• The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami {A Japanese detective story/war novel/Kafka rip-off. It's great.}
• Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays, by Christopher Hitchens {First drafts of history, second thoughts on received wisdom, versatile meditations on great works of literature -- all by a man who can write about anything.}
• The Code of the Woosters, by P.G. Wodehouse {The Rise and Fall of the "Black Shorts," and the best of Bertie and Jeeves. You'll need Wodehouse in your life eventually. Start here; you've 89 or so more to go.}
• The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921, by Isaac Deutscher {Magnificient biography finally back in print, along with Volumes II and III. But better start before the revolution -- and Deutscher's conscience -- was betrayed.}
• Colossus, by Niall Ferguson {Why the U.S. can't hack neo-imperialism, much to Niall's chagrin.}
• Reflections on a Ravaged Century, by Robert Conquest {Don't even try to have an opinion about the twentieth century without reading him.}
• Scoop, by Evelyn Waugh {One of the funniest books, ever. Shrinks the remainder of the "innocent abroad" genre to the vanishing point.}
• Put Out More Flags, by Evelyn Waugh {Lapidary prose on the frisson between the wars. Basil Seal riding low before he rides again; Auden and Isherwood lampooned as "Parnsip and Pimpernell."}
• The Origins of Postmodernity, by Perry Anderson {Terrific writer from the London Review of Books and New Left Review, who ought to be more famous than he is, tackles lucidly the abstruse bloodhound gang -- from Habermas to Jameson -- of Theory.}
• The Counterlife, by Philip Roth {How Portnoy learned to stop complaining and write a brilliant postmodern novel.}
• Rise of the Vulcans, by James Mann {Probably the only low-blood pressure source on Bush's brain trust. Valuable for charting the progression of neo-neo-conservatism, and how Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz contravened, and then dismantled, the Kissinger realpolitik foreign policy machine.}
• Money, by Martin Amis {Forget Bonfire and Psycho. It took the English author of The Moronic Inferno: And Other Visits to America to effectively chew up the Reagan era -- largely by reminding us that it was also the Thatcher era. A fine lesson in history repeating, too: Di and Charles were TV's original Ben and J. Lo; the Self-on-Massi sex tape is where Paris (if she can read) might have learned her stuff; and the cavalier cash flow in this soft-boiled checkbook who-dun-it tale rivals that of any West Coast dotcom monkey a decade later.}
• The War Against Cliche and Experience, by Martin Amis {If Amis kept on doing what he did in his award-winning collection of critical essays, James Wood would lose more hair. It's saying quite a lot that his non-fiction exceeds his fiction. Experience is by far the best memoir to appear in the last decade: a more muscular Speak, Memory, it's a midlife nostalgia trip pureed out of chronology, though somehow more cohesive than a stream-of-consciousness hodgepodge. Guaranteed to pluck at the coronary sinews for anyone dealing with the loss of a father.}
• Lucky Jim, by Kingsley Amis {A comic genius on academia, Amis is the pitch-perfect representative of postwar male rage. None of that Angry Young Man, stuff, though. His apoplexy is hilarious at any age. The faces: "crazy peasant," "sex life in ancient Rome," "shot-in-the-back." Moo, by Jane Smiley, The Straight Man, by Richard Russo and everything by David Lodge seem impossible without this Platonic key ring to rule them all, and on the campus, bind them.}
• The Letters of Kingsley Amis, edited by Zachary Leader {Pay close attention to the letters to Philip Larkin -- together with Larkin's Collected Letters (try eBay, sorry), these constitute the documentation of one of the most rewarding and hilarious literary friendships to date. Amuse yourself by guessing the exact page number where Kingsley abandons Communism.}
• The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov, by V. Nabokov {I'm way underqualified, with my mean years on the planet, to state critical opinion. Still in larval adulation, which I understand is a longterm afflication. Read Anthony Lane's review in Nobody's Perfect. And M. Amis on Nabokov in toto in the prenominate War Against Cliche. And get a dictionary.}
• The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, edited by Leon Wieseltier {The style is dated and stilted, but the insights are not. Especially worthwhile: the Orwell essay, the Mansfield Park burn, and "The Situation of the American Intellectual at the Present Time" (i.e. "What Do They Know of America, Who Only the Upper West Side Know?"}
• A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, by David Foster Wallace {Self-indulgence and the consequences of a missing-in-action editor never had it so good. The state fair, cruise ship and TV pieces are the best. But also read the Lynch essay: it'll make you want to re-watch Blue Velvet, which you can conveniently buy below.}
• Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (edited by Anthony Thwaite) {Poetus mirabilis and, after Auden, the occupant of a near empty Hall of Metrical Wonders in the Postwar Anglophone wing of the museum. Master ironist and curmudgeon you least want to bludgeon.}
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World, by Margaret Macmillan {A dryly told account of global dust-settling after what was then myopically known as "the Great War." Explores the follies of Wilson, Lloyd George and Clemenceau, which helped bring about WWII.}
• Doomed, Bourgeois, In Love: Essays on the Films of Whit Stillman, edited by Mark Henrie {Discreet charms of the bourgeoisie given the scholarly treatment by the kinds of New Criterion-y people who liked Grosse Pointe Blank because John Cusack's assassin refused to unionize. Don't let the pedantry taint your judgment of Stillmania, though.}
• Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi {A beautiful paean to Western literature from an Eastern scholar living under Islamic statism; the Gatsby trial and Jane Austen dance chapters are particularly enjoyable.}
• Nobody's Perfect: Writings from The New Yorker, by Anthony Lane {He needs to stop it with the creepy drooling over Natalie Portman, but Lane is still the best around for losing it at the movies.}
• The Collected Short Stories of Roald Dahl {Adult stories, less like his children�s stuff than what O. Henry would have been like if his ironic plot twists had involved wife-swapping, cannibalism, or turning infants into superhuman bee-monsters. Might be fun for the kid who never reads, actually.}
• The Brothers Karamazov, by F. Dostoevsky, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky {Incest! Murder! Theodicy!}
• Collected Non-Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges {A prose impresario short-winded enough to keep beside the toilet -- especially if your john is in a labrynith that transcends spacetime.}
• Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories, by John Shepard {Stories narrated by John Ashcroft, John Entwistle, Nazi rocket riders, the creature from the black lagoon, and others.}
• My Life and Hard Times, by James Thurber {Think of David Sedaris, in turn of the century Columbus, Ohio. And without the gay schtick, or even a pretense at respect for his family.}
ALBUMS:
• You Are the Quarry, by Morrissey {He's back! And almost paid off the deficit incurred by Maladjusted. A few gripes: "America Is Not the World" never fulfills the promise of its title. It's an unwieldy blunderbuss, not a rapier -- and the use of "hamburger" as synecdoche for our national obesity problem is a new hackneyed low for the Oscar Wilde of the microphone. "I Have Forgiven Jesus" ultimately works, but I can't help but feel that that one was just too easy.}
• Weightlifting, by The Trashcan Sinatras {Remember them from your college radio daze? A brisk homecoming track, appositely named "Welcome Back" ("Everyone survived / Everyone's alive!" -- well, thank goodness) kicks off this highly accomplished return to musicmaking for an alt-pop band that shouldn't have stayed away so long.}
• Strange Bird, by Augie March {With a name like Augie, it has to be good. It is. Analogs fail me.}
• Evergreen, by Echo and the Bunnymen {Best 80's Band Comeback Album. No contest.}
• Mermaid Avenue, by Billy Bragg and Wilco {A fucking classic. Ukanian bloke Billy Bragg manages to capture the rhythms of dustbowl Americana better than Dylan -- the obvious disciple/witch doctor to perform a Woody Guthrie resurrection -- ever could do. All lyrics by Guthrie, music by Bragg and Wilco.}
• Don't Try This at Home, by Billy Bragg {Most people who hear Mermaid Avenue invariably want more of the man who brought it to them. This is Bragg's most "accessible" solo album, though not without the politics that's defined his career. "Accident Waiting to Happen" is a punk snarl against cultural fascism.}
• Galore, by Kirsty MacColl {May this earth angel charm the knickers off the winged principalities. MacColl died a few years ago in a boating accident, but I can only imagine how well-attended her funeral must have been by the panoply of musicians guilty of "sampling" her Celtic nightingale voice. This album consists mainly of covers, but that's more than all right for someone generous enough to never ask for top billing, despite consistently stealing the show.}
• These Are the Vistas, by the Bad Plus {"Smells Like Teen Spirit," the jazz standard. No kidding. Comes off not just better than you'd expect, but brilliantly.}
• SMiLE, by Brian Wilson {Reviewed here. Check to the right.}
• The Soft Bulletin, by the Flaming Lips {And the hard singing voice to take, but worth it anyway.}
• It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, by Public Enemy {More complicated rhymes and denser loops than have been on the radio before or sense, plus the guy with the big clock.}
• Loaded: Fully Loaded Edition, by the Velvet Underground {Funny, Lou Reed doesn't usually look this happy. Must be Laurie Anderson's doing.}
• Traitor In Our Midst, by the Country Gazette {What you always thought bluegrass was supposed to sound like.}
• The Modern Lovers, by the Modern Lovers {Speaking of Lou Reed, remember the guy with the guitar who gets shot in Something About Mary? Imagine that guy redoing "White Light/White Heat," but with lyrics about aging with dignity and eschewing drugs. That sounds like a snark, but it�s actually the SAM guy, and John Cale produced.}
• The Queen Is Dead, by The Smiths {I can't believe you don't own this already. The summa of the Moz/Marr collaboration.}
• The Boatman's Call, by Nick Cave {The Prince of Darkness may have been afraid to board a plane after 9/11, but this "New Testament" sound is proof of moisture's sustainability in Hell. "Into My Arms" is sweet enough to play your girlfriend on Valentine's Day, leaving the oldie-but-dreary "Deanna" to blast at her when she dumps you.}
• No Cities Left, by The Dears {The lead singer cried when Morrissey asked the band to open on the "You Are the Quarry" tour. That kind of gone-to-pieces sentimentalism can only lead one place: straight down. Get 'em while they're new and good.}
• The Boy With the Arab Strap, by Belle and Sebastian {Might as well order that black V-neck sweater, Rimbaud's Collected Poems, while you're at it. "Theoretical" bisexuality not a requisite, despite what angry twee detractors say.}
FILMS & TV:
• Cannibal! The Musical. {Trey Parker's college thesis, a feature-length movie musical about the only American ever convicted of cannibalism. Not for all markets, but better than most of his later stuff.}
• Before Sunset, directed by Richard Linklater {The sequel that doesn't feel like one. Why thirtysomethings who chat are more interesting than twentysomethings who do likewise. Some sluggish moments, but all made up for by a luminous final scene that made me fall in love with Julie Delpy once more. Bet it made Anthony Lane "spill [his] Sprite" again, too.}
• Collateral, directed by Michael Mann {Tom Cruise has always been a hard-working, as opposed to naturally gifted, actor. This part was his pension come early. Michael Mann is the Richard Avedon of the moving Los Angeles image. And Jamie Foxx ain't too shabby, either.}
• The Unbelievable Truth, directed by Hal Hartley {Surreal-ish debut from a master indy filmmaker and satirist. Yes, that is Edie Falco as the diner waitress.}
• Henry Fool, directed by Hal Hartley {Hartley's masterpiece. Probably the only movie about writers that's ever worked. Barton Fink, anyone?}
• Metropolitan, directed by Whit Stillman {Downwardly mobile 60's college jet set. Making a film about this demographic is like trying to play matchmaker to a Republican leper in Northampton, Mass. That the dialogue (and it's all dialogue) stays liquid-tongued is a monument to Stillman's talent... dare I say, genius?}
• Barcelona, directed by Whit Stillman {Anti-Americanism when it was more funny than scary. The "subtext" speech belongs in Bartlett's. The DVD commentary is, as someone from the earlier film might say, "priceless."}
• The Last Days of Disco, directed by Whit Stillman {An assault on 70's cliche in the best possible way -- the anti-54. Also known as Yuppies: A Defense. Chloe Sevigny gives grace to the one night stand, instead of head to Vincent Gallo.}
• Mr. Jealousy, directed by Noah Baumbach {Who wouldn't hunt down the ex-boyfriends of Annabella Sciorra? Eric Stoltz had fewer difficulties with girls in Mask. Chris Eigeman from the Stillman flicks swaps Mayflower pedigree for facial hair (modeled on David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest jacket photo), to varying degrees of success. An underrated romantic comedy, but don't say I didn't warn you: this film may engender awkward relationship conversation. It may also plant supersleuth-stalker seeds in frail men's heads. Or so I've heard.}
• Blue Velvet, directed by David Lynch {So many epigones, so far from this mark.}
• Father Ted: The Holy Trinity {BBC TV series about three priests on an island. No, not that kind of series, you sick fuck.}
One of the problems that Britain has faced in trying to wage a liberal intellectual campaign against radical Islam is that the British catechism of multiculturalism makes doing so all but impossible. This conflict is starkest in the academy, which tacitly acknowledges the threat of campus radicalization and yet refuses to deal with, or even acknowledge, one of its main causes--Islamist ideology. The result is that peculiarly English phenomenon: a hotbed of cold feet.
