the title suggests, the workbook is accompanied by DVDs featuring Arabic speakers from around the Arab-speaking world.

I was curious to see whether they would include any individuals from Israel or the West Bank. In the section where students learn to introduce themselves and their place of origin, there is a middle-aged woman from Israel. She says in Arabic that she is Palestinian, from Nazareth. Nazareth is well within the pre-1967 borders of Israel. There are three possibilities to explain her statement-

1) She lives in Nazareth and is an Israeli citizen, but refers to herself as a Palestinian, as many Israeli Arabs do, especially since the outbreak of the second intifada.

2) She lives in the West Bank, Gaza, or even Lebanon, and still refers to Nazareth as her home, as her parents left during the war in 1948.

3) In Hebrew, she tells people that she is Israeli, but in an Arabic setting, she refers to herself as a Palestinian.

I’d say that the first option is the most likely. But ask her if she’d trade in her Israeli passport, and all that comes with it, for a Palestinian one, there is no doubt as to what her answer would be.  

Obama made a revealing remark in answer to a hypothetical question about what he’d do if his daughter became pregnant.

“I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby,” Obama said.

Now granted this is an off-the-cuff remark made on a grueling campaign trail, and I’m not going to analyze it to death. On the other hand it does offer an insight into why the West is in demographic decline. The idea that having when you’re young, having a child is a punishment — burden, yes, but punishment…? — represents a wider attitude towards children that more or less sees them as getting in the way of personal fulfillment. How many potential parents don’t have kids because of the constraint on their life-style?

I’m not arguing that we need to reproduce at the rate — and with the authoritarian cruelty — of some cultures, but I do think that if we’re going to survive we have to stay in touch with — renew our touch with — the basic joys and ego-deprivations of having children, of pouring some of ourselves into something other than our own self-gratification.

N.B.: The following is an essay I wrote several years ago while working on early Christian millennialism. It’s a critique of René Girard’s work on the subject, in particular, the ideas he delineated in a book with the modest title of Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. I’m posting it here partly because Yaakov of Breath of the Beast is working through some of Girard’s ideas and we have come to similar critiques of this seminal thinker’s provocative work. I also welcome any suggestions or criticisms from readers, even though this is not in the main stream of this blog’s focus. The essay is neither polished, nor fully footnoted; consider it a draft.

According to Girard, the New Testament (NT) stands apart from all previous thinking on sacrifice, with the partial exception of Judaism, because, rather than declare the sacrificial victim guilty, the victim is the very image of purity and innocence. Thus a mythical implosion occurs. This unjust sacrifice of the innocent extinguishes the self-regenerating mentality of sacrificing the guilty, thus putting an end to scapegoating. The notion has problems with handling Jewish materials, something especially evident in the work of Hamerton-Kelly, whose anti-Judaic tendencies flourish under his apologetic pen.

What strikes the millennial scholar here, however, is the depiction of Jesus as innocent. Granted Girard is working with the “myth” of Jesus, – indeed, Girard regularly and, I think, revealingly, refers to not to Jesus but to Christ.¹ But the myth is self-consciously embedded in a historical discourse about millennial hopes and apocalyptic expectations which – surely much to amazement of all sides at the time were they to know it but not retrospectively to Girard – continues to flourish to this very day.

From the millennial, that is from the historical rather than mythical point of view, Jesus is not “innocent.” On the contrary, he was wrong about the imminence of the apocalypse and, whatever his intentions, dangerous to those who brought their demotic millennial hopes to the surface in a prime divider society profoundly hostile to such sentiments, in the case of Jesus, during the pax romana, whose peace the Romans nailed down, literally, with crucifixion. The kingdom was not at hand, and he got crucified for simple and predictable reasons by Romans who had no doubt of his guilt. There may well have been Jewish aristocrats who shared this perspective, and even invoked the “safety of the people” (given Roman rule), for their conservative, prime-divider politics. The disciples, those who developed the myth as well as those who wrote it down, needed above all to save their faith in their own salvation. And they chose to do so by denying Jesus’ error and in so doing, denying their own continuing and continuously fruitful error of anticipating the end at any moment.

