Share
-
Heaven On Earth
Monthly Archives: March 2006
Jews Leaving, Muslims Rising: Reflections of France Part III
For the earlier segments of this essay, see Paris Notes, Spring 2006.
The Jews I meet with show heavy signs of wear. One of the sweetest and smartest of the French Jewish intellectuals I know, a woman of Tunisian origin, one of the single-generation acculturaters, comes towards me without knowing I see her. Her face is so drawn with care that I have difficulty identifying her. I go by her haircut, until, upon seeing me, her smile comes back and wipes away the lines of worry.
The Halimi Affair, whose Jewish and Muslim dimension the French Jews know about in much greater detail than their Christian and post-Christian fellow-citizens, has that community in a panic.
People are affolés, like the thirties. People are leaving. Especially the Jews. But if you try and make the parallel to the thirties, you get cut off. Your colleagues won’t talk to you, stop having you speak at colloquia.
In 2002, the cry was “Synagogue brulé, République en danger.” In 2006, it was “Ilan Halimi brulé, République en danger.”
It’s gotten worse. Before we had hope. We told ourselves, they’re unaware. If we can get them to look at this clearly, we can persuade them. Now we’ve persuaded them, and they do nothing.
The level of appeasement is depressing: every time the Muslims get angry, the French trip over themselves to calm their passions. It’s far worse now. I am losing hope for France.
Even the French communities in good neighborhoods, with fancy Kosher restaurants nearby, are feeling the cold wind blow.
Now, in market places, in schools, even when it doesn’t involve immigrants, Jew is used as an epithet. You can even call a Chinese “dirty Jew” if you want to insult him.
In other words, in the world of honor-shame in French culture today, the Jews are the dhimmis, the ones publicly singled out for humiliation.
Longshoreman smarter than Harvard Dean
I know this text, first written in 1968 by Eric Hoffer, has circulated widely in the past, especially in 2002, when the then mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert urged newspapers to print it as deeply relevant to Israel’s feelings of isolation and reprobation during “Operation Defensive Shield.” But given the massive “erudition” of Messieurs Walt and Mearsheimer, it seemed to me appropriate to re-circulate it. In a few deft, and historically accurate lines, Hoffer not only fingers the moral hysteria that surrounds condemnations of Israel, but anticipates the potential fecklessness of the USA vis à vis Israel so thoroughly attested to in the latest “analysis” coming from academia. (Hat-tip Roland Milelli)
“Israel’s Peculiar Position”
The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews.
Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchmen, Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese and no one says a word about refugees.
But in the case of Israel, the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab. Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis.
Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace. Everyone exprects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world.
Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover. But should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews.
No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on. There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him.
The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews. They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.
The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources.
Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.
I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the holocaust will be upon us.
“Israel’s Peculiar Position”
Los Angeles Times, Sunday May 26, 1968, Section G-7.
Apparently M&W have only a weak grasp of the dangers of feeding a fire in the hopes of putting it out. Maybe it takes a longshoreman to know about such simple things.
America, The Ugly
How come so many people were so easily fooled by “Bush’s lies”? Well, blame it on “american nationalism,” writes Howard Zinn.
We are penned in by the arrogant idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior … The deeply ingrained belief—no, not from birth but from the educational system and from our culture in general—that the United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in the first grade, when we are compelled to “pledge allegiance” (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with “liberty and justice for all.”
And then come the countless ceremonies, whether at the ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during the singing of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” announcing that we are “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” There is also the unofficial national anthem “God Bless America,” and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation—just 5 percent of the world’s population—for his or her blessing.
If your starting point for evaluating the world around you is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth, then you are not likely to question the President when he says we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values—democracy, liberty, and let’s not forget free enterprise—to some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.
It becomes necessary then, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for other people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb the idea of a uniquely virtuous nation. These facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.
Americanophilia or Americanophobia: Reflections on France Part II
[This is Part II of a multipart series. For Part I, see here.]
So this time, when I got to France, I found that many of my old friends, people who had disagreed with me and disapproved of my morbid imagination for the future, more readily agreed with me. “Nous ne sommes pas en désaccord!” [we don’t disagree] – which is about the best one can hope for – insisted one with passion. The people I spoke to, even the most indifferent earlier, even the ostriches, seemed sobered. And the Jews reported more success trying to tell their non-Jewish neighbors about their fears. The French have even come up with a new term – les Gaulois – to designate culturally French (as in “nos ancêtres les Gaulois…” like Asterix)), as opposed to native-born French, which necessarily includes the growing population of un-assimilated, maybe anti-assimilationist children of Arab and African immigrants.
One might even say, some of the Gaulois were finding some clarity on who were the good guys. At the first café we went to, late Saturday night, the waiters, who began the evening making snide remarks about us behind our backs (including the way I wore by beret), upon realizing that were Americans who spoke French, grew quite warm. It turned out that at least two of them wanted to move to America.
“What about anti-Americanism?” I ask the waiter who was marrying an American girl and hoping to go to the States to start a restaurant.
