It seems to me that if you are on record saying that your life is an open book, and you have a state-run web-page about your infant son, and your own children’s travel is paid for by the state, and you presented your infant son at a convention televised across the entire world, and you sent out a press release outing your own daughter’s current pregnancy, then it is not despicable, evil, vile or outrageous for the press to ask factual, answerable questions about Sarah Palin’s experiences as a pregnant and non-pregnant mother and about her marriage and about her parenting of her children. Palin herself just said so.
Please email me and tell me why I’m wrong about this. I want to air all possible views and dissents. I want to do the right thing, to learn as much as we can about this woman. All I want is to know more - about this new, unknown, clearly dishonest person who is asking to be elected a potential president of the United States by next January.
Possible Nazi Theme of Grand Prix Boss’s Orgy Draws Calls to Quit
Few scandals in recent years have provoked as much anger and dismay across Europe as the saga of Max Mosley, the overseer of grand prix motor racing who made tabloid news last weekend in a front-page exposé and accompanying Web video showing him in a sadomasochistic orgy with five supposed prostitutes in a London sex “dungeon.”
But beyond the licentiousness of the episode, it was the suggestion of Nazi undertones in the role-playing during the session in a basement in London’s fashionable Chelsea district that led to demands for Mr. Mosley’s resignation as president of the Paris-based Federation Internationale de l’Automobile.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, they say, and they would be right [e.a.]:
Family history has added to the notoriety: Mr. Mosley, 67, is the younger son of Britain’s 1930s fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley, and the society beauty Diana Mitford, whose secret wedding in Berlin in October 1936 was held at the home of the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels and included Hitler as a guest of honor.
Naturally, automakers are distancing themselves from this nasty episode and this nasty man. But he isn’t having any of it [e.a.]:
Mr. Mosley, undaunted, tried to turn the tables on BMW and Daimler Benz, which manufactures Mercedes-Benz cars, with a statement that raised the specter of the two companies’ own role during the Nazi era. … His statement held to his insistence that fault lay with the way in which his actions had been reported by The News of The World, and not with the actions themselves.
And the NYT’s John F. Burns ends with the kicker:
If he recognized the irony in the son of the man who led Britain’s “blackshirts” in reproving German companies for their wartime past, Mr. Mosley did not show it.
Or perhaps 9/11 will prove to be the beginning of an era when people will once again understand irony, and satire, the weapon of resistance par excellence. One can always hope.
Such incitement against Israel and Jews was supposed to be banned under the 1993 Oslo accords and the 2003 “road map” peace plan. While the Palestinian Authority under Fatah has made significant, if imperfect efforts to end incitement, Hamas, no party to those agreements, feels no such restraint.
Since Hamas took over Gaza last June, routing Fatah, Hamas sermons and media reports preaching violence and hatred have become more pervasive, extreme and sophisticated, on the model of Hezbollah and its television station Al Manar, in Lebanon.
In case any of the NYT’s readers thinks that Hamas’s complaints are legitimate, and that its charter, a “deeply anti-Semitic document” [you get extra points for that, NYT! ---ed.] is just politics [e.a.]:
Mark Regev, spokesman for Mr. Olmert, called on “Arab leaders who are moderate and believe in peace to speak out more strongly against extremist elements.” He called the “incitement to hatred and violence standard Hamas operating procedure,” adding, “In Hamas education and broadcasting they turn the suicide bomber who murders the innocent into a positive role model, and they portray Jews in the most negative terms, that too often reminds us of language used in Europe in the first half of the 20th century.”
The “serious question,” he said, “is what ethos are they promoting?”
Why, they’re promoting “resistance” against the eternally evil Jew, dontcha know? And there are lots of Americans who want the eternally evil Jews of Israel to negotiate with those who look forward to a second holocaust.
Andrew Sullivan says that unless you buy into Obama’s absurd saccharine glossing over of his spiritual mentor’s proud racial animus and defiant anti-Americanism, you are betraying The Dream.
You also have a choice: to believe that this is a sincere message given by a sincere person; or a phony message delivered by a fraud.
That’s funny, because I see another choice. I believe this is a sincere message given by a reptilian politician, who use political correctness to deflect all uncomfortable questions about himself.
But that makes me a cynic and thus another target of Andrew Sullivan’s judgment:
Reveling in cynicism and partnisanship [sic] is the act of those who trulydo not love America.
I see. Now I have to be part of the drooling-idiot band of Obama worshippers in order to prove that I truly love America.
I wonder what other loyalty tests will be in store us if we’re unlucky enough to have to live under an Obama administration
if Obama–or Clinton–can change the focus of the debate to the question of strategy–the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption and broader foreign policy priorities (real Al Qaeda v. Al Qaeda in Iraq), McCain has a far more diffiult hill to climb.
The U.S. military, which gave a lower death toll, said both attacks were caused by female suicide bombers and blamed al Qaeda. An Iraqi military official said the two women were mentally handicapped and the bombs detonated by remote control.
I guess what happend today is okay—because it was done “only” by Al Qaeda in Iraq, not by the “real” Al Qaeda.
Does Joe Klein consider this a serious argument?
Does he ever consider the full implications of the things that come out of his mouth?
How many more morons like him are out there?
And does he really think that Democrats can win on national security with arguments like this?
