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Heaven On Earth
Monthly Archives: April 2006
The Saudis Say Yes
Saudis to transfer $92 million to Palestinian Authority:
Saudi Arabia announced Tuesday that they would transfer $92 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority. Their declaration of support for the PA comes after Russia said it would transfer $10 million, Iran $50 million, and Qatar an additional $50 million for a total of over $200 million.
After meeting with Saudi Arabian Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, PA Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar said that the Saudis had agreed to give $92 million in aid to the Palestinians. He added that at the meeting the two had also discussed the collapsing Palestinian economy and ways of ending the new Hamas-led government’s current international isolation, Israel Radio reported.
The Boston Globe Tries its Hand at Honor-Shame Analysis of the Arab-Israeli Conflict
Today’s Globe has an editorial on the violence embodied in the suicide terrorism of yesterday’s attack in Tel Aviv. See Squaring the Globe for an analysis of the full range of the Globe’s mishandling of the incident. My specific interest is in a curious sentence imbedded in an effort to explain the “cycle of violence” from the angle of honor-shame culture.
It is in the nature of a vendetta that both sides try to justify as retaliation acts that otherwise would stand as sheer murder. The code of the blood feud assumes that every member of the enemy’s camp may be slain in the name of avenging the honor of one’s own clan, tribe, or nation. Whether innocent civilians are murdered by states, by their proxies, or by stateless terrorist groups, the threat is the same. The murders rip away at the civilized conventions that protect the innocent.
The editorial then goes on to urge Israel not to retaliate since that would lead to still further bloodshed:
The worst response to yesterday’s bombing in Tel Aviv would be to accede to the regressive rules of a vendetta. The crime must be denounced — as it was by governments around the world, by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and by United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan. Those who boasted of the crime or rationalized it as resistance to Israeli aggression — as did Islamic Jihad, the Hamas movement that now governs the Palestinian Authority, and Iran — must also be denounced as murderers or accessories to murder.
Having called for such verbal adherence to the code of civil society, the Globe then goes on to present its solution to the cycle of vendetta violence:
Nevertheless, the only way to prevent a descent into the inferno of a vendetta is to pursue a negotiated peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. In the near term, this means that Israel, the United States, and the European Union should not cut off humanitarian aid to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. An economic blockade of the Palestinian people is almost certain to magnify the rage and despair that the terrorist factions feed upon.
Etc. I’m sure most readers can imagine the final paragraphs… ending in:
If there is no progress toward a negotiated peace, there will be regression toward the barbarism of the vendetta.
Since I am teaching a course on honor-shame this semester, and part of it focuses not only on the Arab-Israeli conflict, but also on the lack of the use of honor-shame culture as an analytic tool in understanding the conflict, I must applaud the Globe’s effort to bring this kind of consideration to bear in their analysis.
But even if they get an A for effort, they get an F for product.
1) Both sides do not engage in the “vendetta” mentality. Anyone attentive to the discourse in Israel knows that even the slightest hint of behavior that sounds like revenge rather than preventive retaliation provokes howls of opposition from the press and talking heads. And anyone who compares the retaliation of the Israelis with the retaliations of the Palestinians (especially given the disparity of means of violence) knows the asymmetries of this conflict. On the contrary, if Israel were to engage in the kind of vendetta behavior characteristic of the Palestinians (two eyes for one, indiscriminate killing of civilians in retaliation for targetted killings of terrorists), then a) the conflict would have long been over, and b) the Palestinians would have some justification in accusing the Israelis of ethnic cleansing. To try and pin vendetta mentality on the Israelis is a classic case of even-handedness (a variant of moral equivalence), in which one dares not criticize the Palestinians without also criticizing the Israelis… lest one be accused of “taking sides.”
2) It is most decidedly not in the nature of vendetta to view anyone on the other side as a legitimate target. No honorable man engaged in a vendetta attacks women and children, and the rules of vendetta are quite strict about the acceptable proportions of retaliation. The Palestinian behavior embodied in suicide terrorism does not adhere in any way to the honor-code of vendetta, but rather represents a pathological form of behavior driven not by honor but by a rage at unbearable humiliation. This pathological behavior links up with some of the worst kinds of genocidal holy-war ideologies to produce attacks on civilians like the one the Globe editorial is supposedly trying to understand. So double error: misrepresenting pathological Palestinian vendetta behavior as the norm, and then trying to pin that norm on “both sides” when even the norm doesn’t apply to Israelis.
3) The Globe’s predictable solution: more negotiations and (you guessed it) don’t stop aid to the poor Palestinian people. I won’t go into a lengthy analysis of what’s wrong here. For those who want some background, consult our discussion of the Politically Correct (Globe) paradigm vs. the Honor-Shame Jihad Paradigm. What the folks at the Globe still don’t seem to get is that when you try to push negotiations between a pathologically demonizing honor-shame culture and a pathologically self-critical integrity-guilt culture, you get the kinds of back-firing that Oslo brought us, and that multi-cultural Europe is bringing us.
But to figure that out, the Globe’s editors would have to get at least a C+ in honor-shame culture. And given their learning curve as evidenced by their still pushing negotiations after the devastating results of that policy with the Oslo process, I’m not holding my breath.
Not Too Gay In Iraq
It seems that the gay community in Iraq wants Saddam back:
“I don’t want to be gay anymore. When I go out to buy bread, I’m afraid. When the doorbell rings, I think that they have come for me.”
That is the fear that haunts Hussein, and other gay men in Iraq.
They say that since the US-led invasion, gays are being killed because of their sexual orientation.
They blame the increase in violence on the growing influence of religious figures and militia groups in Iraq since Saddam Hussein was ousted.
Islam considers homosexuality sinful. A website published in the name of Ayatollah Sistani, Iraq’s most revered Shia cleric, says gays should be put to death.
“Those who commit sodomy must be killed in the harshest way,” says a section of the website dealing with questions of morality.
The statement appears on the Arabic section of the website, which is published in the Iranian city of Qom, but not in the English section … But Hussein, Ahmed and gay activists outside Iraq say there is clear evidence that the situation has deteriorated dramatically for Iraqi homosexuals.
“Saddam was a tyrant, but at least we had more freedom then,” said Hussein. “Nowadays, gay men are just killed for no reason.”
Honor-Shame: Response to Lawrence Barnes II
In response to my posting about Honor-Shame culture and a Boston Globe editorial, Lawrence Barnes, regular commentator and skeptic about the value of the “honor-shame abstraction” posted a long and critical comment. Here is my response. [LB in block quotes, me in italics.]