The sacrificial victim in this process of denial was Judaism, especially Pharisaic (later rabbinic) Judaism. This sacrificial Judaism was judged guilty by Christians for the mere fact that they did not accept the divine, blameless and faultless messiah of the Christians. Thus, far from putting an end to scapegoating, NT narratives actually imbedded a new kind of scapegoating into its very history and salvific myth. For Christians, Christ, Jesus sacralized, was innocent, the Jews guilty of the double crime of killing the man and denying the God.

Thus it cannot be “merely” the Saducees who are guilty of killing Jesus, it must be the Pharisees who are responsible for killing Christ. For the sake of saving themselves from the rocky shores of cognitive dissonance, Christians consigned their religious parent to perpetual guilt, and, as we shall see, when Christians gained power, to oppression, prison and death. Girard, despite his usual acuity in such matters, does not perceive any of this disguised sacrificial activity in the text, partly because it is crucial to his own reading of the Crucifixion, partly because his entire effort aims at showing that this text presents the end of sacrificial constructions. Thus he repeatedly refers to and analyzes the “Gospel” and the “text” as if it only needed direct interpretation, not deconstruction for its silent and disguised sacrificial activity.
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Robert Kagan, a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an informal adviser to the McCain campaign, whose most recent book is The Return of History and the End of Dreams, has an excellent piece in the Wall Street Journal on the bizarre turn that our “realist” thinkers have taken in recent years. It’s as if the “realists,” who should in principle line up with the Honor-Shame Jihad Paradigm (HSJP), have somehow adopted the Politically Correct Paradigm (PCP) — whose principles are as un-”realistic” as one could imagine, and then turned that paradigm against the only culture that makes PCP a viable option, the civil polities of the democratic West. Although Kagan focuses on the anomaly, my comments attempt to explain how this bizarre turn of events could happen. It’s got to do with the Moebius Strip of cognitive egocentrism, something no “realist” has any business falling prey to.

Power Play
The nature of nations, like people, never changes. Today’s political realists say economics rather than military might has become the guiding principle of countries, but the conflict in Georgia shows otherwise, argues Robert Kagan.
By ROBERT KAGAN
August 30, 2008; Page W1

Associated Press
A convoy of Russian troops drives toward the Abkhazian border in western Georgia.

Where are the realists? When Russian tanks rolled into Georgia, it ought to have been their moment. Here was Vladimir Putin, a cold-eyed realist if ever there was one, taking advantage of a favorable opportunity to shift the European balance of power in his favor — a 21st century Frederick the Great or Bismarck, launching a small but decisive war on a weaker neighbor while a surprised and dumbfounded world looked on helplessly. Here was a man and a nation pursuing “interest defined as power,” to use the famous phrase of Hans Morgenthau, acting in obedience to what Mr. Morgenthau called the “objective law” of international power politics. Yet where are Mr. Morgenthau’s disciples to remind us that Russia’s latest military action is neither extraordinary nor unexpected nor aberrant but entirely normal and natural, that it is but a harbinger of what is yet to come because the behavior of nations, like human nature, is unchanging?

This “objective law” is what Eli Sagan calls the “paranoid imperative.” Rule or be ruled… Do onto others before they do onto you. According to Sagan, this principle has prevailed in virtually all international relations between polities, and domestic relations between incumbent elites and commoners from the early centuries of the agricultural revolution. The dominance of this principle produces what I’ve called “prime divider societies.” I refer to this principle as the “dominating imperative” partly because when I spoke to colleagues in political science about it, they responded, “that’s not paranoid, it’s realistic”; and partly because I prefer saving the paranoid imperative for “exterminate or be exterminated.”

