diary of an anti-chomskyite

New Blog

2007-10-09T22:23:00.001+02:00

I invite all my fellow anti-Chomskyites to my new blog By Benjamin Kerstein. Enjoy.

Chomskyite Billionare Pleads Oppression

2007-04-16T11:21:00.000+03:00

Its always a bit odd when extremely powerful and influential people, such as Ivy League professors, nationally televised commentators, ex-presidents and internationalist gozillianaires claim to be laboring under the yoke of brutal oppression and terror. For oft-discussed reasons, this phenomenon seems to manifest itself almost constantly when Israel and its enemies are involved. George Soros, perhaps the richest Chomskyite in the world, has unsurprisingly penned his own sob story, which appears in -- where else? -- the New York Review of Books. The irony is thick on the ground when one of the richest men in the world claims to be the aggreived victim of brutal repression. His bone to pick is, of course, American policy in the Middle East and its "discussion", claiming that "The current policy," of which Soros of course disapproves, "is not even questioned in the United States. While other problem areas of the Middle East are freely discussed, criticism of our policies toward Israel is very muted indeed. The debate in Israel about Israeli policy is much more open and vigorous than in the United States." This is amusing if only because Soros' quite stridant criticism is appearing in the same publication which publishes a near constant stream of anti-Israel opinion and even played host to Tony Judt's call for the dismantling -- i.e. destruction, for those uninterested in euphemism -- of the Jewish State itself.

Soros, like his less Chomskyite colleague Donald Trump, appears to suffer from an unfortunate character flaw typical of extremely rich men: the belief that making enormous amounts of money qualifies one to pontificate on literally anything and everything. He claims, for instance, that:

The Bush administration is actively supporting the Israeli government in its refusal to recognize a Palestinian unity government that includes Hamas, which the US State Department considers a terrorist organization. This precludes any progress toward a peace settlement at a time when progress on the Palestinian problem could help avert a conflagration in the greater Middle East.

Some of us, who know from bitter experience that Hamas is not "considered" a terrorist organization but is a terrorist organization, may find such refusal an admirable display of all too rare political courage. We may also believe that the greatest threat to peace in this area and the most likely cause of a "conflagration" in the Middle East is radical Islamic groups such as, well, Hamas. But I digress.

Soros, like his colleagues, who publish in major journals and hold Ivy League jobs while claiming to be silenced and oppressed, does identify the ostensible source of his suffering. His is hardly an original thesis, and not at all surprising. It is, of course, AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group which all anti-Israel idealogues love to hate, as they hate anyone who dares to express the radical idea that Zionism is a good thing and Israel deserves to not only survive but to thrive without the threat of war and terrorism. Soros' case, however, makes even less sense than those of his colleagues. Since he is desperately trying not to invoke a conspiracy theory -- even as he does precisely that -- he instead ties himself in knots trying to equate various unrelated critiques into a single, ominous phenomenon. He claims, for instance, that

Supporters of Israel have good reason to question AIPAC's advocacy and they have begun to do so. But instead of engaging in critical self-examination, AIPAC remains intransigent. Recently, the pro-Israel lobby has gone on the offensive, accusing the so-called progressive critics of Israel's policies of fomenting anti-Semitism and endangering the very existence of the Jewish state.

Soros then cites Alvin Rosenfeld's paper for the AJC as an example. It is, perhaps, pointless to remark that the AJC is not AIPAC, and that Rosenfeld's paper was a perfectly legitimate exercise in intellectual criticism. Such subtleties are likely lost on a man who cannot tell the difference between a Congressional lobby and a personal critique of Israel's naysayers. In ancient times, such as ten years ago, the conflation of disparate Jewish opinion into a single, monolithic, oppressive force would have been called antisemitism, but we are now, apparently, more civilized than that. And, of course, we would not wish to cause the obviously delicate Mr. Soros further pain and suffering.

On the question of AIPAC itself, Soros invokes the usual boogeymen, such as the "neocons" -- a completely meaningless term which has come to mean anyone or anything of which the left disapproves -- and charges

AIPAC's mission is to ensure American support for Israel but in recent years it has overreached itself. It became closely allied with the neocons and was an enthusiastic supporter of the invasion of Iraq. It actively lobbied for the confirmation of John Bolton as US ambassador to the United Nations. It continues to oppose any dialogue with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas. More recently, it was among the pressure groups that prevailed upon the Democratic House leadership to drop the requirement that the President obtain congressional approval before taking military action against Iran. AIPAC under its current leadership has clearly exceeded its mission, and far from guaranteeing Israel's existence, has endangered it.

What Soros, not surprisingly, seems not to understand, is that AIPAC's mission is not to "ensure" American support per se, but rather to advocate the position of the Israeli government. For better or worse, all of the supposed evils which Soros decries were based on the policies of the elected Israeli government and for good reasons: the Bolton nomination led many to hope that the racist attacks on Israel in the UN would be more passionately and effectively opposed, the Iranian threat is obvious, and opposition to "dialogue" with Hamas has been the avowed position of the Israeli government for years. How encouraging apartheid-style policies in the UN or undertaking policies of appeasement towards Iran or Hamas helps the cause of Israel's existence is beyond me, but it is not unusual for advocates of brutality -- such as rapists or abusive fathers -- to claim that they are acting in the best interests of their victim. Which does not, of course, makes such assertions even slightly true. Soros, in the interests, apparently, of gravitas, asserts his bona fides. He is a "critical thinker."

But now I have to ask the question: How did Israel become so endangered? I cannot exempt AIPAC from its share of the responsibility. I am a fervent advocate of critical thinking. I have supported dissidents in many countries. I took a stand against President Bush when he said that those who don't support his policies are supporting the terrorists. I cannot remain silent now when the pro-Israel lobby is one of the last unexposed redoubts of this dogmatic way of thinking. I speak out with some trepidation because I am exposing myself to further attacks that are likely to render me less effective in pursuing many other causes in which I am engaged; but dissidents I have supported have taken far greater risks.