“Oh, that was bad back at the time of the Iraq war, but no longer,” he said, with a reassuring confidence.
A wave of anti-Americanism that poisoned the Western alliance and has contributed so much to making Sadaam Hussein’s removal a nightmare in the winter of 2003, was in his eyes a passing squall. Not a problem.
It reminded me of the remark that an FBI guy said to some scholars about the Waco catastrophe: “We didn’t do anything wrong, and we won’t do it again.” Except that this Gaulois who wanted to jump ship to America wasn’t even saying “We won’t do it again.” There was not even the admission that the wave of pro-Chirac anti-Americanism was a stupidity that hurt France. Just a promise that, right now, we don’t feel any anti-Americanism.
There’s plenty of unconscious evidence that even Chirac regretted pissing the USA off, that your average Gaulois was beginning to realize that they were not in as good shape as America. No sign of an awareness that this spasm of anti-Americanism that they presented to me as a thing of the past, was actually embedded in certain profoundly self-destructive French traits, and that France needs to prepare to resist it on the next occasion of its appeal. Indeed an AOL poll of the French (i.e., those most attuned to the international community), finds 69% think that Chirac’s confrontation with the US was his single greatest accomplishment in his 10 years in power. (Interesting that it never occurred to those setting up the poll to include the same item among the options for Chirac’s failures.)
The next day, in an internet place crowded to the gills, I sit down on a cushion near a single man at a table for two. He eyes me suspiciously. “Vous permettez?” I say, eyeing the chair on the other side of the table.
“Puisque vous avez demandé, bien sûr,” [since you asked, of course], he tells me kindly. The French are interesting. If you are polite and show them respect, they can be very generous. If not, they can be extremely difficult.
We talk. He begins to carry on about “Baboush” [W] and how, if he could, he would wring his neck. This man was the opposite of the waiters we talked to the night before. Here was the anti-Americanism of March 2003, preserved, distilled, well over 80 proof. As I tried to suggest that maybe the French attitude, however right or wrong it might be, was self-destructive, he consistently cut me off, telling me how he was ex-military and knew the inside track, and passionately repeating his violent hatred of Baboush.
I moved away from him as quickly as possible, and later heard him on the phone to a friend talking about a woman: “Il faut lui flaquer une gifle, la salope. C’est une pute… je lui torderai le cou.” [You have to slap the bitch around… she’s a whore… I’ll wring her neck.]
I don’t remember this kind of verbal violence in public. Is it me? Or the new atmosphere of wireless Starbucks look-alikes? Or has Paris taken on a greater coarseness in public.
We go to Normandy. At the hotel, the woman confides to us: “My two sons are planning on leaving. While I pay for their education they’ll stay, but as soon as they’re done, they’re planning to leave and they want to go to America.”
“Why?”
Because the country’s going to hell. Because the bureaucracy favors the Arabs.
She tells the tale of her son-in-law getting refused family aid, but, since he’s dark-skinned, when he wears a keffiya, he gets it right away. Urban legend? Symbolic? Of what?
Because even though the riots didn’t strike their neighborhood [Bayeux centre ville], they weren’t far away. And because they believe that the riots were only a dress rehearsal.
We visit old friends from way back (the wife is a childhood friend). They are from the upper classes – educated, Catholic, intellectually lively, international in outlook, with smart kids who travel the globe studying and doing internships. In the past, the husband has taken the principled position of the ostrich in response to my warnings.
Not this time. This time he’s eager to talk, and quite open in his concerns. A description of what I have been trying to say for three years now.
“So what do you think the French will do?”
“Mais nous sommes tétanisés,” he says. [We’re paralyzed.]
What can you do when you pick your head up and see you’re between the tracks and the train is bearing down on you?
For Part III, see here.
The 20 newspapers-a-day man
Actor/comedian Richard Belzer says that he knows much more about what’s going on in Iraq than the soldiers because he “reads 20 newspapers a day.”
When Congresswoman Ileanna Ros-Lehtinen contended Friday night, on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, that servicemen she’s met in Iraq are “saying ‘we’re proud of our mission, we know what we’re doing over here. We don’t want you guys in Washington to lose it over there,’” actor/comedian Richard Belzer condescendingly fired back, claiming that to “ask them” is “bullshit” since, apparently unlike him, “they don’t read twenty newspapers a day.”
You can read more and watch the video here
When the Ostrich Lifts up Its Head: Reflections on France Part I
[This is the first installment of a multi-part essay, Paris Notes, Spring 2006 on my most recent visit to Paris (March 4-14). It is linked to a series of earlier essays posted as Essays on France.
“Nous sommes tétanisés,” said my French friend. [We are paralyzed.]
The French are beginning to wake up, beginning to lift up their Ostrich head from the sand. As opposed to the frequent dismissals I ran across in the past – when it wasn’t accusations of racism – I now met an increasing number of people willing to say, “we don’t disagree” (the French really don’t like to say “you’re right”). But, as my friend put it, we don’t know what to do. “We’re paralyzed.”
