Augean Stables

Joel Pollack of Guide to the Perplexed has a couple of posts on the Sabeel conference at the Old South Church. In the first one he discusses a quotation from Nelson Mandela on the back of the Official Program.

I sat down in a pew near the front and opened the folder of conference materials. The back page of the official program was entitled “Apartheid?” and was filled with quotes and maps aimed at proving the Israel-apartheid analogy. They had a line from Jimmy Carter, a line from Archbishop Desmond Tutu (the conference’s keynote speaker), and a line from—no, wait, really?—Nelson Mandela:

“Apartheid is a crime against humanity. Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property. It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality. It has systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians, contrary to the rules of international law. It has, in particular, waged a war against a civilian population, in particular children.”

Sounds rather damning, doesn’t it? And who could disagree with Nelson Mandela? There’s only one problem: Nelson Mandela never said, wrote or endorsed those words. They are the creation of an Arab journalist named Arjan El Fassed. When I exposed El Fassed’s fraud earlier this year, he claimed: “There is no possible basis for Pollak to say I intended people to believe the memo was written by anyone other than myself.”

In spite of El Fassed’s admission, the Israel-haters continue to use his Mandela quote to promote their views.

Do the authors of the pamphlet know that this attribution is not true? (Certainly, anti-Zionists are carefully attuned to the meaning of perceived mis-attribution when it’s in their favor, as in the case of Martin Luther King’s Zionist sympathies.) So either they don’t know a “mock memo” when they see one, and/or they don’t care.

On the contrary, my sense is that this text represents what might best be called, mythical status. It embodies an axiomatic “higher truth” for anti-Zionists, and attributing it to Nelson Mandela gives it a further luster that, inaccuracy aside, it clearly deserves in their eyes. In other words, they feel fully justified in presenting it as true. How else can people be mobilized to do what is so obviously the right thing to do “for peace and justice” (i.e., condemn Israel)? When confronted withe problem, they, like the defenders of Dan Rather’s forged memo, can always plead “fake but accurate.”

Such an attitude brings us to one of the key issues separating propaganda from information, separating the informing of an autonomous public, empowered to make decisions, and the manipulation of a public whose decisions, the activists wish to control. In our imperfect world where objective reality cannot be reduced to verbal formulae, only a commitment to accuracy and empirical evidence distinguishes those who report to us, as reliably as they can, from those who tell us what they want us to think. Fake but accurate is the refuge of true believers who consider convenient fictions — what medieval Christians referred to as “pious forgeries” — acceptable means to convey the message.

A commitment to calling it and telling it fairly, even when it is against your own interests, marks an informtion source with integrity. Note, for example, how the allegedly partisan CAMERA (which is careful to document everything it writes) had to deal with a similarly manipulated “Zionist” citation attributed to Martin Luther King, they didn’t mince words and in their headline called it a hoax.

The ability to distinguish empirical information that reflects what happened, and information that comes from dishonest sources, constitutes one of the fundamental skills of any civil society. If you can look at the rushes taken by Palestinian cameramen at Netzarim Junction on the 30th of September, and not see street actors, completely unafraid of Israeli soldiers, with military directed by civilian directors, play scenes before the cameramen of injury and evacuation, rather than people actually injured and taken away, then you have failed the most elemental level of journalistic intelligence.

At that point, you can accept rebuke and become a more critical information provider, exercising shrewder and more penetrating judgment, or you can use the excuse of the PA TV official who explained that doctoring footage of al Durah to accuse the Israelis of deliberately targeting the boy was a form of “higher truth” to which he as a journalist is dedicated above all things. This is the excuse Enderlin used for running the footage of the boy without investigating the reliability of the report, because “it corresponded to the situation in Gaza and on the West Bank.” This is the way many people dismiss the significance of the al Durah as staged: “after all, the Israelis do target children.” As Adam Rose put it so succinctly,

…the critical question in an examination of the dynamics of Mohammed al-Dura’s “martyrdom ” is not whether the singular “Story of Mohammed al-Dura” is true, but whether the “universal Mohammed al-Dura Story is true.

Nor is this merely a problem with Middle Eastern reporting. Fudging the line between real evidence and desired conclusions is a human tendency that threatens scientific research and reporting. The impact of CNN’s decisions on quantity over quality of information from around the world, had an enormous impact on the behavior of nations in the last decades of the 20th century — including Bosnia. Ultimately, critical issues like our understanding of the two great global threats of our age: global climate, and global Jihad warming, are at stake. Is Gore “fake but accurate”? Is that why he declares the debate closed. Or is he saying, the new global warming paradigm acquired and it’s time to move into action? Is Podhoretz just “making it up“? Or should we be taking strategic action against global Jihad? How do we asses the nature of future threats and make decisions on how to deal with them? We have to start with the best information about the present we can get.

