Augean Stables

Noah Pollak has an interesting piece on Barack Obama’s position on the Lebanese crisis. One could hardly imagine a better definition of liberal cognitive egocentrism: define the problem in terms for which we liberals have a solution. (Hat tip: oao)

Obama Stares Down Hezbollah
NOAH POLLAK - 05.11.2008 - 2:19 PM
Yesterday Barack Obama released a statement about the crisis in Lebanon that surely must be cause for celebration in Tehran, Damascus, and Bint Jbeil. First of all, there is the alternate-reality feel to it:

This effort to undermine Lebanon’s elected government needs to stop, and all those who have influence with Hezbollah must press them to stand down immediately.

Does Obama understand that the people who “have influence with Hezbollah” happen to be the same people on whose behalf Hezbollah is rampaging through Lebanon?

Then there is the absurd prescription:

It’s time to engage in diplomatic efforts to help build a new Lebanese consensus that focuses on electoral reform, an end to the current corrupt patronage system, and the development of the economy that provides for a fair distribution of services, opportunities and employment.

So that’s the problem in Lebanon? Economics and the electoral system? As Lee Smith points out in a scathing post,

Obama’s language is derived from those corners of the left that claim Hezbollah is only interested in winning the Shia a larger share of the political process. Never mind the guns, it’s essentially a social welfare movement, with schools and clinics! — and its own foreign policy, intelligence services and terror apparatus, used at the regional, international and now domestic level. But the solution, says Obama, channeling the man he fired for talking to Hamas, is diplomacy.

In the Lebanon crisis, Obama is rhetorically cornered. Since his only prescription for the Middle East is diplomatic engagement, every disease gets re-diagnosed as something curable through talking.

The full Obama statement is only slightly less absurd than Pollak’s cherry-picked quotes suggest. Actually it seems like he has a kind of PC playbook from which he can select three problems from column A and three moves towards a solution from problem B, and when you’ve reached the end of the laundry lists, he’s covered most everything. Lee Smith quotes another trenchant comment from Abu Kais over at From Beirut to the Beltway:

Oh the time we wasted by fighting Hizbullah all those years with rockets, invasions of their homes and shutting down their media outlets. If only we had engaged them and their masters in diplomacy, instead of just sitting with them around discussion tables, welcoming them into our parliament, and letting them veto cabinet decisions. If only Obama had shared his wisdom with us before, back when he was rallying with some of our former friends at pro-Palestinian rallies in Chicago.

“As Tony Badran wrote me [Lee Smith] this morning: ‘I think Obama’s statement is counterproductive in that it will be read by Syria as confirming their hope that there might be a chance with an Obama presidency to get back Lebanon.’”

No wonder so many fine folk in the Middle East are rooting for Obama. (Apparently the electricity problems have not interfered with the internet campaign for Obama in Gaza.)

Update: More excellent analysis from Barry Rubin on Lebanon and the folly of Obama’s “negotiated” strategy. Rubin argues that Lebanon is the Spain of 1936 (implication, Israel is the Czechoslovakia of 1938):

What Spain was in 1936; Lebanon is today.

Does anyone remember the Spanish Civil War? Briefly, a fascist revolt took place against the democratic government. The rebels were motivated by several factors, including anger that their religion had not been given enough respect and regional grievances, but essentially they sought to put their ideology and themselves into power. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy backed the rebels with money and guns. The Western democracies stood by and did nothing.

Guess who won? And guess whether that outcome led to peace or world war.

(Bold in original.) From there he dissects Obama’s folly and concludes.

Obama is endorsing the Hizballah program. It wants a new Lebanese consensus based on it having, along with its pro-Syrian allies, 51 percent of the power. What’s needed is not consensus (the equivalent being getting Fatah and Hamas to bury their differences, or bringing in Iran and Syria to determine Iraq’s future) but the willingness to fight a battle. In effect, Obama without realizing it, is arguing for a Syrian-, Iranian-, and Hizballah-dominated Lebanon. Such talk makes moderate Arabs despair.

Oh the travails of the Western liberal who wants to believe that “War is not the answer precisely at the moment where it is the answer. People who do believe that war is the answer (despite how badly the odds don’t favor them — e.g., Germany against the world, Islam against the West, Japan against the Pacific world), can “level the odds” by pushing aggressively precisely where and when those who don’t like war will back down.

The point is not to get easily provoked, but to respond decisively when the time comes. Of course, to adopt such a policy would mean keeping one’s eye on the ball. I don’t get the sense that Obama even knows what the game us, much less what kinds of balls are in play. Malley’s facile solutions to the Middle East conflict — get Israel to stop humiliatiing the Palestinians — are recipes for disaster precisely because the encourage the belligerents.

Thus, as Rubin points out, Obama has a specific appeal in the Middle East:

Note that this does not make Obama the candidate favored by Arabs in general but only by the radicals. Egyptians, Jordanians, Gulf Arabs, and the majorities in Lebanon and Iraq are very worried. This is not just an Israel problem; it is one for all non-extremists in the region.

If the dictators and terrorists are smiling, it means everyone else is crying.

These war mongers see a natural ally in Obama’s progressive, kind politics, in his willingness to engage anyone and listen to their grievances. In the Moebius Strip of cognitive egocentrism, they can pursue their plans for world domination while Obama and his advisors insist that no one would be that base and inhuman (except, maybe, the Zionists), and that if these folks are violent, it’s probably because they’re less fortunate than we are, and have legitimate grievances. What more could a demopath ask for as president of the United States?