Over the last decade, more than a dozen students from British universities have either carried out or been convicted of terrorist offenses. Some of the more prominent of these include Omar Saeed Sheikh, the London School of Economics graduate who beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and more recently, Waheed Zaman, former president of the London Metropolitan University's Islamic Society who was convicted earlier this year for plotting to detonate liquid explosives on board transatlantic airliners bound from London to the United States and Canada in 2006. During this period, many British campuses have hosted, via their student-run Islamic Societies (ISOCs), countless "hate-preachers."
Two recent reports published in London illustrate, on the one hand, the systemic menace posed by campus radicalization and, on the other, just how far universities will go to suicidally downplay or disregard this obvious fact.
Last Monday, the government-sponsored Quilliam Foundation put out a case study of City University, London's Islamic Society, which it has found to be a cynosure of Islamic radicalization and one which has already graduated a known terrorist, Ahmed Abdullah Ali, also convicted in that 2006 liquid bomb plot. Apart from posting to its website articles written by Abdullah Azzam, "intellectual godfather" of al Qaeda, and Abu Muhammed al-Maqdisi, mentor to former al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, City's Islamic Society has also held regular Friday prayer sessions that disdain "man-made law," applaud the murder of apostates and homosexuals, and endorse marital rape and wife-beating.
Contrast Quilliam's alarming findings with what University College London has uncovered about itself. Once known as a redoubt of anti-clericalism, UCL has become internationally famous for graduating Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 23-year-old Nigerian who tried to murder 278 people on board a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit last Christmas Day. Two weeks ago, the university published the findings of a months-long inquiry, which found "no evidence to suggest either that...Abdulmutallab was radicalised while a student at UCL, or that conditions at UCL during that time or subsequently were conducive to the radicalization of students."
A mere two days after May's deadly flotilla raid off the coast of Gaza, the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), in a special "emergency session," passed a resolution by a 32 to 3 count that "condemn[ed] in the strongest terms the outrageous attack by the Israeli forces against the humanitarian flotilla of ships." Despite already forming its consensus view of the flotilla raid, it nonetheless ordered a "fact-finding Mission," which went ahead despite the support of Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon for a wider and more legally consequential UN inquiry, which Israel later agreed to cooperate with.
In addition to agreeing to work with the general UN inquiry, Israel has conducted an internal military review which acquitted the IDF commandos of any professional misconduct, faulting them only for not anticipating the violence they were met with onboard the Mavi Marmara. Furthermore, Israel is also now engaged in a domestic civil review headed by retired Israeli Supreme Court Justice Jacob Turkel and observed by Northern Irish First Minister Lord David Trimble and former Canadian military judge Ken Watkin.
The results of the UNHRC flotilla investigation were published last week in an "Advance Unedited Version" of its official report and the verdict is as predictable as it is one-sided. As with the Goldstone Report, Israel is once again accused of war crimes. And once again, the UNHRC's Mission sacrifices methodological rigor and dispassion for a politicized and prefabricated ruling.
It claims to have interviewed "more than 100 witnesses in Geneva, London, Istanbul and Amman" but in perhaps the most naked acknowledgement of its own distorted approach to fact-finding, the report states the following in its Methodology section:
In ascertaining the facts surrounding the Israeli interception of the Gaza-bound flotilla, the Mission gave particular weight to the direct evidence from interviews with eye witnesses and crew, as well as the forensic evidence and interviews with government officials. In light of seizure of cameras, CCTV footage and digital media storage devices and of the suppression of that material with the disclosure only of a selected and minute quantity of it, the Mission was obliged to treat with extreme caution the versions released by the Israeli authorities where those versions did not coincide with the evidence of eyewitnesses who appeared before us.
This act of dismissing from the outset the ample video footage of protesters attacking and beating up Israeli soldiers where its contents did not chime with the passengers' versions of events tarnishes the entire mission from the start. Moreover, much of the seized footage referred to above actually corroborates the documentary video, audio and photographic footage recorded by the IDF.
The report thus begins by proceeding from a ridiculously tendentious premise. Interviews with "government officials" in Turkey and Jordan are to be taken at face value, but nothing of consequence from the Israeli government passes the mission's smell test. That is, unless it expressly undercuts the Israeli version of events.
In attempting to justify its rejection of the validity of Israel's domestic inquiry the report states in its introduction that "public confidence in any investigative process in circumstances such as the present is not enhanced when the subject of an investigation either investigates himself or plays a pivotal role in the process." But this principle is hardly adhered to in a report whose conclusions were reached almost entirely on the basis of flotilla passenger testimony and passenger-produced documentary footage--did these individuals not play a "pivotal role" in the subject of the presently under investigation?
The 26-year-old Iranian human rights campaigner Shiva Nazar Ahari was sentenced last Saturday by Iran's Revolutionary Court to six years in prison after being convicted on all charges made against her by the state, including that of moharebeh ("rebellion against God"), conspiracy to commit a crime against "national security," and anti-state propaganda. She was additionally sentenced to receive 74 lashes or pay a fine of $400, an option that makes this punishment especially gratuitous and sadistic.
I wrote about Ahari's plight in late August for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, citing her first arrest at age seventeen for the 'crime' of attending a vigil for the victims of 9/11. Since then she's been in and out of trouble with the theocratic law for fighting on behalf of political prisoners in Iran. She was incarcerated again in June 2009, exactly a day after Iran's fraudulent presidential election, and was released three months later following payment of $20,000 in bail. While traveling with two associates to Qom to attend the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a man now considered to have been the guiding religious light behind the Green Revolution, Ahari was rounded up yet again.
But perhaps sensing that attending a revered cleric's funeral was insufficient grounds on which to haul her before the draconian Branch 26 of Iran's Revolutionary Court, the prosecution cooked up an additional offense: Ahari, it alleged, was also affiliated with the Islamo-Marxist group Mujahideen-e-Khalq (MeK), which has carried out terrorist attacks against the Iranian regime.
On September 12, after many deferred court dates, Ahari was released on bail - $500,000 - after spending 266 days in Evin prison - the Lubyanka of Tehran - 100 of which were in a type of solitary confinement cell commonly referred to as a "human coffin." Her trial, when it occurred, was speedy; Ahari was handcuffed throughout and as part of the prosecution's case for the MeK affiliation, they cited email exchanges she had with other advocates for political prisoners who had once defended MeK members. "It was so tenuous it wouldn't even wash on a blog," one insider told me recently.
Ahari's defenders in the West, from Amnesty International to Freedom House, have only mild cause to welcome a 6-year prison sentence since it was broadly expected that she would receive the death penalty. It's the punishment Branch 26 specializes in Not that her having to serve out her actual sentence in Izeh prison in Khuzestan, in southwestern Iran, will be especially easy. It's unbearably hot in that part of the country. There's no air conditioning in the prison and most of its general population are common criminals - almost all men. Furthermore, Khuzestan is a ten-hour drive from Tehran, where Ahari's mother lives.
The family is appealing the court's ruling, which can take as much time as it likes to respond to her case if, indeed, it chooses to at all.
"One reason to hand her a suspended sentence," a Washington-based human rights activist who has been monitoring Ahari's case told me, "would be to force her to shut up for six years," whereas the regime's previous policy would have been to let her go - even to let her emigrate - confident that no one abroad would listen to her. But things have clearly changed now that democratic Iranian activists have become international symbols, greatly embarrassing a sclerotic regime that, by its own president's estimation, still very much wants to "talk" to the United States. Ahari is young, principled, and beautiful. And her Facebook solidarity page has over 15,000 followers worldwide.
There is something either terribly wrong or terribly right with America when the political spectacle of the hour is Samantha Stephens in a chastity belt.