What "risks" Mr. Soros is facing are unclear to me, since AIPAC is obviously not going to throw him in the gulag. Perhaps his wealth has made him oversensitive to criticism. As Balzac once said: "Behind every great fortune lies a crime." Mr. Soros may be nursing an existential guilt we can only guess at, and for which any criticism at all is simply too much to bear. This is not an excuse, however, for such egregious bad faith as that evidenced in his statement. He claims to be "a fervent advocate of critical thinking." He is not. He is a censorious liar and a monomaniacal paranoiac. Like all judge-penitents, the principle he invokes applies only to himself. The idea that others may apply "critical thinking" to George Soros himself, and reach conclusions unfavorable to him and his opinions, seems impossible for him to concieve. Instead, he denounces any and all dissidents as oppressive, slanderous, tyrannical, undemocratic criminals. Hypocrisy is, of course, the last refuge of cowards. But the coward who believes himself a courageous prophet is not merely pathetic, but dangerous, because the lengths to which such men will go to realize their demented utopias are unlimited and they all end, ultimately, in murder.

Soros, however, is not up to such ominous standards. He is simply another in a long line of self-righteous egomaniacs -- witness Jimmy Carter -- unable to fathom the fact that people less wealthy and successful than him could reach different opinions and conclusions than himself, so he begins looking for insidious other forces to explain his failure to persuade the world to follow his unrequested advice. Nietzsche made a cogent observation during the opening decades of political antisemitism that the antisemite was by nature an example of the slave mind, one who is unable to overcome his own shortcomings and realize his will to power. Rather than blame himself, the antisemite seeks out the Jew as the source of his own impotence. Soros, in his frenzied invocations of invidious hidden enemies, ought to take heed.

Cross posted at Kesher Talk.

Never Again

2007-03-19T11:12:00.000+02:00

Seems to be the message a great many of this nation's veterans are sending us. Those who have written the history of the '60s like to pretend that the entire population of America was in the streets protesting the war in Vietnam, but the truth is that a huge swath of the baby boom generation went to war, remain proud of their service, and justifiably remain incensed at the betrayal they experienced on their return. They seems determined to make sure that this generation of soldiers and vets is not betrayed and erased the way they were. The shadow history of the '60s has just taken to the streets to attack the remnants of the establishmentarians. I, for one, rejoice.

Jewish Self-Hatred on the Right

2007-03-08T14:00:00.000+02:00

Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, once criticized his friend Hannah Arendt for lacking what he called ahavat yisrael, a love of Israel. There are, of course, numerous permutations of this concept, but for me it has always meant the love of one's people, their struggles, their history, their labors and their creative will. Camus once said that a mission exists for any human group which knows how to derive pride and fecundity from its labors and its sufferings. This has always been my sense of chosenness and my sense of Zionism. Unfortunately, there are those among us -- and always have been -- for whom ahavat yisrael means nothing at all. Or worse still, it means the rejection and condemnation of all who do not meet their exacting standards of what yisrael ought to be. Most of the time I deal with the leftist form of this disease, i.e. those who claim that their love for the Jewish people demands that they destroy it through assimilation or universalization. But the problem is by no means confined to the left. This post brings home the darkness that exists on the other side of the political spectrum.

Israpundit recently posted Tovia Singer’s interview of Gil-White. I had a discussion with him today in which I expressed my difficulty in thinking of our leadership so darkly.

He reminded me that during the Greek occupation we had our Jewish Hellenists. During the Roman occupation we had our priestly class in bed with the Romans. In both cases the Jewish people rose up and took their future into their own hands.

Similarly Jewish leadership was far from blameless in not doing more to rescue Jews. In fact they worked against it. They got us into the disastrous Oslo process.

Now Jewish leadership has worked to demonize Israelis living in J & S, otherwise known as settlers, and persecuting them. Just look at Amona. The establishment including the media, academia and the GOI is planning to get Israel to withdraw. This is so even when the Jewish masses oppose such withdrawal.

If we have learned anything from Jewish history it is that we shouldn’t trust our leadership. They do not represent the interests of the people.

The author writes later in the comments section:

They say that people deserve the leaders they vote for. I am trying not to be fair or even to judge but to advocate for a higher standard and for accountability.

I am also calling for a different mindset. Starting with Ben Gurion Jews and Israel have been sold down the river. We have been lead in the direction of appeasement, capitulation and concession from the start.

We need leaders like Jabotinsky who had Jewish pride and was prepared to fight for our rights. Our leaders don’t even mention our rights. They emasculate them. They are embarrassed by the Jewish particular. They want to be like everyone else and to be loved by everyone else.

One doesn't know quite what to do with this kind of lunacy. Its very dissonance seems to shut down any possibility of rational engagement. The idea that David Ben-Gurion; perhaps the one indispensible man in Israeli history, the man without whom the State of Israel would never have been declared in the first place, let alone form an army, win its initial wars of survival and absorb a million immigrants; sold the Jews down the river is sickeningly totalitarian in the enormity of its falsehood. If Ben-Gurion is a traitor then we are all traitors. The standard of loyalty has been reduced to nothing more than adherence to the ideals of the author. What these ideals precisely are I have no idea. They seem to be a random accumulation of vaguely Kahanist fantasies. The notion, for instance, of the "Hellenists" is a classic Kahanist trope. Besides the fact that it is a two thousand year old anachronism, it is, essentially, nothing more than a means of extricating from the Jewish people any and everyone who does not agree with those who employ it. Am I a "Hellenist" because I believe that Israel should withdraw from most of the West Bank? Do I fear the Jewish particular because I think that Ben-Gurion was a great man and not a traitor to his people? Am I not one of Israel because I fear the messianic psychosis expressed by this author? Because I dare to note that when "the Jewish people rose up and took their destiny into their own hands" against the Romans the result was annihilation, genocide and exile?

As for "working against" rescuing Jews, I simply have no idea what this is supposed to mean. If Israel has not done enough to be a refuge for Ethiopian Jews, Soviet Jews, Ashkenazi and Sephardi alike, then nothing will satisfy its purient critics. This is not even to mention operations such as Entebbe, which actively put the lives of Israeli soldiers at risk on foreign soil to rescue not only Israeli citizens but Jews of many nationalities.