I have been visiting France fairly regularly all my life, but particularly since 2000, the nature of those visits has changed, and I’ve watched a radical split occur between the Jewish community in France (which has grown increasingly alarmed at the violence against them) and your typical Frenchman and woman, who consider Jewish alarm – if they even notice it – as, well, alarmist. (For earlier posts on what I noticed, see here and here.)
I haven’t been in France since last Spring, so a number of factors played in the mixture. Obviously the Fall (Ramadan) 2005 riots that started in the Parisian suburbs and spread through France sobered people considerably, despite the official position of the media, political, and academic elites that this was not a religious or cultural issue, but one of socio-economic inequities that could be solved by addressing those inequities. But more recently, there had occurred two things that sobered them considerably.
First, the Danish cartoons. Most every Frenchman I spoke with (especially the non-Jews, who are in most denial about the religious dimension) mentioned them. Even the French, who do not have much of a sense of humor about other people making fun of them, understood that the Muslim reaction revealed a level of immaturity beyond anything they had, in their cognitively egocentric slumber, ever imagined. It was for them a sobering look at a religious mafia, intimidating anyone who dare criticize it. The cultural gap between the French and an Islam which, they had begun to acknowledge, played an increasingly powerful role among its immigrant population, lay bare before their eyes.
Second, the slow torture of Ilan Halimi, a Jewish youth, kidnapped and tortured to death over a three-week period in one of the “territoires perdus” of the Republic, awoke the French to the depth of barbarity that had grown up under their noses. That Islamic hatred played a role came across unmistakably with the calls to the Jewish parents and the reading of Quranic verses over the sound of their son tortured in the background. But the gang was really more a mostly Muslim collection of immigrant sons from the hood, from the “territoires perdus.”
Indeed the most terrifying part of the tale came when the leader of the gang got arrested in the Ivory Coast (whence his parents had emigrated before his birth). His picture smiling and making the V sign with his fingers shocked people with its utter lack of any sign of conscience, and his subsequent interview confirmed the impression. Indeed the photo was so shocking, that after consulting with three lawyers, AFP took the photo down because it was “a blow at the private life” of the suspect, but “above all, there was no imperious necessity to diffuse this highly provocative photo.”
Ah, if only they had felt that way about Muhammad al Durah, they might have spared themselves much pain. But that would have meant sparing the Jews and the Israelis.
But those with eyes, like Nidra Poller, could see. Youssouf Fofana was not a religious fanatic poisoned by paranoid underground hatreds. Here was Nietzsche’s blond beast in blackface, without conscience, a predator who feels no need to apologize to his prey. Robust sadism. The barbarians at the gates… in the suburbs. And their neighbors, who remained silent for weeks as they heard the cries of the tortured youth – not even an anonymous call – illustrated how powerful the dominion of the killers in these territoires perdus.
For Part II, see here.
The “Jewish lobby” …
A new report written by Harvard academics John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt for the Kennedy School of Government claims that the pro-Israel lobby in America causes the United States to skew its Middle East policy in favor of Israel.
.. no lobby has managed to divert US foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US and Israeli interests are essentially identical.
For them US support of Israel undermines the War On Terror:
It argues that supporting Israel is not in America’s best interest and furthermore, that it complicates the US’s international stand and its ability to fight terror. “Israel is in fact a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states,” the authors write, claiming that “The United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.” The paper also argues that the US would not be worried about Iran, Iraq and Syria, if not for its close ties with Israel.
Finally, the lobby manipulates the media and academia:
They point to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)’s activity in Congress and in the executive branch and talk about how it allegedly “manipulates the media” and “polices academia” in order to make sure the US maintains a pro-Israel approach. The authors add that AIPAC also uses the claim of anti-Semitism, or “the great silencer” as they refer to it, to shut off any criticism of Israel.
Some of the accusations strike me as eerily familiar to the ones found in books such as the Protocols. What do you think?
Iraq and Al Qaeda
From The Times (UK):
NEWLY released documents seized in Iraq immediately after the American invasion in 2003 point to the presence of Al-Qaeda members in the country before the war and moves to hide traces of “chemical or biological materials” from United Nations weapons inspectors … The first documents to be released offer tantalising clues to possible Iraqi contacts with Al-Qaeda. An Iraqi intelligence report dated September 15, 2001 — four days after the attacks on America — says Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban were in contact with Iraq and Al-Qaeda members had visited the country. It claims America had proof that the Iraqi government and “Bin Laden’s group” had agreed to co-operate to attack targets in America and that the US might strike Iraq and Afghanistan in retaliation. However, the information comes from an unidentified Afghan informant who states merely that he heard it from an Afghan consul, also unnamed. According to ABC News, which translated the tapes, the claims are “sensational” but the sourcing is “questionable”. Another document from a “trustworthy” source and dated August 2002 claims people with links to Al-Qaeda were in Iraq. There is a picture a few pages later of the Jordanian terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. But the papers suggest Saddam’s agents were trying to verify the presence of Al-Qaeda rather than colluding with it.
