Gilded Butterflies

Before The Fall

The descent into dementia continues apace:

In the past four weeks, every single one of Obama’s foreign policy initiatives has appeased and strengthened the enemies of both Israel and the west, whose fates are umbilically linked. The driving motif of Obama’s foreign policy has been ‘engagement’ with the Muslim world. Ostensibly offering the hand of friendship if that world unclenches its own fist, he is actually offering up not just the west’s hand but its entire body to be kicked into submission. And I use that last word advisedly.

Out Behind the Woodshed

Norman Geras writes:

In the outpouring of hatred towards Israel today, it scarcely matters what part of it is impelled by a pre-existing hostility towards Jews as such and what part by a groundless feeling that the Jewish state is especially vicious among the nations of the world and to be obsessed about accordingly. Both are forms of anti-Semitism. The old poison is once again among us.

Howard Jacobson writes:

Given the number of besieged and battered cities there have been in however many thousands of years of pitiless warfare there is only one explanation for this invocation of Warsaw before any of those - it is to wound Jews in their recent and most anguished history and to punish them with their own grief. Its aim is a sort of retrospective retribution, cancelling out all debts of guilt and sorrow. It is as though, by a reversal of the usual laws of cause and effect, Jewish actions of today prove that Jews had it coming to them yesterday.

Nick Cohen writes:

You do not need me to add that mine is a minority point of view among liberals, and that British Jews are living through a very dangerous period. They are the only ethnic minority whose slaughter official society will excuse. If a mass murderer bombed a mosque or black Pentecostal church, no respectable person would say that the "root cause" of the crime was an understandable repulsion at the deeds of al-Qaeda or a legitimate opposition to mass immigration. Rightly, they would blame the criminal for the crime.

Melanie Phillips writes:

I have previously reported here on the menacing atmosphere in which British Jews are currently living, as a result of the malevolent misrepresentation of Israel’s actions in Gaza by Britain's media and intelligentsia which are pumping out mind-twisting and ultimately genocidal Arab propaganda as unchallengeable truths.

These are merely samples of the foul works of these commmentators. Unfortunately, there appear to be no British commentators willing to take on these fools and condemn their malign folly. This is no longer true in the United States where commentators openly decry these slanders from morally-benighted individuals.

Glenn Greenwald has an article on Salon where he takes the likes of these fools out behind the woodshed and teaches them a lesson:

But what is worth noting -- and celebrating -- is that a significant and palpable change has occurred.  Whereas these smear tactics once inspired fear in many people, now they just inspire pity. They no longer work.  Very few Americans are going to refrain from expressing their views on American policy towards Israel out of fear that the Jeffrey Goldbergs of the world are going to screech "anti-Semitism" at them.  Neocons are far too discredited and their policies far too self-evidently destructive for them to intimidate anyone out of questioning their orthodoxies.  Now, watching neocons recklessly spew their bitter little epithets in lieu of (and in order to suppress) debate is like watching an old, dying dragon sadly trying to breathe mighty fire from its mouth but collapsing in a debilitating coughing fit instead -- or is like watching a disgraced, post-censure Joe McCarthy in 1956 stand in an empty Senate chamber and rail against hidden Communists.  Nobody cares.

...

Indeed, people like Goldberg are becoming extra rancid and reckless in their rhetoric precisely because they know that these rhetorical devices have ceased working.  There is a definite sea change when it comes to American policy debates toward Israel.  They no longer possess the ability to stifle dissent through thuggish intimidation tactics and they know that, which is why they can now do nothing but turn up the volume on their name-calling attacks.

Unlike the fools I quoted above, Greenwald understands the problem of the recent Israeli carnage in the Gaza Strip:

The Israeli devastation of Gaza and its trapped, defenseless civilian population -- using American bombs, arms, money and diplomatic cover -- was so brutal and horrific to watch that it inevitably changed the way people view that Middle East conflict.  Even before that, large majorities of Americans already favored an even-handed approach to the Israel/Palestinian conflict.