I confess to confusion. It begins with my skepticism regarding the utility of the honor-shame abstraction (detailed elsewhere on this site), and continues with my embarrassing failure to grasp the point Mr. Forbes is making.
It seems to me as if perhaps Mr. F. refers to the mass murder policy of Nazi Germany; if so — and of course I could be wrong here — he seems to suggest that some overwhelming humiliation lies behind the death camps. Let me follow that possibility for a moment.
Was Germany humiliated by the Jews, homosexuals, career criminals, Gypsies and Poles? (Those were most of the main targets of Nazi rage.) Or was the humiliation the product of the treaty that ended WWI and imposed absurd penalties on Germany, and did the Germans then punish the Jews and other groups for the punitive peace?
That all seems pretty far-fetched to me. The Nazi rage was directed mainly at France, Britain and the USA, and there was some rational basis for it. After all, when the war ended, not a single enemy soldier stood on German soil. That precipitated the myth of the “Dolchstoss.” Whom to blame? Yes, the nations that defeated the German military and dictated the unjust peace, certainly; and later, the Nazi regime gave expression to the prejudices of much of the German populace.
I think part of the condition of experiencing helpless rage involves the search for scapegoats. As William of Baskerville puts it in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose: “When your true enemies are strong you have to pick weaker enemies.” And when your humiliation comes from a sense of impotence, you need to attack those who can’t/won’t strike back.
Nor do people in such a condition admit it to themselves. As we all know, for Hitler, the Nazis, and many Germans, the Jews were behind the “stab in the back.” We are dealing here with perceptions and compensatory mechanisms, not “reality” as some dispassionate historian might see it. The same is true for the Muslims. On the one hand the Jews are all powerful, on the other, only American support — LBJ parachuted tanks into Sinai in 1967 — could make Israeli victories possible.
But does that explanation mesh with the “humiliation causes mass murder” hypothesis? Suppose instead we simply note that Germany, inexperienced with democracy, fell into the hands of the worst Germans, who advanced their personal, confused, deviant, sadistic agenda.
“simply note…” is strange language. All peoples at the beginning of that experiment in equality before the law that democracy consists of (eg, the opening lines of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address), are inexperienced. Not too many, and certainly not as late as the early 20th century in Europe, fell into the hands of a “confused, deviant, sadistic” leadership “simply” from “inexperience.” On the contrary, in order for Hitler and the Nazis to win, they had to play on a wide range of paranoid and sadistic fantasies whose exploration would bring us back to an analysis of the psychological dimensions of humiliation and rage. Any biography of Hitler has to deal with the psychological dimensions of his personality and its exceptionally powerful impact on the public. It’s not, should we study his psychological condition… it’s how well or badly do we do that inevitable task?
Further, how good are the parallels with the current mess in the Middle East?
I’d say not only close, but, if anything, the dynamics are still more acute. The humiliation of the Arabs at the hands of the puny, previously subject (dhimmi), and humiliated Jews, was far greater than that of the Germans at the hands of great and traditionally powerful enemies like France, England and Russia. Furthermore, the “strong enemies,” the primary source of Palestinian/Arab suffering is, I think, the Arab elites, who sacrifice the Palestinians to their strategies for attacking Israel, and more broadly oppress their masses as part of their prime divider notion of social order.
As Samuels says in his essay on Arafat, when Arafat and his band showed up in the West Bank and Gaza as a result of Olso, they looted the place and treated the Palestinians as occupied people. To attack these folks, who do not hesitate to use staggering violence against civilians, is asking for a whole lot more trouble than to attack the Israelis, no matter how powerful they are in their capabilities.
And in the grand picture, both the Nazis and the Jihadis have global millennial ambitions to rule the world, embrace paranoid fantasies about the Jews, as in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and see the “right order” of the world as the subjection of all others to their dominion.
It seems to me that fitting the facts into the theory takes some huge effort. In that sense, I am reminded of the Marxist approach to history — a fable fleshed out with misinterpreted data. It’s the imposition of a fanciful interpretation on events, and it’s not valid or accurate.
Well, if the choice is between your “simple” explanation above and the lengthy and complex discussion of the psychological dimensions of honor-shame-humiliation-scape-goating, I prefer the latter. Among other things it gives us factors to look for that are transferable to other phenomena, like the Arab dilemma. One of the most fascinating questions, which rational analysis just can’t explain, is the permanent appeal of the Protocols, no matter how false and destructive they prove to be.
In the current case, it seems to me that the ideas posted here depend on the claimed insights of psychology. Example: the concept that humiliation can cause hurt which causes anger that is generalized and seeks blameless victims. That’s very pat, very neat, very trendy and very suspect as a way of understanding history.
Surely you don’t want to argue that scape-goating is not a verifiable
historical phenomenon, however trendy and often misdirected the effort. Take a look at the burning of Jews and lepers in medieval Europe for poisoning wells at the time of the Black Death. If anything, scape-goating may well be one of the most common phenomena in the history of violence, and the fundamental force behind conspiratorial thinking.
As for the “reality” of humiliation as an emotional factor in the lives of people — especially men — see the description from Tom Wolf I posted a while back. Granted it’s “literature” not science, immeasurable and unquantifiable, but are you going to tell me that such things are not important to those who experience/repress them, that they do not play a role in men’s behavior either to avoid further such experiences or to avenge/eliminate the shame?
Psychology is a new discipline, not yet a science, and it is at war with itself; I don’t rate it as helpful in explaining human events such as wars, because it can only come up with facile “Just So” stories. It’s the Monday morning quarterback who always knows why his team lost, but can’t make a buck betting on the next game.
I’ll grant you your first point: Psychology is not a science (and never will be, despite it’s physics envy). But your second, I’m not sure I can agree with. Give me an example of a “Just So” story that psychology offers. I think it’s indispensible in explaining a phenomenon that I know we both are paying a great deal of attention to: self-destructive behavior. I don’t know how else to explain European behavior right now. Anything that does not pay attention to psychological factors fails to explain the deeply irrational (if rational is that which is to the advantage of the person exercising the rationality) behavior of the Europeans.
As for Monday-morning quaterbacking… I agree more or less but I’m not sure what that means. Few, if any, can consistently be correct in predicting the future when human behavior is concerned. We have to explain looking backwards. Give me an example of a more accurate way of predicting the future. Can you tell us when the Europeans will finally and decisively wake up to the danger of Eurabia (when the book by that name is still not published in the original French in which it was written)?
I don’t mean to offend or attempt a refutation. I think I’m so confused that I almost despair of understanding the contentions here. Maybe I should be enrolled in Prof. Landes’s class (though I don’t think he would like my paper!). Then too, I may be on target when I suggest that ultimately much of the thinking here depends on the quasi-scientific jargon of psychology (if so, big mistake, IMHO). Eh? Help, please.