Shlomo Avineri has written an interesting meditation on the Palestinian Nakba. He makes his criticism carefully, peppered with constant efforts not hurt anyone’s feelings by suggesting that the Palestinian national movement is not legitimate, strong, etc. But the thrust of his argument suggests just the opposite: the institutional weakness he identifies reflects a much broader weakness in “nationalist” aspirations. In order for the Palestinian Arabs to engage in the kind of self-criticism he calls for, they would have to confront the issue he refuses to raise: i.e., that the only real solidarity that Palestinian Arabs manage to muster among all the mutual rivalries and hatreds they feel among each other, is their hatred of Israel. And that, alas, is not enough to make a civil polity. On the contrary…

The real Nakba
By Shlomo Avineri
Last update - 12:35 09/05/2008
Tags: Palestinians, Israel, Nakba

When the Palestinians mark what they call the “Nakba” (catastrophe) on May 15, they would do well to consider that their real failure did not occur in 1948: It had already happened earlier, and it continues to happen now. The real Nakba occurs before our eyes - and theirs - every day, at every hour, and Hamas’ violent coup in Gaza is only the most recent example of it.

While Palestinians may see themselves, with much justification, as the victims of the Zionist movement’s successful establishment of a Jewish state in the Land of Israel, the reasons for their historical failure should be sought elsewhere: in the inability of the Palestinian national movement to create the political and social institutional framework that is the necessary foundation for nation-building. The history of national movements teaches us that national consciousness, strong as it may be, is not enough: Movements that could not create the institutional system vital for their success failed.

I assume this remark about “strong as it may be” represents Avineri’s effort to acknowledge Palestinian “national consciousness.” I actually think that any serious national consciousness is a key ingredient in “creating the institutional system…”, and that the Palestinians’ failures in this area come specifically from a lack of national consciousness except insofar as it articulates a passionate hatred of the Zionists. Beyond this, Palestinian nationalism seriously lacks any sense of “national” solidarity.

It would be a mistake to underestimate the power of the Palestinian national movement, as quite a few members of the Zionist camp did in the past; it is an error that many continue to make today. But it was Haim Arlosoroff - then a young man in his early 20s - who as early as 1921 recognized that what the Zionist movement faced was not a series of violent events, but a national movement.

This warning not to underestimate Palestinian nationalism misses an important point. To the Western (including the Israeli) observer, it’s hard to tell the difference between national resistance to Zionism and the resistance of a religio-cultural tradition that needs to dominate minorities, especially religious ones. Since the Palestinians long ago learned that the West did not like hearing about religious dreams of genocide, they have systematically presented their resistance as national. In fact “national sentiment” may be the least distinctive dimension of the resistance to Israel. What we need not to underestimate is the depth of the resistance; and by emphasizing the role of nationalism, we indulge our cognitive egocentrism and make just that mistake.

Thus Arlosoroff was absolutely right to argue that Zionism did not face a series of (presumably unconnected) violent events, but he was wrong to assume that it was a “national movement.” Indeed, as Steven Plaut just pointed out, for the Arabs living in Palestine in 1920, the “Nakba” that drove them to riots was the creation of a separate politico-administrative unit, Palestine, that separated them from Syria. The resistance Arlosoroff detected was real: it had a consistent and powerful ideology behind it. But it was a mistake then, and continues today, to think of this resistance not in religious and cultural terms. It is not an act of empathy to project Western egocentric notions about nationalism on people who had and continue to have radically different religious and cultural orientations. (Ironically, that projection may be the supreme example of Western cultural imperialism, one which, in the hands of avowed anti-imperialists, may destroy the West.)

The Palestinian national movement, however, has been accompanied by a long string of failures, which have been rooted in its inability to form frameworks of consensus and solidarity; these failures weakened and fragmented it, and it seems that this is a problem the Palestinians have not been able to overcome to this day.

The first and sharpest expression of this failure came in the years 1936-1939, during the Palestinian uprising against British rule. This rebellion failed not only because it was brutally suppressed by the British colonial authorities or because the Haganah (pre-state underground) forces were able to defend the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine). What happened is that the Palestinians were unable to establish institutions that would be acceptable to all parts of Arab society in the country, and when internal disputes arose over the nature of the struggle, the rebellion evolved into an intra-Palestinian civil war. More Palestinians died at the hands of rival armed Palestinian militias than were killed in clashes with the British army or with the Haganah. Within Palestinian society there is tendency to suppress the memory of this violent struggle, which took place between the militias associated with the Husseinis and those tied to the Nashashibis. But this suppression only deepens the failure and makes it more difficult to draw lessons from it.

The price of a lack of self-criticism. Mind you, the means the Arabs living in Palestine used to supress the memory of this internally-generated catastrophe is a narrative about evil Zionists and evil British… in other words, a narrative of grievance and victimization.
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Benny Morris has a new book out on 1948. In the course of researching it he discovered how intense the religious dimension of the conflict that year. Such an observation is on the one hand, quite ordinary and empirical, on the other, a violation of the principles of cognitive egocentrism whereby the Arab objection to Jewish independence must be formulated and presented to the public as a “rational” objection, as a “nationalist” argument. Negotitations according to the PC Paradigm will only work if the dispute is about territories and rational national narratives that can come to a mutual understanding (2-state solution). But if it is profoundly zero-sum and religious in nature, then all the pacific bromides about war not being the answer fall by the wayside.

Here Morris discusses the religious dimension of 1948 and chides the modern historian for not taking it seriously.