Greenwald ends by explaining why the screams of anti-Semitism from the likes of Geras, Jacobson, Cohen and Phillips are getting increasingly shrill:

America's destructive involvement in all Israeli conflicts and its blind devotion to all Israeli actions is one area where -- not due exclusively or even primarily to Obama -- change is on its way.  That policy just isn't sustainable any longer, nor are the myths that have long been propagated, and the smear tactics that have long been invoked, in service of shielding that policy from critical scrutiny and open debate.  As the debate finally unfolds, Jeffrey Goldberg can -- and almost certainly will -- scream "anti-Semite" until he loses his voice.  But the louder he screams, the more he abuses and exploits that accusation, the fewer people who will be listening.  Or caring.

The Zionutty Boy

In a foul and despicable article in the Independent titled "Let’s see the 'criticism' of Israel for what it really is" Howard Jacobson demonstrates the depths of moral depravity now trawled by self-described supporters of Israel. He writes:

But my argument is not with the Palestinians or even with Hamas. People in the thick of it pursue their own agenda as best they can. But what’s our agenda? What do we, in the cosy safety of tolerant old England, think we are doing when we call the Israelis Nazis and liken Gaza to the Warsaw Ghetto? Do those who blithely make these comparisons know anything whereof they speak?

In the early 1940s some 100,000 Jews and Romanis died of engineered starvation and disease in the Warsaw Ghetto, another quarter of a million were transported to the death camps, and when the Ghetto rose up it was liquidated, the last 50,000 residents being either shot on the spot or sent to be murdered more hygienically in Treblinka. Don’t mistake me: every Palestinian killed in Gaza is a Palestinian too many, but there is not the remotest similarity, either in intention or in deed - even in the most grossly mis-reported deed - between Gaza and Warsaw.

Given the number of besieged and battered cities there have been in however many thousands of years of pitiless warfare there is only one explanation for this invocation of Warsaw before any of those - it is to wound Jews in their recent and most anguished history and to punish them with their own grief. Its aim is a sort of retrospective retribution, cancelling out all debts of guilt and sorrow. It is as though, by a reversal of the usual laws of cause and effect, Jewish actions of today prove that Jews had it coming to them yesterday.

Berating Jews with their own history, disinheriting them of pity, as though pity is negotiable or has a sell-by date, is the latest species of Holocaust denial, infinitely more subtle than the David Irving version with its clunking body counts and quibbles over gas-chamber capability and chimney sizes. Instead of saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, the modern sophisticated denier accepts the event in all its terrible enormity, only to accuse the Jews of trying to profit from it, either in the form of moral blackmail or downright territorial theft. According to this thinking, the Jews have betrayed the Holocaust and become unworthy of it, the true heirs to their suffering being the Palestinians. Thus, here and there throughout the world this year, Holocaust day was temporarily annulled or boycotted on account of Gaza, dead Jews being found guilty of the sins of live ones.

Howard Jacobson conveniently makes a confusion that is all too common these days among the intellectual class who remain supportive of Israel's decades-long subjugation of the Palestinian people. It is becoming a commonplace among a certain type of supporter of Israel, including Howard Jacobson, to believe that because the fate of the Jews was almost unique in the Second World War that it was the unique experience of the Second World War - the Holocaust was the war. There was far more to Nazism than the Holocaust. As Jacobson knows full well, Continental Europe was occupied by Germany for five years - a period that while tragic for Jews was certainly no picnic for their fellow citizens. The lives of these citizens, just as are Palestinian lives today, were subject to random whims of the occupier. It is the memory of the effect of that occupation that causes Europe to despise the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. The United States was neither occupied nor, like Britain, faced the threat of occupation, and its citizens never endured the level of suffering due to the Nazi occupation that Europeans did and is consequently much more blasé about the occupation.