The significance of Sagan’s perspective, however, comes out when we understand the role of overcoming the paranoid imperative in creating civil polities. Only when a critical mass of autonomous moral agents can commit to renouncing the dominating imperative and trusting that others will as well, can a society create a democratic polity. I recently reread Mill’s words in an article by Alain de Botton on “The Nanny State”

“The only freedom which deserves the name is that of pursuing our own good, in our own way, so long as we do not attempt to deprive others of theirs, or impede their efforts to obtain it … The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community against his will is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not sufficient warrant.”

When I first read those principles in high school, it all seemed fairly straightforward. I didn’t realize how much they appeal to what I now understand is “liberal cognitive egocentrism” (LCE) that the zero-sum games that people play for emotional reasons make Mill’s eminently reasonable-sounding conditions extremely rare to achieve at a social level.

Our problem, as a democratic culture committed to the principles of civil polities, is that we fail to appreciate how exceptionally difficult it is to achieve these levels of tolerance and good will towards others, and as a result we get profoundly confused about both the ability of other cultures to achieve the same levels (PCP 1) and about our achievements (hyper-self-criticism and PCP 2). This goes back at least to the late 60s (when I first encountered the phenomenon): if we can have civil polities based on mutual trust and mutual freedoms, why can’t we do that with the whole world? (This is, by the way, an unspoken axiom of Chomsky’s thinking.) In some senses, the UN was created precisely with this model in mind, and the legislation of universal human rights was its quintessential expression.

Today’s “realists,” who we’re told are locked in some titanic struggle with “neoconservatives” on issues ranging from Iraq, Iran and the Middle East to China and North Korea, would be almost unrecognizable to their forebears. Rather than talk about power, they talk about the United Nations, world opinion and international law. They propose vast new international conferences, a la Woodrow Wilson, to solve intractable, decades-old problems. They argue that the United States should negotiate with adversaries not because America is strong but because it is weak. Power is no answer to the vast majority of the challenges we face, they insist, and, indeed, is counterproductive because it undermines the possibility of international consensus.

Maybe the key here lies in the phrase “some titanic struggle with neoconservatives.” Among the many elements of zero-sum thinking is a bizarre (and highly emotional) force-field that distorts judgment. Like Bush Derangement Syndrome (or its many relatives, like Israel Derangement Syndrome), people so dislike someone or thing that they adopt positions that are self-destructive just so that the object of their hatred, resentment, or irritation, can suffer. From zero-sum to negative sum.

This is where we enter the Moebius Strip of Cognitive Egocentrism. We project our good intentions on demopaths (”realism” rephrased as “idealism”), demopaths project their bad intentions on us, and with the help of some hyper-self-criticism, we accept their profoundly dishonest and hypocritical accusations of not living up to standards they themselves hold in contempt (attacking the realists as racists for pointing out profound cultural differences).

They are fond of citing Dean Acheson, Reinhold Niebuhr and George Kennan as their intellectual forebears, but those gentlemen would have found most of their prescriptions naive. Mr. Acheson, as Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, had nothing but disdain for the United Nations and for most international efforts to solve world problems. As his biographer, Robert L. Beisner, has shown, he considered such efforts evidence of the naive hopefulness of “people who could not face the truth about human nature” and “preferred to preserve their illusions intact.” He strongly supported the NATO alliance but ultimately put his faith not in international institutions but in “the continued moral, military and economic power of the United States.” He aimed to build a “preponderance of power” and to create “situations of strength” around the world. Until the United States acquired this predominant power, he believed, negotiations and international conferences with adversaries such as the Soviet Union were worthless. He opposed talks with Moscow throughout his entire time in office.

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A gem from Clausewitz that I recently came across:

“We see then that if one side cannot completely disarm the other, the desire for peace on either side will rise and fall with the probability of further successes and the amount of effort these would require. If such incentives were of equal strength on both sides, the two would resolve their political disputes by meeting half way. If the incentive grows on one side, it should diminish on the other. Peace will result so long as their sum total is sufficient- though the side that feels the lesser urge for peace will naturally get the better bargain (emphasis mine).” (On War, Book One, Chapter Two).