I don’t take offense easily. I like challenges, so don’t hesitate to disagree.
As for quasi-scientific jargon, heaven forbid! I don’t think that the study of humans can ever be scientific, and the psychological and cultural approaches I take are exegetical, not scientific. There is no hard and fast answer to anything when dealing with the infinite complexities of the human soul and cultural phenomena.
Maybe you should be enrolled in my class. I’ll post the syllabus for the first part (general readings on honor-shame culture) soon. And as for your paper, I prefer one that’s in disagreement but well researched and well-argued to one that parrots me back. I think you’d do fine.
Thinking about the Global War in Progress
The Jerusalem Post has a review of a book by Efraim Halevy, former Mossad chief.
Man in the Shadows is in large part a memoir of the former Mossad director’s twilight years of quiet creative thinking, common sense and troubleshooting in the upper echelons of the Israeli intelligence community, and in small part a recipe for trying to sustain life on the planet in the face of al-Qaida style global terrorist aspirations.
The end of the review discusses Halevy’s thoughts on global Jihad. Note in particular his reflections on the difficulty to even conceive of the battle, much less its amplitude, and the ways that difficulty to wake up to the problem aggravates it.
YET THERE is real, blood-racing drama in this memoir, nonetheless. It stems from Halevy’s sober and somber thinking on the stakes of the global conflict with Islamic extremism – his uncluttered assessment that we are in the grip of World War III and have no concerted international strategy for waging it….
What Halevy takes pains to point out, however, is that Israel is only one priority for the global Islamic terrorists, and not a major one at that. “Al-Qaida,” he writes, “has set its sights on the entire world with the goal of effecting an Islamic international revolution that will encompass the entire planet. It is as simple and diabolical as that.”
He notes that the perpetrators make no secret whatsoever of this agenda. “It is not a hidden blueprint. It is stated up front for everyone to read and absorb.” It is equally clear that the enemy will use whatever means at its disposal to achieve the goal – “from the roadside bomb to the civilian aircraft.” Were it to obtain non-conventional weaponry, it would have “no reservation about employing that device at any moment considered appropriate and against any target, civilian or military, across the globe.”
Halevy explains why it is proving so hard to forge an effective counterstrategy, a failure he argues is rooted in the disinclination of the general public “to come to terms with the reality of terrorism… no matter how horrifying the acts,” and the consequent reluctance of political leaders to lose their constituencies by endorsing the kind of radical policies required to prevail.
He calls for a “master plan” of offensive action to be agreed upon by all states targeted or perceived as likely terror targets, and to be implemented over a fixed time frame – an “extreme” strategy to “up the ante” and “accelerate the rate of physical confrontation before the terrorists have the opportunity to upgrade the sophistication of the weaponry they have at their disposal.” It seems an improbable suggestion, unless or until acts of terror still more extreme than 9/11 bring appalled new focus to the minds of presidents and prime ministers.
Beyond this, in any case, he acknowledges, the war cannot only be won through offensive action. It is primarily “an internal struggle within Islam.” And it is in this aspect of his assessment that Halevy is original indeed.
He distinguishes between movements like Hamas, and its “territorial” aim for the complete destruction of Israel, and the al-Qaida brand of terror which, he argues, belongs “in a category in itself… They do not wish to conquer country A or country B. They do not wish to secure this or that tract of land. Their aims and aspirations are universal.” Furthermore, he notes, the likes of Hamas have political and social interests, too. They have constituencies, property, educational programs, welfare agendas. “In their own way, they aspire to be part of the system and not, as al-Qaida aspires, to destroy it.”
Here I think I disagree. Hamas has its own explicit program and, as a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, sees Israel as the most immediate but not the only element in their millennial thinking. They may have a constituency, and social commitments, but I think that, were the occasion to go global to present itself, they would certainly have significant leaders ready to make the leap into a larger war, even at the cost of their “people.” It is an error, I think, to take the distinction between local and global too seriously. In matters apocalyptic, local is global and vice-versa.
Earlier in the book, Halevy briefly muses as to whether Hamas’s 30-year “truce” offer to Israel in the late 1990s might have been worth exploring. In these concluding pages he notes the Hamas pragmatism that saw it opt to enable an “ordered and dignified withdrawal of the Israel Defense Forces” from Gaza last summer, rather than attacking the retreating army and demonstrably savoring victory, because it recognized that Israel would have hit back with a fury that would have jeopardized its major assets.
This may be cognitive egocentrism at work here. According to David Cook, the truce that Hamas offered in the 1990s for thirty years was in part based on the predictions of the demise of Israel according to Quranic calculations made by one of their major thinkers.
The Hamas leader Bassam Jirrar takes it one step further in a very popular book, Israel’s Destruction in 2022. Writing primarily while exiled by Israel in south Lebanon during 1992-94, he explores the Qur’an numerologically using the verses that mention Israel and a number of others. He finds a numerological pattern of nineteen and predicts that Israel will be destroyed in the year 2022. If God has really decreed the destruction of Israel in that year, it is sacrilegious to attempt to destroy it beforehand. Hence Hamas’ willingness to speak about a truce with Israel.
As for Israel hitting back with fury… that hardly seems like something predictable. Despite their constant and bitter complaints about Israeli cruelty, the Palestinians know well how unlikely such responses actually are.
In short, he argues, Hamas has much to lose. Indeed, right now, it is being given a choice, by Israel and the international community, between terrorism and politics – a choice that could never be put to al-Qaida which, by its very nature, could never be a political partner.
At present, Halevy stresses, “it is not politically correct for a responsible Israeli or American or European to contemplate bringing Hamas into the fold.” But the day might come, he believes.
Wow, that’ s an interesting use of “politically correct.” The issue is not whether Hamas is capable of keeping a thirty-year truce, but whether they view that truce something that will benefit them more than Israel in the next round of confrontation. My sense is that the Muslim Brotherhood, with people like Tariq Ramadan as their demopathic spokesmen, prefer to wait for another generation before waging battle, that now is too soon. The issue then is, will Hamas, over the next thirty years, become more “bourgeois” and, whatever their current commitments, grow moderate and abandon the purpose they launched the hudna or not. I personally don’t think the odds are good, and even if they were, in the next thirty years we can expect far more radical Islamic groups to emerge.