The citing of Jabotinsky is telling indeed. We are told that Jabotinsky had Jewish pride and was prepared to fight for Jewish rights. This is true. I admire Jabotinsky as much as the next man. There is, however, a difference between me and this author: I have actually read his work. Jabotinsky was uncompromising, yes. But he was also the quintessential political realist. He was, in fact, the least messianic of the early Zionist leaders. Yes, he desired the restoration of Jewish pride. Yes, he opposed many of Ben-Gurion's policies which he viewed as unduly accomodationist. Yes, he advocated defiance as a form of political action. But he never entertained the fantasy that the Jewish people were invulnerable. He never branded his enemies traitors because of their political beliefs. His aim was to instill pride -- and thus power -- in the Jewish people, not to divide it into "Hellenists" and "real" Jews. And indeed, if any Zionist leader was wholly engaged in the world outside of Jewish tradition it was Jabotinsky. This was a man who based his philosophy on European liberalism and took the Italian nationalist leader Garibaldi as his model. He respected Jewish tradition, but was never beholden to it. He was a model of the "normalized" Jew he sought to create, a normalization based on the negation of the ghetto and the exile. In other words, a Jew who based his identity on nationalist principles and not on religion. What Jabotinsky would have to say about the appropriation of his name by those who would label the majority of the Jewish people traitors is impossible to say, but I doubt he would view it as a positive development.

More to the point, since I am writing here of Jewish self-hatred, we can see where this self-referential and self-fulfilling philosophy, this endless closed circle is taking us: to something very much like antisemitism. I have said from time to time that Kahane was an antisemite. I am generally greeted with open mouths and shocked expressions. While I sometimes enjoy rendering people speechless, I am not being frivolous when I say this. The philosophy we have here before us renders, for all intents and purposes, every Jew who does not agree with it a "Hellenist". That is to say, a traitor. By definition, therefore, the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people are wholly condemned. Most of us, after all, are not Kahanists or any variation thereof. We are enjoined, of course, to hate and despise traitors, and to consider them our enemies. Any philosophy that hates, despises and makes an enemy of the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people can bare no other name than antisemitism. And antisemitism in the hands of Jews can bear no other name than self-hatred. This self-hatred is, of course, brethren to its left wing counterpart. It concieves of itself as a voice crying in the wilderness to a stiff-necked and corrupted people. A people becoming progressively unworthy of salvation or even, perhaps, existence. There can be no answer to it except the simple dictum of the Sages: the Temple was destroyed because of baseless hatred. They meant hatred between Jews. This hatred, baseless as it is, insane as it is; as self-hatred is, of course, inherently insane; is, for me, the most terrifying and ominous threat in an era which sometimes seems to be nothing more than an infinite architecture of the ominous and the terrifying.

Irony

2007-02-11T06:49:00.000+02:00

The Chomskyite world has never lacked for it. Back in my former and much unhappier life I was a resident of the gray-cold hell city of death known as Boston, Massachusetts. Yes, the capital of liberal America, where everyone loves Chomsky and everyone loathes the Jews. I still remember being told by a cracker Irish kid from Southie about how he'd "Jewed" somebody and then going the next day to a political science class at Boston University to be told by the professor that Israel was the cause of 9/11. At least the various ethno-class divisions in the gray-cold hell city of death can find solidarity around something.

At any rate, the gray-cold hell city of death's newspaper of record, The Boston Globe, which could well be a charter member of Chomsky's fan club, reports that Chomsky is now the prime signatory of a petition on behalf of an academic who claims he was denied a post at MIT because of racism.

What makes this amusing, of course, is that Chomsky is something of flaming racist himself. While he confines himself to such politically correct forms of bigotry as claiming that the Jews are "priveleged people" who want "total control" over American society and invoking Rousseau's image of "half-naked savages" to describe the Third World, it is nonetheless incumbant upon us to call the thing what it is. The Boston Globe, if it weren't too busy congratulating itself over its latest condemnation of whatever Israel has done this week to defend its right to exist, might have noted this slight contradiction. Perhaps I should be sanguine on the matter, and simply confine myself to being grateful for one more reason to be happy that I now live in Israel.

Another Jewish Radical Goes Completely Insane

2007-02-10T20:22:00.000+02:00

I knew Michael Lerner was a Chomskyite idiot. I did not know that he was completely insane.

The book in which Lerner’s essay appears is billed as having been “inspired by” David Ray Griffin’s “The New Pearl Harbor,” a seminal text of the so-called “9/11 Truth” movement. The new book includes an essay by Griffin in which he makes the case that the September 11 attacks were likely “orchestrated, like many previous false-flag attacks, by U.S. agents as a pretext for a war to expand the American empire.”

In his own essay for “9/11 and American Empire,” Lerner wrote: “For those who watched the reactionary political uses made of this tragedy, it’s easy to conjure up a variety of possible conspiratorial motives that would have led the president, the vice president, or some branch of the armed forces or CIA or FBI or other ‘security’ forces to have passively or actively participated in a plot to re-credit militarism and war. We’ve learned enough about the subsequent ways that the Bush administration lied to the American public to no longer be shocked if there had been some active involvement by them in these deeds.”

But, Lerner immediately added, “Neither would I be surprised if, when all the archives were opened and all the communications revealed, it turned out that there was some other non-conspiratorial explanation for elements of the story that currently seem to make no sense.”

Lerner told the Forward that he has good reason to be suspicious of the government.

“I’ve had a lot of personal experience of government lying and doing things that are very destructive and pretending that they weren’t doing it,” Lerner said. “I was part of antiwar demonstrations in which violence was done and the violence later turned out was being done by police agents. I had that personal experience…. After that, nothing surprises me about what this government would do to achieve what its perceived ends are. Nothing would surprise me. That doesn’t mean I believe it. That doesn’t mean that I believe that that’s actually happening right now.”

This guy's giving Tony Kushner a run for his money in the tiresomely earnest psychopath department. I'd say that we can come up with some very cogent reasons for being suspicious of Michael Lerner. Perhaps we could talk about the ways in which the anti-war movement has lied to the American public. I can certainly speak from personal experience on that issue. This is not even to mention the movement's awesome responsibility for the deaths of millions of innocent people in Vietnam and Cambodia, or its support for tyranny from Eastern Europe to Cuba. But I digress. When discussing forms of political insanity one should not seek logic, reason or simple human decency from its practitioners. As for Lerner himself, Jewish radicalism has a long and rather depressingly futile history, and Lerner is exceptional only in that he seeks to hijack halachic Judaism itself for his revolutionary purposes. Most Jewish radicals of the past have had the good sense to ignore religion or dismiss it entirely. Lerner's desperate need to desecrate the Torah for his own purposes is both cheap and insulting, but I suppose that if I were an "agnostic" in regards to certain historical truths I might need faith in my corner as well.