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Haaretz  is reporting that Danny Ayalon, former Ambassador to the United States and new member of the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party, is warning against the secessionist threat posed by Galilean Arabs.

In Ayalon’s first public appearance since he joined the right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu party on Saturday, he warned on Sunday: “If the government of Israel does not act to have a Jewish majority in the North, then the Arab majority in the Galilee will declare independence and [demand] international recognition on the basis of the precedents of Kosovo, Abkhazia and [South Ossetia].

“The formal demand will be the last piece in the puzzle, which will lead to the dismantling of the State of Israel in practice,” explained the former envoy.

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As passionate observers of America’s and Israel’s struggle against Islamic terrorism, we often take pause to reflect on those countries’ strategies in their wars on terror. We discuss and critique past strategies, and debate the various proposals for future strategies for a successful plan to make the world more secure.

Many of the participants in this debate would be well served to move the discussion back to an understanding of basic concepts in security before given their prognoses for the most elusive answer, the proper course of action against terror.  One cannot propose a strategy without understanding what  ’strategy’ is,  and once that has been established, whether it is truly attainable (or whether ’strategy’ really does exist).

The finest evaluation of the fundamental questions of strategy that I have come across is Richard K. Betts’ in International Security, “Is Strategy an Illusion” (Vol. 25, No. 2 (Fall 2000), pp. 5-50). Dr. Betts is the Director of the Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, and is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. The article, no less than its author, is very highly regarded in the field of security studies, and is still taught today to students of the discipline, the future policy-makers of the nation.

 So, to our first, crucial question- What is strategy?

Strategy is simply how the means serve the ends. In our discussion, the means are the military measures, the actual tactics and operations, the ends are the political goals,  the establishment of a democratic government or the dispersal of a terrorist network, and strategy is how the military fighting  makes possible the political aims. In the absence of strategy, war becomes meaningless act, the shedding of blood with no rational reason. In Betts’ words,

Strategy is the essential ingredient for making war either politically effective or morally tenable. It is the link between military means and political ends, the scheme for how to make one produce the other.

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Seeing this photo from a Denver demonstration taken by Zombietime

reminded me of an article from CNN about a mosque run by Al Sadr’s army that had its own torture chamber… for fellow Muslims. Alas! “Peace” militants as tools of Jihad.

Chain wrapped around ‘old man’s body’ found in mosque
By Arwa Damon
CNN

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — “There are the bloodstains on the wall, and here it is dried on the floor,” Abu Muhanad said as he walked through a torture chamber in a Baghdad mosque where more than two dozen bodies have been found.

“And here, a woman’s shoes. She was a victim of the militia. We found her corpse in the grave.”

Chunks of hair waft lazily across the floor in the hot Baghdad breeze.

“This was the torture room,” said Muhanad, the leader of a U.S.-backed armed group that now controls the mosque.

“This is what they used for hanging,” he said, pointing to a cord dangling from the ceiling. “Here is a chain we found tied to an old man’s body.” Go inside the mosque’s torture chamber »

The horrific scene at this southwestern Baghdad mosque is what officials say was the work of a Shiite militia known as the Mehdi Army. Residents who live near the mosque say they could hear the victims’ screams.

The militia had been in control of the mosque, called Adib al-Jumaili, from at least January 2007 until May of this year. Residents say coalition forces weren’t in the region and the torture and killings went unchecked.

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I recently posted on the way the NYT packages discussions of the Middle East. Now we get a close look at how it packages book reviews. Below is a review of a book by Ken Pollack offering a grand strategy for the US to contribute significantly to resolving the Middle East conflict. It seems like a flawed book in many ways, but hardly in the terms in which the chosen reviewer critiques it. The reviewer is Max Rodenbeck, the Middle East correspondent for The Economist. It’s a case of washing away PCP1 with a dose of PCP2, rather than balancing it with a more sober appraisal of the situation (HSJP)

For a more valuable critique, see Michael Rubin’s review in the New York Sun. Thank civil society for multiple sources of opinion. Thank the NYT for sheltering you from painful realities, and loading up its pages with writers from the ship of fools.