I was shocked by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Any fool knew it was coming, that is the not the point. It was the pure evil infamy of it. They hate democracy. Who hates democracy? Well, some elements of radical Islam. When David Axelrod of Obama’s campaign yesterday hinted that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible because she voted for the Iraq War, I thought, Don’t be an idiot. …
After the Cold War, Susan Sontag famously said that the National Review was more reliable than the Nation on the Soviet Union. This time around the left must show that it is more reliable than the Weekly Standard and the New Republic about “the war on terror”. We are winning this ideological battle because we have not overstated the threat, and they have, and we do not ignore the fact that the Palestinian situation is a red flag across the Muslim world. Yet we can’t forget: there are forces of darkness out there.
The sewer rats in his comments section are none too pleased about Weiss’s revelation:
We liked you better when you blamed everything on the Jews.
For his cheerleading of those other blamers of the Jews, Weiss made a Top Ten Moonbats of 2007 list:
Weiss has become an “Israel Lobby” fundamentalist. In his eyes, to question the scholarship of Walt and Mearsheimer is to question truth. Every page of their book is gospel. Any negative review of their work is automatically dismissed as a “smear,” and every day that passes without an expose of the “Israel Lobby” on “60 Minutes” or the cover of Time magazine is further evidence of Jewish control over the media.
This mild critique doesn’t do Weiss justice. He has to be read to be believed. I’ll give you all the pleasure of finding out for yourselves, but I won’t provide another link.
Here’s the background to the Norman Mailer–Norman Podhoretz “feud” that Andrew Sullivanso generously alluded to and so stingily failed to provide the context for. (Every story has at least two sides.):
In taking a critical stand on the Berkely [Free Speech Movement] uprising, we did not deny the reality of the grievances against the university that had presumably caused the trouble. Nor did we deny the need for changes in the way Berkeley, and the American educational system in general, operated. That would have been the conservative or right-wing position. What we did deny was that the situation had become so bad that nothing less than revolution could possibly do any good. We thought that Berkeley was a fundamentally sound institution that should and could be improved without resort to “tactics of force and disruption” and the rhetorical violence that always seemed to accompany tactics of that kind. …
[We were served notice] that to deviate from [the Movement party line], then, even gently, was at a minimum to risk abuse and to open oneself up to the most insulting interpretation of one’s motives.
This too was reminiscent of the experience of our intellectual elders in the thirties….
In the sixties things were a bit different, but what s ome were later to think of as the “terror” also came into play then. The word “terror,” like everything else about the sixties, was overheated. No one was arrested or imprisoned or executed; no one ws even fired from a job. … The sanctions of this particular reign of “terror” were much milder: one’s reputation was besmirched, with unrestrained viciousness in conversation and, when the occasion arose, by means of innuendo in print. People were written off with the stroke of an epithet—”fink” or “racist” or “fascist” as the case may be—and anyone so written off would have difficulty getting a fair hearing for anything he might have to say. Conversely, anyone who went against the Movement party line soon discovered the likely penalty was dismissal from the field of discussion.
Seeing others ruthlessly dismissed in this way was enough to prevent most people from voicing serious criticisms of the radical line, and—such is the nature of intellectual cowardice—it was enough in some instances to prevent them even from allowing themselves to entertain critical thoughts. The “terror,” in other words, could at its most effective penetrate into the privacy of a person’s mind. But even at its least effective, it served to set a very stringent limit on criticism of the radical line on any given issue or at any given moment. A certain area of permissible discussion and disagreement was always staked out, but it was hard to know exactly where the boundaries were; one was always in danger of letting a remark slip across the border and unleashing the “terror” on one’s head. …
They were afraid of what might be said about them … and not only to their faces but behind their backs when they would be unable to defend themselves and when, as they knew all too well from their own reluctance to defend others against such insulting charges, there would be no one else to stand up for them either. …
Of course one could recant and be forgiven; or alternatively one could simply speak one’s mind and let the “terror” do its worst. Yet whatever one chose to do, the problem remained. …
[In 1968] the new radicalism was riding so high that it was in no mood for anything but allegiance, praise, and flattery. This had been enough, and more than enough, to frighten William Phillips. but what was more surprising, and more significant, it was even enough to intimidate Norman Mailer, whom Phillips commissioned to write the piece for Partisan Review about Making It.
The author of these words is Norman Podhoretz. This is from his book Breaking Ranks (1979).
I would add two things:
One: Norman Mailer has said (I can’t find the reference, but I will) that judging a man by his politics is like looking at him from the perspective of his asshole. He and Podhoretz were friends, and that Mailer tried to keep up the friendship after this, Podhoretz reports. Under the circumstances, the friendship withered.
Two: Podhoretz went on to have a magnificent career, and a profound impact on two generations of thoughtful, politically engaged Americans—as did Norman Mailer.
I’m not sure what Israel’s crime is, but I hope it’s the craven, abject British National Union of Journalist (probably—and pathetically and wrongheadedly—hoping to ingratiate itself with whoever kidnapped Alan Johnston) that will get the punishment for publicly violating journalism’s code of ethics to take sides: to assert its solidarity with “the Palestinian people” [a faux-pious dodge,*** which fails to distinguish between those murderous Palestinians whose clearly stated and oft-repeated goal is to eliminate Israel and Israelis from existence and those not-murderous Palestinians who wish to get on with their lives and are willing to give peace in exchange for land or rich bribes]”
the Palestinian people — notably those suffering in the siege of Gaza, the community Alan Johnston has been so keen to help through his reporting
and at the same time to attack Israel for
a “savage pre-planned attack on Lebanon” last summer and the “slaughter of civilians in Gaza.”
Happily, not all British journalists agree with the NUJ, and some of those who disagree have been quite outspoken in their opinions:
The NUJ also cited Israel’s “continued attacks inside Lebanon following the defeat of its army by Hizballah.”