To see where other conspiracy theories have brought us, check this out. I can't wait for the movie on the 9/11 conspiracy, and there will be one. Count on it.

There's No Problem with Antisemitism in the United States

2007-02-10T02:50:00.000+02:00

Apparently...

Nobel Peace laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel told Haaretz on Thursday he escaped a kidnap attempt in a San Francisco hotel last week.Wiesel, 78, whose novels deal with his experience as a Holocaust survivor, said he was grabbed by a stranger in an elevator at the hotel he was staying at for a peace conference and ordered to follow at the risk of violence...

A driver's license in the name of Harry Hunt, a member of a Holocaust denial group, was found in a car parked near the hotel. Hunt has not been located since the event.

A posting on a virulent anti-Semitic Web site Tuesday by a person identifying himself as Eric Hunt claimed responsibility. "I had planned to bring Wiesel to my hotel room, where he would truthfully answer my questions regarding the fact that his non-fiction Holocaust memoir, 'Night,' is almost entirely fictitious," Hunt wrote on the site. The poster also said "I had been trailing Wiesel for weeks and had hoped to get Wiesel into my custody, with a cornered Wiesel finally forced to state the truth on videotape."

I really don't know what to say about this. Its scary and psychotic and not at all surprising. I do remember a time when there didn't have to be security guards in front of synagogues in the town where my parents live. I think American Jews have, in some ways, consented to a slow deterioration in their situation. I have my own ideas about why this is, one of them being that the Jews in America have totally lost their capacity for communal violence, whereas other ethnic groups have managed to maintain it and therefore retain some deterrance capacity against this sort of thing. I realize that this isn't a pleasent thing to hear, but one ought to be realistic when people are out there trying to kill you. Whatever the reason may be, it worries me greatly.

Jewish Liberalism and Its Discontents

2007-01-31T20:42:00.000+02:00

The NY Times, in its infintely conventional wisdom, has suddenly discovered that Jewish liberalism has some fairly major issues. Occasioned, apparently, by an AJC report attacking various "liberals" for being insufficiently dedicated to Israel's continued existence. The Times, of course, starts out with some major semantic problems, since most of the aforementioned accused cannot be accurately described as liberals at all. We are presented -- again -- with Tony Judt, who advocates the dismantling of Israel in favor of a "binational", i.e. Arab, state. As I have noted before, advocating such measures in regards to a country of 6 million people is difficult to describe as "liberal" by any definition of the term. Judt defends himself by, as per usual, revealing his extraordinary ignorance.

“The link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is newly created,” he said, adding that he fears “the two will have become so conflated in the minds of the world” that references to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust will come to be seen as “just a political defense of Israeli policy.”

I will not even bother to deal at length with Judt's claim that the link between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism is in any way new. Such a wretched distortion of history is either willfully ignorant or consciously deceptive. My guess, judging by Mr. Judt's record, is the former. As to his "fears" as the Times describes them, I can say only that the obscenity he describes exists already and has existed for decades, though it is no fault of Israel's defenders that this is the case. Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust are, of course, only part of the argument for Israel's existence, but they bear an immeasurable weight, and must be dismissed by its enemies. Those who wish Israel to simply go away -- Judt among them -- cannot make a reckoning with the history which brought it into existence. To do so would preclude holding their chosen position. The reduction of catastrophe to politics is, therefore, inevitable on the part of those who reject Israel's existence. A fact with which Judt may well wish to struggle, rather than simply trot out antique rhetorical vulgarities.

We move on, of course, to Tony Kushner, a necro-socialist psychopath who has won the Pulitzer Prize for his writing solely on the basis of the passion with which he reinforces establishment prejudices. Screenwriter of the asinine Munich, a film upon which I have already said all I wish to say, Kushner is probably the stupidest literary presence in America today. Having been subjected myself to one of his public rants, there is little one can say for him besides his obvious need for psychotherapy and a few history lessons. He plays, of course, upon the emotions, and not the intellect, since he doesn't have one, and comes up with this stirring defense.

“Most Jews like me find this a very painful subject,” Mr. Kushner said, and are aware of the rise in vicious anti-Semitism around the world but feel “it’s morally incumbent upon us to articulate questions and reservations.”

This, of course, means absolutely nothing and can be interpreted as meaning absolutely anything. One could argue that it is morally incumbant upon us to articulate "questions and reservations" regarding Tony Kushner himself, but that would seem to be beside the point. We are dealing here, after all, with a man who has the intellectual maturity of a five year old. We shall move on to more interesting subjects.

One of whom happens to be Alan Wolfe, a man whose writings I have recently criticized. His response is, quite frankly, bizarre.

Mr. Wolfe, who has written about a recent rise in what he calls “Jewish illiberalism,” traces the heated language to increasing opposition to the Iraq war and President Bush’s policy in the Middle East, which he said had spurred liberal Jews to become more outspoken about Israel.

“Events in the world have sharpened a sense of what’s at stake,” he said. “Israel is more isolated than ever,” causing American Jewish defenders of Israel to become more aggressive.

I have already noted my opinions regarding what Mr. Wolfe calls "Jewish illiberalism". Needless to say, I consider it a far more positive development than he does, at least to the extent that liberalism must, inevitably, attempt the destruction of Judaism if it is to continue to exist. What is at issue are not historical events but the inevitablities of an ideology which cannot and will not accept Judaism as anything but a temporary anomaly to be dispensed with on the way to total dominion. The very phenomenon of Jewish liberalism itself is proof of this.

I say proof because of what Jewish liberalism in fact is. Jewish liberalism is not, after all, simply liberalism. It is liberalism that is, in some way, acknowledged by its practitioners, if only obliquely, as something specifically Jewish. Jewish liberalism is, in other words, a statement of unconscious discontent with liberalism as it is. With the liberalism which is, in my opinion, imperial universalism. Jewish liberals are sensing or seeking the particular in the universal, the limited in the unlimited, the ethical in the all-accepting nihilism. In this sense, there is at least some hope for Jewish liberalism. But we must regard those of its practitioners who express their discontent with the Jewish, and not with the liberal, elements of their ideology, as those who are looking for salvation in their discontents, and not seeking a way out, or a way up. A way up which I believe does exist in the possibility of difficult freedom. The difficulty here, of course, is of a different and far more tragic nature.