War and Peace

By MAX RODENBECK
Published: August 22, 2008

Back in 2002, I ran into one of the Brookings Institution’s top Middle East hands at the inaugural session of the United States-Islamic World Forum, a now annual event that Brookings sponsors jointly with the government of Qatar. “How’s it going?” I asked, expecting to hear about clashing misperceptions across the cultural divide. “Good,” came the gruff reply. “They’re beginning to realize that they are the problem.”

A PATH OUT OF THE DESERT
A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East
By Kenneth M. Pollack
539 pp. Random House. $30
Related
First Chapter: ‘A Path Out of the Desert’ (August 24, 2008)

Reading this big, ambitious book by Kenneth M. Pollack, who is the head of research at Brookings’s Saban Center for Middle East Policy, it is hard not to wish that what he refers to as Washington’s “policy community” would more often realize that they are the problem.

That’s pretty amazing. If he had written, “they are part of the problem,” okay. But “they are the problem.” That’s pure MOS: Masochistic Omnipotence Syndrome — as if there were no problem besides our bungled attempts to solve the problem. It’s a little like saying all health problems are iatrogenic. There are no diseases; it’s the doctors’ fault.

It would have been nice, for instance, had Pollack himself thought harder before arguing, in scholarly papers and his widely read 2002 book, “The Threatening Storm,” that America had “no choice” but to invade Iraq. That ostensibly sober appraisal, coming from a former C.I.A. analyst, Clinton official and self-described liberal, arguably added more gravitas to the shrill cries for war than any other voice.

Pollack has long since confessed to having been wrong about Iraq. “A Path Out of the Desert” includes other mea culpas. “There has been far too little asking the people of the region themselves what they thought and what they wanted,” he ruminates at one point, though the book offers slim evidence of his having pursued this advice. While the administration that Pollack served gets some light wrist-­slapping, it is the following eight years of Bush policy that he calls “breathtakingly arrogant, ignorant and reckless.”

Rudenbeck speaks as if it’s a) clear how to consult the people of the region, b) that they are clear on what they want, and c) they’ll give you a straight answer whether they are clear or not.

Many of Pollack’s other judgments are as sound as is this criticism of the Bush administration. Since most of the post-cold-war world has stabilized, democratized and prospered, it is probably correct to suggest, as he does, that America should commit itself to helping the messy Middle East come up to par.

Now there’s an breathtaking piece of ignorant and reckless arrogance. Who says they want democracy? And who is they? And even if they say they want it, who says they (and here I’m speaking of the key players, the alpha males) are willing to make the sacrifices necessary for democracy (like giving up honor-killings or self-help justice). What a mealy-mouthed homogenized view of post-war culture Rodenbeck offers up with this description of post-war culture and the [obvious] conclusions he thinks we should draw from it.
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The far left staged a protest march today in Denver in front of the state capitol. The march included figures like Cindy Sheehan and Ward Churchill (he who called 9/11 victims “little Eichmanns). Churchill called on the United States to end its occupation of Hawaii. Fox News reporter Griff Jenkins tried to talk to some of the protesters to give them a chance to make their message clear, but all he got was blind, stupid rage from people who could not come up with a coherent message. The video from the event gives an idea of the tenor of the affair, and what kind of people it attracted. The irony of the situation was summed up nicely by Caleb Howe of Political Machine:

Throughout the event, these men and women exercising their freedom of speech lamented, in dramatic and ominous terms, their lack of free speech. Then in the middle of the event they decided to silence the Fox News crew.

Ze’ev Maghen, Senior Lecturer in Islamic Religion and Persian Language at Bar-Ilan University, and Chair of the Department of Middle East History, recently published “From Omnipotence to Impotence: A Shift in the Iranian Portrayal of the “Zionist Regime“. The article examines and challenges some of the prevailing notions about the prospects for and the price of an agreement with Iran, and what the implications would be for Israel.