“What kind of language is this?” [Toby] Harnden [the Telegraph's D.C. correspondent] asked. “It is tendentious and politically loaded propaganda that would be rightly edited out of any news story written in a newspaper that had any pretensions of fairness.”
Simon McGregor-Wood of ABC News, who chairs the Foreign Press Association in Israel, said the NUJ’s statements “seem to go against some of the core ethics of journalism that we are here to protect, such as balance and objectivity.”
“I don’t think any representative body of journalists should be taking a side,” he said.
No kidding!
———-
*** I am grateful to the British journalist Nick Cohen for pointing this out in print. He put it like this:
It’s not radical, it’s barely political, to turn a blind eye and say you are for the Palestinian cause. Political seriousness lies in stating which Palestine you are for and which Palestinians you support. The Palestinian fight is at once an anti-colonial struggle and a clash between modernity and reaction. The confusion of our times comes from the failure to grasp that it is possible to have an anti-colonialism of the far right.
While we’re at it, don’t excuse Hamas and Islamic Jihad and all the rest by saying the foundation of Israel and the defeat of all the Arab attempts to destroy it made them that way. Anti-Semitism isn’t a local side effect of a dirty war over a patch of land smaller than Wales. It’s everywhere from Malaysia to Morocco, and it has arrived here. …
To explain away a global phenomenon as a rational reaction to Israeli oppression, you have once again to turn the Jew into a supernatural figure whose existence is the cause of discontents throughout the earth. You have to revive anti-Semitism.
The Democratic speaker from San Francisco and Lantos, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, were asked at a press conference in San Francisco Tuesday whether on the heels of their recent trip to the Middle East they would be interested in extending their diplomacy in the troubled region with a visit to Iran.
“Speaking just for myself, I would be ready to get on a plane tomorrow morning, because however objectionable, unfair and inaccurate many of (Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s) statements are, it is important that we have a dialogue with him,” Lantos said. “Speaking for myself, I’m ready to go — and knowing the speaker, I think that she might be.”
Pelosi did not dispute that statement, and noted that Lantos — a Hungarian-born survivor of the Holocaust — brought “great experience, knowledge and judgment” to the recent bipartisan congressional delegation trip to Israel, the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia in addition to Syria.
I think I am now officially retired from trying to talk sense. Why bother?
A quote from Arnold Schwarzenegger about “climate change” in today’s New York Times (in Thomas Friedman’s behind-the-pay-wall column) caught my eye:
What is “amazing for someone that does not come from a political background like myself,” said Governor Schwarzenegger, is that “this line is being drawn” between Democrats and Republicans on climate change. “You say to yourself: ‘How can it be drawn on the environment?’ But it is.
[[Ostensibly, Schwarzenegger was saying that climate change is a suprapartisan issue, which is true. To the extent that climate change is happening---and it certainly seems to be happening; the question is how quickly and what we can or should do about it---it certainly affects everyone on the planet---but not equally. However, to say that “the debate is over,” which Schwarzenegger also says to Friedman, is a crafty, cunning classic triangulation political maneuver. See Frank Luntz on this matter.]]
Back to the matter at hand, however, which is the politicization of everything in our country and our culture and our national conversation—a horrible path that we should resist, not encourage.
Unfortunately, things do not seem to be going in that direction. Today, for example, Andrew Sullivan suggests that America’s finest writers and thinkers—in this case, Emerson and Thoreau and Emily Dickinson—ought to be used as cudgels in a propaganda war against those who would deny ”climate change.”
In America, in particular, love of the land has long been a part of patriotism. And where religious faith appears, it isn’t necessarily a paean to Gaia. “America, The Beautiful” is an environmentalist hymn. America’s greatest poets, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, are intoxicated with the natural beauty of this continent. Part of their intoxication is their sense of the divine saturating the natural. Read Thoreau or Emerson and the same American interaction with nature is palpable. Americans, after all, forged a relationship with wilderness more recently than any Europeans. And there is, therefore, a deeply patriotic form of green thought in America that has been overly neglected by environmentalists and that can and should be reclaimed by political leaders, especially on the right.
There is also, it seems to me, an authentically religious approach to the environment that is completely orthodox and defensible.
This is the essence of demagogy, helpfully defined by Wikipedia thus:
Sullivan’s deplorable and grotesque suggestion that we should plunder America’s national treasure—its glorious art and literature—for political purposes is disgusting enough in itself.
That anyone would take Andrew Sullivan, entertaining and popular as he is, seriously on anything having to do with politics is a sad commentary on how far we, as a country and a culture, seem to have fallen.
Global politics enters the entertainment arena in Europe. The organizers of the cheesy Eurovision Song Contest, “notorious for the banality of its entries,” as The Times (London) puts it, are confronted with the problem of an Israeli band that sings about not wanting to be annihilated by A’jad (who was last seen yesterday making love to Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, who showed his appreciation by claiming that A’jad endorsed the Saudis’ 2002 peace plan for Israel and the Palestinians. Ha!).
Will Israeli peaceniks be allowed to participate in the world of global pop culture? With lyrics like this? [see this post for a discussion about how pop culture can work to dissipate conflict]
The world is full of terror
If someone makes an error
He’s gonna blow us up to biddy biddy kingdom come
There are some crazy rulers they hide and try to fool us
With demonic, technologic willingness to harm
They’re gonna push the button
Push the button push the bu push the bu push the button
And I don’t want to die; I want to see the flowers bloom
Don’t want a go capoot ka boom, and I don’t want to cry
I wanna have a lot of fun, just sitting in the sun
But nevertheless - he’s gonna push the button
Push the button push the bu push the bu push the button
The New York Times and the London Times quoted one of the contest organizers as saying: “It’s absolutely clear that this kind of message is not appropriate for the competition.” Why not? I wonder. Last year, as I recall (and wrote about here), a Finnish heavy-metal band with a rather unappealing Satan-worshipping “message” won the competition.