Some Worthy Reading

2007-01-01T19:22:00.000+02:00

The new issue of Azure, to which I have occasionally contributed, is now available on the web. Anti-Chomskyites may especially enjoy my friend Noah Pollak's well-deserved castigation of French foreign policy.

Why We Fight the Thieves of History

2007-01-01T11:20:00.000+02:00

Last night, I was treated to the unfortunate experience of watching a thoroughly reprehensible piece of Riefenstahlian propaganda called Why We Fight. Manipulative, simple minded and slanderous, this "documentary" purported to expose the evils of "the military-industrial complex" (how long, I ask, does it take for a hideous cliche to die?) and its sinister influence on American foreign policy. While seeminly unable to make up its mind whether war itself is evil -- which would imply only a banal and useless pacifism -- or whether only American war is bad -- being, as it apparently is, the tumerous growth of an insatiable imperial project -- the film nonetheless clearly rested on a single point: all wars of the post-World War II era have been manufactured by the "military-industrial complex" in order to serve its economic interests. This is, of course, pure Chomskyite paranoiac conspiracy theory and is impossible to either prove or disprove, since it is based on theoretical conjecture and absolutely no evidence whatsoever. By definition, therefore, it is ahistorical and anti-intellectual balderdash. Which is, of course, the point. All totalitarian ideologies stand on an unfalsifiable article of faith. The ostensibly anti-war left (or right, for that matter, although this film is clearly the product of the former) is no different in this regard.

What I wish to analyze, however, is the presence in the film of a particular and much abused historical document: president Dwight David Eisenhower's farewell address. Delivered on national television on 17 January 1960, this address has, by one of the ironies inherent in history (or anti-history, depending on how you look at it) become one of the central texts of the "military-industrial complex" conspiracy theory, not least because it appears to mark the first appearence of the phrase itself. Oft-quoted by anti-war talking heads of both the left and right, excerpted for Oliver Stone's masterpiece of anti-history JFK, which charged the complex in question with the murder of the president of the United States, this address has been sanctified by Why We Fight in extraordinary fashion, the filmmakers going so far as to place a still photograph of Eisenhower giving the speech on the film's poster.

The usefulness of such a source cannot be overstated. The charges of scurrilousness, irresponsible rhetorical hysteria and flatulent radicalism are inherently undermined when faced with a personage such as a former and much revered president of the United States. And not merely that, but a former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe. The man upon whom the great responsibility of winning World War II ultimately rested. In the presence of such a witness, gravitas is instantly bestowed upon the prosecutor.

The question, therefore, becomes a simple one. Did Eisenhower in fact say what he is purported to have said? Does his statement in fact reflect the overall ideology which is being foisted upon us by those who make use of it? The answer, and this should not be a surprise, is a resounding negative, and a simple examination of the complete document, rather than the few strategic excerpts emphasized by its hijackers, makes this eminently clear.

Eisenhower begins his speech with some statements of thanks to, among others, the Congress and the American people. He praises the bipartisanship which has marked his term, a bipartisanship, incidentally, abhorred by anti-war leftists. Radical anti-historian Howard Zinn has, in fact, spent an entire chapter of his magnum anti-opus A People's History of the United States denouncing precisely this consensus Eisenhower lauds. The body of the speech does not begin until the fifth paragraph.

We now stand ten years past the midpoint of a century that has witnessed four major wars among great nations. Three of these involved our own country. Despite these holocausts, America is today the strongest, the most influential, and most productive nation in the world. Understandably proud of this pre-eminence, we yet realize that America's leadership and prestige depend, not merely upon our unmatched material progress, riches and military strength, but on how we use our power in the interests of world peace and human betterment.

Throughout America's adventure in free government, our basic purposes have been to keep the peace, to foster progress in human achievement, and to enhance liberty, dignity and integrity among peoples and among nations. To strive for less would be unworthy of a free and religious people. Any failure traceable to arrogance or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice would inflict upon us grievous hurt, both at home and abroad.

Progress toward these noble goals is persistently threatened by the conflict now engulfing the world. It commands our whole attention, absorbs our very beings. We face a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method. Unhappily, the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment.

As can be easily seen, this is hardly a call for disarmament or isolationism. It is, in fact, precisely the opposite. It calls for strength, perseverence, sacrifice and involvement. It posits America as the great hope for human peace and freedom and demands that America continue to stand against "a hostile ideology global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose and insidious in method." In other words, communism. Its only caution is that this task be undertaken with care and intelligence. That we must not rely only upon our military and economic power, but also upon the skill with which we apply this power. Eisenhower, in other words, is not negating military power. Quite the opposite. He assumes that it will and must be applied and that we must be ready to do so with skill and willingness. He speaks fearfully of failures born of our "arrogance or our lack of comprehension or readiness to sacrifice." In other words, of isolationism and decadance. If we can credit Eisenhower with any prophetic powers, it must be in his comprehension of the dangers of weakness, cowardice and moral arrogance. In other words, of the anti-war movement.

This becomes even clearer two paragraphs later:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.

As can be obviously seen, Eisenhower is hardly a pacifist. He sees the "military establishment", that permanent boogeyman of anti-warriors both past and present, as a "vital element" in attaining America's strategic goals, goals which are altruistic, noble, and of the utmost global import. It proposes, moreover, an indefinite timetable for these goals, and implies that not only current aggressors but potential, other agressors must be taken into consideration as well.

Now we come to the heart of the matter. The following paragraphs compose Eisenhower's primary statement on the "military-industrial complex" and its possible discontents. It is important to display them in full.

Our military organization today bears little relation to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or, indeed, by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.

Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense. We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security alone more than the net income of all United States corporations.

Now this conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual --is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Far from a spluttering malcontent howling at unseen forces of sinister power, what we see here is a naunced, careful discussion well worthy of an aging and experienced statesman at the end of his career. Eisenhower is noting certain necessities: the necessity, and imperative necessity, for the armaments industry, and some elementary and quite sensible concerns about its effect on American society. He states in no uncertain terms that "We recognize the imperative need for this development." In his view, it is something "we have been compelled to create." The reasoning here, seen in historical context, is obvious. The United States has risen to global preeminence, something Eisenhower considers a highly positive development (and which the anti-war movement deplores as imperialism) and therefore cannot risk, for its own sake and for the sake of freedom and peace around the world, to be the isolationist, essentially disarmed nation it was in the past. America can no longer risk, according to Eisenhower, the state of unreadiness that led, for instance, to the early disasters of World War II in the Pacific. It is not unreasonable to imagine that he was also thinking of 1930s Europe, who's unreadiness for war certainly contributed to the policy of appeasement in regards to Hitler. The "military-industrial complex" therefore, is not a sinister plot or a war-mongerer's cabal. It is, rather, an essential "vital element" in maintaining America's position as the world's defender of peace and freedom. It is hardly a surprise that Eisenhower's hijackers regularly ignore this part of his statement and concentrate on what follows as if it took place in a vacuum of history. The vacuum, of course, where they themselves reside.