While occupation weakens the spirit of the occupied it destroys the soul of the occupier. Israel, and an overly pliant West, has allowed the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories to continue for more than four decades at enormous cost to the soul of that nation and those who blindly support its policies. If we can call two skinheads knocking over a gravestone neo-Nazis then why should we not use the same word to describe the so-called settlers who, aided and abetted by the IDF, commit far worse crimes against the Palestinian people. A nation, be it Germany or Israel, which commits atrocious acts of collective punishment - and that is really what the carnage in the Gaza Strip was all about - deserves to be treated as a pariah state and it deserves to be compared with appropriate and relevant historical cases.

I understand why Howard Jacobson would rebel against and be repulsed by such analogies. He does not wish to be the target of these analogies. Ironically, he himself belittles the historic suffering of Jews by wanton and inaccurate accusations of anti-Semitism - that too is a commonplace these days. The problem facing Howard Jacobson, however, is that he is repulsed by the accusation not the actions on which the accusations are based. Indeed, he expends a lot of effort in mocking use of the words like "slaughter" and "massacre" to describe the carnage we all witnessed in Gaza last month. And in doing so he provides moral succor to those who committed this slaughter and this massacre, and makes future carnage all the more likely.

It is time we had a word with the moral force of anti-Semitism to describe those like Howard Jacobson who provide moral succor to the Israeli subjugation of the Palestinian people and the horrors consequent to it.

Madness, Madness, I Call it Madness

Tom Gross in the Wall Street Journal Europe:

Unfortunately in recent years we have become used to leftist media burying their heads in the sand about the threat that Islamic fundamentalism poses, in much the same way as they once refused to report accurately on communist atrocities. But now even conservative media may be doing it too.

There was nothing accidental about any of the seven sites that the terrorists attacked. And it was no accident that Mumbai was hit. It is the most multireligious city in India -- with Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Parsees and Jews living in relative harmony.

Melanie Phillips on her blog at The Spectator:

Meanwhile, the psy-ops strategy of war employed by the jihadi armies has been stunningly successful in de-moralising their western targets (including Israelis) in precisely the way Raphael Israeli describes. That is why people in Britain, America and elsewhere cannot grasp the significance of Mumbai; that is why they bay against America's alleged ‘crimes’ of self-defence against those who wish to murder American citizens; that is why they persist in viewing Israel, the six decade-long target of annihilatory aggression, as the oppressor in the region.

The difficulty, and it is extreme, lies in persuading a civilisation that is fast losing the power to reason at all of the objectively verifiable truth -- in whose very existence, however, the relativist west has long ceased to believe.

Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post:

The jihadists in Mumbai, like their counterparts from Gaza to Baghdad to Guantanamo Bay, have been defended, and their acts and motivations have been explained away, by their allies and loyal apologists: Western multiculturalists. Multiculturalism is a quasi-religion predicated on both moral relativism and a basic belief in the inherent avarice of the West - particularly of the US and Israel. Multiculturalists assert that Westerners - or, in the case of India, Hindus - are to blame for all acts of violence carried out against them by non-Westerners. IN THE case of the Mumbai massacres, the jihadists' multicultural defenders began justifying their actions while they were still in the midst of their torture and murder spree. In Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria hinted that Indian Hindus had it coming.

Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal:

Of course, it's always possible to fall for a well-told lie. But it's worth wondering why a media that treats nearly every word uttered by the U.S., British or Israeli governments as inherently suspect has proved so consistently credulous when it comes to every dubious or defamatory claim made against those governments. Or, for that matter, why the media has been so intent on magnifying genuine scandals (like Abu Ghraib) to the point that they become the moral equivalent of 9/11. Some caution is in order: Terrorists, of all people, might actually believe what they read in the papers.

The ultra-right madness of the week certainly seems to be blame liberals for international terrorism.

To Begin at the Beginning - XXXIX

The guests had left long ago. The clock struck half-past twelve. Only the host, Sergey Nicolayevich and Vladimir Petrovich remained in his room.

The host rang the bell and ordered supper to be taken away.