Christine O’Donnell, the much satirized Republican nominee for Delaware’s senate race, has abjured masturbation as a sin, lying as morally wrong under any circumstances (“So say the SS turned up at your flat in Amsterdam and Anne Frank were hiding upstairs...”), only then to have it disclosed that she once admitted to “dabbling into [sic] witchcraft” as a youth. Actually, what she literally said on Politically Incorrect in 1999 was that she “dabbled into witchcraft but... didn’t join a coven,” a distinction with a marked difference, I think you’ll agree, if High Holy Day paganism is to have anything to recommend of itself.
Jessica Grose at Slate’s womanly blog XX Factor makes a good point about how scandalizing O’Donnell, a television-savvy born-again, has become much easier now that all human behavior and misbehavior is thoroughly mediated:
I can foresee a media universe in which old, dumb Facebook posts and unearthed tweets become a consistent source of fodder for journalists. O'Donnell is 41, so her earlier transgressions were on an older media, television. However, the incredibly quick dissemination of O'Donnell's ridiculous comments is all thanks to blogs and online video. Budding candidates a decade or two younger have lived their entire adult lives with these media.
There will be presidential sex tapes, in other words.
And a concomitant of this frightening prospect is that as our every thought and brain-fart and slip of the tongue or other piece of anatomy is recorded for posterity, so too will our standards for acceptable conduct decline. Whole generations reared on the discourse of text messaging and Facebook status updates will come to submit to an ever-lowering threshold for public officials who can’t speak in coherent sentences, follow a train of thought or engage in honest debate about anything. If Lindsay Lohan misses her re-sentencing for drug abuse it’ll be because she’s forming an exploratory committee.
In fact, the O’Donnell case is more revealing for what hasn’t been disclosed on YouTube but for what has been blithely tolerated without seeming to threaten her political fortunes in the slightest. Her former campaign manager, Kristin Murray, resigned from this Tea Party-concocted protest candidacy because, “I found out [O’Donnell] was living on campaign donations - using them for rent and personal expenses, while leaving her workers unpaid and piling up thousands in debt. She wasn't concerned about conservative causes. O'Donnell just wanted to make a buck." Four years ago, in a previous senate run, O’Donnell also invented a diploma for herself from Fairleigh Dickinson University, a document that even her campaign now admits she was only just awarded in late August 2010 under cryptic circumstances.
A woman who uses the company card to buy her clothes and pay her rent, stiffs the help and invents academic credentials is thus to be welcomed as a vibrant young upstart wishing to return the country to the principles of the Founding Fathers. I see. This doesn’t so much beg the original question of how the gluttony of information and the famine of knowledge has vitiated our culture as answer it with a resounding, “Whatevs.”
One of the slow-burn methods by which terrorism lives up to its name is to cause a state of absolute, literal-minded stultification in laws and writs of the society being terrorized. We complain daily about long, bare-footed queques at airport security gates, witless government “watch lists” that seem to include everyone not participating in global jihad but exclude everyone doing just that, and the absence of trash bins in the London Underground (or at least, I complain about those daily). A public transport system under omnipresent video surveillance and heavily populated throughout the day is unlikely to be idle once a man is seen stuffing a bomb into a receptacle marked “Trash.” So why the categorical ban on bins and the implicit encouragement of an older public infraction again decency: littering?
The misdemeanors against common sense and rational precaution in the age of terrorism are manifold. However, none compares to the more aggravated crime of arresting a harmless person for a casual tweet. Nick Cohen has a column up at the Observer about the plight of Paul Chambers, a 27 year-old automotive manufacturer who was so frustrated about not being able to fly from Doncaster into Northern Ireland to visit his girlfriend that he tweeted: “Crap! Robin Hood Airport is closed. You've got a week… otherwise I'm blowing the airport sky high!" The airport monitor for such things saw this, considered it innocuous, but duly passed it along to his superiors. The rest is security-state history:
A plain-clothes detective from South Yorkshire Police arrived at Chambers's work. Instead of quietly pointing out that it was best not to joke about blowing up airports, he arrested him under antiterrorist legislation. A posse of four more antiterrorist officers was waiting in reception.
"Do you have any weapons in your car?" they asked.
"I said I had some golf clubs in the boot," Chambers told me. "But they didn't think it was funny. I kept wondering, 'When are they going to slap my wrists and let me go?' Instead, they hauled me into a police car while my colleagues watched.”
Chambers lost that job and only last week lost another in Northern Ireland, where he repaired to be with his girlfriend after being handed a criminal record and a £1,000 fine for saying on the Internet the kind of meaningless hyperbole we all say every day to air our grievances. Why was he fired from that second job? Because his employer heard him mention his forthcoming court appeal and its probable media coverage along with the words “bomb” and “airport” -- admittedly not wise water-cooler palaver in Northern Ireland. Yet Chambers’ attempt to preempt further misunderstanding was enough to do the opposite for the new boss.
In solidarity with this victim of a real-life Czech parable, people are planning a mass Twitter inundation Friday, the day of his appeal, of gobbets of good or great literature that would likewise indict the original authors under current counterterrorism statutes. These include John Betjeman’s verse, “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!” (which was the basis for Morrissey’s equally tweetable lyric, “Come Armageddon.... Come, come, nuclear bomb” in “Everyday is Like Sunday”). Also on the roster is Shakespeare’s famous prescription, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers,” against which it might truly be said that the skin of an innocent lamb has not made a scribbled-over parchment that undoes a man but that the parchment needs re-scribbling to see that innocent men are not undone.
Russ Smith at Splice Today has a short but pungent squib against the ridiculous charge of “McCarthyism” being leveled at all types of Ground Zero Mosque opponents. He reserves particular scorn for Peter Beinart, a pundit who has lately undergone the transformation from ADA-style liberal hawk to reigning hall monitor of American Jewry:
“If Beinart’s going to raise the Joseph McCarthy specter, shouldn’t he at least provide some evidence of Congressional inquisitions of Muslim-Americans (which haven’t occurred under the presidencies of either Bush or Obama), blacklisted men and women in academia, entertainment or even those applying for a mortgage or credit card, or mass deportations borne of rampant Islamophobia?”
It would have been nice if Smith also took his scalpel to the nonsensical term “Islamophobia,” but perhaps he lives to splice another day. But there are other substantial historical ironies and discrepancies that intrude upon this facile comparison between McCarthyism and the mosque affair.
-- The shrewdest critiques of McCarthyism came from serious Cold Warriors such as Whittaker Chambers and Robert Conquest, who argued that by sensationalizing a world-historical struggle, McCarthy was in effect giving a free hand to Soviet propaganda. Which indeed he was: Even into the perestroika and glasnost decades, Stalinoid apologists could compare the Great Terror to Congressional Red-baiting without a trace of irony. Just to put this in perspective, between years 1937 and 1938, the Soviet Union arrested seven million people, executed one million more, and was complicit in the deaths of two million gulag inmates who perished either from starvation, medical neglect and/or extreme overwork. It would be gratifying to hear, as against so much multiculturalist patter, that the problem with the Ground Zero Mosque opponents it that they similarly confuse rather than make crucial distinctions in a long-term and necessary war. Is a slippery and self-promoting imam trying to be all things to all people a real “extremist” or just a nuisance? So far, Lawrence Wright has been one of the few students of global jihadism to offer sensible commentary on the mosque controversy and yet even he cannot elevate himself above equating loud but non-violent demagogues such as Pamela Geller with professional head loppers and suicide bombers.
-- McCarthyism claimed no human lives and his “victims” have largely been sacralized in the popular imagination as martyrs even when defending them on civil libertarian grounds ought not to mean defending them on political grounds. One of these, Dalton Trumbo was an avowed Stalinist who even censored new editions of his 1939 antiwar novel, Johnny Got His Gun, when the Hitler-Stalin pact evaporated with the Wehrmacht's invasion of Russia. Trumbo also blocked -- in a rather “McCarthyist” fashion, you might say -- the Hollywood adaptation of Arthur Koestler’s anti-Communist masterpiece, Darkness at Noon.
-- Indeed, Communists, fellow travelers and Soviet spies and agents of influence who eventually “broke” with Moscow faced much harsher public defamation campaigns in the international press and threats to their survival than did any blacklisted screenwriters. Former underground activist turned national whistle-blower Elizabeth Bentley was repaid for her service to national security by having her sexual escapades ventilated in the American media. KGB agent Ignace Reiss was murdered in Switzerland. KGB defector Walter Krivitsky committed suicide in a Washington, D.C. hotel room. The aforementioned Chambers, who narrow escaped the NKVD/GPU’s attempts to find him after he'd abandoned the underground, then had a pleasure of facing Alger Hiss's rebarbative national defense team, which persists today, in spite of all evidence, in the masthead of The Nation magazine. Within the last few years, Trumbo has been the subject of a fawning documentary while Chambers’ much more fascinating and film-worthy career has so far failed to find studio backing.
-- So preoccupied is the intelligentsia with this brief but shameful episode in American history that McCarthyism has become its own statute in politically correct thought policing even to the point of absurdity. Angela Davis was thus described as an “activist” in the Stanford University newspaper when she came to speak at the California campus because to name her as the actual vice president of the CPUSA would have been “McCarthyist” of the student press. The Italian film Il Postino lost an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film because it dealt with Stalinist indoctrination and the Italian media complained to the Los Angeles Times that such subject matter was... you get the idea. In the same manner, Rauf’s unpleasant-to-cretinous views on everything from Israel’s right to exist to the Khomeinist concept of vilayet-i-faqih to the “root causes” of the September 11 mass murders are papered over or ignored by histrionic defenders of "tolerance," even when those not necessarily opposed to the idea of a mosque close to Ground Zero mention them.
-- Former Soviet officials used to seriously suggest to Western interlocutors that McCarthy himself was a Russian spy. As cited earlier, he was a rhetorical or polemical scarecrow for distracting audiences from grave Soviet atrocities and, after all, didn’t he receive electoral help from the Wisconsin Communist Party in first unhorsing Robert LaFollette for the senatorship? It seems unlikely in the extreme that Al Qaeda's lieutenant corps has made the equivalent inquires of Osama bin Laden about Newt Gingrich, Abe Foxman and Sarah Palin's true identities.
-- On balance, McCarthy underestimated the extent of Soviet espionage in the United States, particularly in the State Department. For a good summary of what the Russian archives and FBI Venona decrypts have turned up on the surprising level of Communist infiltration in the 1930s and 1940s, see The Mitrokhin Archive: The KGB in Europe and the West, by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, and also Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America, by John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr and Alexander Vassiliev.