Let Them Have it
It’s a done deal, Iran will have nuclear weapons in the future. From the New York Times.
“The reality is that most of us think the Iranians are probably going to get a weapon, or the technology to make one, sooner or later,” an administration official acknowledged a few weeks ago, refusing to talk on the record because such an admission amounts to a concession that dragging Iran in front of the United Nations Security Council may prove an exercise in futility. “The optimists around here just hope we can delay the day by 10 or 20 years, and that by that time we’ll have a different relationship with a different Iranian government.”
A Muslim “Life of Brian”
Monty Python satirist Terry Gilliam says that what the Muslim world needs is a Muslim version of the “Life of Brian”:
Oscar-nominated screenwriter and director Terry Gilliam, the former political cartoonist and satirist, has stepped gingerly into the Prophet Muhammad cartoon wars, asserting that someone “from within” Islam needs to take on the fundamentalists in the way that he and his Monty Python colleagues lampooned abuses of Christianity in their 1979 film Life of Brian … Gilliam recalled that the Monty Python team “knew what we were doing” when they set out to satirize Christianity in Life of Brian, a movie that was banned in parts of the UK, Ireland, the US Bible Belt and elsewhere. “We were pissed off at organized religion. We weren’t going to take on Christ, so Christ was treated with respect. But the whole idea of what religion is about and how it works… the sex, the heresy, the persecutions. We knew what we were doing and that was what was so exciting about it.” “Our triumph,’ he said, “was that in Variety magazine, the trade paper, there it was: A whole page devoted to us. Two columns, the Protestants protesting. Two columns, the Catholics protesting. Two columns the Jews protesting. We got everybody evenly.” Still, he noted, the Monty Python team had had the good sense not to lampoon the Islamists. “We didn’t go for the Muslims, did we?” he said, a little self-deprecatingly. “We were smart.”
Barbarians at the Gates: The Second Fall of Rome?
Israel Insider has a new piece by Avi Davis, a freelance journalist based in LA on a topic we’ve treated at this blog before.
AWAITING THE NEW FALL OF ROME
By Avi DavisIn his work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the historian Edward Gibbon describes how a vacillating Roman Senate, with the army of the Barbarian Goths at its city gate, debated fretfully about the Roman Empire’s future. Apparently unknown to them, a civil rebellion, led by slaves and domestics, had erupted within the city walls, leading to anarchy. Days after the appearance of the enemy, the gates were opened from within and the Barbarians poured in to pillage Rome. Within a week, 1100 years of empire building had come to a close.
Sixteen hundred years after that epochal event, it should surprise no one that new barbarians threaten the safety and security of the continent Rome once controlled When the body of Ilan Halimi turned up last week on a railway track outside of Paris the group responsible was identified as the Barbarians. Yet these were not Goths, Huns or Vandals of ancient times, but Muslim criminals whose intent was clearly to commit a racial murder. The torture to which Halimi was subjected and the methods with which he was eventually dispatched should remind everyone in Europe of the original provenance of the term “barbarian” – that of men intent on destruction of centers of Western culture and civilization.
Historians are actually quick to point out that the “barbarians” didn’t want to destroy Rome, they wanted to take it over. The issue here is really a matter of distinctions, rather than opposing one gross generalization with another. While the leadership, the German generals, many of whom had fought for Rome, negotiated with Rome, they may have had in mind a desire to move in and take over without destroying. Of course, that hardly means that they didn’t destroy in taking over. In other words, there are often vast differences between intention, capacity, and the consequences of acting on intentions which one is incapable of carrying out. The military forces that the German leadership brought with them were not up to the demands of a culture which had made significant strides in pruning back the “plunder and distribute” mentality of tribal warrior societies. “Vandal” as an adjective, comes from the Vandals, whose troops were notorious for their “gratuitous” destruction.
Similarly, I think, one can argue that the more educated Islamist leaders, like Tariq Ramadan, anticipate not only taking over Europe, but keeping Europe as prosperous as it is today. For those from cultures that do not understand the nature of modern western society and its positive-sum dimensions, who still work from the plunder and distribute” paradigm, the world of modernity is only a variant on their own, and running the show once one has taken over should be no more difficult that the aftermath of a coup-d’état in a Muslim country. Cognitive egocentrism runs both ways.
The actions and justifications of the present day Barbarians, are of course, more than a match for their ancient predecessors. The brutal slaying of Halimi , a young French Jew of no particular importance, has opened the eyes of the European public to the dangers of the Muslim jihadist culture as no other act of terrorism or criminality has done until now. Tens of thousands protested the murder – recognized universally as an attack – not on just a Jew, but on France itself. Not even the brutal slaying of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh or the murder of the gay Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn has quite provided the same political impact. That is because in the wake of the recent French riots and the worldwide disturbances caused by the publication of the Danish cartoons, European politicians now recognize that radical Islamic sentiment is no longer confined to a few scattered sects, focused on anti-Semitic provocations, who can be tamed through dialogue and discussion. It rather represents an ideological pandemic spreading voraciously in European cities, which vouchsafes the notion that the murder of Jews, gays, conservatives, journalists, editors – and in fact anyone who is perceived as a barrier to Islam’s advance, entitles those with requisite religious belief to issue and execute death warrants. And further, that flimsy , ignorant responses and the cognitive dissonance of denial only fans these flames higher.