And an anti-war message is inappropriate in 2007? I’m not sure I get that.
Kobi Oz, the lead singer of the Israeli band whose song was voted into the competition by popular vote in Israel (those are the rules of entry), says:
“I’m not worked up over the issue, because I know our song is not political. …the song is about the state of humanity in general, whereby a minority has access to excessive power. The song could be about the terror in Russia or Spain, or the violence on the streets of England or France.
“Our way of dealing with terror it to laugh in its face. I think the Europeans should adopt this method as well.” [e.a.]
This is the brilliant new strategy of the impudent, murderous thugs who were democratically elected to represent the Palestinian people—Israelis should leave the area (starting with Sderot and ending with ?) if they want peace:
The only way to stop the regular rocket fire on Sderot, an Israeli city of about 20,000 nearly three miles from the Gaza Strip border, is for the Jewish state to evacuate the entire city, Hamas announced in a statement Wednesday.“Only the departure of residents from Sderot will stop the rocket fire,” Abu Abaida, spokesman for Hamas’ so-called military wing, said in a statement to reporters.
“There are no limits on our rocket attacks and we will prove that in coming days. We advise residents of Sderot to evacuate,” the Hamas spokesman said.
…
…Abu Abaida said Hamas is seeking to impose “a new equation in which the Zionists understand that for every incursion into Gaza, we will use our rockets to bombard your towns and cities until more and more are forced to evacuate. Our rockets have already improved, as Sderot residents know. We keep working on (the rockets) to improve deadliness, force and distance.”
Unfortunately, Hamas’s rocket attacks are having the desired effect in Sderot: the life of the town has been totally disrupted, with children afraid to leave home to go to school. You can read all about it here.
Somehow, under the circumstances, it’s not surprising that Israeli workers hurled stones and insults at Louise Arbour, the UN’s top “human rights” official, who was visiting the area. Rushed to the scene of an attack to see it firsthand, she said:
“Israel has a responsibility to defend its citizens, but has to do so only by legal means. …It has to do so in line with international law.”
Why? to make room for international law to “legally” annihilate Israel? I don’t think so, Ms. Arbour.
The Jews have been clever enough to survive your kind of “laws” for thousands of years, as even their most vicious enemies understand. For example, Mahathir Mohamed:
We are up against a people who think. They survived 2,000 years of pogroms not by hitting back, but by thinking. They invented and successfully promoted Socialism, Communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so they may enjoy equal rights with others. With these they have now gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power. We cannot fight them through brawn alone. We must use our brains also.
Mahathir Mohamed, who implies that persecuting Jews is not wrong—that it just seems wrong and the Jews talked people out of it by coming up with clever world-changing ideas—spouts the essence of perverse anti-Semitism, which ascribes mystical powers to the Jews.
But we can’t ignore what he says: that the Jews have survived by thinking. So, Ms. Arbour, maybe you should start looking for another job. Because the clever Jews will soon have formulated yet another world-changing ideology to persuade you and your pals that persecuting the Israeli Jews is wrong.
Margaret Hodge, a British cabinet minister who claims to have disagreed with Tony Blair’s foreign policy since 1998, has accused him of following a policy of “moral imperialism”—i.e., “exporting British attitudes and ideas to other countries,” according to The Times (London), which also reports that she later denied having made this remark.
Whether or not she actually said this is, frankly, irrelevant. It’s what Blair has been challenging, in speech after speech, as stubborn and bizarre Western “opinion.” Implicit in Hodge’s controversial remark is her perspective—that the West’s values are alien and unwelcome in the rest of the world and that we’re bullying people and trying to shove these things down “their” throat.
Perhaps I can make amends by offering up an example of what I consider to be moral imperialism: MSNBC’s breathless Special on Scientology, featuring TomKat, the Camera-ready Castle at Bracciano, fashions by Giorgio Armani, guest list by [insert name of Cruise's PRopaganda (TM) Team here: they have just earned themselves a gigantic bonus, 'cause The Glamorous Scientology Wedding of TomKat has totally hijacked the airwaves], with stupendously reverent questions by anchor Alex Witt and soothing responses from the Rev. John Carmichael (”Church of Scientology”)
A special report from the home district of the new Majority LeaderSpeaker of the House.
Give San Francisco school board members your support for their initiative to discontinue their JRTOC program in area high schools. Here’s why [emphasis mine]:
A majority of board members say the benefits of the 90-year-old program are not worth the association with the U.S. military, an institution they consider discriminatory, homophobic and at odds with the mission of public education.
And the mission of public education? Why, to teach children that the military is “discriminatory” and “homophobic.” Perfect reasoning!
Hey, wasn’t Kerry in California when he made that ha-ha not-funny joke?
The European Union urged Iraq on Sunday not to carry out the death sentence passed on Iraq’s former leader Saddam Hussein after his conviction for crimes against humanity.”The EU opposes capital punishment in all cases and under all circumstances, and it should not be carried out in this case either,” Finland, current holder of the rotating EU presidency, said in a statement.
No matter how terrible a crime you have committed against how many, the Enlightened body that represents Europe forgives you and pleads for your life. Likewise, Amnesty International.
Why?
How will Saddam’s grotesque indecencies and perversions, which went unchecked for decades, be punished? If even “crimes against humanity,” which meet an internationally agreed upon standard to be called such, do not warrant the death penalty, what is the moral yardstick by which we contain, judge, and punish criminals (understood to be such by the common decency that binds us all as human beings)?