-- McCarthy’s ultimate downfall followed his stupid attempt to hunt suspected Communists in the U.S. military, the one precinct of state power that the Soviets put the least amount of effort in infiltrating. Being publicly abjured by General Eisenhower put an end to the senator’s overlong career. By contrast, the Islamist organization Hizb ut Tahrir believes that the easiest way to establish a worldwide caliphate is to take over militaries in Muslim countries from within and foment coups. In a U.S. context, the ascension of Major Nidal Malik Hasan would seem to tell against a paranoid fear of at least a strong attempt at this clandestine strategy.
-- The severest bullies in the present conflict are fanatical Muslims, not the United States or Western countries, which, if anything, have been far too lax and submissive in combating Islamism’s farsighted entryist agenda. If there is a pointlessness to the mosque controversy it is that it has turned a real cultural argument into a sentimental brief on cultural sensitivities. Last Spring, Ibn Warraq and I wrote a long essay for City Journal on how the Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC) operated as a kind of sacred Comintern, working to criminalize “blasphemy” by instituting speech and literature codes in Western countries. It has so far had its most impressive success in controlling the largest voting bloc of the UN Human Rights Council, a body designed to protect internationally against abuses of human rights but has instead, at the OIC's prompting, remained silent on genocide in Darfur, the crackdown of civil dissent in Iran and murder of homosexuals in Saudi Arabia. It has even re-written the mandate of its Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Speech such that this official must now inform on people saying critical or unflattering things about religion, with one in particular in mind. Meanwhile, Saudi sheiks engage in libel tourism and get embarrassing books about themselves banned from the shelves in Europe. Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who has endowed two major Middle East academic centers at Harvard and Georgetown, sponsors tele-a-thons in Riyadh where clerics are permitted to spout the vilest incitements against Jews, secularists and Americans. Last I checked, it was Muslims claiming “offense” who have hauled their critics before actual government tribunals where verdicts rendered against the defendants can carry real financial and civil consequences. See Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant's separate skirmishes with the “Human Rights Commissions” of Canada. If this is not a more accurate semantic updating of the McCarthyism card, then nothing is.
With the resumption of Arab-Israeli direct talks comes the regurgitation of a minority view that these talks are destined to fail because Hamas is excluded. The first salvo in this ongoing campaign came from Palestinian-American blogger Ali Abunimah, an advocate of the one-state solution, who expounded upon the need for recognizing Hamas in the New York Times. Peter Beinart made the same case in a broader Daily Beast column about Obama's failed foreign policy. What both had in common, apart from thinking rather generously of a totalitarian and anti-Semitic Islamist party, is use of the Irish Republican Army and Northern Ireland as a convenient analogy for the Middle East peace process. Didn't the British government eventually sit down with Sinn Fein, the IRA's "political wing," after decades of murderous mayhem in Belfast and Tube, pub, and other bombings on the mainland? And can't the same lessons learned from the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which inaugurated the end of the Troubles, be applied to the Arab-Israeli conflict?
There are many obvious reasons why this analogy fails. The IRA never employed suicide bombers or called for the wholesale destruction of Great Britain. Nor was it the client of a theocratic state intent on becoming a nuclear power. It was also thoroughly integrated with Sinn Fein and could therefore act with greater strategic cohesion than the fragmented Hamas, whose political and paramilitary leadership is spread throughout Gaza, the West Bank, and Damascus, Syria. But, most important, the analogy misconstrues the history of the Northern Ireland peace process and the ultimate aim of the Good Friday Agreement, which was, chiefly, to undermine the terrorists, not to legitimize them.
Abunimah and Beinart both refer to Hamas' 2006 election victory, although neither acknowledges that the group has twice refused to hold new national elections this year, fearing a likely walloping at the polls. Moreover, Hamas has loudly denounced each and every framework for Arab-Israeli negotiations from the Clinton-brokered Oslo Accords of 1993, which created Palestinian democracy in the first place, to the Bush administration's 2002 roadmap for peace. It's worth measuring all this against the way "inclusive dialogue" with the IRA really proceeded.
BBC Arabic's Jerusalem correspondent Ahmad Budeiri claims that were it not for "hostile environment training," he might have been beaten and kidnapped by "an angry mob" of Israelis in Ashdod in response to his reporting on the Free Gaza flotilla raid.
In an online dispatch for the BBC World Service, Budeiri describes a scene in the Israeli port city as something out of Somalia or Waziristan. Only by his own quick-witted recourse to the BBC's safety-first self-preservation seminar, Budeiri insists, did he and his crew narrowly escape being assaulted or taken hostage by a violent gang of Ashdod residents. He writes:
"I remembered what I was trained for in a kidnap situation and used the exact process during the mob incident. The cameraman and I had a password that, if used, he will start packing and I would be on the phone for more than ten minutes. By doing this the mob lost interest in me and gave us a gap to leave the location without being spotted. Other Arab crews were beaten when they all left as one big group and were slow departing because of their equipment."
Budeiri says that the Ashdod police merely looked on with indifference and "never reacted to nor stepped in to prevent the threats" - an odd disclosure in that these "threats" were evidently backed up by real actions and yet our correspondent doesn't explain what the police response to those might have been. Also, assuming others saw and reported on the Ashdod "chaos," why is this first-person testimony the BBC's first and only statement on the matter?
Even as a primer on institutional methods of journalistic precaution in the field, Budeiri's piece does little to avoid a descent into macabre self-parody:
"The course also taught me to avoid any confrontation, but at the same time not to be seen as a weak person. While I was on air, the mob tried to distract me and some then even blocked the camera. I tried to get them to speak on air and show I was not weak, but also fight back in a positive way to gain respect for a moment - other reporters did not do that which resulted in more fury."
It seems almost cruel to inquire of Budeiri how a furious mob of would-be kidnappers were first approached for on-air testimony, or to what secret location in Israel's fifth largest city they might have repaired with a foreign stringer from a multinational news organization. Other daunting obstacles standing in the way of Budeieri's broadcasts that week included "having to charge my mobile phone four times a day" and tolerating the beastly heat and unreliable bus schedule of Beersheva.
Old wounds shall be worried anew; stale arguments shall be leavened once more.
Tony Blair's record-shattering memoir, A Journey, which has been marketed for its salacity of disclosures about Gordon Brown (emotionally unintelligent, blackmailing), the Queen (lunch-maker and dish-washer), and Princess Diana (dangerously emotional, manipulative) was published on a day when its author wasn't even in England but the Labour party was in the midst of deciding its next leader. This was either a twofer display of chutzpah or a sign of his centripetal significance.
In the last several months, the former prime minister has given testimony at the Chilcot Inquiry, where every arcane footnote in the British preparations for the Iraq war was cited to challenge him once more on the decision that has defined his legacy. He has also, as the Mideast envoy of the Quartet, overseen the Palestinian state-building effort in the West Bank led by Salam Fayyad, delivered a blockbuster speech on de-legitimization of Israel at Herzliya, and acted as a key participant in the Arab-Israeli direct talks currently taking place in Washington. If David Cameron has worked this hard in office, he has yet to let on.
The re-emergence of Blair in the press means the re-emergence of demonic Blair hatred, which Roman Polanski's conspiratorially silly film The Ghost Writer utterly failed to capture. What's left of this ragtag contingent of "war crimes" accusers is not very impressive by way of number or influence. This contingent specializes in organized disruption: A tour stop in Dublin has already been interrupted by egg and shoe throwing protestors allied with the Stop the War Coalition, a potpourri of irrelevant Marxists and hyper-relevant Islamists led by Tony Benn, the second-longest serving Labour MP and a type of befuddled English radical that only grows more fuddled with age. (Benn was last heard explaining the agricultural achievements of Mao Zedong on the BBC World Service documentary about useful idiots.) Nevertheless, this party stalwart is treated somewhat reverentially in A Journey, a volume that his Stopper coalition, ever professing concern for the blood spilled in Iraq and Afghanistan, wishes to see unsold despite the fact that all proceeds go to a veterans' charity.
The neo-fascist British National Party had threatened to attend a similar demonstration, planned for last Wednesday, during a scheduled book signing at Waterstone's in Piccadilly, an appearance Blair decided to cancel at the last minute rather than risk a public disruption. The Socialist Workers Party has already moved scores of memoirs to the "Crime" section of book retailers where a reading public glutted on the fiction of Dick Francis and P. D. James is more likely to discover it anyway.
No one believes that Arab-Israeli direct talks are likely to lead to a viable peace deal since none of the preconditions for one are in place. Hamas still controls Gaza and tosses Fatah loyalists off of rooftops. Jerusalem is either a Palestinian capital or an undivided Israeli one. Religious-nationalist settlements in the West Bank are due to renew their "natural growth" at the end of the month. Palestinians demand that all refugees of the 1948 and 1967 wars, and their descendants, be allowed back into what is now the State of Israel. Given this dour climate for rapprochement, one would be forgiven for not taking notice of the substantive if prosaic achievements that these negotiations may yet yield, namely, those fixed around furthering Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad's state-building efforts in the West Bank.
A year ago, Fayyad introduced a two-year plan for laying down the armature of a future Palestinian state with an emphasis on economic development, security and bureaucratic housecleaning. The goal was to end the corrupt, Tammany-style system of patronage that formerly defined the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat and create transparent and accountable institutions beholden to no one party, particularly Fatah. Not only were these the necessary preconditions for a functioning democracy, Fayyad reasoned, but they were also indispensable indicators of financial health and stability necessary for luring foreign capital. Halfway through, Fayyad's two year-program is working.
The West Bank economy, according to the International Monetary Fund, grew 8.5 percent last year despite a global recession and ongoing military occupation. Nablus, formerly a flashpoint in the second intifada, is today home to a burgeoning marketplace of imported luxury goods and a brand new cinema featuring the latest Hollywood blockbusters. An older movie house in Jenin, another memorable locus for Arab-Israeli violence, reopened last month after being shuttered for twenty years and just in time for a three-day film festival. Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital, is undergoing both a cultural renaissance as well as a housing boom, with apartments in well-off neighborhoods now selling for as much as $200,000 each. The trendy Jordanian cafe-restaurant chain Tche Tche has unveiled a branch in Ramallah, and a 5-star Movenpick hotel is set to open this month.