The notion that Hamas, and Hizbullah for that matter, might ultimately constitute a relative force for internal Muslim moderation, part of the solution to al-Qaida’s assault on global free society rather than part of the problem, “might seem, at present, entirely in the realm of fantasy,” Halevy allows. But at the beginning of his narrative, Saddam Hussein was the guardian of vital US interests in the Middle East, confronting Iran’s Shi’ite revolutionary zeal, and the Taliban and Osama bin Laden were miniheroes in the American celebration of victory over the Soviet Union.
And that was less than two decades ago.
I don’t follow the logic here. Because we got it wrong (i.e., we allied with people who seemed useful to us and whose radical Islamic commitments we didn’t take seriously), and are learning from that experience (i.e., isolate groups who openly declare their paranoid, megalomanic, apocalyptic intentions), we may be getting it wrong again? We actually had lots of people telling us to trust Hamas during the Oslo “peace process,” like Ehud Sprinzak explaining that terror was Israel’s fault and that treating Hamas better would change their attitude (see The Oslo Syndrome, p. 396). I don’t think this made much sense in the 1990s, and less so now.
“The events of the last few years,” writes this most savvy of veterans, “have stretched the limits of imagination as never before.” The strangest of partners have come together under pressure from joint enemies.
And the most obvious allies have behaved like enemies.
In order to triumph against global Muslim fundamentalist terror, the world will need to muster all its imagination and all of its intelligence. Because the very act of living, he concludes, “is fast becoming more impossible than ever in human history.”
And I hate to say it, but it’ll take even more imagination than even this thoughtful meditation has produced.
Update on France: Bower on Timmerman
I just posted on Bower’s article on Europe. Among the authors he discusses is Ken Timmerman, a journalist who writes for the Washington Times. Timmerman’s book, The French Betrayal of America, details the ways in which France under Chirac has betrayed the United States in the period after 9-11. Here are Bower’s thoughts which in many ways complement, sharpen, and intensify my own reflections on France.
As Ye’or recounts decades of behind-the-scenes Euro-Arab collaboration through dialogue, Kenneth R. Timmerman, in The French Betrayal of America, recounts decades of secret French-Iraqi collaboration through arms deals, kickbacks, and payoffs.19 Timmerman—an American investigative reporter who lived in France for many years—is no glib France-basher, happily acknowledging America- and Israel-friendly actions by France during the Cold War, mostly when François Mitterand was president. For example, Mitterand secretly assisted Israel when it took out Iraq’s French-built Osirak nuclear reactor, covertly arranged to keep strategic mobilization plans out of the hands of his Communist transportation minister (who would’ve turned them over to the Soviets), and, most impressively, shared with the U.S. a breathtaking trove of information acquired by French spies about Soviet attempts to acquire Western military technology. Though a Socialist, in short, Mitterand “chose America as his ally” and thus “helped President Reagan win the cold war.”
Yet if Mitterand stood by America’s side in the confrontation with the Soviet Union, he rejected U.S. involvement in North Africa (notably the 1986 attack on Libya), since his country’s political class regarded that continent, a rich source of “commissions and kickbacks to French political parties,” as “its baronial domain.” Nor did Mitterand’s staunch cold-war support last: in the late 1980s, pecuniary considerations led him to “switch sides” on the issue of military sales to the Soviets.
Still, he was a better ally than his predecessor, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (whose government agreed, in a nuclear cooperation treaty with Iraq, to bar Jews from participating), or his successor, Chirac, who repeatedly called Saddam his “friend” and helped him skirt UN sanctions after the Gulf War. Chirac’s corruption, which would appear to be of Dantesque proportions, nearly destroyed his career; 9/11 saved it. The terrorist attacks, and America’s response to them, deflected attention from his sleazy shenanigans and enabled him to posture on the world stage as a statesman and peacemaker. And what the 9/11 terrorists couldn’t accomplish, the right-wing extremist Jean Le Pen did: in the 2002 election, Le Pen ended up as Chirac’s challenger, causing everyone in France except the Le Pen fringe to rally behind Chirac, who, after winning over eighty percent of the vote, was seen as his country’s savior, “the very incarnation of the permanent values of La France.”
All of which makes it even more fascinating to read Timmerman on Chirac’s shabby little demimonde of bribes and bagmen. From the cash stashes in Chirac’s office toilet to the Quai d’Orsay diplomat caught poking through garbage bags outside a Houston home to the classified U.S. and UN data that Chirac, unforgivably, shared with Saddam right up to the invasion of Iraq, Timmerman’s account makes the entire history of Washington scandals from Watergate onward look like a Girl Scout cookie drive. He makes a point that’s actually occurred to me before, too: that the French are so accustomed to their politicians being profoundly cynical and corrupt that they naturally assume all American politicians are like that, too. One recalls the cheers at Cannes for Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, that pastiche of falsehood and cheap innuendo; the bitter irony is that the scale of French leaders’ real-life avarice and perfidy dwarfs even the worst of that film’s accusations against their American counterparts.
The French Betrayal of America, however, is not just a chronicle of unexampled greed. It is also a story of obsession with power and nostalgia for French glory. A U.S. official who works closely with the French tells Timmerman: “France is not the United States. And they just can’t seem to get over it.” Passages quoted by Timmerman from a book by Chirac crony Dominique de Villepin (now the French prime minister) provide disturbing insight into the mentality of a political elite that, as Timmerman puts it, has “consistently favored authoritarian regimes over democracy, not just in the third world but also in Europe.” He observes that Villepin’s naked envy of American power and his nostalgia for a return to a time (Napoleon’s) “when France was ruled by an all-powerful state, that had only to appear to be obeyed” bespeak “a dangerous delusion and a penchant for authoritarianism.” They certainly paint a picture of a government that seems to have learned little from modern European history. “French diplomacy today,” a French politician tells Timmerman, “continues to consider Iraq as a cake to be divided and not as a democracy to be constructed.” And get a load of this comment by a Villepin adviser: “We get all the blame [for making illegal arms deals], but not the signature [on the contract]! . . . We pass for a country that is cynical and immoral without getting the business such an attitude is presumed to bring.”
Timmerman agrees with Guy Millière that Chirac’s support for Saddam was based largely on the latter’s high standing among French Muslims. “French leaders,” he quotes Millère as saying, “will never take a decision that could make young radical Muslims angry”; had Chirac supported the Iraq invasion, there would have been “riots in the suburbs.” (Most Muslim neighborhoods in France are on the outskirts of cities.)20 In France, this appeasement mentality is reflexive. Timmerman quotes a local French official who, prior to the sixtieth-anniversary D-day commemoration, worried out loud in Le Monde that “What image will we send of Normandy to Arab and Islamic countries by receiving Bush and Putin with pomp and circumstance?”
It sheds interesting light on my thoughts about French lack of gratitude. They have to watch their backs.