One of the interesting points about his study concerns the wild swings of Iranian thinking on Israel. One minute it’s omnipotent, the next, impotent. Not only does this reflect the Iranian mullahs’ lack of touch with reality, but also their terrible lack of confidence which they must compensate for by using totalistic language. Profound imbalance, profound instability.

Maghen opens with a description of the banal, ubiquitious nature of calls for the destruction of the U.S. and Israel in Iran. After classical music performances, soccer goals, and even a speech by Ayatollah Khamenei meant to counter President Ahmadinejad’s extreme rhetoric about Israel, Iranians robotically call for Israel and America’s demise:

In January 2006, the Iranian daily Jomhuriya Eslami carried the text of a speech delivered in Tehran’s main mosque by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamene’i. Attempting to defuse the diplomatic tension occasioned by newly elected President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel’s destruction at the previous month’s “World without Zionism” conference, Khamene’i concluded his uncharacteristically moderate sermon with the following ringing remarks: “We Iranians intend no harm to any nation, nor will we be the first to attack any nation. We do not deny the right of any polity in any place on God’s earth to exist and prosper. We are a peace-loving country whose only wish is to live, and to let live, in peace.” Without missing a beat or evincing even a hint of irony, the reporter who had covered the event continued: “The congregation of worshippers, some seven thousand in number, expressed their unanimous support for the Supreme Leader’s words by repeatedly chanting: marg bar Omrika, marg bar Esra’il - ‘Death to America, Death to Israel!’”1

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The International Solidarity Movement’s ‘protest’ boats shipped off today from Lanarca, Cyprus, toward the Gaza Strip. Their stated goal is :

Our mission is to expose the illegality of Israel’s actions, and to break through the siege in order to express our solidarity with the suffering people of Gaza (and of the occupied Palestinian territory as a whole) and to create a free and regular channel between Gaza and the outside world.

It does not take in-depth analysis to understand that the ‘free and regular’ channel that the ISM advocates is an open door for Hamas to increase their already unacceptable arms shipments into Gaza for use against Israeli soldiers and civilians (not to mention Palestinians who belong to other factions).  (more…)

Muzzling press freedom in Occupied Palestine

Khalid Amayreh
Voices
08/21/08

To begin with, I would like to point out that I am writing this article at the risk of being arrested for “incitement” and “tarnishing” the Palestinian Authority (PA) image.

However, the cause of press freedom in Occupied Palestine is too important to be compromised by fears for one’s safety.

Sounds like a brave man. And he may be. But his opening sentence is packed with ludicrous notions: a) there is a cause of press freedom in “Occupied Palestine”; b) it’s only for “incitement” and “tarnishing” the PA image that he runs risks (try criticizing Hamas and see who shows up at your door); and c) it’s “Occupied Palestine” that’s the problem. On the contrary, the closest thing to press freedom Palestinians ever experienced was under Israeli “occupation.” It’s when the place was handed over first to Arafat, and then in Gaza to Hamas, that press freedoms — and freedom of speech — vanished.

As one Palestinian in “occupied Jerusalem” put it: “At least here I can speak my mind freely without being dumped in prison…” Another, from an area that rioted in 2000 against Israel, but balked ferociously at being “transferred” to Arafat’s Palestine in a land-exchange deal, said: “Here you can say whatever you like and do whatever you want — so long as you don’t touch the security of Israel. Over there, if you talk about Arafat, they can arrest you and beat you up.”