Eisenhower does indeed render some cautions. They are not, however, criticisms. They are warnings, calls for a measure of reasoned vigilance. He understands that all concentrations of power, and not only military ones, can be a threat to democratic governance. He proposed therefore, that we should "take nothing for granted." This does not, however, imply an abandonment of American hegemony, a return to isolationism, nor a blanket condemnation of American society as inherently manipulated and corrupted. It is, rather, a call for balance. For moderation. For the compromise essential to democracy. Eisenhower does not desire a revolutionary assault, but rather "the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." In other words, Eisenhower calls for the proper use, the proper channeling, of these enormous energies, towards the goals of the American project. Namely, the projection of American power abroad in order to defeat political evil and ensure peace and freedom. Precisely the goals that this document's hijackers consider a manufactured pretense for war profiteering. Eisenhower states the responsibility he places upon himself and his successors in this regard in rather moving fashion

It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.

It is precisely these "supreme goals", as Eisenhower concieves of them, that the makers of Why We Fight, the anti-war movement, and innumerable other scurrilous manipulators of Eisenhower's words wish to thwart. It is precisely this integration that they wish to prevent. It is precisely the victory which Eisenhower desires that they wish to turn into defeat. The fact that they regularly stoop to manipulating, distorting and ultimately violating the words and the creed of a man who stood his whole life against everything they represent in pursuit of this goal tells us a very great deal about what and who we should be cautious of. It may not, in fact, be the "military-industrial complex", but rather the domination of our media and intellectual elite by liars, cowards, and thieves of history that constitutes the greatest danger to our freedoms, to peace, and to the supreme goals of our free society.

The complete text of president Eisenhower's farewell address can be read here.

A Worthy Campaign

2006-12-09T12:29:00.000+02:00

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has started an email campaign in response to thankfully ex-president Jimmy Carter's new anti-Israel screed. Carter, whom I consider the worst president the United States ever had -- and I include such luminaries as Millard Fillmore and James Buchanan in that assessment -- has a long history of loathing for Israel and support for the PLO and other terrorist elements of Palestinian nationalism. I will not even enter into his megalomaniacal insistance on taking total credit for the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, which was, of course, largely worked out beforehand by the real heroes of that agreement, Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin. In a world divided between resistance to totalitarian violence and the sophistry of its collaborators, I do not think that such fetid pathologies as Carter's can safely go unchallenged. I strongly recommend reading the linked page and participating.

Jewish Liberalism/Difficult Freedom

2006-11-26T21:50:00.000+02:00

Alan Wolfe, a professor at Boston College, has added his voice to the unending chorus of hand wringers desperate to identify Judaism not only with mainstream liberalism but as mainstream liberalism. In his article “Free Speech, Israel and Jewish Illiberalism” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Wolfe concentrates, of course, on Israel and the myriad attempts of its attackers to portray themselves as poor, oppressed, and victimized, when they are none of these things, Wolfe constructs a narrative of “Jewish illiberalism” which has nothing whatsoever to do with the Jews and very little to do with liberalism. It has everything to do with the politics of the Diaspora, the failure of liberalism to answer the needs of the Jewish people, and Zionism’s critique of precisely this failure.

Wolfe springs to the defense, for instance, of Tony Judt, who has become the court scribe of liberal triumphalism:

Judt, who once lived in Israel and served in its military, has emerged as a strong critic of a Jewish state. Basing statehood on ethnicity or religion, he wrote in a 2003 article, is an "anachronism." The only possible future for Israel, he said in "Israel: The Alternative," published in The New York Review of Books, is as a binational state. For many Jews, such positions come close to denying Israel's right to exist…

Judt had been invited to speak in October on "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" by a group called Network 20/20, which regularly rents the Polish Consulate in New York as the site for its events. Although the Anti-Defamation League, whose leading officials view Judt as an Israel hater, denies pressuring the consulate to cancel the talk, it acknowledges having made a call inquiring about the event. That conversation, in turn, led the Poles, who tend to be very sensitive on any issues remotely touching on anti-Semitism, to cancel Judt's talk — one hour before it was supposed to take place.

In response to the cancellation, two protest letters were sent off to the ADL's national director, Abraham H. Foxman. One, organized by Norman Birnbaum, an emeritus professor at Georgetown University Law Center, called Foxman's actions "political vigilantism" and labeled Foxman himself "an adversary of our traditions." I did not sign it. As unhappy as ADL's phone call made me, Foxman is neither a person who takes the law into his own hands, as the term vigilante implies, nor, given the ADL's commendable record of combating extremism, un-American.

I shall make only a few specific objections to these paragraphs, but they are important ones. Firstly, to call for a binational state is not only to deny Israel’s right to exist, it is to call for an end to that existence in practical terms. The fact that Judt is considered a “liberal” despite calling for the annihilation of an entire state is rather telling, but not particularly accurate, and we do not need his defenders obfuscating the issue by attempting to relegate it to the realm of the purely theoretical. Judt objects to Zionism in theory, which is an issue for debate, but he also desires its destruction in real life, which is not. Then we are in the realm of life and death and not the amorphous wasteland of ideas. Ideas are important, but there can be an ethics of ideas. There cannot be an ethics of murder. No one has earned the right to destroy nations or peoples. As such, Judt’s cause, however much it may be couched in the language of the innocuous, is outside the realm of which Wolfe is speaking. That is, we are no longer discussing one man’s freedom of speech – a right which has hardly been repressed in any case, Judt having become more famous than he ever was since his call for Israel’s de-Judification – but rather discussing one nation’s existence or non-existence. We have moved, in other words, from words to the concrete. And the concrete has ethics utterly different from those of words. This distinction, lost on Wolfe, as it is on most Americans, being, as they are, far from Israel and far indeed from any of Israel’s immediate dangers, is typical of liberalism’s failure. It reduces the concrete to the word and thus makes sure of its failure.