Are We Waking Up Yet? Bower on Eurabia
I spent a depressingly realistic evening with Arnold and Frimit Roth, parents of Malki, a fourteen-year-old girl blown up in the Sbarro Pizza bombing of the summer of 2001. Among the issues discussed was whether Europe would wake up before it was too late. He was not optimistic to say the least, and unlike me, whose contact is largely with friends, colleagues and taxi-drivers, he’s spent time with European political and administrative figures. I hope he will share some of his experiences with us at The Augean Stables.
In the meantime, at the end of the evening I decided to start a new category: Are We Waking Up Yet? to track the process of people — American intellectuals as well as Europeans — waking up to the threat that hangs over us all. Among the ways of conceptualizing this, I recount a conversation I’ll keep anonymous. I suggested to a colleague who wanted to do some innovative conferences on the Middle East, that we do one on Bat-Ye’or’s book Eurabia, exploring the thesis, critiquing its claims, and evaluating its validity. From my point of view this seemed like a no-brainer: provocative thesis which, even if only partially correct, represents an issue of immense importance and urgency, serious academic discussion, including experts in demography, international relations, religious history, sociology, anthropology, to explore and critique… what could be more appropriate for a responsible academia to do for the society that both sustains it and should be able to turn to it for timely and well-considered opinions?
His response suprised me (although it shouldn’t have). “Absolutely not. If we do something on Eurabia, that would completely discredit us. We can do something on the problem of Islam in Europe, but we can’t call it Eurabia. That would be the kiss of death in current academic circles.”
Now the person speaking here is not at all an idiotarian. On the contrary, his writings on the Middle East represent some of the most hard-hitting and incisive I’ve read. But he knows the academic scene… better than I, a medievalist who has just begun to poach on the fields of contemporary history and political ‘science’.
So as an introduction to the question: “Are We Waking Up Yet?” I’d like to ask the following question: “Will academia address the phenomenon of Eurabia before it becomes a reality?”
To that end, I draw your attention to an excellent essay by Bruce Bower, “The Crisis of Europe,” published by the Hudson Review. (See The Belmont Club, which has its own excellent discussion of the article.)
It begins with a autobiographical statement that struck me with particular force.
My learning curve was steep. When I look back, it’s as if one day the whole business wasn’t even on my radar screen, and the next day I understood that it was the most important issue of our time.
It happened in Amsterdam, a city I flipped for in 1997 and moved to a year later.1 But it wasn’t till 1999, when I lived briefly in a predominantly Muslim neighborhood, that I took in the fact that the city was divided into two radically different and almost entirely separate communities. One of them, composed mostly of ethnic Dutchmen, was secular, liberal, and (owing to a very low birthrate) dwindling steadily; the other, composed of immigrant Muslims, lived in tradition-bound, self-segregating enclaves whose autocratic leaders despised democracy and whose population (thanks to high birth and immigration rates) was climbing rapidly. This division, I soon realized, was replicated across Western Europe. Clearly, major social friction—and more—lay down the line.
Yet nobody talked about it. Or wanted to.
The entire article is worth reading, as well as the footnotes. But below I quote the discussion of Bat-Ye’or’s Eurabia because it raises precisely the issues that academics should be discussing and are not.
Fashion Advice to the Ugly: I’d Rather be in my Pajamas
[This is the first of a series of 6 segments on the OSM Launch in New York last November.]
Fashion advice for the ugly: I’d rather be in my pajamas.
Ask not on whom the Joke is; the Joke is on Us
Everyone writes with an audience in mind. To some extent, what we write says something about what we think of that audience: Are we condescending? Demagogic? Demanding? Generous? Some of the above?
Bloggers, especially the political bloggers who form the core of the new Pajamas Open Source Media, got their start by writing to an imagined audience that wanted to hear what they had to say even if, initially, they had no idea how large an audience that might be (and any expert in the MSM would have told them to forget about it). Above all they broke the matrix of MSM mimetic desire, the now suffocating arrogance of the gatekeepers of public discourse, those who get repeat parts in the public discussion, those who adhere to the powerful, if invisible, consensus as to what the “public” wants (entertainment, lifestyle issues, national news, all packaged professionally) and what they need (images that encourage respect for other cultures, that do not give fodder for right-wing warmongering).
I once read about a fish that is programmed to follow the fish in front of it, so that they all follow each other and the whole school moves in a kind of Brownian motion. But when experimenters took one fish and pithed the part of the brain that made it follow other fish, it swam off in any direction and drew in its wake the rest of the school. Although far from pithed, or random motion, the bloggers who form the core of PJMediaís initial launch group, and those who read them, are not random swimmers followed by mimetic idiot(arians). They are mavericks followed by independent thinkers, and they do break out of the Brownian motion of the MSM. No phenomenon illustrates better the workings of the invisible hand in the market place of ideas, than the sudden, stunning, and salutary rise to the top of the blogosphere of such independent minds as Richard Fernandez, Glenn Reynolds, Charles Johnson, Roger Simon, Michelle Malkin, Pamela … the list goes on and on.
So going to the launch of PJMedia promised to be a delightful experience. It was like going to a convention of people, all of whom, were they at the procession where the emperor paraded naked, would have said — indeed they have said — “Daddy, why is the emperor naked?”
But every time a grass-roots movement institutionalizes, or as Max Weber says, goes from charisma to rationalization, certain dangers emerge. This week we’re studying heresies in my medieval French history course. Repeatedly movements that started out charismatic, independent, passionate, gained immense popularity thereby, and got drawn in the direction of institutionalization that all too often distorted the very source of their initial strength. Francis of Assissi, pressured to form an order by the Pope Innocent III in the early 13th century, ended up distancing himself from his own order, so unhappy was he with the results; and before the century was out, institutional Franciscans were executing spiritual Franciscans for heresy. Now modern grass-roots movements like the blogosphere need not be as extreme in their demands, nor as violent in their transformation, but… you get the idea. And since Pajamas Media was such a nice term — like the Lollards or the Quakers, a name given to the group by disdainful outsiders and accepted by the group as a way of turning the insult around — the idea that it would be discarded in favor of something more neutral made me uneasy.
Would the process of institutionalizing contribute to shifting from a primarily free-wheeling discourse that rewards plain talk and common sense to one that worries about who speaks rather than what they say. As OSM becomes a portal to the blogosphere, it runs the risk of shifting attention in this direction, and ending up more as a gatekeeper than a portal. How much effort will now go into catching the eyes of the institutionally powerful decision makers, rather than into addressing the very audience of plain-thinkers who raised them to prominence? This can be the beginning of the slippery slope of mimetic desire that leads to a group of people who, taking their cues from above, end up praising “the emperor’s new clothes.”