Historians Should Take the Jihadi Rhetoric of 1948 Seriously

By Benny Morris

Mr. Morris is a professor of history at Ben-Gurion University and the author of 1948 (Yale University Press), from which this article is excerpted.

Historians have tended to ignore or dismiss, as so much hot air, the jihadi rhetoric and flourishes that accompanied the two-stage assault on the Yishuv [the Jewish residents of Palestine before the founding of Israel] and the constant references in the prevailing Arab discourse to that earlier bout of Islamic battle for the Holy Land, against the Crusaders. This is a mistake. The 1948 War, from the Arabs’ perspective, was a war of religion as much as, if not more than, a nationalist war over territory. Put another way, the territory was sacred: its violation by infidels was sufficient grounds for launching a holy war and its conquest or reconquest, a divinely ordained necessity. In the months before the invasion of 15 May 1948, King Abdullah, the most moderate of the coalition leaders, repeatedly spoke of “saving” the holy places. As the day of invasion approached, his focus on Jerusalem, according to Alec Kirkbride, grew increasingly obsessive. “In our souls,” wrote the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, “Palestine occupies a spiritual holy place which is above abstract feelings. In it we have the blessed breeze of Jerusalem and the blessings of the Prophets and their disciples.”

The evidence is abundant and clear that many, if not most, in the Arab world viewed the war essentially as a holy war. To fight for Palestine was the “inescapable obligation on every Muslim,” declared the Muslim Brotherhood in 1938.

The Muslim Brotherhood gained great strength from their anti-Zionist activities particularly during this period of the “Arab Revolt” of 1936-39, launching, according to Matthias Küntzel, their first “fanatical solidarity campaign in which the idea of Jihad was linked to the policies in Palestine,” and going from 800 to 200,000 years from 1936-38 (p. 21).

Indeed, the battle was of such an order of holiness that in 1948 one Islamic jurist ruled that believers should forego the hajj and spend the money thus saved on the jihad in Palestine. In April 1948, the mufti of Egypt, Sheikh Muhammad Mahawif, issued a fatwa positing jihad in Palestine as the duty of all Muslims. The Jews, he said, intended “to take over … all the lands of Islam.” Martyrdom for Palestine conjured up, for Muslim Brothers, “the memories of the Battle of Badr … as well as the early Islamic jihad for spreading Islam and Salah al-Din’s [Saladin’s] liberation of Palestine” from the Crusaders. Jihad for Palestine was seen in prophetic-apocalyptic terms, as embodied in the following hadith periodically quoted at the time: “The day of resurrection does not come until Muslims fight against Jews, until the Jews hide behind trees and stones and until the trees and stones shout out: ‘O Muslim, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.’ “

Of quote not only marks the Jihad as apocalyptic, but also, alas, genocidal.

The jihadi impulse underscored both popular and governmental responses in the Arab world to the UN partition resolution and was central to the mobilization of the “street” and the governments for the successive onslaughts of November-December 1947 and May-June 1948. The mosques, mullahs, and ulema all played a pivotal role in the process. Even Christian Arabs appear to have adopted the jihadi discourse. Matiel Mughannam, the Lebanese-born Christian who headed the AHC-affiliated Arab Women’s Organization in Palestine, told an interviewer early in the civil war: “The UN decision has united all Arabs, as they have never been united before, not even against the Crusaders …. [A Jewish state] has no chance to survive now that the ‘holy war’ has been declared. All the Jews will eventually be massacred.” The Islamic fervor stoked by the hostilities seems to have encompassed all or almost all Arabs: “No Moslem can contemplate the holy places falling into Jewish hands,” reported Kirkbride from Amman. “Even the Prime Minister [Tawfiq Abul Huda] … who is by far the steadiest and most sensible Arab here, gets excited on the subject. “

Note that even the Christian Arab is swept up in the mood of collective empowerment. One cannot understand either the decisions of the Arab leadership in 1947-49, or the catastrophic scale of the defeat, if one does not understand the omnipotent inebriation they felt about their cause.

Nor did this impulse evaporate with the Arab defeat. On the contrary. On 12 December 1948 the ulema of Al-Azhar reissued their call for jihad, specifically addressing “the Arab Kings, Presidents of Arab Republics, . . . and leaders of public opinion.” It was, ruled the council, “necessary to liberate Palestine from the Zionist bands … and to return the inhabitants driven from their homes.” The Arab armies had “fought victoriously” (sic) “in the conviction that they were fulfilling a sacred religious duty.” The ulema condemned King Abdullah for sowing discord in Arab ranks: “Damnation would be the lot of those who, after warning, did not follow the way of the believers,” concluded the ulema.

The Naqba was not the terrible tragedy that befell the Palestinian refugees. They were collateral damage, soon to be turned into sacrificial victims by imprisonment in the camps. The real Naqba was the catastrophe of Jewish sovereignty in Dar al Islam — a humiliation to the Arabs, a blasphemy to Muslims.

While on the Cape last week, I saw a number of signs that read “War is not the Answer.” I had only recently brought up this bumper sticker with my students in order to illustrate the problems of liberal cognitive egocentrism: No culture has ever proposed such an idea, with the exception of some messianic groups. Those that have (and survive), live in exile (Jews after Bar Kochba, Tibetans). Indeed, it’s hard not to savor the irony of these well-intentioned folks, living peacefully on the land of the Wampanoags whose plague-decimated numbers were finally reduced to some 400, and completely subjugated by “King Phillip’s War.”