The BBC World Service recently broadcast a two-part investigative documentary, hosted by John Sweeney, on the useful idiot, a concept that Lenin didn't invent so much as expropriate to denote the semi-witting accomplices of Western imperialism. Although more frequently employed in the service of deriding apologists of the totalitarian system Lenin created, the phenomenon to which useful idiocy alludes is transferable to any and all modern tyrannies. (The closely related concept of 'fellow traveler' is not nearly as fungible because it still retains the definition Trotsky intended in Literature and Revolution--that of being a halfway-there Bolshevik whose political future was as yet undecided by historical circumstances.) The Sweeney documentary examines the Soviet Union, Red China, apartheid South Africa, and Ba'athist Iraq, and while all interviewees and case studies are well chosen, one is still left feeling unenlightened as to the etiology of this troubling condition. What causes useful idiocy, and how is it that so many sufferers are eventually cured?
A common precipitant is a broad ideological sympathy with the long-term goals of a tyrannical state matched by an incuriosity about measuring its touted claims with tangible reality. Very often this isn't entirely the sympathizer's fault as the state makes every effort to mask its deformities and keep the fantasy in tact. "I was taken around and shown things," a very candid Doris Lessing tells Sweeney. "I can't understand why I was so gullible." The Potemkin dupe may have begun with Catherine the Great, but it is a more rampant species in the twentieth century. None has grimly excelled or exceeded the category better than Maxim Gorky.
Lenin's favorite novelist had spent the formative early years of the Soviet Union on the isle of Capri and thus counts as something of a Westernized observer to his native Russia. After being welcomed home by an ingratiating Stalin, then badly in need of writers who hadn't been arrested or shot, Gorky paid a visit to the notorious penal colony at Solovki in order to see how counter-revolutionaries were being rehabilitated by the state. The wretched reality of the place been masked in advance--with well-fed guards dressed up as prisoners--save for one minor oversight. Within three hundred yards of where Gorky and his retinue had alighted, a ship docked at Popov Island was being loaded up by a visibly bedraggled gang of real inmates. Of this infamous episode in useful idiocy, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn writes:
Where can this disgraceful spectacle--these men dressed in sacks--be hidden? The entire journey of the great Humanist will have been for naught if he sees them now. Well, of course, he will try hard not to notice them, but help him! Drown them in the sea? They will wail and flounder. Bury them in the earth? There's no time. No, only a worthy son of the Archipelago could find a way out of this one. The work assigner ordered, "Stop work! Close ranks! Still closer! Sit down on the ground! Sit still!" And a tarpaulin was thrown over them. "Anyone who moves will be shot!"
This crude deception may have gone unnoticed by Gorky (though it'd be good to know what he thought those human-shaped objects under the tarpaulin were), but the unscripted encounter that followed left little to the airbrushed imagination. While touring the children's quarters, he was cornered by a fourteen year-old prisoner who proceeded to tell him of the day-to-day horrors of Solovki being kept from view. Gorky, writes Solzhenitsyn, left in tears, only then to register in the visitor's book his ecstatic praise for the "vigilant and tireless sentinels of the Revolution." (The boy was later shot.) Gorky had managed to work himself out and then back into a fantasy within the space of minutes or hours. How? We can see the self-preservation instinct easily enough in his decision: He knew that popularizing what he'd been told would result in his own imprisonment or death. But, like all artists in a patronage system, Gorky probably also felt that his reputation rested on catering to certain level of expectation. The very fact of his celebrity under Stalinism was proof enough against his possessing the courage needed to put that celebrity to good use. Gorky went on to author a famously bad book about the White Sea-Baltic Canal, built wholly by slave labor and to little economic benefit to the state, that argued in favor of the rehabilitation of enemies of the people, a claim, needless to say, never borne out by Soviet parole statistics.
Daniel Henninger at the Wall Street Journalenvisions a world still blighted by the presence of Saddam Hussein:
Saddam was obsessed with Iran. Imagine the effect on the jolly Iraqi's thinking come 2005 and the rise to stardom of Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, publicly mocking the West's efforts to shut his nuclear program and threatening enemies with annihilation. That year Ahmadinejad broke the U.N. seals at the Isfahan uranium enrichment plant. In North Korea, Kim Jong Il was flouting the civilized world, conducting nuclear-weapon tests and test-firing missiles into the Sea of Japan. In such a world, Saddam would have aspired to play in the same league as Iran and NoKo. Would we have "contained" him?
There are two possible scenarios to weigh and I can’t tell which is worse.
The first is that Saddam would have redoubled his efforts to reconstitute his own nuclear program either by cutting a deal with North Korea or A.Q. Khan (which all evidence shows he was trying to do anyway) but with new assistance. Arab regimes now quietly entreating the United States and Israel to take care of the mullahs’s atomic ambitions for them would likely hedge their bets by helping out the one Sunni brethren who stood the best chance of becoming a "deterrent." For Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the unpredictable adventurist of yesterday would suddenly appear a reliable countermeasure against Shiite predominance tomorrow.
The second grim outcome to contemplate is that Saddam might have once again become a military ally of the United States, providing us with intelligence on Tehran in exchange for a loosening of sanctions or some other material douceur to keep his dictatorship afloat. If you think such an arrangement impossible after the first Gulf War, the Anfal campaign and the No-Fly zones, you’d do well to remember the arguments that were in fact trotted out against removing Saddam from power in 2002. Mainstream war opponents took for granted that he was indeed seeking the bomb and yet they believed he was containable. Well, it's fairly easy to see the progression of this logic in light of a mounting Iranian threat: "realists" of both a right and left coloring would now make the case that only by soliciting the Baathist’s aid on this key national security challenge could we truly be able to cool his lust for a nuke of his own.
Many contentious issues could bedevil the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that began Wednesday, but on one subject both sides can largely agree: The state-building program launched last year by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has made measurable progress. While the terrorist group Hamas rules in the Gaza Strip, Palestinians in the West Bank are trying to build the framework of a future state.
The West Bank economy grew by 8.5% last year (according to the International Monetary Fund), despite the global recession and regional factors inhospitable to foreign investment. Palestinian GDP for the third quarter of 2009 was $1.24 billion, up from $1.18 billion a year before.
Real estate in the West Bank is booming. Property prices in Ramallah have risen 30% in the last two years, according to local developers. In July, construction began on Ramallah's Ersal Commercial Center, a $400 million project expected to create thousands of new jobs. And a joint Palestinian-Qatari company is currently building Palestine's first planned city, Rawabi, a high-tech suburb with business and commercial districts and 5,000 homes. A further accelerant to the housing market will be a new $500 million mortgage fund, established by the Palestine Investment Fund, which will begin issuing loans later this year.
These promising trends are reflected in the Palestine Securities Exchange, especially its main Al Quds Index, which in June experienced a 5% market capitalization increase to reach $76.8 million. According to the Portland Trust, four out of the five main sectors of the PSE increased in 2009, with banking up by 30.6%. That's one reason the European Investment Bank last December made a $6.4 million "anchor" investment in Palestine's first venture capital fund. The fund will target export-oriented information and communications technology businesses, which represent the only area of the Palestinian economy that has seen almost uninterrupted growth over the past decade.
If radicalism has had any positive value in the last century, it was to scandalize an otherwise complacent centre-left consensus on civil rights, one reason why I’ll always prefer the hardheaded wisdom of “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to the treacly pastiche of “I Have a Dream.”
Richard Just -- which rather sounds like the pen name someone in his position would adopt -- has authored an indignant essay in The New Republic against Barack Obama’s nonsensical views on gay marriage, which have objectively placed the Democratic president to the right of “Laura Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and, according to a new CNN poll, 52 percent of the American people.” The relevant portion is this:
Obama argues that he is against gay marriage while also opposing efforts like Prop 8 that would ban it. He justifies this by saying that state constitutions should not be used to reduce rights. (His exact words: “I am not in favor of gay marriage, but when you’re playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that that is not what America is about.”) Obama appears to be saying that it is fine to prohibit gay people from getting married, as long as the vehicle for doing so is not a constitution. Presumably, then, he supports the numerous states that have banned same-sex marriage through other means, without resorting to a constitutional amendment? If so, he might be the only person in the country to occupy this narrow, and frankly absurd, slice of intellectual terrain. Obama has also said he favors civil unions rather than gay marriage because the question of where and how to apply the label “marriage” is a religious one. This argument makes even less sense than his stance on state constitutions, since marriage, for better or for worse, is very much a government matter.
By now it’s common knowledge that Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and the former manager of George W. Bush’s presidential re-election campaign, prefers the company of men to women and believes in same-sex marriage legislation. Was it cynicism or prudence that impelled a high-ranking conservative not to make the most of this aspect of his “identity” when it might have made a political difference? The Daily Show will no doubt have a sober and fair-minded discussion about this very topic in the days to come. But the DNC and those ever diminishing Obama torch-bearers are hardly in a position to score partisan points off of Mehlman’s disclosure.
In fact, the best arguments in favor of gay marriage have come from conservatives such as Jamie Kirchick and Jonathan Rauch, both of whom can’t quite fathom what’s leftist about gentrifying another ten percent of the population. (There’s also likely some forward-thinking Karl Rove in the younger crop of GOP operatives who sees expanding the party’s voter base by endorsing such a platform.)
Meanwhile, the best half-serious arguments against gay marriage come from cultural traditionalists, but not the kind you think. There are quite a few homosexuals, mostly older, who fear that by gaining admittance to mainstream institutions, they stand to forfeit the aura of camp subversiveness and bohemian affiliation that formerly clung to the "lifestyle." If you know anything about English poetry in the 1930's, you'll know exactly what this cultivated and storied aesthetic looks like: Larkin called it the oh-my-dear-ist school, best embodied by Auden and Spender. Yet this contingent is becoming a source for idiosyncratic nostalgia -- the sexual equivalent of Yiddish revivalism -- equally embarrassed by the term "partner" as it is by Bravo's reality television programming. A viable cultural movement it is not.
Iranian authorities first arrested Shiva Nazar Ahari in 2001, when she was seventeen. Her 'crime' was attending a candlelight vigil in Tehran that commemorated the victims of 9/11. Since then, she's taught Iranian homeless children and Afghan refugees' children. In 2006, after she became the spokeswoman for the Committee of Human Rights Reporters (CHRR), Ahari was kicked out of university, whereupon her troubles really began.
She was re-arrested in June 2009 and sent to Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, where she spent 33 days in solitary confinement. The cells are so small that a short person can't even stretch her arms or legs. One informed observer has described them to me as 'human coffins.' Despite being verbally threatened by Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran's prosecutor general, who told her she'd be murdered if she didn't stop working on human rights campaigns in Iran, Ahari persevered. She was released in September 2009 on $200,000 bail and promptly resumed her defense of political prisoners. A month later, she paid a visit to the gravesite of Sohrab Arabi, a nineteen year-old student who'd been arrested in June 2009 for protesting Iran's sham presidential "election" and was subsequently shot in the chest while in state custody.