Pushing that thought to the back of my mind, with the prospect of hanging with all the lively independent minds, I made my way over to the W hotel on Wednesday night with Pedro Zuquete (my partner in crime), just glad to be there.
Getting Warmed Up: The Root Causes of Terrorism
The first evening, after spending a delightful time with, among others, Sol (Solomonia), Pieter Dorsman (Peak Talk) and Stephen Green (Vodka Pundit) on the lobby of the W, Pedro pointed out David Corn of The Nation to me.
“We used one of his writings to illustrate the PCP (Politically Correct Paradigm) slogan, poverty breeds terrorism.”
“Really, so what’s he doing here?” I asked, thinking that that was a pretty idiotarian position to hold.
“He’s the token leftist on the steering committee.” (On the panel the next day, Corn referred to himself at the “token liberal”).
“Great, let’s ask him if he really thinks that.”
We finally reached him by “joining” a conversation between him and Pamela, of (don’t mess with) Atlas Shrugs.
“Is it true” I said, with the kind of incredulous tone that tends to make people defensive, “that you think poverty breeds terrorism?”
“I didn’t say that,” Corn responded quickly, “I said that addressing poverty is a way among others to reduce terrorism. I didn’t say that poverty breeds terrorism [ah, cyberspace is so merciless]. I’m just arguing that if you have programs and help the economic situation, then you’re going to reduce terrorism and… the influence of jihadis,” he said, gesturing to us as if to say, ‘you know, the people you’re so worried about’).
“That’s not helping, that’s extortion money,” Pamela shot back without missing a beat. Pure PCP vs JP. This was going to be a lot of fun.
Iran, the Bomb, and the Second Coming
Fascinating article about the nuclear plans of Iran:
Last Monday, just before he announced that Iran had gatecrashed “the nuclear club”, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad disappeared for several hours. He was having a khalvat (tête-à-tête) with the Hidden Imam, the 12th and last of the imams of Shiism who went into “grand occultation” in 941.
According to Shia lore, the Imam is a messianic figure who, although in hiding, remains the true Sovereign of the World. In every generation, the Imam chooses 36 men, (and, for obvious reasons, no women) naming them the owtad or “nails”, whose presence, hammered into mankind’s existence, prevents the universe from “falling off”. Although the “nails” are not known to common mortals, it is, at times, possible to identify one thanks to his deeds. It is on that basis that some of Ahmad-inejad’s more passionate admirers insist that he is a “nail”, a claim he has not discouraged. For example, he has claimed that last September, as he addressed the United Nations’ General Assembly in New York, the “Hidden Imam drenched the place in a sweet light”.
Last year, it was after another khalvat that Ahmadinejad announced his intention to stand for president. Now, he boasts that the Imam gave him the presidency for a single task: provoking a “clash of civilisations” in which the Muslim world, led by Iran, takes on the “infidel” West, led by the United States, and defeats it in a slow but prolonged contest that, in military jargon, sounds like a low intensity, asymmetrical war.
In Ahmadinejad’s analysis, the rising Islamic “superpower” has decisive advantages over the infidel. Islam has four times as many young men of fighting age as the West, with its ageing populations. Hundreds of millions of Muslim “ghazis” (holy raiders) are keen to become martyrs while the infidel youths, loving life and fearing death, hate to fight. Islam also has four-fifths of the world’s oil reserves, and so controls the lifeblood of the infidel. More importantly, the US, the only infidel power still capable of fighting, is hated by most other nations.
According to this analysis, spelled out in commentaries by Ahmadinejad’s strategic guru, Hassan Abassi, known as the “Dr Kissinger of Islam”, President George W Bush is an aberration, an exception to a rule under which all American presidents since Truman, when faced with serious setbacks abroad, have “run away”. Iran’s current strategy, therefore, is to wait Bush out. And that, by “divine coincidence”, corresponds to the time Iran needs to develop its nuclear arsenal, thus matching the only advantage that the infidel enjoys.
Moments after Ahmadinejad announced “the atomic miracle”, the head of the Iranian nuclear project, Ghulamreza Aghazadeh, unveiled plans for manufacturing 54,000 centrifuges, to enrich enough uranium for hundreds of nuclear warheads. “We are going into mass production,” he boasted.
The Iranian plan is simple: playing the diplomatic game for another two years until Bush becomes a “lame-duck”, unable to take military action against the mullahs, while continuing to develop nuclear weapons …
At the same time, not to forget the task of hastening the Mahdi’s second coming, Ahamdinejad will pursue his provocations. On Monday, he was as candid as ever: “To those who are angry with us, we have one thing to say: be angry until you die of anger!” His adviser, Hassan Abassi, is rather more eloquent. “The Americans are impatient,” he says, “at the first sight of a setback, they run away. We, however, know how to be patient. We have been weaving carpets for thousands of years.”
One more cartoon … more protests?
THE controversy over cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad was reignited yesterday after an Italian Catholic magazine printed one on its front cover.
Studi Cattolici carried a drawing of the Prophet in Hell, with the Italian writer Dante Alighieri asking the poet Virgil: “That man divided in two from his head to his feet – isn’t that Muhammad?” Virgil replies: “Yes, it is him and he is in two because he has divided society – while the man next to him with his arms down represents Italian politics towards Islam.”
The cartoon is a play on Dante’s Inferno – a similar scene is painted on the ceiling of the San Petronio Cathedral in Bologna, which had been the planned target of a Islamic terrorist cell until the plot was uncovered. Yesterday, there was widespread condemnation of the decision to print the cartoon – earlier this year riots erupted across the Muslim world after similar cartoons were published in Denmark. But Studi Cattolici, which has close ties with the Vatican and the secretive Opus Dei group, defended the decision to publish it. Its editor, Cesare Cavallieri, said: “It is not a cartoon against Muhammad but rather a cartoon about the loss of identity in the West …
Muslim groups in Italy also condemned the publication of the cartoon. Roberto Piccardo, of the Italian Union of Muslims, said: “The mother of cretins is always pregnant.”"
Help Is On The Way
Iran will give $50 million to the Palestinian authority:
TEHRAN, Iran – Iran will give the financially strapped
Palestinian Authority $50 million in aid, state-run television reported Sunday.Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki announced the aid package during a conference held in Tehran in support of the Palestinians. The promise of funds comes a few days after the United States and Europe announced they were cutting aid to the government led by the Islamic militant group Hamas.