A visit to the sponsoring site of this pacifist sign reveals that it is, indeed, a messianic pacifist group, the Quakers, who arose out of the messianic crucible of the 17th century English Civil War. They address the obvious question: “If war is not the answer, what is?

The practical instruments of negotiation, aid, and development assistance, the psychological instrument of respect for human dignity and equality, and the political instruments of human, juridical, and civil rights provide a more effective, just, and moral answer.

I agree with all of those “instruments” when they are practicable. But in the (hopefully rare) situation where they do not work, applying them actually backfires. Remember Gandhi’s famous non-violent resistance (suicidal) advice to the Jews when dealing with the Nazis — which, alas, too many instinctively followed. Such techniques only work when dealing with people who have a liberal conscience (like the British in India). When dealing with political cultures that seek dominion at any cost, such kindness registers as weakness and triggers aggression, not reconciliation.

Later today I will be on a committee examining a thesis on the failures of the US Intelligence Community in dealing with the “civilizational Jihad” of the Muslim Brotherhood against the United States. It is a staggering tale of political correctness that renders us dupes to demopaths who have learned to use every principle we treasure in order to dupe us into allowing them to flourish.

CAIR’s mission statement sought “to enhance understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.” This sounds wonderful, but is not the true intent of the organization. The reality is that this is another organization within the [Muslim] Brotherhood running a deception campaign. The Brothers’ real objectives are to use CAIR as an instrument to influence the United States by mounting a public relations campaign under the guise of a civil rights campaign. The Brothers know how to use words and issues in ways that Americans want to hear. In one of the documents there [in the material entered in evidence at the “Holy Land Foundation” trial] is reference to a dictionary of terms that will placate the American public.

If they ever need any help, going to the “Friends’” site will give them all the buzz-words they need.

While meditating on these issues, I ran across the following piece in the Jerusalem Post by Caleb ben-David, one of their more reflective writers. It illustrates the problems of “peace advocacy” in prime-divider cultures where violence — male violence, to be redundant — is a norm.

Apr 24, 2008 12:23 | Updated Apr 25, 2008 1:39
Snap Judgment: The last journey of Pippa Bacca
By CALEV BEN-DAVID

The killing earlier of this month of Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, “Pippa Bacca,” has received little media comment outside the country of her birth, Italy, and that of her death, Turkey.

It should, though; Bacca was apparently a very special kind of “performance artist,” who saw her life, or at least the way she chose to live it, as her “brush,” and the whole world as her canvas. Tragically, the end of that life turned out not in the way she intended - nor left behind exactly the message that she had hoped it would convey.

Bacca, 33, set off from Milan last March together with fellow artist Silvia Moro on what they dubbed a “Brides on Tour” journey, with both wearing white wedding dresses and taking separate routes from Italy through southern Europe and the Middle East, with the intention of meeting up together at the end here in Jerusalem sometime this month.

The central point was to promote peace and faith in one’s fellow man, in part by doing the entire trip via hitchhiking. Although to many the idea of a single woman thumbing rides through some of the most conflict-ridden regions of the globe sounds more than a little naïve and dangerous, this apparently was the very point. The Web site they created for the “Brides on Tour” project declares: “Hitchhiking is choosing to have faith in other human beings, and man, like a small god, rewards those who have faith in him.”

Alas, on the way Bacca met a man who had a very different outlook, and in early April her corpse was discovered near the Turkish town of Gebze, southeast of Istanbul. Traced through his use of her cellphone, a local man was later arrested and confessed to her rape and murder shortly after he picked her up.

“We cannot blame all Turks for this incident,” Bacca’s mother told the Turkish press. “No one could have predicted my daughter would encounter such a maniac.”

Of course not - though a Western woman hitchhiking alone through the Turkish hinterlands surely must be aware of a very real element of risk.

I would be a little less understated in responding to this poor mother’s comment: “What are you talking about? Anyone with any knowledge of honor-shame, alpha-male behavior and its enormous power in cultures like that of Turkey could have predicted precisely this.” Of course, her sister, quoted in the NYT, anticipated my comment and refuted it:

“Just read any newspaper — people get killed for playing music too loudly, and women get raped in the subway; there are fiends everywhere,” Ms. Pasqualino said. “This was not a question of Turkey or of religion.”

Not surprisingly, the comment was echoed by Turkish and Italian officials. And it may be true in some sense, although I do think the odds vary depending on the culture.

Bacca’s murder generated widespread revulsion in Turkey, sparking demonstrations by local women wearing placards declaring, “We are Pippa,” and demanding the government take greater steps to ensure that unaccompanied women in the streets are free from harassment.

This gets to an interesting tension within these cultures of male-dominance. Women generally live lives of quiet desperation. If Bacca’s murder were to give them voice, it would not have been in vain. But for that to happen, not only would these women need to speak up, but the international press would have to cover this story in its details and thereby shame Turkish officials into taking real measures.

Bacca’s artistic collaborator Moro, who cut short her own trip after her friend’s murder, told The New York Times she “still hoped to take to the road to finish the performance. Otherwise it would be a failure, and I don’t want the message to fail.”

“I am not disowning the project,” she added firmly. “This tragedy only highlights how difficult peaceful relations are and how much work there is still to do.”

This is classic messianic behavior in a state of cognitive dissonance. When your premise has been disproved, keep pursuing the goal, which is more important than reality testing.

INDEED. I sincerely hope Moro does carry on (with greater precaution) her and Bacca’s project, even the performance they were planning to stage in Tel Aviv at its end, when they were planning to ceremonially wash their wedding dresses.