During the Hezbollah-vs.-Israel war, I was surprised to discover that Israelis were required to have bomb shelters in their homes. Now I’m suitably alarmed but not surprised to read that wealthy Israelis are going all-out in their preparations for a nuclear attack by Iran:
AMID mounting fears that Iran is planning to obliterate their country, wealthy Israelis are shelling out on underground nuclear shelters in the gardens of their luxury homes.
The shelters, which cost at least £60,000 for a bargain-basement version, are built to withstand radioactive fallout, have fortified walls and doors and generate their own electricity and decontaminated air.
Predictably, the Goldbergs are trying to outdo the Finkelsteins:
“The shelter looks like a regular flat,” [Goldberg aka Rakib] said. “It is 2,000 square feet, with a living room, two bedrooms, kitchen, self-powered electricity.”
Rakib’s post-nuclear pad, which can accommodate more than 25 people for two weeks, cost about £250,000.
…
Leading the stampede to the nuclear bunker is [Finkelstein aka] Shari Arison, the country’s wealthiest woman, estimated to be worth about £2.7 billion. The Israeli media have reported that she has already made preparations for Armageddon by building two sophisticated underground structures. One is at her home in Tel Aviv, the other in the garden of her holiday villa in Bnei Zion village.
Meanwhile, the Israeli government’s got some ’splainin’ to do:
Seeking to allay public fears, the government insists that the population has little to fear. “We are aware of all these panicky people building atomic shelters. They’re wasting their money,” said a security source.
“Israel will not allow Iran to build an atomic bomb, and even if it did, the Iranians know very well that we’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age before they’ve launched a single missile.”
Oh, but I forgot. There’s nothing to worry about, according to Matthew Yglesias, who spends a lot of time writing about national-security policy, he says, “frequently criticizing the hawkish urge to blend disparate problems together into a unified ‘Islamofascist’ menace.”
So he ought to know: we’ve got nothing to worry about from Iran. Why, it’s not even a totalitarian state:
The Iranian regime, objectionable though it may be, is a run-of-the-mill authoritarian oligarchy with competing centers of power and some space for civil society.
Yes. And Ahmadinejad is just another “Muslim Behaving Badly.”
If you love this non-partisan super-democratic positively Ghandi-esque advice from a commenter at CampusJas much as I do, please pass it on.
Tensions between Jewish and Muslim students at UC Irvine peaked recently after an incident involving vandalism with swastikas and “vulgarities” (unspecified). Half a dozen Jewish students met with university officials to discuss both the incident and an atmosphere they described as intimidating to their persons and their freedom of speech. The officials were very sincerely sympathetic. Then:
…[S]ome students asked that Drake place restrictions on where MSU events are held, saying that if their events were held in classrooms as opposed to public spaces, their effect would not be as broad. However, Chancellor Drake told Jewish students at the meeting that he cannot restrict any club, that it would be “violation of law to prohibit certain speech.”
[Vice-Chancellor] Gomez emphasized that though hate speech may be present, he would not seek to curtail it, as “one person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Here’s the genius advice from a commenter on how to respond:
My suggestion? Take this opportunity to make Mr. Gomez understand the impact of his words. Stage a rally based on them. If possible, get together with the black student union, the latin american student union, the asian american student union (or whatever the campus equivalents are), but if necessary, go it alone.
The rally should be in a public space, and it should involve loud, repeated chanting of racist slurs followed by “one person’s hate speech is another person’s education”
So:
Rally Leader: “Kike go home”
Crowd: “Kike go home”
Rally leader: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Crowd: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Rally leader: “Monkeys Niggers, don’t belong”
Crowd: “Monkeys, Niggers, don’t belong”
Rally leader: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Crowd: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Rally Leader: “Raghead, towelhead, muslim scum”
Crowd: “Raghead, towelhead, muslim scum”
Rally leader: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Crowd: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
(and so on, with slurs for hispanics, asians, etc. Then repeat from “Kike go home”)
Spend an hour chanting that on the lawn in front of his office, invite some press, and see if that doesn’t have an impact.
To veil or not to veil? Jack Straw, Britain’s former foreign minister, says he would prefer it if Muslim women would remove their veils when talking to him as it is a barrier to face-to-face communication. A currect deputy prime minister of Britain disagrees.
Last week, in his editorial published in the Lancashire Evening, Straw asked Muslim women to “take off their veils”. He said that the increasing number of women wearing a veil was concerning, noting it was disturbing to talk to a woman whose face he could not see….
Prescott suggested that Straw’s fears about the women who wear a veil were exaggerated.
“If a woman wants to wear a veil, why shouldn’t she? It’s her choice,” Prescott told the BBC’s Sunday AM program.
Prescot said he would not ask a Muslim woman to remove her veil when she visits his office.
“If somebody comes into my constituency whether they are wearing a school cap, or wearing a turban or wearing dark glasses, I’m not going to ask them to remove it. I think you can communicate with them,” he explained.
The Big Pharaoh doesn’t like Prescott’s comparisons. This is the kind of veil Straw was talking about:
You can definitely see where it would stop communication cold. Moreover, it’s hard to read the wearing of this kind of veil in Merrye Olde England in 2006 as anything but a political statement—and an in-your-face one (no pun intended) at that. And Straw is calling bulllshit on it.
A commenter at the Big Pharaoh’s blog writes:
I wish Muslims around the world realize that the veil is NOT Islamic, but a byproduct of Arabian culture.
Sad that some people regard culture higher than the faith itself.