In December of last year, Ahari was arrested yet again, along with two other activists, while en route to the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a man considered to be the clerical inspiration behind much of the Green Revolution. Ahari went on hunger strike for two days, then fell ill and was taken to Evin's prison hospital.
According to the Revolutionary Court, which is due to try her case on September 4, she stands accused of "anti-regime propaganda by working with the CHRR website" and "acts contrary to national security through participation in gatherings on November 4, 2009 and December 7, 2009." These are the dates, respectively, of the anniversary of the U.S. embassy seizure, which is a sanctified Iranian holiday but last year became a ferment of democratic protest, and the Student Day demonstrations, which commemorate the murder of three Iranians students killed in 1953 by the Pahlavi government. Ahari maintains she was at home on both days.
So over-hyped is Jonathan Franzen's new novel that the British press, which devours its own enfants terribles and indulges an unseemly envy for their American counterparts, has repeatedly remarked on the over-hype. One editorial enticement peeping above the fold of yesterday's Guardian instructs that Freedom is bad for Barack Obama, whose advanced copy arrived just in time for the First Family's Martha's Vineyard holiday. So now it seems that Franzen has gone from being a mere literary liability to a political one.
Not having read Freedom, I’ve had to rely on the pornographically positive stateside reviews such as Sam Tanenhaus’ in the New York Times which labels it “a masterpiece of American fiction.” I’ll have to take Sam's word for it, but I must confess to a slight twinge of skepticism because he also thinks that Franzen’s previous attempt to explain the Way We Live Now, The Corrections, a book I have read, was “a masterpiece of American fiction.” Among the first-order merits bestowed on the present volume is the author’s hawk-eyed observatory powers despite his touted disdain for being a SIM card’s throw away from an Internet connection when he writes. Franzen knows, for instance, that college freshman are these days called “first years” and that suburban hausfraus’ all-purpose put-down is “weird.” Very nice, but what does he think of Snooki's new gorilla juicehead?
Now comes Marc Tracy at Tablet magazine (my old Hebraic haunt) with applause all around save for one minor quibble. It seems that the Great American Novelist doesn’t have much of an ear for Beltway rhetoric, at least the realistic sort that strives to exceed a Huffington Post comments thread. Featured in Freedom (the title is ironic, or “ironic,” depending on your point of view) is a resentful and brooding neoconservative intellectual who happens not to be a Gentile. The patriarch of a Virginian family coping with the aftermath of a very recent terrorist attack on U.S. soil, this dour Causabon of interventionism has got friends in high places and a comely daughter named Jenna (just like Bush!) and although the whole the whole lot of them are joined at a Thanksgiving repast, the bill of fare seems to be a mezze platter of platitudes:
Jonathan and Jenna’s father, at the far end of the table, was holding forth on foreign affairs at such commanding length that, little by little, the other conversations petered out. The turkey-like cords in his neck were more noticeable in the flesh than on TV, and it turned out to be the almost shrunken smallness of his skull that made his white, white smile so prominent. The fact that such a wizened person had sired the amazing Jenna seemed to Joey of a piece with his eminence. He spoke of the “new blood libel” that was circulating in the Arab world, the lie about there having been no Jews in the twin towers on 9/11, and of the need, in times of national emergency, to counter evil lies with benevolent half-truths. He spoke of Plato as if he’d personally received enlightenment at his Athenian feet. He referred to members of the president’s cabinet by their first names, explaining how ‘we’ had been ‘leaning on’ the president to exploit this unique historical moment to resolve an intractable geopolitical deadlock and radically expand the sphere of freedom. In normal times, he said, the great mass of American public opinion was isolationist and know-nothing, but the terrorist attacks had given “us” a golden opportunity, the first since the end of the Cold War, for ‘the philosopher’ (which philosopher, exactly, Joey wasn’t clear on or had missed an earlier reference to) to step in and unite the country behind the mission that his philosophy had revealed as right and necessary. “We have to learn to be comfortable with stretching some facts,” he said, with his smile, to an uncle who had mildly challenged him about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities. “Our modern media are very blurry shadows on the wall, and the philosopher has to be prepared to manipulate these shadows in the service of a greater truth.”
"White, white" teeth and a Turkey neck -- at Thanksgiving, no less. Well, this man must be wickedness defined if he’s explaining Straussian methods of crowd-control to a tableful of horny eighteen year-olds who’d like nothing better than to return to “normalcy,” perhaps by figuring out why they’ve all been given first names that begin with the letter “J.”
Now, I’ve spent a fair bit of time with many sinister neocons who fancy themselves disciples of a scholar known for his esoteric allusions and in-between-the-lines manner of exegesis. One thing they do not do, even in low company such as mine, is cite Plato’s Cave, a philosophical allegory that any “first year” would grasp. How shall I put this to a masterful American fictionist? It’s considered the “The Second Coming” of political cliches.
However, I do think Franzen has got a noble intention with the cardboard prose and plasticene characterization offered above. If this set-piece is indicative of the entire novel, he is clearly trying to atone for past sins of horn-rimmed hauteur. Gone are the taut little essays about an American middlebrow grown encephalitic with celebrity culture and a superficial knowledge of everything. Not for him anymore the smug litterateur who offers left-handed compliments to Oprah. Franzen’s gone mainstream now, deigning even to appear -- as the successor novelist to Stephen King -- on the cover of Time, a magazine that, as The Onion deliciously satirized it, has Gerberized its content sufficiently to be able to launch a new version of “aimed at adults.”
I think I like this new Jonathan Franzen.
Meanwhile, Bellow’s letters are due out in November.
The sons and daughters of Eire are not generally known for their fondness of Jewish statehood. And yet the exceptions to this ignoble rule are distinguished and vocal enough to merit citation when they occur. Lord David Trimble, who won a Nobel Peace Prize that actually mattered, has written learnedly on the false analogy between the Troubles and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Conor Cruise O'Brien produced one of the best and most prescient histories of Zionism -- prescient in the sense that history, when done right, provides a useful guide to the present and future. His appetite for this strangely un-neglected subject was whetted, he claimed, whilst serving as an Irish delegate to the United Nations for many years. Because of an institutional caprice of seating diplomats in alphabetical order, the Cruiser found much to favor in the Israeli colleague seated to his right, especially when measured against the Iraqi one who was seated to his left -- that is, until the day this poor man was hanged.
I've long been a keen observer of Hibernian sympathies for Zionism because my own heritage is as much Dedalus as it is Bloom. And so now to this esteemed company we can add the name Cliona Campbell, a 19 year-old girl from Cork who was so taken with the Jewish people and their plight that she went to Israel to volunteer with an international corps of the IDF. She returned home, wrote about the experience for the Evening Echo. The unsought reverberations of this article constitute one of the blackest campaigns of national obloquy ever heaped upon a writer in Ireland. According to my friend Ben Cohen, "Grown men have walked to up to [Campbell] in the street and abused her. Browsing in a clothes store, the security guard recognized her and showered her with insults. Threats have been emailed to her." To say that this has been done in the name of Palestinian solidarity would be an insult to Palestinians.
You can dial up Campbell's original piece, which is more elegant than anything written against it, here.
Religious architecture used to yield erudite discussions about function and form. Now it leads to discussions about property rights, the First Amendment, religious bigotry and the colloquial definition of “McCarthyism.” Much like Switzerland’s silly and point-missing ban on minarets, the proposed Cordoba House mosque has turned the specific cultural urgency of combating Islamism into a general cultural complaint about Islam.
This has led to two unintended consequences. The first bolsters one of the paranoid claims made by Islamists, which is that the United States is tirelessly working to demonize and undermine Islam rather than fight a war against its most barbaric exponents. The second automatically improves the profile of Cordoba House’s chief cleric, Feisal Abdul Rauf, who, judging by his dubious statements and deeds over the past decade, deserves no such courtesy. By couching the present debate in terms of “sensitivity,” “symbolism” and “offensiveness,” certain elements on the right have taken up the uncharacteristic mantle of political correctness and, in effect, given a free hand to a subject worthy of more discriminating scrutiny. All I want to do, Rauf has been able to say, with high backing, is build a house of worship in the one country that takes confessional pluralism for granted. What could be more American than that?
For my own part, I have no problem with a mosque being built near Ground Zero and if that’s all that was at stake, I could rest comfortably in my opposition to Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Abe Foxman. But I do have a few unresolved questions about this particular mosque; more pointedly, about the man behind it.
Leave aside for now Rauf’s tone-deaf statements on 60 Minutes on September 30, 2001 that American foreign policy was an “accessory” to 9/11 and that Osama bin Laden was “made in the USA.” Noam Chomsky with a prayer mat may not be an inviting prospect in the heartland, much less a major metropolis, but he is not necessarily an imminent danger. Let’s also ignore for the time being Rauf’s inability to state that Hamas is indeed a terrorist organization. If the good imam feels compelled to hedge his bets on what to term a genocidal, anti-Semitic gang of suicide bombers and rocketeers because he’s afraid of offending Muslims who see Hamas as something nobler, then this makes him no different from those pleading against Cordoba House on strictly emotional or populist grounds.
More troubling to me are two episodes in Rauf’s career that suggest, if not a practical alliance with Islamism, then at least a strong eagerness to earn the trust of Islamists, whether out of financial or face-saving motive. The first is Rauf’s participation in the Perdana Global Peace Organisation, which bills itself as a pacifist lobby group seeking to “criminalize war” but is really the brainchild of former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, a man whose greatest compliment to the Jewish people was to credit them with a methodology for world domination that he thought instructive for the forthcoming Islamic attempt at same. To get a sense of Perdana’s commitment to ending militarism, consider that it was responsible for convening a portion of the ‘Free Gaza’ flotilla, whose declared purpose was not to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians but rather to break the Israeli naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled territory -- itself an act of war.
The second troubling spot on Rauf’s c.v. is his certification of Iran’s theocracy. Here he cannot excuse himself with an air of scholarly neutrality since in his own writing he takes the precepts of Khomeinism at face value and describes the clerical oligarchy of Iran as a legitimate form of government. Following Iran’s sham presidential “election” in June 2009, Rauf penned the following editorial, which anyone can dial up on Cordoba’s website:
After the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took the Shiite concept of the Rightly Guided Imam and created the idea of Vilayet-i-faqih, which means the rule of the jurisprudent. This institutionalizes the Islamic rule of law. The Council of Guardians serves to ensure these principles.