This may be a bit premature… wishful thinking. My sense, after spending a week there (and I’ll post on that this weekend), is that although people are waking up, some of them, like the proverbial ostrich, have lifted their head from the sand, noticed that they are between the tracks, and that the train is bearing down on them. “Nous sommes tétanisés,” said one of my friends. We are paralyzed. In my opinion, we’re still not at the stage of awareness and mobilization Davis had described above.
A word should certainly be offered to those secular humanists who still believe that amelioration of the economic plight of Islamic urban centers will substantially change the attitudes of the jihadists in their midst. This view not only ignores the historical pattern of the jihadist culture and motivation; it is a sop to the Islamists – clerics and leaders – who see such soft-pedaling as a weakness to be exploited. One must wonder at the blindness of European politicians who still believe that the fire bombings of synagogues, the murder and harassment of Jews or the torching of Jewish businesses are merely isolated examples of urban unrest, economic disenfranchisement or even latewnt anti-Semitism. They are, in fact blows, aimed against Western civilization. Imams and Islamic clerics throughout Europe have prophesied for years about the West’s imminent collapse. They do this while employing the liberal values of tolerance, openness and dialogue to protect their mosques while propagating hatred, racism and incitement to murder beneath the shield of freedom of speech.
Good description of dupes and demopaths. And the blindness of the elite is really deep-seated. The more I try and explain to my French friends and colleagues about the ways in which the anti-Zionism/Judeophobia are part of a larger pattern, the more they resist and tell me that I’m “communautariste” (partisan, not objective) and unfair to the Muslims, who just want a fair deal. I am more convinced than ever that the blindness Davis describes is a form of cultural AIDS, and anti-Zionism is how we get infected.
Most Western countries have not , as yet, recognized the profundity of the threat. But for some there is a growing measure of clarity. Last week Peter Costello, the Australian treasurer, made public his government’s opinion that those who do not subscribe to Australian values or deny the supremacy of Australian law over Islamic law should be denied both citizenship and the right to enter Australia. Costello went further, in an interview on television, in declaring that even Australian citizens who fail to pass this basic litmus test should be subject to deportation. The Australian government, particularly its feisty prime minister John Howard, have been well ahead of the rest of the world in legislating firm controls against incitement and racism emanating from their country’s mosques. But few Western leaders have been as forthright as Costello in recommending deportation as a measure against a country’s citizens for denying the basic values upon which their own societies are founded.
Meanwhile, time is running short for Europe. Without recognizing that an unbalanced emphasis on pluralism at the expense of security, will gradually erode the moral superstructure of liberal democracy, there will be thousands more Ilan Halimis – Jew and non-Jew alike – tortured in third floor apartments and dying on the streets of restive Islamic communities.
For that reason, no one should be deceived. Barbarism has returned to Europe. But this time the barbarians are not just outside the city, battering at the walls. They are inside it, with sufficient political clout and public sympathy to open the gates from within.
For further reflections on this topic, see Nidra Poller’s most recent article: Gang of Barbarians.
Where the Honor in all this Humiliation
The ever incisive Khaled abu Toameh has an article on Hamas’ response to the Prison-raid by the Israelis. It reveals the complex layers in the pathologies of “honor-shame” culture — what Akhbar Ahmed calls “hyper-assabiyya” — in among Palestinians today.
The problem derives from the utterly humiliating experience of the prisoners who surrendered in their undies.
Hamas legislators are demanding a commission of inquiry into Tuesday’s IDF raid on the Jericho prison, as many Palestinians expressed outrage over the “humiliating” way in which scores of Palestinian Authority policemen, stripped to their underwear, surrendered….
A general strike was declared in the West Bank and Gaza Strip on Wednesday in protest against the raid.
Thousands of Palestinians took to the streets, chanting slogans against Israel, the US and Britain. Militiamen continued to issue threats against any American or British citizen who enters the PA territories.
“This is humiliation for all Palestinians,” PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas told reporters during a tour of the Jericho prison on Wednesday. “This is an unforgivable crime and a violation of all agreements that we have signed.”
Abbas held both Britain and the US responsible for what happened. “The American and British monitors left the prison five minutes before the Israeli soldiers stormed it,” he said. “This shows that they had colluded with Israel.”
Abbas, however, confirmed that the British government had informed him of its intention to withdraw its monitors. “But,” he added, “they did not set a date. They surprised us by leaving very quickly.”
Abbas and the PA leadership, meanwhile, have come under sharp criticism for failing to prevent the arrest of the assassins of tourism minister Rehavam Ze’evi.