And this reminded me of another story I read today, about a brave Iranian cleric who is trying to recapture traditional Shi’ism from the grip of what he calls “political religion.”
News filtered out of Iran this Sunday of demonstrations protesting the arrest of supporters of Ayatollah Mohammad Kazemeini Boroujerdi, an Iranian cleric fighting against the “Political Religion” that has dominated his country since Khomeini. Rumors also spread that these demonstrations have become violent with fatalities reported.
A couple of days ago, another site reported on the events leading up to the confrontation with Boroujerdi and his supporters:
October 6, 2006 (RFE/RL) — A dissident Iranian cleric who advocates the separation of religion and politics, Ayatollah Seyyed Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi, is accusing officials of persecuting him and his followers. Boroujerdi claims dozens of his supporters have been arrested and taken to Tehran’s notorious Evin prison in recent weeks. The ayatollah tells RFE/RL that he has appealed for help from international figures that include the Roman Catholic pope and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana….
The Shi’ite cleric says pressure has increased significantly since the summer, following a gathering he held for his supporters. He claims that thousands of people attended his June 30 religious meeting in Tehran’s Shahid Keshvari stadium.
“About two months and a half ago, there was something similar to a coup d’etat against me — because our last meeting was such that it shook the city and it made the establishment think that if they don’t stop me, then there will be millions of people [supporting me],” Boroujerdi says.
He’s not the only cleric who’s being intimidated and harassed, apparently:
The ayatollah says his belief in the separation of religion from politics and his refusal to support “political religion” have drawn the ire of Iran’s leaders. Iran’s Islamic establishment is based on the principle of “velayat-e faqih,” or the rule of the Islamic jurist.
Reports have emerged in recent years of other clerics and dissidents who have criticized the velayat-e faqih principle being persecuted in Iran.
They include the late Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, an influential Iranian cleric who was placed under house arrest in the 1980s.
“The political establishment forces them to accept its demands and interpret the religion in accordance with the establishment’s needs,” [Shariatmadari's son, who lives in Germany,] says. “Most clerics have realized this, but because of the heavy price of opposition to the regime, most of them do not have the courage to express [that view] publicly. Ayatollah Boroujerdi has been able to express the demand for the separation of religion from politics very openly — to a wide audience and with boldness. This is something that this establishment doesn’t like.”
From stories like these, it is so obvious that well-meaning Western multiculturalists, in the name of tolerance, are backing the forces of reaction in the Islamic world—and, worse, allowing them free passage into our societies under the name of “tolerance.” It’s got to stop. Good for Jack Straw.
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, literary home of Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer, will soon publish a book by Walt and Mearsheimer that expands on their Israel lobby paper, which I have written about many times.
The paper — which argues that America’s “unwavering support for Israel… has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardised not only U.S. security but that of much of the rest of the world” — has sparked a wide range of responses among scholars. Some have called it the stuff of conspiracy theory, while others have praised it as a welcome foray into a subject often thought to be taboo.
(Ooooooh, it has been such a secret for so long that there’s a powerful lobby representing Israel, dontcha think?)
Publishers love controversy, and they also believe (in principle) in freedom of expression, so good on FSG for getting there first. The book will get plenty of attention—or more attention than it the debate about the Israel lobby has received so far (I note that opinion writers have yet to weigh on the Great Debate that took place at Cooper Union last week; the New York Sun and Jerusalem Post have both reported on it, and the latter gives a nuanced accounting of the evening—read it).
And what else do Walt and Mearsheimer gain? An opportunity to publish more of their un-scholarly but passionately held ideas about the Jews who have made, and continue to make, America unsafe—and they get to publish them without editorial oversight: because book publishers don’t do fact-checking***, unlike respectable magazines like The Atlantic, which rejected the good professors’ original article due to its low standards.+++
What was most interesting about this hourlong punishment, which included commentary from Frey’s publisher and several prominent journalists, was the difference between how publishers vet manuscripts and how the media handles accuracy. It was a difference that was addressed but never resolved. Fact-checking is a routine part of almost every news operation. Publishers with worries about a manuscript they plan to publish may question an author, and they may run the manuscript by a lawyer, who looks at it for questions of libel. If a book is particularly technical, it may be sent to one or more outside experts for verification. Academic presses routinely subject manuscripts to peer review before publication. But that’s about it. Most publishers insist that they cannot afford to fact-check every manuscript that comes their way. In the case of small- to medium-sized houses, that’s probably true. In the case of Doubleday, Frey’s publisher and a unit of a large multinational corporation, the defense looks a little rickety.
In an interview with The Associated Press, Ashbel Green, a senior editor at Knopf who specializes in history and nonfiction, acknowledged a “traditional dependency on the author” when it comes to the truthfulness of a manuscript. But, he noted, “I think for a while [the Frey episode] will make people careful.”
+++on April 27, 2006, our pal Philip Weiss (who has published two blogposts about the Cooper Union debate last week) reported in the Nation:
They turned their piece in to The Atlantic two years ago. The magazine sought revisions, and they submitted a new draft in early 2005, which was rejected. “[We] decided not to publish the article they wrote,” managing editor Cullen Murphy wrote to me, adding that The Atlantic’s policy is not to discuss editorial decisions with people other than the authors.
“I believe they got cold feet,” Mearsheimer says. “They said they thought the piece was a terrible–they thought the piece was terribly written. That was their explanation. Beyond that I know nothing. I would be curious to know what really happened.” The writing as such can’t have been the issue for the magazine; editors are paid to rewrite pieces. The understanding I got from a source close to the magazine is that The Atlantic had wanted a piece of an analytical character. It got the analysis, topped off with a strong argument.