Before the election, the Iranian government allowed an unprecedented degree of political discourse so that the election would establish a legitimate ruler.
Now, on the streets of Teheran and undoubtedly in high political circles behind the scenes, Iranians are asking themselves, has this election confirmed the legitimacy of the ruler? President Obama has rightly said that his administration will not interfere with the internal affairs of Iran, unlike what happened in 1953. Now he has an opportunity to have a greater positive impact on Iranian-American relations.
He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution -- to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faqih, that establishes the rule of law.
Vilayet-i-faqih in practice means that the people of Iran are possessions of the state. The Council of Guardians, Rauf neglects to mention, was responsible for vetting and approving the list of “acceptable” candidates for the wholly honorific role of president, a fact that rubbishes his boast of an “unprecedented degree of political discourse.” You can tell a lot about a government that rigs its own elections beforehand, and rigs them again once all the votes are in.
Rauf published this paean to the captive mind just as many hundreds of peaceful democratic activists were being clubbed and shot on the streets of Tehran. According to the Iranian “rule of law,” torture and rape are also permissible forms of punishment for people who exercise their right to be incensed at a pantomime of self-determination.
But how curious that Rauf, who believes that the U.S. Constitution is compatible with sharia law, should be encouraging the President of the United States to issue a statement “respecting” the guiding principles of an Islamist tyranny.
Is this really the best that moderate Islam can do?
Now here's a fascinating two-part series from the BBC on "useful idiots," a term mistakenly attributed to Lenin, who enjoyed the favor of many such examples of this species of semi-witting accomplices to tyranny. The documentary is hosted by John Sweeney and features a collection of insightful speakers, including Doris Lessing, whose voice reminds me of what the granny-tricked-out wolf in Little Red Riding Hood would sound like, but who, post-Nobel, is fiercely honest and self-critical about her pourparler with Josef Stalin: "I was taken around and shown things as a 'useful idiot'... that's what my role was. I can't understand why I was so gullible."
"I hate being taken round to be shown things," the waspish Kingsley Amis, himself an ex-Communist but one who never toured the Soviet Union, once wrote to Philip Larkin in a slightly different context, giving what I think is a covert virtue of notorious English incuriosity: a reluctance to be persuaded by people with ulterior motives. The evidence of things unseen under totalitarianism is closer to the truth than guided tours of Potemkin villages and labour camps where the guards are dressed up as inmates.
Donald Rayfield, who wrote a not-bad book about Stalin's willing executioners, also makes a not-bad point about George Bernard Shaw, who especially liked being taken round to be shown things that didn't actually exist. About the author of Man and Superman, it cannot quite be said that the sinister politics found no expression in the art. Henry Higgins, Rayfield tells Sweeney, is a "bit of a Stalin," and what he tries to do to Eliza Doolittle is nothing short of what Soviet Communism attempted to do to the proletariat. Many readers of Pygmalion may only have come away wishing that the guttersnipe flower merchant had been shot or sent to Siberia, but such are the softeners of Fabian parlor fiction.... Though it must also be claimed for Shaw, as against socialist realists, that he made no attempt to glorify the working-class even before it became a utopian work-in-progress. No indomitable, brawny builders and austere womenfolk here, comrades. One imagines that a wisp of classic English empiricism slipped out from beneath the bonnet of grim ideology.
Part one of the Sweeney documentary also includes this observation by Malcolm Muggeridge's biographer that when the one-time fellow traveler and aspiring emigre to the Soviet Union realized what a mistake he'd made and then tried to persuade his relatives, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, to do the same, the Webbs were resistant. Not, you see, because they hadn't realized that people were being disappeared or murdered in Russia but because disappearing and murdering people in England was what Beatrice most wanted to do herself.
The closet bully, the fetishist of strongman politics is an ongoing feature of faux radicalism on these shores, as evidenced by Tony Benn's sad Sinology:
Benn: "Mao's role in preventing China from being permanently occupied by the Americans was, I think, a significant role, and I think China's development strategy, of going to the countryside and building it up there, has played a significant role of building China up as a major power. So I think he would have to rank as a great figure in Chinese history."
Sweeney: "Mao was a mass murderer. Surely in the balance, if he's a great man, he's also a great monster."
Benn: "I have no doubt that there were aspects of Mao's life and record that I would deeply deplore. But..."
When agricultural outreach ranks higher in your admiration than mass murder does in your reprehension, it's safe to say you aren't all that bothered by the latter.
Benn's not alone. Seamus Milne, the current politics editor of The Guardian, extols the jihadist "resistance" of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist who converted to Islam after being kidnapped and released by the Taliban, presents on the Iranian state-controlled propaganda organ PressTV. George Galloway, who refused to be interviewed by Sweeney, pimps for Hamas as he has done for every Middle Eastern despot of the last quarter century. And Alistair Crooke, a former British spy under the Blair government who now runs a Beirut-based public relations firm for the Islamic Republic known as Conflicts Forum, explains his sympathies with the rocketeers and human shield-warriors of Gaza like this: "As for terrorism, I hate that word...People cannot tolerate the sight of babies being killed, and that triggers an emotional response."
Not so for those who have seen the future and declare it to already be upon us.
Less than a week on, the brief but fatal skirmish that occurred along the Israel-Lebanon border on August 3 seems that rarest phenomenon of all Middle East disputes: an open-and-shut case. All but the least discriminating of partisans and conspiracists now know who did what to whom and when and how. Most surprising is that the United Nations, in the form of its 12,000-strong peacekeeping Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), is to thank for swiftly settling the most contentious questions of whether or not Israel had trespassed onto Lebanese territory: it hadn't. However, there remains the broader matter of how to interpret Lebanon's unprovoked attack on an Israeli maintenance team and its military escort; was premeditated or spontaneous? And if it was premeditated, does that hint at something darker on the horizon?
Here's what we now know with some measure of certainty: On July 29, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) informed the UNIFIL Liaison Officer that it would be performing routine maintenance work at the edge of its own territory, just north of the Misgav Am kibbutz in the upper Galilee. Coordinating such clean-up operations with UNIFIL is a regular occurrence for both Israel and Lebanon as they are bound by the terms of UN Resolution 1701, which formally ended the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War. Israel said it had wanted to remove some shrubbery and a tree that were blocking the view of its security cameras. According to IDF Lt Col Avital Leibovich, who addressed a conference call with journalists and bloggers on Wednesday evening, this was exactly the kind of leafy coverage from which Hezbollah launched multiple kidnapping raids in 2006. The IDF further instructed UNIFIL that some of its own troops would be escorting an engineering crew for protection but that this escort, consisting of armored vehicles, tanks and flak-jacketed soldiers, would be positioned even further south of the 'technical fence', the barrier that physically divides Israel and Lebanon but that does not always intersect with the so-called Blue Line designating the internationally recognised boundary between the two countries. There would later be some confusion over an Associated Press photo that showed an IDF crane reaching over the fence; the caption suggested that Israel did in fact cross into Lebanese territory and violate Resolution 1701. But the crew's exact position, even north of the fence, was still about 200-300 meters south of the Blue Line, as has now been confirmed by UNIFIL. (The fence/Blue Line "gap" problem could have been easily substantiated earlier in the news cycle: When I interviewed UNIFIL deputy spokesman Andrea Tenenti on August 4, he told me that the peacekeepers have begun demarcating the real border with blue barrels to prevent any unintentional crossings.)
Hamas are resistance fighters who are struggling to defend their land. They have won an election. I have told this to U.S. officials ... I do not accept Hamas as a terrorist organization. I think the same today. They are defending their land.
That would be Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking before an exultant crowd a few weeks ago in the city of Konya as a newly decorated defender of regional Islamism. This is the man whom David Cameron was out to please the other day when, in a speech delivered in Ankara, he referred to Gaza as a "prison camp," assailed Israel's raid on the Mavi Marmara as "completely unacceptable," and insisted that despite the aura of hopelessness now clinging to Turkey's agonized bid to join the European Union, it must join it whatever the grumblings from Germany and France. Brutal occupation of Cyprus, subjugation of a Kurdish minority in everything from politics to linguistics, and ongoing denial of the Armenian genocide are evidently Maastricht-compatible initiatives to the new British prime minister, considered even by his support base not to "do" foreign policy so terribly well.
That didn't stop a fellow Conservative, MEP Daniel Hannan, from encouraging Cameron's Obama-like overture to an increasingly hostile and subversive ally: "Cameron's reasons for backing Ankara's bid for EU membership are solidly Tory: Turkey guarded Europe's flank against the Bolshevists for three generations, and may one day be called on to do the same against the jihadis."
Except that Turkey is sponsoring the jihadists, not guarding against them--a fact which ought to have been clear to Cameron in the post-script news coverage to the flotilla crisis. The best look into Turkey's turn toward radicalism has been provided by independent Turkish journalists who have for months been arguing that Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) is leading the country into the asphyxiating embrace of the East. The Islamist "lite" party, which won power in 2002, used to adhere to a policy of "zero problems with the neighbors;" today it prefers one of helping the neighbors cause problems with the West.
At the heart of Israel's deadly raid of the Mavi Marmara on May 31 is the Turkish charity Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (I.H.H.), the "Free Gaza" flotilla's lead organiser. But the extent to which I.H.H. has been enabled and underwritten by the Turkish government has been increasingly scrutinized by international observers over the past several months and for good reason. In the aftermath of the violent showdown on the high seas, which left nine Turkish passengers dead and a number of Israeli commandos critically injured, Turkey's parliament passed a resolution to "reconsider economic and military relations" with the Jewish state, a decades-long ally. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, returning to Istanbul after an emergency meeting with Hillary Clinton, blamed Israel alone for the confrontation and accused it of committing a "crime against humanity." But the most incendiery rhetoric came from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself.
Recent months have seen a weakening of the once assured Israeli-Turkish relationship almost to the point of dissolution and in the aftermath of the Mavi Marmara clash, Erdogan has not only depicted Israel as an anathema, worse than "bullies and pirates," but also full-throatedly endorsed its main clerical enemy in the Levant. "Hamas are resistance fighters who are struggling to defend their land," he told an ecstatic anti-Israel rally a few weeks ago in the Turkish city of Konya. "They have won an election. I have told this to US officials... I do not accept Hamas as a terrorist organization. I think the same today. They are defending their land."