Their journey, said Moro, was intended to show that “by overcoming differences and lowering the level of conflict individuals and cultures could come together… Meeting people was the key.”

But if their project is to retain its artistic integrity, it should honestly take into account Bacca’s tragic fate, and incorporate it into the work and the meaning it seeks to convey. And surely that message is that sometimes faith in fellow man and a desire for peace is not enough in this world; often it is wise, if not essential, to combine those elements with strong doses of hardheaded - and hearted - caution and concern, pragmatism and patience. If not, the end result may turn out to be not only failure, but violent failure that ends up defeating the very message of trust and peace the original effort was meant to convey.

Precisely. In other words, when one pursues peace only through negotiations when dealing with a bloody-minded foe, one ends up strengthening the very forces one hopes to overcome. PCP strengthens Jihad.

Strangely enough, I thought of Pippa Bacca this week while attending a press conference in Jerusalem featuring former US president Jimmy Carter discussing his own recent travels and encounters in the region, with the likes of Syrian President Bashar Assad and Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal.

This was performance art of its own kind - “ex-president on tour” - that was also all about promoting peace in the region. Again, meeting people was key, as was giving them the benefit of the doubt and taking them at their word, even when in contradiction to good sense. Fortunately for Carter, the conditions under which he traveled virtually guaranteed a safe final arrival in Jerusalem to close his trip.

If I am inclined under these circumstances to be far more generous to Bacca’s wanderings, it is in the certainty that at least in her case there is no doubt her motives were entirely good-hearted, and that the only possible harmful outcome of her trip was to herself, which regrettably did come to pass.

Pippa Bacca was a dreamer - and yes, perhaps so is Jimmy Carter. Peace, of course, is always worth dreaming about. But the longer I live in this country, and this region, the more convinced I become that peace is not made by the dreamers, but the realists, especially weary and wary old warriors such as Menachem Begin, Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin, King Hussein, Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak.

Peace is not made by simply choosing to have faith in other people - which one should - but by taking reasonable precautions that if that faith is not rewarded, the end results will not be cruelly catastrophic. Though I appreciate her idealism, this to me is the real meaning of Pippa Bacca’s final journey.

Yair Lapid, an Israeli columnist asked a long, painful, and highly relevant question. Why the hate? Not Palestinian hate, but Arab, Muslim? My attempt at the beginning of a answer aftewards.

The Mystery of Hate
by Yair Lapid

Hundreds of years of fighting, six and a half wars, billions of dollars gone with the wind, tens of thousands of victims, not including the boy who laid down next to me on the rocky beach of lake Karon in 1982 and we both watched his guts spilling out. The helicopter took him and until this day I do not know whether he is dead or survived. All this, and one
cannot figure it out.

And its not only what happened but all that did not happen - hospitals that were never built, universities that were never opened, roads that were never paved, the three years that were taken from millions of teenagers for the sake of the army. And despite all the above, we still do not have the beginning of a clue to the mystery of where it all started:

Why do they hate us so much?

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Charles Enderlin, whose reputation is shredding as his career winds down, came to Harvard’s Center for European Studies on Thursday, January 17, 2008 to speak about his new book, The Lost Years. He rambled on for about forty minutes, telling anecdotes whose major but unspoken thrust was that Israel and Clinton were responsible for the failure of Camp David and the perdurance of the Intifada. Part of what was so astonishing was that despite the fact that he was at Harvard and presumably speaking to a crowd that was not composed of dummies, he readily made remarks that any well-informed person would find astonishing to say the least. But overall, he’s a skillfull storyteller (most of his remarks are about how Rabin said this to me, Peres said that to me, Saeb Erakat and I used to talk over coffee at the American Colony Hotel, etc…) and he manages to get his dagger jabs very subtly.

He began with some remarks on how, as a reporter, he tries to get at not just what the big-wigs say, but the “feeling on the ground.” His first example was the following remark:

During the first months the Israeli army used a million bullets, that’s one per Israeli child.

Come again? What kind of a statistic is that? Are those bullets “protecting” Israeli children — certainly not. As far as Enderlin is concerned, the Palestinian violence represented little threat to Israeli society. So what’s the relationship? Why even bring up the number of children? Or is it a way to link those bullets to the 800+ Palestinian “children” that Israel [allegedly] killed, and who serve a wide range of Israeli “progressive” ideologues as a stick with which to flagellate their own government…? a stick Charles Enderlin would immediately pick up during the question and answer section when someone asked him about al Durah.

Having subtly if jarringly indicted Israel for their contribution to the violence, Enderlin immediately exonerated Arafat.

He did not foment or direct the Second Intifada. It was a spontaneous movement.

Now this, in itself is interesting. My personal view is that Arafat was the sorcerer’s apprentice to the really malevolent forces of Hamas. But there’s plenty of documented evidence that he and his croneys in Fatah did everything they could to stir the sh*t, including the following from PA Communications Minister, ‘Imad Al-Faluj in Lebanon March 3, 2001:

“Whoever thinks that the Intifada broke out because of the despised Sharon’s visit to the Al-Aqsa Mosque, is wrong, even if this visit was the straw that broke the back of the Palestinian people. This Intifada was planned in advance, ever since President Arafat’s return from the Camp David negotiations, where he turned the table upside down on President Clinton. [Arafat] remained steadfast and challenged [Clinton]. He rejected the American terms and he did it in the heart of the US.”

That it got away from him and spun out of control, hardly means that he “did not foment or direct” the Intifada.

But for Enderlin, the culprits are the Israelis and Arafat’s a befuddled old man whom events are passing by.