Many Palestinians said they were more disturbed by the humiliating way in which scores of PA policemen, walked out of the compound than by the arrest of the five members of the PFLP and Karine A bankroller Fuad Shubaki.
Dozens of Fatah activists in the Bethlehem area signed a petition on Wednesday calling on Abbas to resign and dissolve the PA. “The stripping of the PA security officers in front of the entire world is a disgrace for all Palestinians and Arabs,” they wrote. “If the Palestinian Authority can’t protect its prisoners, it might as well be dismantled.”
Mustafa Barghouti, head of the Ramallah-based Independent Palestine List, said most Palestinians were deeply offended by the pictures featuring the semi-naked policemen. “What is the value of all the PA security forces if Israel could force their members to strip any time?” he asked. “We have reached this situation because of the Oslo Accords and the imaginary arrangements created under them.”
Hafez Barghouti, editor of the PA-funded daily Al-Hayat al-Jadeeda, described what happened in Jericho as a scandal. “This is a scandal for the Palestinian Authority because it proves that it is on the verge of collapse and that it is unable to achieve anything,” he said. “Our government is behaving as if it were ruling in Finland and not in the Palestinian territories.”
Majdi Ashour, a Nablus lawyer and political analyst, said the images of the policemen in their underwear were designed to humiliate not only the Palestinians, but the entire Arab and Muslim world. “Every Arab and Muslim should feel ashamed,” he said. “If I were in Abbas’s place, I would resign immediately.”
A senior Fatah official commented sarcastically: “I suggest that the PA leadership buy another pair of underwear for all its security officers so that next time they won’t be left totally naked.”
Hamas legislators here told The Jerusalem Post that they were planning to summon Interior Minister Nasser Youssef and other security commanders to a special hearing to demand explanations about the surrender of the policemen.
“We want to know why the policemen did not defend the prison,” said one legislator. “We want to know who issued the orders to surrender in this humiliating way.”
Another legislator said the events in Jericho had seriously undermined the Palestinians’ confidence in their security establishment. “How can any Palestinian respect the security forces after watching their members stripped to their underwear in public?” he asked. “I believe there are many decent officers who would have resisted the Israeli operation, but the problem is with their commanders.”
…Altogether, 17 foreigners had been abducted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the past 48 hours.
Comments:
This is by any standards, but especially by those of a warrior honor-shame culture, a major humiliation, a fadihah as the Arabs might put it. Not only were the PA security forces and these warriors photographed in their underpants, but they did it themselves, to show the Israelis they were not armed.
The main target of the raid, Ahmed Saadat behaved with particular cowardly distinction. The leader of the PFLP (People’s Front for the Liberation of Palestine) and mastermind of the 2001 assassination of the minister of Tourism, Rehavam Ze’evi, Saadat and his organization won three seats in the Palestinian elections, and Hamas was making it clear they would release him as soon as they could. On a cell phone (one of the Israeli complaints about his lax incarceration), Saadat spoke with reporters during the siege. “We are not going to surrender. We are going to face our destiny with courage,” Saadat told Al Jazeera.
“Our prison is surrounded on all sides by Israelis. They are asking us over loudspeaker to come out,” Ahed Abu Ghoulmi, one of the targeted prisoners. “We will not come out under any circumstances.”
It’s bad enough to surrender humiliatingly to the despised enemy, but to brag about your courage publicly beforehand is even worse.
This incident raises a host of issues which, even if they would never admit it publicly, must create some cognitive dissonance among Palestinians. First, the central myth of Palestinian resistance is that Palestinian martyrs will sacrifice their lives willingly for the cause. And yet, among the leadership primarily accustomed to parading in front of cameras, this willingness to die seems absent. Even before the leadership — both “secular” (PLO) and “religious” (Hamas) — began recruiting other people’s children to send in as suicide bombers back in 2001, Palestinian parents had spoken out against the exploitation of their children by a group of men who would neither sacrifice their own lives, nor their own children’s lives in this manner. If anyone needed proof of cowardice, here it was. These men — prisoners, leaders, prison guards — all of them stripped themselves and walked out with their hands up in order to save their lives. Ouch.
Hallucinations of Hitler
To Larry Derfner, there’ s no comparison between the 1930′s and today’s situation.. The forces of Islamism are much more weaker than the Nazis and democracies are stronger.
BUT WHILE their wishes are basically the same, their abilities to carry out those wishes are vastly different, and that’s the decisive comparison, or lack of comparison, between the two. The forces of militant Islam don’t have anything approaching the power the Nazis had. The world’s reaction to Islamism today could hardly be more different from its reaction to Nazism in the Thirties. As a result, militant Islam is limited in its potential for evil in a way Nazism wasn’t. While Islamism today is obviously dangerous, it is nowhere remotely as dangerous to the world – or to the world’s Jews – as Nazism was.
