When the leadership of the ACLU (an organization I support even when I do not agree with its selection of fights to pick) starts to limit the speech of its own board, we’ve got a big problem.

The American Civil Liberties Union is weighing new standards that would discourage its board members from publicly criticizing the organization’s policies and internal administration.

“Where an individual director disagrees with a board position on matters of civil liberties policy, the director should refrain from publicly highlighting the fact of such disagreement,” the committee that compiled the standards wrote in its proposals….

Nat Hentoff, a writer and former A.C.L.U. board member, was incredulous. “You sure that didn’t come out of Dick Cheney’s office?” he asked.

I love Nat Hentoff. I wrote about him here.

In the New Republic ($$), Joseph Braude reports that a crucial bit of history that went down the memory hole is being resurrected:

ater this week, a bipartisan group of senators and congressmen are expected to introduce a resolution that…urges the president to make sure that, during international discussions on refugees in the Middle East, “any explicit reference to Palestinian refugees is matched by a similar explicit reference to Jewish and other refugees, as a matter of law and equity.” Sponsors of the measure include everyone from Rick Santorum on the right to Dick Durbin on the left, and a number of congressmen and senators in between.

The resolution constitutes a long-overdue acknowledgment of a tragedy which, for decades, Arab states have denied and the international community has ignored. Nine hundred thousand Jews have been forced to flee their homes in Arab countries and Iran since the years leading up to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. (Most left in two waves–immediately before or after Israel’s independence, and during the years following the Six Day War.) Some were deported outright; others faced widespread campaigns of violence and intimidation so unbearable as to render their ancestral homelands unlivable. …

Having served the Arab Middle East as government workers, professionals, merchants, and artists, the indigenous Jewish population left a profound economic and social void behind them as they fled for their lives–a void that some Arab countries still have not managed to fill, 60 years later. These states’ loss was Israel’s gain: Today, 52 percent of the Jewish population of Israel consists of emigres from North Africa and the Middle East.

Braude goes on to note his personal involvement in this story:

My mother was born into a Jewish family in Baghdad in 1944. Several of her siblings are old enough to have personal memories of the “Farhud.” My late grandfather and his oldest daughter and son–then twelve and eleven, respectively–were caught trying to flee the country in the late 1940s. The children spent six months in an Iraqi prison, which my aunt recalls as having been “full of Jews.” They were eventually released and flown out of Baghdad with their mother, four more siblings, and 120,000 other Jews in the celebrated airlifts to Israel of the early 1950s. My grandfather suffered a year longer in prison before joining them on his own. They said goodbye to their friends, their home, almost all their belongings, and 2,500 years of Jewish history in Mesopotamia. Like many Palestinians, they too became refugees. And yet, somehow, over the last 50 years, their history has been largely ignored.

So far, the comments over at TNR are positive.

But Braude and the bipartisan group of senators and congressmen who are sponsoring the resolution are messing with The One and Only True Narrative of the Middle East. I predict Walt & Mearsheimer-type*** fireworks.

The proposed resolution in Congress favors conditions in which the moral case for Israel’s existence can be made anew.

Good.

***Jeff Weintraub has continued to follow this story. I’ve been meaning to add some thoughts too. In the whole controversy, what bothers me most is that W&M have been slippery: when they were “misinterpreted,” their response has been to say: “I didn’t mean to say that.”

I don’t have it in front of me for reference–I’ll link later—but in their original paper, they dispensed with the moral case for the U.S. supporting Israel. They said that the moral case could not account for the U.S.’s continued support for Israel—and they implied that it should not account for it, either. Even Michael Massing, writing in the NYRB, called this “harsh.” In their letter to the LRB, however, M&W deny that they said there’s no moral case for supporting Israel.

That sticks in my craw. They are slick and slimy.

On March 25, the International Herald Tribune published an op-ed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in which she made an appeal on behalf of the 1.5 to 3 million women who go “missing” each year due to “gender-based violence or neglect.”

This cause is, of course, supported by many well-known people: Hillary Clinton has spoken out, as has Laura Bush. Jane Fonda is a very vocal advocate for women’s rights, and a big supporter of Eve Ensler’s V-Day Movement to End Violence Against Women and Girls—which is an international organization.

In her op-ed, Hirsi Ali called on “us” in the West to act:

Women are not organized or united. Those of us in rich countries, who have attained equality under the law, need to mobilize to assist our fellows. Only our outrage and our political pressure can lead to change….