The IDF General staff decided we won’t go back to the first intifada, where their response was too weak. The army wanted “to recover its capacity of dissuasion” which they felt they had lost after Lebanon which “was considered a failure by many generals… To be seen fleeing was very bad.” There was “almost an Israeli military coup: orders given by Barak to calm down the army’s response were ignored. Ephraim Sneh negotiated with Palestinians, and agreed that Israel would open so-and-so checkpoint, but then the troops on the ground refused.

In Enderlin’s world, any time the Palestinians negociate, it’s in good faith, and any time the Israelis don’t make them happy, the resulting violence is Israel’s fault. He overflows with stories of people who are just on the verge of becoming (or better yet, already have, become) more moderate, and then the foolish/malicious Israelis go ahead and target them for assassination. If only the Israelis wouldn’t fight back, if only they were smarter… if only they followed my advice.
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I recently attended a conference in Budapest, where I made the mistake of saying that Europe was in danger of “going under” to Islam. It was something like passing loud and smelly wind in public. Not too many people wanted to talk to me after that, and no one wanted to talk about my remark. What’s so appalling is that it’s precisely that failure to face the problem that makes it so likely. Here Melanie Phillips pulls no punches.

Sleepwalking Into Enslavement
The Spectator
MONDAY, 7TH JANUARY 2008

Step by remorseless step, the free world continues in its trance-like state to attack, disable or paralyse its ability to defend itself against the global Islamic jihad.

In other words, a form of auto-immune deficiency. Here, not only can the system’s “brain” not recognize the nature of the invasive forces, but it actively attacks any anti-bodies that spontaneously form… as in the “Canadian Human Rights Commission” in its prosecution of Ezra Levant for publishing the Muhammad Cartoons.

First, the ineffable UN has condemned not Islamic terrorism but the identification of and defence against it. As Robert Spencer reports:

The Organization of the Islamic Conference, the largest voting bloc at the United Nations, has succeeded in pushing through the UN a resolution condemning the ‘defamation of religions.’ That’s ‘religions,’ not ‘religion’ – yet according to Cybercast News Service, ‘although the resolution refers to defamation of ‘religions,’ Islam is the only religion named in the text, which also takes a swipe at counter-terrorism security measures.’ …The resolution denounces ‘laws that stigmatize groups of people belonging to certain religions and faiths under a variety of pretexts relating to security and illegal immigration.’ Muslims, it says, have suffered from ‘ethnic and religious profiling…in the aftermath of the tragic events of 11 September 2001.’ This is the fault, in part, of ‘the negative projection of Islam in the media.’ The UN voices its ‘deep concern that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism.’

Perish the thought. Next, the western liberal mind now presents such a mortal threat to life and liberty that a group of anti-jihadi Muslims has been driven to denounce an American Reform rabbi, Rabbi Yoffie,for his sanitising of Islamic extremism and grotesque moral equivalence. In a column in The Jewish Week, they said they viewed with dismay a ‘partnership’ between the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) which they said was not a legitimate representative of mainstream Islamic believers in the West.

Rabbi Yoffie was cited by the Post in a number of statements with which we disagree. He said, ‘As a once-persecuted minority in countries where antisemitism is still a force, we [Reform Jews] understand the plight of Muslims in North America today.’ We are Muslims concerned to protect the rights of our communities in non-Muslim societies, but we consider absurd any attempt to equate the situation of Muslims in Western Europe and North America today with historic anti-Jewish prejudice and oppression. Muslims in Western Europe and North America have not been subjected, in recent times, to wholesale denial of civil rights. Free discourse about Islam in the Western democracies is occasionally abrasive, but has never resembled the wholesale libels directed against Jews — including by latter-day Islamists — and has not been embraced by or institutionalized by any government in Western Europe or North America.

When I made my remark about Europe possibly going under to Islam, the chair of my panel rebuked me: “It’s like accusing the Jews of wanting to take over the world, a new version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” The statement is deeply ironic. It’s an attempt to dismiss the awareness of an Islamic imperialism that does threaten Europe by pretending it’s as false as the forged and destructive fantasy of Jews wanting to take over the world. “Lest we end up being like the Nazis, let us not go down that paranoid path,” it seems to say.

And yet, no Jew ever claimed they wanted to take over Europe or the world; the Jews never had the demographic weight to conceive of a population take-over; and finally, the Jews’ power came from their genuinely playing the rules of the game of civil society. In the current scene, Muslims openly declare their desire to take over; they have effectuated a stunning demographic shift over the past generation which is accelerating; and they act precisely as the Jews are accused of doing in the Protocols — using democracy to destroy freedom.

Rabbi Yoffie continued, ‘Islamic extremists constitute a profound threat. For some, this is a reason to flee from dialogue, but in fact the opposite is true.’ We do not understand the intent of this statement. It appears that Rabbi Yoffie believes dialogue is possible with extremists. We do not agree. We believe that dialogue between mainstream Muslims, Jews, and Christians is necessary, but that the defeat of Islamist extremists is necessary for such interfaith efforts to succeed. We do not support ‘dialogue’ with Islamist and other apologists for violence, or proponents of restrictions on freedom under the pretext of religion.

To which one can only say ‘Bravo’ to these courageous Muslims for reasserting truth and sanity in the face of a lethally deluded Jewish liberal.

Next, an intensely disturbing development in, of all places, the Pentagon. One expects the State Department to grovel to illegitimate force, but the Department of Defence has been assumed to be more robust. No longer. It has fired Stephen Coughlin, its most knowledgeable specialist on Islamic law and Islamist extremism — because he committed the crime of identifying that extremism. The Washington Times reports that Hasham Islam, a key aide to the Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England, tried to get Coughlin to soften his views about Islamic extremism.