There has been a tendency to overreact:
The leaders of Europe are aware of the threat from militant Islam, and their constituents are hyperaware of it. Jews have to understand that whatever increase there has been in anti-Semitism, it is nothing compared to the increase in Islamophobia – not only in America, but in Europe as well. My guess is that the law-abiding Muslims of Europe are living in much greater fear of persecution than Europe’s Jews are.
Unlike in the 1930s, today the world is fighting totalitarianism. Unlike in the 1930s, today the free world is incomparably stronger than the forces of totalitarianism. The Jewish state by itself is stronger than those forces; for the Jewish people, these times couldn’t be more starkly different from the time of the Nazis.
If anything, the free world, or at least its leader, has shown a tendency to overreact to Middle East totalitarianism; witness what’s happened in Iraq. I don’t think any responsible person wants to see America go on another long-term mission like that inside Iran, driven again by visions of mushroom clouds, WMD, and a Muslim dictator whom everyone keeps comparing to Hitler.
IF PEOPLE will step back, look at the big picture – at the radical imbalance of power between Islamism and its enemies – and realize that we are in a thousand times stronger, more secure position than our forebears were in the 1930s, it won’t make anybody an unpatriotic American or a bad Jew. It’ll no doubt ruin their chances to work for AIPAC or the Israeli hasbara machine, but that’s not the end of the world, either.
The AP at work
This is how the Associated Press turned a positive into a negative. God forbid people thinking that something positive was coming out of Iraq!
BAGHDAD, Iraq – Iraq’s new parliament was sworn in Thursday with parties still deadlocked over the next government, vehicles banned from Baghdad’s streets to prevent car bombings and the country under the shadow of a feared civil war.
Free At Last (For Noam Chomsky)
The US-dominated world order is being challenged by a new spirit of independence in the global south, writes Noam Chomsky:
Every day Latin America, too, is becoming more independent. Now Asia and the Americas are strengthening their ties while the reigning superpower, the odd man out, consumes itself in misadventures in the Middle East …
Meanwhile, in Latin America left-centre governments prevail from Venezuela to Argentina. The indigenous populations have become much more active and influential, particularly in Bolivia and Ecuador, where they either want oil and gas to be domestically controlled or, in some cases, oppose production altogether.
Many indigenous people apparently do not see any reason why their lives, societies and cultures should be disrupted or destroyed so that New Yorkers can sit in their SUVs in traffic gridlock.
Venezuela, the leading oil exporter in the hemisphere, has forged probably the closest relations with China of any Latin American country, and is planning to sell increasing amounts of oil to China as part of its effort to reduce dependence on the openly hostile US government …
Growing popular movements, primarily in the south but with increasing participation in the rich industrial countries, are serving as the bases for many of these developments towards more independence and concern for the needs of the great majority of the population.
Just Like Vietnam
“Stop Bush’s War,”writes Bob Herbert in The New York Times:
Last Friday and Saturday, a conference titled “Vietnam and the Presidency” was held at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. Discussions about the lessons we failed to learn from Vietnam, and thus failed to apply to Iraq, were pervasive.
Some of the lessons seemed embarrassingly basic. Jack Valenti, who served as a special assistant to Lyndon Johnson, reminded us how difficult it is to “impress democracy” on other countries. And he noted something that the public and the politicians seem to forget each time the glow of a brand-new war is upon us: that wars are “inhumane, brutal, callous and full of depravity.”
Think Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Think suicide bombers and death squads and roadside bombs. Think of the formerly healthy men and women who have come back to the United States from Iraq paralyzed, or without their arms or legs or eyes, or the full use of their minds. Think of the many thousands dead.
Most of the people who thought this war was a good idea also thought that the best way to fight it was with other people’s children. That in itself is a form of depravity.
Among those who played a key role in the conference was David Halberstam, the author of “The Best and the Brightest,” which is not just the best book about America’s involvement in Vietnam, but a book that grows more essential with each passing year. If you read it in the 70′s or 80′s, read it again. We can all use a refresher course on the link between folly and madness at the highest levels of government, and the all but-unimaginable suffering it can unleash.
Good News From Iraq?
David Ignatius thinks so. The political dialogue is moving.
But there are unmistakable signs here this week that Iraq’s political leaders are taking the first tentative steps toward forming a broad government of national unity that could reverse the country’s downward slide.
This week’s dialogue broke the deadlock over the composition of the coalition. A month ago, radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr was refusing to endorse any government that included the party of Ayad Allawi, a close ally of the United States who, as interim prime minister, had ordered a military strike against Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia. Khalilzad said Wednesday that the logjam was broken “because people realized that if one side has red lines, all sides will have red lines.” He said of this week’s gatherings: “These are the best meetings of Iraqis I’ve seen since I’ve been here.” The U.S. ambassador’s upbeat account is believable because it is echoed by Iraqi political leaders. Adel Abdul Mahdi, Iraq’s vice president and a representative of Hakim and his powerful Shiite party known as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, told me Wednesday: “We have a common understanding on major issues — on the need for consensus and on a national security commission. What makes me confident is that I think we are building up a sense of understanding among different communities.” He said the message of the new government must be: “No one is outside of the law, whether the Badr Organization [the Supreme Council's militia], the Mahdi Army or the insurgency.”