It is this failure which goes to the heart of liberalism’s hatred of Zionism. Zionism proposes the concrete as an answer to the failure of words. Enough with your good will, says the Zionist, give me ground underneath my feet. This is no small thing, nor insignificant. The Weimar constitution was a model of liberalism at its most sublime and beautiful, the League of Nations a fine ideal, and the French revolution the epitome of liberal utopianism. We may go further back to Christianity’s creed of love for all, the Enlightenment’s ideology of tolerance and debate, the Marxist ideals of solidarity and equality… There is, in fact, no end to this graveyard of modernism, all of it leading, for the Jewish people, to precisely the same place: the Terror. Zionism’s success rests in the fact that it recognized earlier than any other Jewish movement an essential truth about liberalism’s professed ideals: they are completely meaningless. And that, for the Jewish people, this meaninglessness would mean destruction. For liberalism, which adores expansion, and the power that comes with expansion, this simple but undeniable critique, with Auschwitz itself as its ultimate proof, is an existential threat, as all critique is an existential threat to a universalist, and thus imperial, ideology.

It cannot be denied that there is a monstrous side to liberalism. In this, it is not alone, but the nature of this darkness is of the utmost importance. It is simply this: liberalism cannot stop its own expansion, it has no limits. As such, it cannot flinch at the inevitability of madness. When liberalism reaches its limits, it does not stop, it goes mad. We can find expression of this in Wolfe’s own autobiographical musings:

Aside from those who believe that there is no such thing as free speech, most intellectuals can be counted on to oppose efforts at censorship. In my own case, it was the Jewish environment in which I was raised that led me to value free speech and expression. Although I grew up a secular Jew - my bar mitzvah was as pro forma as they come, and after that, I have returned to synagogue only a handful of times - I was spoon-fed a version of Jewish liberalism in which we Jews were always expected to come to the defense of unpopular ideas. When American Nazis announced in 1977 their intention to march in Skokie, Ill. — a town in which one-sixth of the population was related to a Holocaust survivor - the American Civil Liberties Union defended their right to do so, and many of the leaders of and contributors to the ACLU were Jewish. I recall taking considerable pride in the ACLU's actions, not out of Jewish self-hatred, but out of pride in Jewish liberalism.

There is little one can say in response to such complete abandonment of all reason, except to simply point out the obvious: liberalism has created a Jewish culture in which the highest expression of Jewish pride is the defense of those who would, and have, turned them and their children into soap and lampshades. Sometimes ideas are unpopular for very good reason. The fact that many Jews of my generation; in the shadow of the second intifada, 9/11, and Iran’s desperate attempt to emulate precisely these gentlemen in whose defense Wolfe takes so much pride, an attempt which has aroused a similarly impotent response from the doyennes of liberalism; find this brand of “Jewish liberalism” at best archaic and useless and, at worst, suicidal minstrelsy, should come as a surprise to no one.

Even more disturbingly, Wolfe freely admits to the fact that none of the so-called illiberal actions of various Jews and Jewish organizations resulted in any damage whatsoever to the objects of their criticism or any silencing of their ideas. Of course, this is of little consequence to him, as all practical effects apparently are:

Suppression, however, is not the issue; in our open society, it is close to impossible to suppress any idea. The important question deals with intentions, not consequences. In all of the cases I've mentioned, a troubling number of Jews had no intention at all of rushing to defend the rights of people with whom they disagreed, and that alone is cause for concern.

Unfortunately, Wolfe’s litany of the suppressed, Juan Cole, Human Rights Watch, Walt and Mearsheamer’s anti-Israel screed, are not people with whom one simply disagrees. They are people who make charges and practice forms of intellectual violence which violate the basic dignity and pride of the Jewish people. They do so, moreover, through lies, unhinged rhetoric, unfair double standards, and, at times, as in the case of Human Rights Watch, through Orwellian distortions of language which completely devalue human life should said life belong to members of the Jewish nation. To Wolfe, of course, all of this is irrelevant. And it is important to understand why. Because if he can take pride in defending Nazis than there is indeed little he can object to in defending Juan Cole. For Wolfe, the actual agenda of these various figures and organizations is irrelevant. The only thing of any importance is that Jews continue their self-abasement in the name of liberalism, a creed whose goal is their destruction. I emphasize, liberalism seeks to destroy Judaism because it must. Because it cannot stop and will not stop. Jewish particularism, the very existence of the Jewish people as a particular nation, a particular civilization, a particular people, is an affront to liberalism’s universalist imperialism. Judaism and liberalism are opposed not because of Judaism but because of liberalism. Judaism desires to exist and to continue to exist. Liberalism desires to subsume and become everything that exists. The result of this contradiction, and if liberalism is incapable of anything, it is accepting contradiction (Judaism, on the other hand, exists in its contradictions) are fairly plain to see. The primary concern of certain of our intellectuals appears to be, not that liberalism has turned itself against the Jews, but that the Jews are insufficient collaborators in the project of their own sublimation.

One is tempted to simply lament such an impasse, but this will get us nowhere. We should not be seeking merely to analyze but rather to ascend. To move up from the ash heap of liberalism to something new and, perhaps, better. How such an ascension will be accomplished and what its contours and limits will be remains unclear, but its necessity is obvious. It may, in fact, find its basis in precisely the “Jewish illiberalism” that Wolfe so decries. In the ethical particularism and the specified, anti-imperialist form of freedom it embraces. The “difficult freedom” expressed in the works of Emmanuel Levinas. Without it, we may find ourselves with a “Jewish liberalism” in which liberalism has devoured the Jewish, and with it the very rights and freedoms it claims to value and defend. We may, in fact, soon have to choose between “Jewish liberalism” and difficult freedom. When this moment comes, it may be our very illiberalism that saves us from the abyss into which liberalism plunges both its victims and its priests.

New Publication

2006-10-12T18:56:00.000+02:00

I've just published a new article at Azure magazine on French writer Michel Houellebecq. I think you have to register to read it, but its free, so no big deal. Enjoy.

Synchronicity...

2006-10-10T19:47:00.000+02:00

never fails when it comes to leftist antisemitism. Monique Dols, who seems to have become official spokesman for those who initiated the anti-Minutemen Columbia University riot, appears to also have an interesting weakness for antisemitic conspiracy theory.