That might have been the end of it. The authors “nosed around,” Mearsheimer says, looking for another US publisher, then gave up, concluding that the piece could not be published as an article or book in “a mainstream outlet” in the United States.
Untroubled by the McCarthyite tone and line of questioning of George Allen by TV reporter Peggy Fox (which I wrote about here, in disgust), Arianna Huffington, interviewed today on Reliable Sources, asserted that asking about a candidate’s “heritage” and “origins” is no problem at all.
Here is what Fox asked Allen:
PEGGY FOX, REPORTER, WUSA: Could you please tell us whether your forbears include Jews, and if so at which point Jewish identity might have ended?
Here is the exchange between Kurtz and Huffington on Reliable Sources:
KURTZ: Arianna Huffington, I assume you’re 100 percent Greek. You ran for California three years ago. Would you have resented being asked in a debate about your grandfather’s or your mother’s ethnicity?
ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, HUFFINGTONPOST.COM: Absolutely not. I mean, it’s a straightforward question. And what made it a story is that George Allen could not give a straightforward answer and has not been able to do so ever since.
Let me suggest that a straightforward question to Allen, as Huffington refers to it, would have been: “It was recently reported that your mother was born Jewish, yet you are a Christian. Could you address this?”
Instead, the question was an elaborate trap that baited both Allen (its intended victim) and a lot of unhappy Jews, who were left wondering when they would be asked just how Jewish they are and how long Jewishness has been in their family and when it might be expected to be extinguished from their family.
Michiko Kakutani, book reviewer for the New York Times, is deeply offended by the most recent work of Judge Richard Posner, a book about the Constitution in the age of terrorism, which he titled Not a Suicide Pact.
This willingness to bend the Constitution reflects Judge Posner’s archly pragmatic approach to the law and his penchant for eschewing larger principles in favor of utilitarian, cost-benefit analysis. Efficiency, market dynamics and short-term consequences are what concern Judge Posner, not enduring values or legal precedents.
One result is a depressing relativism in which there are no higher ideals and no absolute rights worth protecting. It is a distinctly cynical outlook that imputes the most mercenary of motives to everyone from journalists to judges: just as Judge Posner has asserted that the media merely pander to the demands of their audiences rather than striving to inform the public, so he suggests in these pages that justices simply “make up constitutional law as they go along,” following subjective criteria instead of striving to uphold principle and precedent.
Funny how Kakutani doesn’t see this same phenomenon from the other side: the totally cynical outlook of almost every liberal reporter, anchor, and commentator in the blogosphere and the media about the policies of the Bush administration, which, from the moment it took office, was branded as interested only in making America safe for its business cronies.
That this ultra-cynical critique was also leveled against Bush’s decision to topple Saddam (No Blood for Oil! No Blood for Halliburton!) is, frankly, a disgrace. It implies that BushCo played fast and loose with American lives (not to mention billions of dollars) just because it could.
That liberal/media cynicism is cocktail-party chatter, and it quickly entered mainstream media coverage. It was the reason that war opponents were unable to tip the scales against deposing Saddam: their arguments fell on deaf ears from an American media audience/public that is not nearly as cynical about its government as the media elite.
The liberal establishment, represented by the media, has seriously overreached. Instead of displaying a strong skepticism about government, it has run a relentless attack on BushCo for lying to Americans (i.e., deliberately misleading them) on issue after issue.
Most people just don’t buy it. So it has backfired, and it will continue to backfire.
The Path to 9/11 might have been lowbrow infotainment (yes: infotainment comes in many flavors, and see my entire take on the miniseries and related issues here), but screenwriter Cyrus Nowsrateh is one serious dude. And he points up one very serious side effect of the era of extreme political partisanship: the witch-hunting is getting uglier by the day.
In July a reporter asked if I had ever been ethnically profiled. I happily replied, “No.” I can no longer say that. The L.A. Times, for one, characterized me by race, religion, ethnicity, country-of-origin and political leanings–wrongly on four of five counts. To them I was an Iranian-American politically conservative Muslim. It is perhaps irrelevant in our brave new world of journalism that I was born in Boulder, Colo. I am not a Muslim or practitioner of any religion, nor am I a political conservative. What am I? I am, most devoutly, an American. I asked the reporter if this kind of labeling was a new policy for the paper. He had no response.
The hysteria engendered by the series found more than one target. In addition to the death threats and hate mail directed at me, and my grotesque portrayal as a maddened right-winger, there developed an impassioned search for incriminating evidence on everyone else connected to the film.
Nowsrateh, the son of Iranian immigrants, also says that he undertook the project as a sort of (nonpartisan) mission:
I am neither an activist, politician or partisan, nor an ideologue of any stripe. … I felt duty-bound from the outset to focus on a single goal–to represent our recent pre-9/11 history as the evidence revealed it to be. The American people deserve to know that history: They have paid for it in blood. Like all Americans, I wish it were not so. I wish there were no terrorists. I wish there had been no 9/11. I wish we could squabble among ourselves in assured security. But wishes avail nothing.
“The Path to 9/11″ was intended to remind us of the common enemy we face. Like the 9/11 Report itself, it is meant to enable us to better defend ourselves from a future attack. Past is prologue, and 9/11 is merely another step in an escalating Islamic fundamentalist reign of terror. By dramatizing the step-by-step increase in attacks on America–all of which, in fact, occurred–we are better able to see the pattern and anticipate the future. That was the point of the series, its only intention. Call it the canary in the coal mine. Call it John O’Neill in the FBI.