'Well then, that's agreed,' he said, settling himself more deeply into his armchair and lighting a cigar. 'Each of us is to tell the story of his first love, You begin, Sergey Nicolayevich.'

Sergey Nicolayevich, a round little man with a fair, plump face, looked first at his host and then up at the ceiling.

'In my case,' he finally said, 'there was no first love. I began with the second.'

Ivan Turgenev - First Love

Dementia

Melanie Phillips writes about the Obama Administration:

If Israel is to be browbeaten into committing suicide, however, it is essential that the fingerprints of the Israel-haters are not found at the scene of the crime and that it is carried out instead by someone with impeccable credentials as an Israel supporter. That person may well be Hillary Clinton who, if appointed Secretary of State, will be expected to finish the job her husband failed to do and force a Palestine state into being.

There are saner people in Broadmoor.

Shining a Light on Torture

TPMCafe is hosting a discussion this week on the possibility of Bush Admininistration officials being held accountable for the serious crimes committed during the last eight years. Scott Horton is harsh in his assessment of the Administration:

When all the facts are on the table (and I have been researching them for four years now, which is why I am certain that Mukasey's characterizations won't hold water), we will learn that the decision to introduce torture was taken first, and the DOJ lawyers were asked to issue memoranda to provide cover for the decisions taken. Some of it happened in a shockingly casual form over a squash court, as Rumsfeld's lawyer told a DOJ lawyer about some of the techniques used and asked him to provide cover in some written memo. When DOJ lawyers attempted any measure of serious analysis (as happened with Dan Levin, for instance), they were fired, or quickly learned that to protect their own reputation they would have to leave the Department soon. When DOJ lawyers talked with lawyers with actual expertise in the area--at the Department of Defense and State--they were told repeatedly that the proposal was a criminal act. One general, one of the Pentagon's most senior lawyers, recounted to me a meeting with John Yoo in which Yoo described to him the OLC memo on torture. "Your opinion is both incorrect and incompetent" he told him. To this Yoo responded that he wasn't concerned, why he had even gotten the head of the Criminal Division to sign off on it. The general told me this was the point at which he began suspecting that a criminal conspiracy was afoot inside the Justice Department to violate the Anti-Torture and War Crimes Acts. Indeed, I soon learned, that view was widespread within the government, even inside of the Justice Department.

Even then Horton suggests that now is not the time to look at prosecutions, now is the time to bring to light the excesses of the Bush Administration.

The Little House in Hebron

Gershom Gorenberg and Haim Watzman have a brilliant blog named South Jerusalem which humanizes Israel and Judaism in a stark contrast to the writings of Bret Stephens, Caroline Glick, Melanie Phillips and too many others. Gorenberg and Watzman are a credit to their country and their religion. South Jerusalem has an interesting discussion of the Israeli settlement of the Occupied Palestinian Territories here and there. Indeed, one commenter provides a solid case demonstrating the illegality under modern international humanitarian law of the Israeli settlement of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This is, of course, behind the attacks on international humanitarian law by the many useful idiots who support the Israeli settlements.

Gorenberg has a piece in the American Prospect on the events leading up to and following the Israeli Supreme Court decision to evict militant Israeli settlers from a house in Hebron.  Gorenberg describes the settlers response:

"We shall defend [ourselves] against this injustice with our bodies," Noam Arnon, spokesman of the Hebron settler community, has declared. At a meeting to galvanize resistance, one rightist rabbi showed up with helmets for young people intending to struggle with soldiers at the site and said that the "the state of Israel's greatest enemy" is its own government. That was low-key compared to the response of the settlers, who vandalized a Muslim cemetery, sprayed "Mohammad the pig" on the wall of a mosque, and reportedly splashed turpentine in an Israeli soldier's face, injuring him.