The Iraqi political dialogue will move into a new and potentially fractious stage soon, when the leaders begin bargaining over who will hold top positions in the new government. Those negotiations could blow apart the fragile hopes for a unity government. But, for a change, pessimism isn’t necessarily the right bet for Iraq.
Iraq: A Diferent View
Ralph Peters writes about the failure of the media in Iraq.
During a recent visit to Baghdad, I saw an enormous failure. On the part of our media. The reality in the streets, day after day, bore little resemblance to the sensational claims of civil war and disaster in the headlines. No one with first-hand experience of Iraq would claim the country’s in rosy condition, but the situation on the ground is considerably more promising than the American public has been led to believe. Lurid exaggerations and instant myths obscure real, if difficult, progress. I left Baghdad more optimistic than I was before this visit. While cynicism, political bias and the pressure of a 24/7 news cycle accelerate a race to the bottom in reporting, there are good reasons to be soberly hopeful about Iraq’s future.
Iraqi stringers are part of the problem:
Nonetheless, the real story of the civil-war-that-wasn’t is one of the dog that didn’t bark. Iraqis resisted the summons to retributive violence. Mundane life prevailed. After a day and a half of squabbling, the political factions returned to the negotiating table. Iraqis increasingly take responsibility for their own security, easing the burden on U.S. forces. And the people of Iraq want peace, not a reign of terror.
But the foreign media have become a destructive factor, extrapolating daily crises from minor incidents. Part of this is ignorance. Some of it is willful. None of it is helpful.
The dangerous nature of journalism in Iraq has created a new phenomenon, the all-powerful local stringer. Unwilling to stray too far from secure facilities and their bodyguards, reporters rely heavily on Iraqi assistance in gathering news. And Iraqi stringers, some of whom have their own political agendas, long ago figured out that Americans prefer bad news to good news. The Iraqi leg-men earn blood money for unbalanced, often-hysterical claims, while the Journalism 101 rule of seeking confirmation from a second source has been discarded in the pathetic race for headlines. To enhance their own indispensability, Iraqi stringers exaggerate the danger to Western journalists (which is real enough, but need not paralyze a determined reporter). Dependence on the unverified reports of local hires has become the dirty secret of semi-celebrity journalism in Iraq as Western journalists succumb to a version of Stockholm Syndrome in which they convince themselves that their Iraqi sources and stringers are exceptions to every failing and foible in the Middle East. The mindset resembles the old colonialist conviction that, while other “boys” might lie and steal, our house-boy’s a faithful servant.
The result is that we’re being told what Iraqi stringers know they can sell and what distant editors crave, not what’s actually happening.
A Media Revolution
Rupert Murdoch is under no illusions: there is an empire of “new knowledge” on the rise.
Rupert Murdoch last night sounded the death knell for the era of the media baron, comparing today’s internet pioneers with explorers such as Christopher Columbus and John Cabot and hailing the arrival of a “second great age of discovery”.
The News Corp media magnate nurtures a long-held distaste for “the establishment” but last night confided to one of the few clubs to which he does belong – The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers – that he may be among the last of a dying breed.
“Power is moving away from the old elite in our industry – the editors, the chief executives and, let’s face it, the proprietors,” said Mr Murdoch, having flown into London from New York after celebrating his 75th birthday on Saturday.
The owner of Fox News added: “Never has the flow of information and ideas, of hard news and reasoned comment, been more important. The force of our democratic beliefs is a key weapon in the war against religious fanaticism and the terrorism it breeds.”
Refusing to reminisce over a career that saw him develop a global empire stretching from DirecTV and the New York Post in the US to Sky and the Sun in the UK via assets in South America, Asia and Australia, he declared: “I believe we are at the dawn of a golden age of information – an empire of new knowledge.”
But he combined his new-found enthusiasm for the digital future with a “change or die” message for the monolithic media empires of the 20th century.
“Societies or companies that expect a glorious past to shield them from the forces of change driven by advancing technology will fail and fall,” he warned. “That applies as much to my own, the media industry, as to every other business on the planet.”
Dictatorship on the rise …
The Guardian , of course, didn’t miss the story:
Sandra Day O’Connor, a Republican-appointed judge who retired last month after 24 years on the supreme court, has said the US is in danger of edging towards dictatorship if the party’s rightwingers continue to attack the judiciary.
In a strongly worded speech at Georgetown University, reported by National Public Radio and the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin, Ms O’Connor took aim at Republican leaders whose repeated denunciations of the courts for alleged liberal bias could, she said, be contributing to a climate of violence against judges … She pointed to autocracies in the developing world and former Communist countries as lessons on where interference with the judiciary might lead. “It takes a lot of degeneration before a country falls into dictatorship, but we should avoid these ends by avoiding these beginnings.”