Good for Nowsrateh. His movie may have been lowbrow, but it seems to have been an honorable attempt to communicate important information to everyday people who don’t follow the news too closely.
This is not to say that his version of the story of the 9/11 Commission is accurate according to the historical record (which has not yet been fully revealed), but it gets the important part of the report out there in a way that people can relate to.
That’s the power of infotainment. That’s why the project was endorsed by Tom Kean. And Clinton was a narcissistic asshole for the arm-twisting and kicking and screaming he did over it. And some Democrats were willing to stain their reputation as democrats over it.
Nowsrateh makes one other wholly nonpartisan point that is being avoided by partisans on both sides—because it’s about human nature and you can’t make hay from it for either “side”:
“The Path to 9/11″ was set in the time before the event, and in a world in which no party had the political will to act.
That is a very shrewd observation: the failure of imagination that was the backdrop and the run-up to the terror attacks of 9/11 was accompanied by a narcotized, celebrity-obsessed, glamour-obsessed, addicted-to-the-good-life population that had to be—and still has to be—roused from its long slumber.
Infotainment is a good way—maybe the only way—to get through to…us. Because in addition to being impossible to pin down in our media choices, we are also addicted to being distracted. About which more another time.
UPDATE: Edward Wyatt of the NYT certainly doesn’t agree with me. He thinks it’s “puzzling” that ABC aired the movie:
It’s little wonder that ABC?s mini-series “The Path to 9/11″ drew stinging criticism earlier this month for its invented scenes, fabricated dialogue and unsubstantiated accounts of how the Clinton and Bush administrations conducted themselves in the years encompassing the World Trade Center attacks of 1993 and 2001.
A more puzzling question is why ABC spent $30 million on what, since it lacked commercials, amounted to a five-hour public service announcement.
Of course Nowsrateh did consider it a public service announcement, and it may well have been one. Robert Thompson, the go-to pop culture guy when Neal Gabler isn’t available, sniffs his dispproval:
“Saying it is a public service is the same as claiming ideological ownership,” said Robert J. Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. “If it is being packaged as a way to expose people to the contents of the 9/11 Commission report, and you’re encouraging it to be used in schools, then you do have to present it as factual. It doesn’t do a good job of that.”…
Maybe it didn’t do a good enough job for the politicians, but the audience isn’t interested in their reputations.
Mr. Thompson asserted that however that form of entertainment was categorized, it did little teaching about history. “ ‘Richard III’ is one of the greatest plays ever written,” he said, “but it is not very good history.”
Maybe not, but that’s not why people stage and attend the play, as Mr. Pop Culture should know.
Two big guns have come out on opposing sides of what is beginning to seem not so much like World War Three as the Global Culture War.
On the side of those who are confident of our Western post-Enlightenment values is Tony Blair, who is using his final months in office and his megaphone to repeat his message again and again, in plain language:
LONDON (Reuters) Britaish Prime Minister Tony Blair launched a withering attack on Thursday on what he called “mad anti-Americanism” among European politicians.
Blair, President George W. Bush’s closest ally in the so-called war on terror, said the world urgently needs the United States to help tackle the globe’s most pressing problems.
“The danger is if they decide to pull up the drawbridge and disengage. We need them involved,” Blair said, spelling out his political vision in a pamphlet published by The Foreign Policy Center think-tank.
“The strain of, frankly, anti-American feeling in parts of European politics is madness when set against the long-term interests of the world we believe in,” he said.
The latest sign of GOP division over White House security policy came in a letter that Powell sent to Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., one of three rebellious senators taking on the White House. Powell said Congress must not pass Bush’s proposal to redefine U.S. compliance with the Geneva Conventions, a treaty that sets international standards for the treatment of prisoners of war. …
“The world is beginning to doubt the moral basis of our fight against terrorism,” said Powell, who served under Bush and is a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “To redefine Common Article 3 would add to those doubts. Furthermore, it would put our own troops at risk.”
If I have the energy, I may start keeping a scorecard.
In Reading Lolita in Tehran, her passionate tribute to the imagination, and to the power of literature to make us feel and to empathize, the Iranian author Azar Nafisi relates the story of how she put The Great Gatsby “on trial” in the 1980s in her Tehran classroom after one of her Islamic revolutionary students complained to her that it was an “immoral” work:
“Ma’am, may I talk to you for a second?”… He had a complaint. Against whom, and why me? It was against Gatsby. I asked him jokingly if he had filed any official complaints against Mr. Gatsby. And I reminded him that any such action would in any case be useless as the gentleman was already dead.
But he was serious. No, Professor, not against Mr. Gatsby himself but against the novel. The novel was immoral. It taught the youth the wrong stuff; it poisoned their minds—surely I could see? I could not. I reminded him that Gatsby was a work of fiction and not a how-to manual. Surely I could see, he insisted, that these novels and their characters became our models in real life? Maybe Mr. Gatsby was all right for Americans, but not for our revolutionary youth.
The rally should be in a public space, and it should involve loud, repeated chanting of racist slurs followed by “one person’s hate speech is another person’s education”
So:
Rally Leader: “Kike go home”
Crowd: “Kike go home”
Rally leader: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Crowd: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Rally leader: “Monkeys Niggers, don’t belong”
Crowd: “Monkeys, Niggers, don’t belong”
Rally leader: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Crowd: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Rally Leader: “Raghead, towelhead, muslim scum”
Crowd: “Raghead, towelhead, muslim scum”
Rally leader: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Crowd: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
(and so on, with slurs for hispanics, asians, etc. Then repeat from “Kike go home”)
Spend an hour chanting that on the lawn in front of his office, invite some press, and see if that doesn’t have an impact.