Gorenberg explains:

But the militancy in Hebron is part of a wider mood among the most ideologically committed settlers. They want Israeli leaders and the public to be too scared to think about evacuating whole settlements as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. They seek strategic deterrence that will eliminate the political option of giving up land and of returning to a smaller and more democratic Israel. And they could be succeeding.

And if they succeed they will have created a society that has lost sight of the meaning of civilization and has descended into barbarism.

On Being Nice

David Foster Wallace died recently. I had never heard of him, although I had read one of his articles in The Atlantic, showing perhaps how out of touch I am with current American literary fashion. Harpers, which has an entire memorial archive of his pieces, recently had a short piece in which he responded to letters from creative writing students:

I've had to back out of certain book reviews, for example, because it turned out that I hated the book, the book was simply bad, and I simply refused to spend a week and 750 words skewering a book or explaining point by point why it was bad ... mainly because I have myself been skewered, and know how it feels, and after a certain age I just didn't have the stomach to do it to someone else.

The Most Primordial of Barbarisms

It has become a commonplace for bloggers to ignore the editorial output of the Wall Street Journal because it exists in a plane spanned by utter insanity and wanton lies. Bret Stephens is a regular columnist - indeed, he is the point man for the "Global View" of the editorial page. His columns are a mass of insanity and lies typically not worth the effort of comment. But this week, he clones the meme of the week -and in writing about Somali pirates finds time to criticize Palestinians. Caroline Glick, Melanie Phillips and now Stephens - was there something in their mother's milk or are they all just bigots. To his credit, Stephens did not follow Glick and Phillips into a full-throated attack on modern international humanitarian law although it is clearly the subtext of his article to anyone familiar with his argument.

At the end of a long article on Somali piracy, Stephens writes the following final paragraph:

Piracy, of course, is hardly the only form of barbarism at work today: There are the suicide bombers on Israeli buses, the stonings of Iranian women, and so on. But piracy is certainly the most primordial of them, and our collective inability to deal with it says much about how far we've regressed in the pursuit of what is mistakenly thought of as a more humane policy. A society that erases the memory of how it overcame barbarism in the past inevitably loses sight of the meaning of civilization, and the means of sustaining it.

Stephens is absolutely correct in his first sentence but immediately drops into reflexive bigotry in his second sentence when he introduces Muslims as his only exemplars of modern barbarism. He then describes piracy as the "most primordial" form of barbarism. No, Bret, it is not.

The most primordial form of barbarism is the conquest of another people and the appropriation of their lives and land. The most significant example of that barbarism is the Israeli conquest of and settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territories which has brought death to thousands of Palestinians and misery to millions. The Israeli subjugation of the Palestinian people is the definitive example of barbarism in the Western World today. Rather than raise this, the most primordial of barbarisms, Bret Stephens chose instead to point out the Palestinian suicide bomber whose impact is de minimus in comparison with the effect of the Israeli subjugation of the Palestinian people.

Stephens cannot blame ignorance for his decision not to use the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people because, as his biography states:

From March 2002 to October 2004 Mr. Stephens was editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, a position he assumed at age 28. At the Post, he was responsible for the paper's news and editorial divisions. He also wrote a weekly column.

For thirty months Stephens was editor in chief of the main propaganda organ of Zionazism - a foul and bigoted ideology that has made war criminals of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who settled in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and a legal and moral pariah of the State of Israel. Of course, people like Glick, Phillips and Stephens decry international humanitarian law because they need to as their first line of defense for an Israel which has committed monstrous crimes against humanity and war crimes over the last four decades. They need to defend Israel from the indictment that it has committed and continues to commit the most primordial barbarism.

Now to the final sentence of Stephens' article:

A society that erases the memory of how it overcame barbarism in the past inevitably loses sight of the meaning of civilization, and the means of sustaining it.

This is an almost perfect description of what is happening to Israel. In denying that Israel is currently committing the primordial barbarism its "supporters" have lost "sight of the meaning of civilization." And they will continue to forget the meaning of civilization as long as they continue to support that most primordial of all barbarisms - the subjugation of another people.