Pipes quotes Palestinians about “Freedom of Expression”:

‘Adnan Khatib, owner and editor of Al-Umma, a Jerusalem weekly whose printing plant was burned down by PA police in 1995, bemoaned the troubles he’d had since the Palestinian Authority’s heavy-handed leaders got power over him: “The measures they are taking against the Palestinian media, including the arrest of journalists and the closure of newspapers, are much worse than those taken by the Israelis against the Palestinian press.” In an ironic turn of events, Na‘im Salama, a lawyer living in Gaza, was arrested by the PA on charges he slandered it by writing that Palestinians should adopt Israeli standards of democracy. Specifically, he referred to charges of fraud and breach of trust against then-prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. Salama noted how the system in Israel allowed police to investigate a sitting prime minister and wondered when the same might apply to the PA chieftain. For this audacity, he spent time in jail. Hanan Ashrawi, an obsessive anti-Israel critic, acknowledged (reluctantly) that the Jewish state has something to teach the nascent Palestinian polity: “freedom would have to be mentioned although it has only been implemented in a selective way, for example, the freedom of speech.” ‘Iyad as-Sarraj, a prominent psychiatrist and director of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, confesses that “during the Israeli occupation, I was 100 times freer [than under the Palestinian Authority].”

So, granted, the PA are thugs and don’t allow freedom of expression, but alas for our intrepid journalist trying to stand up for freedom of the press in “occupied Palestine,” the only time there was anything like “freedom of the press” was when the Israelis really did occupy the land.

Hence, journalists and free-minded citizens must not allow themselves to be intimidated by a police-state apparatus that views itself as God’s vicegerent on earth.

In recent weeks and months, the American-backed and Israeli-favored regime in Ramallah has been systematically violating the human rights and civil liberties of the Palestinian people in ways unseen since the start of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967.

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Pascal Bruckner is one of my favorite French intellectuals, someone who cuts through the maze of post-modern morality like a lazer through butter. So I was pleased to find that he’s taken on Durban II.

Boycott Durban II
Sign and Sight, 16/06/2008
Pascal Bruckner

At the 2001 UN Conference against Racism in Durban, anti-colonialism bared its anti-Semitic face. Democracies should stay away from a repeat performance next year in Geneva. By Pascal Bruckner

In September 2001 the South African city of Durban played host to the third United Nations World Conference against Racism, which was aimed at achieving recognition for crimes related to slavery and colonialism. The event’s organisers hoped that the whole of mankind would use this ceremonious occasion to face up to its history and chronicle events with equanimity.

It was billed as a conference against racism, and had a “soft” millennial quality of hoping that the world would enter a new era where it left racism behind.

These good intentions rapidly degenerated into one-upmanship among victims and bloodlust directed at Israeli organisations and anyone else suspected of being Jewish. The original intent, which was to heal the wounds of the past through a sort of collective therapy and arrive at new standards for human rights, twisted into an outburst of hatred which, in the wake of the September 11 attacks that followed only days later, disappeared from the public eye.

It was an orgy of hatred aimed at Israel and the USA, and offers perhaps the single most concentrated example of demopathy available. Led by Arab nations, it excoriated the USA for her slavery (almost a century and a half ago) and Israel for her racism and genocide (with al Durah as poster boy and patron saint), when Arab states are currently the only ones actually engaged in both genocide and slavery (specifically of sub-Saharan Africans). The hypocrisy was suffocating, and the participation of “human rights NGOS’s” one of the most astounding expressions of the moral corruption of the “progressive” left on record.

It’s time we had another look. Against the wishes of the organisers, Durban became an arena where people screamed and hurled insults at each other in a re-enactment of the comedy of damned, in the face of the white exploiter. “The pain and anger are still felt. The dead, through their descendants, cry out for justice”, Kofi Annan said on August 31 of the same year – an astounding choice of words for a UN secretary general and more a call for revenge than reconciliation. The delegates at the conference, particularly those from the Arab-Muslim states, also understood it as such and, together with the African group, they transformed the conference into a stage for anti-colonialist revenge. The West, which is genocidal by nature, should recognise its crimes, beg for forgiveness and pay symbolic and financial reparations to the victims of its oppression. Emotions ran high and anger was brought to the boil by coverage of the second Intifada which was being violently quashed by the Israeli army.

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