Most of Turkey's independent political class see domestic and international calculation behind this bluster, a way for Erdogan to shore up Islamist credibility in advance of an upcoming election and reposition Ankara as a renascent power broker in the Middle East - Iran's chief competiton for that role. One writer for the Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet observed that, it's "almost as if [Erodgan] was waiting for a new crisis with Israel to be able to work the streets in order to regain some of the political ground his ruling Justice and Development Party has been loosing over bread and butter issues at home."
But this raises the fundamental question of why a country that is both an ally of the United States and Nato as well as an aspiring member of the European Union would brazenly declare its solidarity with a terrorist group outlawed by both. The answer lies in the increasingly Islamist nature of Erodgan's regime as well as the complicated relationship his party AKP has enjoyed with I.H.H., a suddenly infamous non-governmental organisation that acts more like a governmental one. Its evolution has been from a rogue and highly suspect charity into the advance guard of a new Turkish foreign policy.
I have a soft spot for Oliver Stone, that Pablo Neruda of the steady-cam. Never has a left-wing filmmaker matched the skill with which Stone's political lessons back-fire on him. Apart from making a Turkish prison look realistically unpleasant, just how failed has his agitprop oeuvre actually been? Let's tabulate:
1. Stone wanted to create the cautionary tale of the Eighties, a glamorous financial thriller about overnight millionaires, steak tartare and limousine sex acts that would snuff Wall Street careers before their Series 7's got going. Instead, he created a primer on self-conscious decadence that's more quoted on the floor of the Exchange than Sun Tzu's The Art of War or Yeats' "The Second Coming." So unsuccessful was Stone at de-romanticizing insider trading that he's made a sequel to Wall Street. Its working title was The Misunderstood Collateralized Mortgage Broker.
2. Stone set out to depict John F. Kennedy as the victim of a hydra-headed government conspiracy that reached all the way to the top (or all the way to the top, as it was probably transcribed in the screenplay). An overlong, inter-spliced masterdud starring Kevin Costner in his first post-apocalyptic role, JFK is probably best remembered today as the template for a cute Seinfeld bit about spitting on Keith Hernandez. And JFK himself? Almost as anticlimactic in history as Barack Obama is in real-time.
3. No easy task to make Richard Nixon look pitiable and sympathetic, but in Stone's less-than-Shakespearean telling, the disgraced president was a paranoid mama's boy who rightly wondered why when he did something naughty, it was wrong, but when a well-coiffed Democrat from Massachusetts did it, it was Camelot.
4. "Daroosh is dead and I am king / Of everywhere and everything." Alexander the Great exaggerated, but as a bi-curious bleach-blonde Oedipal case with an army, he must have also wondered where he found the time to conquer half the known world. The great Macedonian's martial and imperial legacy remains in tact on The History Channel whose DVDs of his exploits are less remaindered than one catastrophic biopic.
I haven't seen Stone's hagiographies of Castro and Chavez (although the latter "documentary" has been ably demolished by Ron Radosh and Antonio Rumbos). But rest assured, now that he's celebrated them on celluloid, their regimes can't be long for this world. Nor is Stone deterred in his Alice-in-Wonderland efforts at counterintelligence filmmaking. Evidently unsatisfied with the creep of ultraconservative patriotic sentiment in the United States, he is subtly trying to foment a Tea Party coup by offering his take on the occluded history of the nation. According to Camilla Long at the Sunday Times:
His next task, the leviathan Secret History of America, tackles received versions of events in the last century, an extension, perhaps, of what he did in 1991’s JFK, when he suggested that the president’s assassination was in fact a high-level conspiracy. The 10-part documentary will address Stalin and Hitler “in context”, he says. “Hitler was a Frankenstein but there was also a Dr Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support.”
He also seeks to put his atrocities in proportion: “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30m."
Why such a focus on the Holocaust then? “The Jewish domination of the media,” he says. “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f***** up United States
foreign policy for years.”
A cheque to Palin Headquarters would have sufficed.
When Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was assassinated in Dubai last January, and his cause of death later ascribed to foul play, it didn't take long before the British press found itself the beneficiary of a troika of good copy. First, al-Mabhouh's end had been delivered by the injection of a muscle relaxant and a suffocating pillow - so clearly the result of a "wet job" performed by well-trained agents of a foreign intelligence service. Second, that service was almost certainly the Israeli Mossad. Third, the movements of the dozen or so disguised suspects throughout the corridors of the murder scene - Dubai's posh Al Bustan Rotana Hotel - were captured on closed circuit television, which inspires pride and paranoia in equal measure in Londoners who are typically invigilated on this form of technology whenever they venture outside their own homes.
International condemnation of Israel's alleged action came swiftly, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the United Kingdom, especially after it was discovered that twelve of the assassins had used forged British passports to enter and leave Dubai. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown said at the time, "The British passport is an important document that has got to be held with care. A British passport is an important part of being British." Brown's foreign secretary David Miliband went a step further on March 23, calling the forgery "intolerable" in an umbrageous speech before parliament. He chose not to blame Israel explicitly for al-Mabhouh's murder, but he did state that Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency had concluded that the country must have been behind the passport forgeries. (Miliband's strongest evidence being the fact that all of the identities counterfeited were of people who hold dual citizenship in the UK and Israel). Milliband then made the decision to expel the Mossad chief resident in London.
More telling than the British government's muscular response was that of the correct-thinking British media, best exemplified by The Guardian. On March 24, the newspaper's editorial on the affair carried the ominous title, "Israel and Britain: The rule of law," and described Israel as "an arrogant nation that has overreached itself" -- not just in terms of identity theft, but also land theft. Indeed, it actually devoted more than half of its column to arraigning Israel for rejecting Washington's instructions on settlement build-up in East Jerusalem and refusing to even consider that territory as the site of a future Palestinian capital. If this seemed a non sequitur, then one clearly hadn't grasped a fundamental principle of The Guardian's moral outrage: So incensed was it by an allied nation's covert toying with sensitive British documents that it felt obliged to bring up other instances of Israel's misbehavior in recent months. "Mr Netanyahu has to face the consequences of an ideological stand over East Jerusalem which precludes any other. Here, as in the rest of the West Bank, where the number of Jewish settlers has more than doubled since the Oslo peace accords were signed in 1993, Israel is pre-empting the shape of the final agreement by creating facts on the ground. No deal with the Palestinians can be made in these conditions," The Guardian editorialized.
So it was quite expected that The Guardian would be similarly categorical when late last month the FBI arrested a 11-person Russian spy-ring in the United States, and federal prosecutors in their brief disclosed that one paid agent of Moscow, Tracey Foley, had also "travelled on a fraudulent British passport prepared for her by the SVR [Russian foreign intelligence service]." No doubt the liberal broadsheet would mention the arrogant abuse of trust that now exists between two former Cold War antagonists and devote the rest of its column inches to reviewing the evidence of Vladimir Putin's authoritarian tendencies in general, such as his nationalization of Russian television, his silencing of domestic dissidents through murder, arrest, or army conscription, and his imperialist certification of the north Georgian breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as part of the Russian demesne. The KGB's assistance in the "umbrella murder" of Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov on the Waterloo Bridge in 1978 may have been a mite old to merit recapitulation, but surely there'd be a passing reference to the polonium poisoning of British citizen and ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, which occurred in a Piccadilly sushi joint a mere four years ago?
There is some justice in the fact that the renewed debate over confessed pedophile Roman Polanski, now a free man thanks to a pusillanimous Swiss legal system, should take place at exact the time in which the second bestselling book in the world is a feminist crime thriller trilogy whose main themes are violent misogyny and rape. It was the mere marketing whim of a Swedish publisher that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was not titled Men Who Hate Women. And if being a brilliant filmmaker is all that stands in the way of one's responsibility to do hard time for raping a 13 year-old girl, then one wonders afresh at just what a moral and literary absence was created when Stieg Larsson died (or was killed) in 2004. His feminine hero Lisbeth Salander, now in strong competition with an all-male pantheon of super-sleuths ranging from Holmes to Poirot, did not have the benefit of being plied with wine and muscle relaxants before she was sodomized by a much older man in Larsson's debut fiction, a man upon whom she exacts a revenge that Samantha Geimer will likely not be able to exact upon the director of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown.
No doubt a sigh of relief has been exhaled from Hollywood to the Left Bank over Polanski's all-clear. (Has Woody Allen been reached for comment yet?) Moral relativism being what it is in the 21st century, crimes are only as umbrageous as a criminal's ability to thank the Academy. Meanwhile, an entire generation of male and female readers are being fed real lessons on human rights and sexual depredations by a dead Scandinavian Trotskyist who never got to cash in on his storytelling talents.
Since (late) 2004, satisfying your jones for political and cultural commentary, day-old scoops and late-breaking marginalia, and whatever else finagles its way into the cyber-planetary potluck...
• Civil Disobedience on the Web By Michael Weiss {British bloggers stand up to threats of libel lawsuits., originally published in Slate.}
• Spray-Fire Atonement By Michael Weiss {How cognitive behavioral psychology can help High Holy Day Jews who repent too much., originally published in Slate.}
• Mutiny on the Manifesto By Michael Weiss {Spineless scalawags are sabotaging the most promising leftist doctrine in decades. Don't let them., originally published in Jewcy.}
• Rise of the Faux-cialists By Michael Weiss {Three poseurs who would have Marx spinning in his grave (plus their real-deal counterparts), originally published in Jewcy.}
• Stepson of the Time By Michael Weiss {A reconsideration of Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, originally published in The New Criterion.}
• The Surge Can Work By Michael Weiss {Everyone's wrong about the president's new war plan, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Kibitz on Pure Reason By Michael Weiss {The author of Betraying Spinoza on rationalism, passion, and great 17th-century hair, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Brainwashing's Nemesis By Michael Weiss {How Rick Ross became a cult buster extraordinaire, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Whiz Kid of Warfare By Michael Weiss {How Noah Shachtman has revolutionized military reporting, originally published in Jewcy.}
• A Blacklist The Left Could Use By Michael Weiss {Meet the Christopher Hitchens of postpunk, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Is Marriage the New Dating? By Michael Weiss {A divorcee, a young married, and a singleton debate wedded bliss, originally published in Jewcy.}
• The Jewish Jihad for Jesus By Michael Weiss {Why converts are leading the evangelical movement, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Tribal Threads By Michael Weiss {The designer of Gytha Mander on the holy land, holsters, and honeys, originally published in Jewcy.}
• Some Kind of Republican By Michael Weiss {The real legacy of John Hughes, published in Slate.}