Misguided Pentagon officials, including Mr. Islam and Mr. England, have initiated an aggressive ‘outreach’ program to U.S. Muslim groups that critics say is lending credibility to what has been identified as a budding support network for Islamist extremists, including front groups for the radical Muslim Brotherhood.

Mr. Coughlin wrote a memorandum several months ago based on documents made public in a federal trial in Dallas that revealed a covert plan by the Muslim Brotherhood, an Egyptian-origin Islamist extremist group, to subvert the United States using front groups. Members of one of the identified front groups, the Islamic Society of North America, has been hosted by Mr. England at the Pentagon.

So much for America’s role on the battleground of ideas.

In Britain, one man does get it. The Bishop of Rochester, Michael Nazir-Ali, himself the Pakistani son of a Muslim convert to Christianity, created a storm when he wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that Islamic extremists have created ‘no-go’ areas across Britain where it is too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter. Already separate communities, he says, have been turned into areas where adherence to this ideology has become a mark of acceptability.

Those of a different faith or race may find it difficult to live or work there because of hostility to them. In many ways, this is but the other side of the coin to far-Right intimidation. Attempts have been made to impose an ‘Islamic’ character on certain areas, for example, by insisting on artificial amplification for the Adhan, the call to prayer. Such amplification was, of course, unknown throughout most of history and its use raises all sorts of questions about noise levels and whether non-Muslims wish to be told the creed of a particular faith five times a day on the loudspeaker. This is happening here even though some Muslim-majority communities are trying to reduce noise levels from multiple mosques announcing this call, one after the other, over quite a small geographical area.

There is pressure already to relate aspects of the sharia to civil law in Britain. To some extent this is already true of arrangements for sharia-compliant banking but have the far-reaching implications of this been fully considered? It is now less possible for Christianity to be the public faith in Britain.

The Roman Empire fell in part because the Germanic kingdoms carved out autonomous regions from the Empire’s living body politic.

For uttering these truths, the Bishop has been denounced by both Islamists (with the ever-more preposterous Inayat Bunglawala proving the Bishop’s point by asserting that church bells are just as much of a public nuisance in Britain as the muezzin’s call to prayer) and Nick Clegg, the new centrist Gramscian leader of the more mature infantile Liberal Democrats.

Clegg described the Bishop’s comments as

a gross caricature of reality.

Once again, however, it was a Muslim who showed up both the idiocy and the arrogance of the western liberal. Manzoor Moghal, chairman of the Muslim forum, wrote of the Bishop in the Daily Mail:

He has been condemned for making ‘inflammatory’ remarks, distorting the truth about our inner cities and ’scaremongering’ against the Muslim population. But, paradoxically, this reaction from the politically-correct establishment is an indicator of the weight of his case. If our ruling elite were not so worried that his views would strike a chord with the public, it would not have been so anxious to condemn him.

His statement about the dangers of the rise of radical Islam matches the reality of what people see in our cities and towns, where the influence of hardliners is undermining harmony and promoting segregation…However much his critics may sneer at his accusations, the fact is that the determination of some of my fellow Muslims to cling to certain lifestyles, customs, languages and practices has helped to create neighbourhoods where non-Muslims may feel uncomfortable, even intimidated.

Indeed.

It is encouraging that Muslim voices are now being heard more and more speaking up against Islamic extremism. Their task is made infinitely more difficult, however, by western liberals determined to do the extremists’ work for them.

It has been a longstanding argument that only moderate Muslims can save Islam. Given our idiocy, it may be that only courageous moderate Muslims will save the West.

A website called Orthodox Anarchist — “no authority but G-d” — put up a brief note on my post on David Landau:

Augean Stables’ response to David Landua’s remark to Condoleezza Rice that the US should “rape” Israel offers perhaps the most insightful critique of “Jewish anti-occupationism” that I have ever read. As Kelsey so brilliantly noted in a recent conversation: The Jewish Left and the Jewish Right are hardly ever right about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they’re often very right about each other.

I responded:

thanks for your comment on my explanation for David Landau’s request to Condi that the US rape Israel. i do however, object to your implied categorization of me as “right”, and to your implied suggestion that i’m wrong about the “occupation” when i haven’t even published something on what Israel “ought to do.” my overall point is that, however annoying and even violent the settlements, they are not the source, cause, or main problem behind the “occupation.” indeed they are a drop in the bucket compared with the Palestinian/Arab/Muslim perception that the very existence of an autonomous Jewish state in the region is a theological blasphemy and an unbearable humiliation. so it’s got nothing to do with the “green line” and everything to do with the shore line. if that kind of realistic observation makes me a “right-winger”, then heaven help us all.
Posted on 06-Jan-08 at 12:20 am

To which Mobius wrote back:

richard,
i apologize if you feel misrepresented. you’ll have to excuse me if i took the inclusion of dhimmi watch, little green footballs, and pajamas media in your blogroll, as well as your championing of daniel pipes and your endless indictments against the palestinians and their supporters as an indication of your political orientation. it is certainly not uncommon for jews to hold liberal positions on every domestic issue and only go batshit crazy when it comes to israel. so perhaps you’re not a right-winger. perhaps you are indeed a liberal. …on everything except israel.

as per your remarks concerning the main problem underlying the occupation, i will not bother to justify arab rejectionism (though i think one can make such a case legitimately).