The unique commitment to discerning and reporting the “truth,” as best one can consensually determine it, constitutes one of the more unusual characteristics of the West, and it makes modern science (and hence technology) possible. Civil society did not emerge as a constitutional experiment in the West until this commitment had given rise, thanks to the printing press, to a public sphere presided over by a city of letters, a culture of debate and information exchange. In order to do so, one must overcome the demands of honor and shame — above all, do not contradict an alpha male in public.

Of course, people are always tempted to, and often do lie. But one is much more careful about lying in a culture that punishes such behavior with public humiliation. Only through the acceptance of reliable negative feedback — i.e., the ability to self-criticize and deal with moral ambiguity — can we begin to grapple with the world beyond our egos; only when a free press informs the public as best it can, and trusts the public to make its own judgments, rather than manipulating the public to make the judgments journalists have decided are true, can a democracy sustain itself.

Apparently, for the organizers of this conference, not only was distributing material under false pretences legitimate, but in not taking questions from the floor, they indicated how little they are willing to deal with negative feedback. As Jacques Elul says, “Propaganda begins where dialogue ends…” And, apparently, that’s where this conference begins.

Arjan el Fassed

Let’s first consider the identity of the author of the document. This will not only raise questions about the reliability of the broad and aggressive generalizations this text contains, but also about the moral arguments which actually constitute the core of the indictment. According to CommonDreams.org, a news center for the “progressive community.”

Arjan El Fassed, a Palestinian political scientist, media activist, and human rights specialist living in the Netherlands had also distinguished himself as an effective cyber-activist, spearheading boycott campaigns against Burger King and Benneton for opening franchises in Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, and producing a prodigious amount of Op-Eds and letters to editors of papers in Europe, the US, the UK and Canada. El Fassed is also a co-founder of Al-Awda, the Palestine Right of Return Coalition.

He has a blog, and is one of the co-founders and regular contributors to the Electronic Intifada, which announces its stated intention of provide an alternative to what it deems “the prevailing pro-Israeli slant in U.S. media coverage by offering information from a Palestinian perspective.” El Fassed is clearly far more concerned with Israeli crimes against the Palestinians (which he makes a central focus), than either Palestinian crimes against Israelis (surprise!) or Palestinian crimes against Palestinians. When Arjan tells you that every Palestinian man woman and child in prison has been tortured, don’t expect that to refer to those in Palestinian prisons. This latter point is important: he claims to be a “human rights policy advisor,” and a proponent of Palestinian democracy.

It does not seem like too much of an exaggeration to say that his work represents partisan advocacy, and that he has no hesitation attributing evil intent to the Israelis regardless of the circumstances. As far as he’s concerned, Rachel Corrie was murdered regardless of discrepencies in the evidence. He is an avid consumer and propagator of Pallywood and Hizbollywood products.

In other words, the work of Arjan is impressively consistent in its use of every rhetorical device to indict Israel, and the accompanying omerta that reigns over internal problems. [The only surprise in his predictable record of opinion and moral indignation is his take on Darfur.]

Differently put, Arjan el Fassed is a prime candidate for an award in energetic demopathy. He employs a ringing moral discourse, but only applies it to the enemy: overwhelmingly Israel, but any Palestinian faction that looks like it will “cave” to the Israelis. Any report of Israelis killing Palestinian children outrages him. Reports of “democratically elected” Hamas executing civilians don’t seem to register.

Now calling someone a demopath is not just a smear tactic. Demopathy involves a specific moral hypocrisy which uses human rights language as a weapon with which to assault an enemy (one committed to human rights), while refusing to apply the same (or really any) standards to oneself. In other words, it’s a form of information warfare that weaponizes accusations of immorality, not to increase morality, but to win a battle for dominion with an enemy committed to morality. Nietzsche called this the ressentiment of the slave morality: the weak, whining at the injustice of their being down, even as they seethe with impatience to get the power whereby they can inflict their own injustices.

The “Mock” Memo: Studies in Demopathy

And one of the best indexes of such Nietzschean demopathy is the degree to which someone accusing his enemy shows an awareness of the same flaws on his own side. So in assessing the combination of strong generalization and moral accusation in each of these sentences, let’s consider the accusations in the framework of Palestinian behavior in each of the crimes that Arjan brings to the docket.