Tnitial steps could be taken by world leaders to begin eradicating the mass murder of women:

A tribunal such as the court of justice in The Hague should look for the 113 million to 200 million women and girls who are missing.

A serioternational effort must urgently be made to precisely register violence against girls and women, country by country.

We need a worldwide campaign to reform cultures that permit this kind of crime. Let’s start to name them and shame them.

All of which sounds sensible and smart. And she was quite serious about calling out some of the worst offenders

The Islamists are engaged in reviving and spreading a brutal and retrograde body of laws. Wherever the Islamists implement Shariah, or Islamic law, women are hounded from the public arena, denied education and forced into a life of domestic slavery.

as well as their “enablers”:

Cultural and moral relativists sap our sense of moral outrage by claiming that human rights are a Western invention. Men who abuse women rarely fail to use the vocabulary the relativists have provided them. They claim the right to adhere to an alternative set of values - an “Asian,” “African” or “Islamic” approach to human rights.

This mind-set needs to be broken. A culture that carves the genitals of young girls, hobbles their minds and justifies their physical oppression is not equal to a culture that believes women have the same rights as men.

This, I believe, is the source of the continued hostility toward Hirsi Ali: She doesn’t sweep the problem under the carpet in the name of “being nice.” She is unafraid to stigmatize the villains. She names names.

Christopher Hitchens alludes to this when he writes

[Hirsi Ali] is an author and a politician who has made the transition from early Islamic fanaticism (she initially endorsed the fatwa against Salman Rushdie) to a full-out acceptance and advocacy of secularism and of Enlightenment ideals. Hirsi Ali calls for a pluralist democracy where all opinion is protected but where the law does not—in the name of some pseudo-tolerance—permit genital mutilation, “honor” killing, and forced marriage. One might have expected a more robust defense of this position from the Dutch, and indeed the international left, but instead there has been a response of extraordinary and sullen ungenerousness, as if a lone woman defying taboo and standing up to violence has in some way let down the side and become a menace to multiculturalism.

And Marlise Simons, writing in today’s International Herald Tribune reports:

Hirsi Ali urged the Dutch to stand firm and not to appease immigrants, asserting that Dutch Muslims, like much of Islam, were largely backward. She said they needed to free themselves from the control of an archaic clergy who preached the subjugation of women and ostracized homosexuals. The many Islamic schools and mosques could breed militants, she argued, urging that they be closed.

All this disturbed the Dutch culture of consensus.

Apparently, it isn’t only the Dutch culture of consensus that is disturbed. The New York Times, carrying Marlise Simons’s IHT piece in a different form, published those two paragraphs this way:

Ms. Hirsi Ali urged the Dutch to stand firm, and not to appease immigrants. She said Dutch Muslims needed to free themselves from the control of clerics who preached subjugation of women and ostracized homosexuals. The 40 or more Islamic schools isolate children and could breed dangerous militants, she argued, so they should be closed.

All this disturbed the Dutch culture of consensus.

Missing from the Times’s account is this seemingly crucial assertion by Hirsi Ali.

asserting that Dutch Muslims, like much of Islam, were largely backward.

The American culture of consensus seems to be that we can talk about the problem in a general way—on that we can all agree. But when it comes time to doing something about it, we cannot even name the problem.

Wretchard writes on a related point over at the Belmont Club, and he gives it a name—”the Great Polite Silence.” He says it’s over:

Until September 11 it was possible for the more “enlightened” segments of society to regard patriotism, religion and similar sentiments with the kind of amused tolerance that one might reserve for simpletons. Nothing that a little institutionalization and spare change couldn’t straighten out. The problem for the Democratic Party is that the Great Polite Silence is over. People like Chomsky and President Bush have stopped being hypothetical and become all too real. Bring it on.

From the HuffPost, the inimitable Jane “Savonarola” Smiley on John McCain:

Of course, my real beef against John McCain is the same as my beef against all supporters of the Iraq War and the current administration. He has collaborated (enthusiastically) in decimating the treasury, breaking the army, wrecking the bureaucracy, silencing the media, gelding the opposition party, handing the public lands over to private interests to exploit as they please, dirtying the air and water, impoverishing the working class, damaging the schools, outsourcing the jobs, and laying waste to the public health, not to mention killing and maiming thousands upon thousands of Americans and Iraqis, destroying the Iraqi infrastructure, defying international law, and alienating formerly friendly people around the world. His crimes are legion. He should consider himself lucky to get away with mere humiliation. [emphasis added]