rather, what i will say is that the most interesting question for me, piqued, in fact, by your post upon which i initially remarked, is as to whether or not it is wise to withdraw from the territories — having the full awareness that it is the ethical and moral thing to do — while acknowledging that it will neither pacify israel’s enemies nor bolster israel’s standing in the world.
israel certainly has a responsibility to its citizens to insure their safety, and withdrawing from the territories without a negotiated settlement (to which fatah, hamas, and islamic jihad adhere) will, in fact, only bring the rocket and sniper attacks all that much closer to israel’s major population centers. with this assessment, i cannot disagree. it is an inescapable fact and as a resolution to this situation i can offer no easy answers.

however, i can say that the occupation does go to certain extremes. there are certain excesses that go beyond israel’s legitimate security needs: the often humiliating and degrading policies of the IDF towards palestinians, the endless complications heaped upon the average palestinian in the conduct of their daily affairs, and the act of settlement and the actions of settlers, only add to the anger, the animosity, and the hatred that commit palestinians to the destruction of israel.
that said, i believe it is possible to provide for israel’s security without inflaming the situation by allowing — among other things — religious fundamentalists to run amok, enacting their own version of vigilante justice, by uprooting olive groves, cutting off water, staging attacks against arab villagers, and expanding their settlements onto lands from which palestinians draw their sustenance.

there is no magickal sigil — no simple act — that israel can do that will resolve this conflict painlessly. however, israel as the occupier can act to minimize the pain and reduce the harm to everyone involved, should it only choose to do so.

that israel and its supporters have grown completely callous and indifferent towards the suffering of palestinians is certainly understandable. but it’s neither acceptable nor forgivable. it is israel’s responsibility to ease the suffering of those it occupies, and to do so should not be considered rewarding terror nor abetting the enemy.

i can accept not racing to withdraw from the west bank. i cannot accept indifference to the actions of yesha.

to which I respond interlinearly [Mobius in blockquote; me in regular]:

i apologize if you feel misrepresented. you’ll have to excuse me if i took the inclusion of dhimmi watch, little green footballs, and pajamas media in your blogroll, as well as your championing of daniel pipes and your endless indictments against the palestinians and their supporters as an indication of your political orientation.

I don’t know if I’d take PJMedia and LGF as signs of “right-wingerhood.” Certainly, before 9-11, both Roger Simon and Charles Johnson were pretty much on the left by any standards. As for Pipes, I’m not even sure what his real political orientation is, since what he talks about virtually non-stop is the problem of Islamism (and is careful not to indict all of Islam), which problem, as I’ll argue below, throws all the political meters off kilter. If the only way to stay “left” or “progressive” in these times is to ignore what sites like Dhimmiwatch, Pipes, PMW, and MEMRI have to tell us, then okay, I’m not left.

By the way I periodically go to “leftist” blogs, but I must say I find them so riddled with Bush Derangement Syndrome (not that I either like or voted for Bush), that it gets very tiresome. If you have some good “progressive” blogs to recommend, I’d be happy to visit and blogroll them.

it is certainly not uncommon for jews to hold liberal positions on every domestic issue and only go batshit crazy when it comes to israel. so perhaps you’re not a right-winger. perhaps you are indeed a liberal. …on everything except israel.

Regardless of whether I or anyone else is Jewish, I’d argue that any real liberal — i.e., someone who believes in things like equality before the law, resolution of conflict through a discourse of fairness, human rights, gender equality, freedom of speech and press — could not possibly side with anyone but Israel in the Middle East, and that for any liberal to side with the Palestinians given the behavior of their leaders and colleagues in the Arab/Muslim world, is nothing short of a dramatic betrayal of liberal values. On the contrary, it is precisely because I adhere to liberal values that I cannot countenance the “progressive” pro-Palestinian discourse that has hijacked the “left” in these last years (since 2000 in particular).

as per your remarks concerning the main problem underlying the occupation, i will not bother to justify arab rejectionism (though i think one can make such a case legitimately).

i’d like to see you do that by liberal standards without special pleading and without ignoring the behavior of the Palestinian political elites whatever their orientation — secular, religious, “moderate”, extremist…
(more…)

The following article, by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr, raises an important issue. Often it is the religious sectors who are denounced as ‘zealots’, as making decisions based on faith, and not facts. This charge is often used to describe the national-religious camp in Israel, whose opposition to land-for-peace deals with the Palestinians is derided as a product of blind faith and not reason.

But who is really relying on blind faith? Experience and history alone lead one to the conclusion that territory given up by Israel will be used by Jihadi groups to oppress the local population and carry out attacks against Israel. To come to the conclusion that abandoning the West Bank will advance the cause of peace between Israel and the Palestinians, one must have deep faith in the unproven doctrines that have dominated the peace efforts since the first days of Oslo.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is behaving like a zealot. In her ever-more-rash pursuit of a Palestinian state, she is exhibiting the syndrome defined by the philosopher George Santana, as one who redoubles her efforts upon losing sight of the objective.

Let’s recall: The objective laid out by President Bush, when he decided in June 2002 to support the creation of a homeland for the Palestinian people, was to provide a stable, secure neighbor for Israel, committed to leaving peaceably with the Jewish State.

Mr. Bush explicitly preconditioned such support on: an end to Palestinian terror; a Palestinian leadership that was not tainted by ties to terrorism; and the elimination of the infrastructure in Palestinian areas that enables such behavior. After the 9/11 attacks, the United States was in the business of eliminating terrorist-sponsoring regimes, not creating them.

(more…)