Mottaki said the decision was made based on Iran’s firm and long-standing policy of supporting the Palestinians, the broadcast said. “Cutting the West’s financial aid to Palestine would not affect the will of the Palestinian people,” he was quoted as saying. This was the first time that Iran has specified a figure in aid to the Palestinians. In the past, it has said that it would give the Palestinian Authority funds to compensate for the lack of funding from the West.
The EU War On Words Continues …
European Union’s first rule regarding Islam: If you don’t “offend” people they will not get “upset”.
Brussels, 14 April (AKI) – The European Council – the European Union’s decision-making body – is currently preparing a new public communication guidelines aimed at removing ‘derogatory’ terminology on Islam, such as “Islamic terror” and “fundamentalists” to make it clear that extremists are hijacking the religion. The lexicon of terms is aimed at politicians, officials and diplomats, but given freedom of speech concerns, its use will not be be legally binding. It is expected to be adopted in June.
The lexicon will reconsider terms like “Islamists” and also “Jihad” – which is often used by groups like al-Qaeda to mean a holy war against ‘infidels’ or non-Muslims.
The European Council’s move follows a the crisis in relations between Western countries and some segments of the Muslim world sparked by the publication of a series of Danish-originated caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in scores of newspapers worldwide over the past six months.
Is Anyone Listening?
This is what happens when people feel their leaders don’t represent them anymore.
From the Daily Telegraph:
White working-class families feel so neglected by the Government and angered by immigration that they are deserting Labour and flocking to the British National Party, a minister admitted yesterday.
In a sensational claim, Margaret Hodge, one of Tony Blair’s closest allies, said that eight out of 10 white people in her east London constituency of Barking are threatening to vote for the far-Right party in next month’s local elections. Once traditional Labour supporters are angry at a lack of affordable housing – and blame immigration, and Labour, for the changes.
“They can’t get a home for their children, they see black and ethnic minority communities moving in and they are angry,” said Mrs Hodge, the employment minister. “When I knock on doors I say to people, ‘are you tempted to vote BNP?’ and many, many, many – eight out of 10 of the white families – say ‘yes’. That’s something we have never seen before, in all my years. Even when people voted BNP, they used to be ashamed to vote BNP. Now they are not.” Mrs Hodge said the pace of ethnic change in her area had frightened people. “What has happened in Barking and Dagenham is the most rapid transformation of a community we have ever witnessed …
She also complained about a “lack of leadership” from her party on race, and said the “political class”, including Labour, was frightened of the issue. “The Labour Party hasn’t talked to these people. This is a traditional Labour area but they are not used to engaging with us because all we do is put leaflets through doors. Part of the reason they switch to the BNP is they feel no one else is listening to them.”
Israel as a “dying tree” …
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad obsession with Israel continues:
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has again made provocative statements about Israel, this time calling the Jewish state “a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm”.
He has made the comments at the start of a three-day international conference in Tehran, where Islamic leaders are discussing how to raise funds for the new Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.
Mr Ahmadinejad has predicted that Israel will soon be “annihilated by a storm”.
“Whether you like it or not, the Zionist regime is approaching its end,” he said.
“The Zionist regime is a dying tree and soon its branches will all be broken down.”
Funding callOpening the conference, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has called on Islamic nations to give all possible support to the Palestinian people and the new Government.
Ayatollah Khamenei has also lashed out at the United States and Israel.
“America, like a guardian, defends the rights of this occupying regime and the international treaties and agreements will be ignored,” he said.
“This country even attacks the neighbouring countries like Egypt, Lebanon and Syria and even takes their land.”
The Iranian President provoked an international outcry last year when he rejected the Holocaust and said Israel should be “wiped off the map”.
The media’s role in fanning the flames
[This is yet another blog entry from Solomonia, from Sunday, November 06, 2005 about the riots in France which, all of a sudden, led to people wondering about whether showing the rioters might inflame the situation, and encourage "right-wing" voting patterns.]
A recent BBC report by Hugh Schofield actually shows some awareness of the role of the media in pouring oil on the fire.
The other reason for pessimism is that the rioters can read in much of the reaction to their rampages a legitimisation of what they have done.
The universal press response – both national and international, left and right – has been to point out how the French model of integration has failed, and how the suburbs have become exploding cauldrons.
From every direction come calls for a new assessment, but some calls are stronger than others.
An editorialist in Le Monde, for example compared the riots to May 1968, and expressed the hope that just as the student uprising forced a major – and in the writer’s view – positive change to French society, so will these. That is not exactly an encouragement for the violence to cease.
And from the BBC no less. Is something happening over there? When will it occur to them that they’ve poured this oil on the Palestinian Intifada for decades?
[Update: Apparently nothing serious was going on over there, but I may be wrong. I don't regularly consult the BBC, but this website does.
Next week: The 7-part report on the launching of Open Source Media in NYC]
Europe’s emerging Islam
The Economist has an article on “Europe’s emerging Islam.” It seems that European Muslims have conflicting views about their role in Europe.
“I BELIEVE there is no European Islam,” said Mustafa Ceric, a Bosnian imam, at a meeting of Islamic clerics and advisers in Vienna. Yet two months ago, his supreme Islamic department of Bosnia said that “Muslims who live in Europe have the right—no, the duty—to develop their own European culture of Islam.” Such contradictions are part of a broad debate over the role and character of Islam in Europe, which could have profound implications, and not only because Muslims are the continent’s largest minority. It might affect the wider Islamic world if it shows that Muslims can adapt to modern, secular democracies …
In the teeth of traditional teaching, European Muslims are creating a distinctive form of Islam. They are driven by their experience as minorities; by a desire to overcome ethnic differences; and by the trauma of emigration. The first encourages Muslims to co-operate with non-Muslims; the second encourages them to look beyond their traditions; the third forces them to come to terms with change and modernity. Sayed Ghaemmagami, mufti of the Shias in Germany, argues that the situation of Muslims in Europe is unique. “The existence of an Islamic diaspora”, he says, “is totally different from the past and requires new thinking about relations with non-Islamic peoples.” The Koran calls for peaceful relations between Muslims and others, so Muslims should engage with their new countries and not set up parallel structures. “We must participate in all activities of life, as students, as businessmen, as social workers,” says Ahmed al-Rawi, president of the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe.
Muslims should also respect the difference between religion and politics. As Mr Ceric puts it, “a Muslim has allegiance to God as an act of faith but is a citizen with a duty to the state as an act of reason.” Mr Ghaemmagami says that “parallel societies are unIslamic. Muslims ought to feel accountable to the overall society and not manifest their customs in such a way as to run counter to the societies in which they live.”