Apartheid is a crime against humanity.

We begin with a moral statement. The subsequent “observations” are all efforts to direct it against Israel.

Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property.

In order for this to hold true, the Palestinians would have to be able to point to a period in history where liberty “ruled” and property rights were respected. But the Arab inhabitants of the region never had liberty, and the vast majority of them were, before the advent of the Zionists, tenant farmers who worked land owned by the effendis is Cairo, Alexandria, Damascus, and Istanbul. This historical observation is not to say that they should not have liberty and property. But it underlines two points:

• First, everywhere that Arabs rule Arabs, they deprive their subjects of liberty and property, certainly by any modern “civil” definition of the issue. Arab political culture has not yet figured out how to grant even their own people liberty, much less their minorities. Everywhere where Arabs rule, even in fabulously oil-rich states like Iran, Iraq, Lybia, Saudi Arabia, the majority live in poverty and powerlessness. Thus, we have the most embarrassing situation of all: Arabs in Israel enjoy more liberty and property than Arabs in the Arab world.
• Second, to therefore blame Israel for taking away an Arab “liberty” that never has and does not exist, blames Israel for an Arab failure, radically misdiagnoses the problem. Get the Israelis out of the equation, and the Palestinians will not be any freer… on the contrary, alas. When the border between Gaza and Northern Sinai (Egypt) opened up briefly, Egyptian brides came flooding across the border to marry Gazans since, at least from their view, Gaza in its worst condition under Israeli rule (2000-2005), was a step up from everyday condition in Egypt. Today, after two years of Gazan rule, it’s unlikely even Northern Sinai Egyptians want to go to Gaza.

So for Arjan to accuse Israel of taking away Arab liberty when Israel is the only place in the Middle East where Arab liberty has appeared, systematically misconstrues what liberty means.

But it does sound good as an accusation.

It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality.

Here’s the “apartheid” accusations. Here is where Arjan as the author of the statement becomes significant. The culture he advocates for has the worst record of apartheid in human history. The only significant difference between the UN resolution’s definition of apartheid, and what goes on in the Muslim world is the substitution of the word “religious” and “gender” for “racial.” Islam systematically and legally discriminates against its own women and against infidels in its political control. For gross (and violent) discrimination, the Palestinians, in their few moments of power (Jordan, 1964-70; Lebanon, 1970-82; PA, 1993-present), have demonstrated the most extraordinary propensity to violence, hate-mongering, and discrimination against their neighbors, regardless of race, creed, or gender. They are equal opportunity offenders. So on what basis, by what standards of justice is Arjan complaining of Israel’s behavior towards the Palestinians?

It has systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians, contrary to the rules of international law.

Again, we run into this strange situation. The Palestinians have not even the semblance of law, domestic or international. People are executed in the streets without trial for “collaboration”; Hamas created “order” in Gaza by ruthless murders; Palestinian prisons abound with torture victims. Now, none of this excuses Israel from living up to its own (and international) standards, but it does call into question just how reliable someone who defends a culture with no moral standards can be when he throws out his accusations. Does Israel have thousands of Palestinians incarcerated. Yes. Of course, many are incarcerated because Israel doesn’t have the death penalty, and therefore, they are imprisoned despite involvement in mass murder. Listening to Arjan on Israel is a little like having a tour guide take you through a desert who focuses your attention on the lack of jungle in the only section where plants grow.

It has, in particular, waged a war against a civilian population, in particular children.

This brings us to the climax of Arjan’s moral dishonesty. If anyone has “waged a war against a civilian population, in particular, children,” it’s the Palestinians, who openly declare their desire to commit genocide, target civilians, and celebrate their successes. Indeed, they use their own children to kill Israeli children.

Given this shameful and shameless behavior on the Palestinian side, to have Arjan accuse the Israelis of what the people he advocates for advocate, is sheer hypocrisy. Indeed, he is engaged in only a slightly more sophisticated version of the systematic disinformation that Palestinian media feed their own people.

Now the real question is not why Arjan el Fassed does what he does, but why his “mock memo,” itself a shameless piece of demopathy, gets recycled as a statement by Nelson Mandela and used as an epigram for a conference where progressives secular and clerical, come to hear Israel assaulted for depriving of liberty a culture that can neither provide liberty for its own people, nor, a fortiori, for others?