Internal ethnic differences are reinforcing the minority experience to encourage a European Islam. Outsiders tend to see Europe’s Muslims as all the same. But in fact they fall into at least five categories: those from European countries (Bosnia, Albania, bits of Russia); converts; first-generation immigrants; second- or third-generation Muslims born in Europe, who speak only European languages and, except in their religion, are indistinguishable from others; and those who have become largely secular.
Olivier Roy, a French academic, has argued that, when Islam is torn from its traditional moorings—customs, family life and cuisine—it can become fundamentalist, and in some cases fanatical. Alienated both from their parents’ way of life and their host societies, young European Muslims can be easily attracted by a back-to-basics version of Islam that acknowledges no national boundaries and has been disseminated with the help of plenty of Saudi oil money. As an example of the rupture between young European Muslims and their parents’ homeland, take the Muslims of Bradford, England. When imams were brought in from north-western Pakistan to teach them, they failed completely to communicate with their young pupils. It is exactly in these circumstances, as Mr Roy points out, that Saudi-supported “neo-fundamentalism” becomes attractive.
Just Like The Nazis (Part 2)
The RAF officer who refused to serve in Iraq and accused the United States of acting like the Third Reich is going to jail.
From the Daily Telegraph:
An RAF officer who refused to serve in Iraq because he considered the war illegal was accused of arrogance and attempted martyrdom before being jailed for eight months at a court martial yesterday.
Flt Lt Malcolm Kendall-Smith, 37, a doctor, was found guilty of “calculated and deliberate disobedience” of five direct orders after he was told to replace another doctor in Basra last year.
He considered that the war was “a campaign of imperial conquest” by America.
After reading international law on conflict, including the Nuremberg Principles, he believed that he would be committing a crime by taking part in the “illegal” occupation. Kendall-Smith looked shocked when the sentence was read out and he was dismissed from the RAF. He was also ordered to pay £20,000 in defence costs.
Before asking for the sentence to be read, Judge Advocate Jack Bayliss told him: “You have, in the view of the court, sought to make a martyr of yourself. You have shown a degree of arrogance which is amazing.
“Obedience of orders is at the heart of any disciplined force. Refusal to obey orders means that the force is not a disciplined force but a rabble.
“Those who wear the Queen’s uniform cannot pick and choose which orders they will obey. Those who seek to do so must face the serious consequences.”
Let’s Not Be Abusive! (The EU and Terrorism)
The European Union wants Europeans to stop saying “Islamic terrorism.” They should say instead “terrorists who abusively invoke Islam.”
From the Daily Telegraph:
European governments should shun the phrase “Islamic terrorism” in favour of “terrorists who abusively invoke Islam”, say guidelines from EU officials.
Backed by diplomats and civil servants from the 25 EU members, the officials are drafting a “non-emotive lexicon for discussing radicalisation” to be submitted to Tony Blair and other leaders in June.
The Brussels officials hope the new lexicon, which would not be legally binding, would be adopted by governments and other EU institutions, such as the European Commission and European Parliament.
An EU official said: “The basic idea behind it is to avoid the use of improper words that would cause frustration among Muslims and increase the risk of radicalisation.”
Along with civil servants from the Home Office, the officials have reviewed the impact of such terms as Islamist, fundamentalist and jihad when describing acts of terrorism and murder.
“Jihad means something for you and me; it means something else for a Muslim,” EU officials at a Berlin conference on radicalisation said. “Jihad is a perfectly positive concept of trying to fight evil within yourself.”
Though British officials have been involved in drawing up the lexicon, Whitehall sources indicated the Government was unlikely to adopt it wholesale or heed any call to ban “Islamic terrorist”.
Two thoughts:
Firstly, this reminds me of the BBC editorial guidelines about the need to avoid the use of the word “terrorist” because it “can be a barrier rather than an aid to understanding” …
Secondly, it epitomizes an overall European attitude that somehow there is an “unjustified fear” of Islam. Read for example Peaktalk discussion of the new report from The Netherlands Scientific Council for Government Policy. Very revealling.
Just Like The Nazis …
From Reuters:
ALDERSHOT (Reuters) – A British Air Force doctor on trial for refusing to go to Iraq because he thought the war was illegal said on Wednesday he believed the United States was the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany.
Australian-born Flight Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith could face an unlimited jail sentence for disobeying an order to go to Iraq last year and four orders to prepare for his deployment, in the first British case of its kind.
“As early as 2004 I regarded the United States to be on a par with Nazi Germany as regards its activities in the Gulf,” he told the court.
Prosecutor David Perry asked: “Are you saying the U.S. is the moral equivalent of the Third Reich?” to which Kendall-Smith replied “That’s correct.”
The judge in the case has already ruled that orders for British troops to deploy to Iraq in 2005 were legal because the British presence was covered by a United Nations Security Council resolution passed after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Essays in Judeophobia II: Jews, Civil Society and It’s Enemies
[This is the second part of the Essay on antisemitism written in 2002 and posted here, beginning with the last section on Post-modern anti-semitism. This part deals with a general theory of Civil Society vs. "Prime Divider" Society and the Jews as an early experiment in Civil Society.]
Civil vs. Prime Divider Societies and Modern Globalization
In order to understand the dynamics that I am concerned with, and which, I think offer the best approach to understanding the distressing situation in which Israel finds itself, let me lay down some definitions and relate them to the most important single phenomenon of our time, globalization:
Prime divider society: Those cultures in which a small elite monopolize the technology of power (weapons, communications, public voice) by creating a fundamental gap between them and the vast majority (commoners). The three key components of the prime divider are: 1) legal privilege for the elite, 2) stigmatization of commoner manual labor, and 3) radically different forms of education/socialization for the two groups. The monopoly on weapons and communications that the elites maintain in such cultures permit them to appropriate, with violence if necessary, always with the implied threat of violence, the vast majority of the surplus that the largely peasant society produces. The basic interpersonal and international principle behind such structures is the dominating imperative of “rule or be ruled”, a zero-sum game in which the elite wins and the commoners lose, producing the wealth distribution typical of such societies – an immensely wealthy and cultured elite and an uneducated subject population living largely at subsistence levels.
The logic of the elite here is quite simple: if we do not dominate you, whoever does take power will use it to dominate us, or, as the Athenians said to the Melians, “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” The more political ideology is equally simple: to grant “freedom” and autonomy to commoners, who have no discipline, no self-control, is, as Plato might have put it, a recipe for anarchy. The very stability of society depends on a small elite to run public affairs, and the immense disparities of wealth and power that mark the prime divider are necessary for the social order. Power, in prime divider society, is opaque, mysterious, beyond the ken of the population. (These issues will become crucial in understanding modern Antisemitism.)