Witness the following:

There is a concerted campaign to get Massad fired by a number of defenders of Israel, who are threatened by his scholarship and his support for a one-state solution. Bollinger's actions--and the findings of the investigation--give ammunition to the campaign to fire Massad. "This is a part of a nationwide campaign to chill any kind of discourse that interrupts American foreign policy, including Israel and Palestine," Nader Uthman, a teaching assistant who testified to the investigative committee on Massad's behalf, said in a radio interview. "And we're seeing this all over the country."

How this translates into the overwhelming dominance of anti-Israeli sentiment among the nationwide professoriat is not mentioned, nor the fact that support for a one-state solution is, by definition, support for Israel's annihilation as a Jewish state and is, therefore, self-evidently racist and, one might even say, threatening. One could mention the fact that the same Columbia University in question played host to Edward Said, one of the most grossly fascistic intellects of the twentieth century, for decades, or that that it now has a Saudi endowed chair in his honor. But I have already said my piece on the ridiculous assertions by Israel's would be annihilators that they are constantly being silenced by an amorphous establishment (Zionist, Israeli, pro-Israel, neoconservative... every word that is not the real word, "Jew", is drafted into their service as a pesitilent and cowardly lying adjective) even as they toil happily away in the very bastions of that establishment itself. Desperate, in fact, to obfuscate the obvious: that in the post-60's world of academia they are the establishment. It is the unthinkable, that the proleteriat of knowledge I described in my last post dares to question and rebel against their platitudes when they venture into the realm of, say, antisemitism and genocide, that drives them to distraction, as rebellion does to all holders of illigitimate power, and forces them to dispatch their blackshirts in Birkenstocks like the lamentable Miss Dol to slander, lie, intimidate, obfuscate, and, if necessary, silence (yes! that precious fetish of silence!) those who dare to speak the truth.

I am no Columbia professor, but I know Nazism when I see it. Antisemitism, conspiracy theory, strong arm tactics, censorship by violence, the great lie told enough times to become true... The enemies of freedom have progressed nowhere in fifty years, even as they take the name of progress as their innoculant against the terrible possibility of thought.

Cross posted at Kesher Talk.

Asking Tough Questions...

2006-10-10T13:12:00.000+02:00

Cross posted at Kesher Talk.

Alcibides' recent post on Bill Maher and Chris Matthews aroused certain emotions in me. One of them, naturally, was disgust and contempt for the self-martyrdom inherent in Matthews' obvious adoration of himself, but another was a basic sense of things I have felt for a long time: that the advent of liberalism was not so much the triumph of reason and thought as it was a shift in the structures of social and intellectual power, or rather a shift in who holds that power and why. The hierarchy that was once ecclesiastical is now intellectual, the idolatry of faith has been replaced by the idolatry of reason. A decidedly closed and sharply defined reason, and one which is not so much thought as it is property. The question for us, of course, is who claims this amorphous territory, and whether it serves any purpose other than the perpetuation of its own power.

That the media is about power ought to be obvious. Knowledge, goes the aphorism (Foucault's aphorism?) is power. Knowledge, and its dissemination, is the raison d'etre of the media. Such is openly admitted by its practitioners. Their goal, so they tell us, is to enlighten, educate and inform. Each individual, of course, has the capacity to think, and therefore the capacity to educate and inform himself. The key, therefore, for any hierarchy of information, that is, any hierarchy of knowledge, is to lay claim. The pre-liberal order placed knowledge (information) at a distance. That is, on an Aristotelian (or Maimonidean, if we prefer) plain. God, according to the philosophers of faith, is an uber-thought, an all-consciousness or over-consciousness constantly thinking itself. This places knowledge, which is power, beyond the hands of man. In theory, if not always in practice (sometimes never in practice) man was divested of knowledge and therefore of power. Opposed to this, of course, in ecclesiastical terms, was hierarchy. That is, the hierarchy of knowledge and therefore the hierarchy of power. Nonetheless, through the domination (the longest, perhaps, of any philosophy) of Aristotelianism, limits were set on the contours of this domain. As Maimonides theorized, we cannot know what God is, only what he is not. The nature of the hierarchy, at least in Judaism, is therefore negative in nature. The man who knows knows only by virtue of knowing what he does not know. A slightly comical statement, perhaps, but nonetheless essential. It points us to an essential limitation.

The advent of liberalism, with its theory of progress, and especially of progressive knowledge, shattered this barrier. Liberalism, as I have sometimes said before (and I am by no means the first) is essentially imperialistic. It respects no borders, its appetite is infinite. Liberalism consumes (thus, perhaps, it is essential to capitalism). Unlike its predecessor, liberalism exists in an essential contradiction. That is, it presumes a world which is knowable and which progressively becomes more knowable. It proposed, therefore, a world bound by laws which are understandable in human terms. This is a fundamental: liberalism parts from Aristotelianism exactly at the point where Aristotelianism limits power. Liberalism reduces God to knowledge. A knowledge which is limited, demarcated, and complete. A God which is, therefore, conquerable.

This new idolatry (and it is, ultimately, idolatrous) raised several objects of veneration. One is the question. Another is man. Man questions, and by questioning man can know. Knowledge, being finite, can also be absolute. The question, and the willingness to ask, the asking in and of itself, becomes a prayer, an invocation, and an indication of holiness. It created, in other words, a new priesthood, a new definition of the heroic. "Dare to know!" said one of the scions of the Enlightenment. He created, in so saying, a new Achilles. An Achilles whose tragedy was not his arrogance but his lack of courage. The man who knows must dare. He must, in other words, transgress in order to seize.

This new archetype negated that aspect of philosopy considered most important by its ancient practitioners. Knowing what one does not know is no longer an indication of wisdom but an indication of cowardice. To not know is impossible for the courageous. The hero-priests will not and need not accept such limitations. At this very moment, liberalism consumed God. God, who is unknowable, is valueless. Liberalism recognizes only the positive existent. If we cannot know a thing, it is nothing. Literally nothing. God is not dead, He simply is not.

What replaces God is the question. Or, rather, the questioner. The idolatry of man, we must emphasize, is a hierarchical idolatry. It specifies man and seperates him into the questioners and the non-questioners. As in any hierarchy, the essential question is not who knows but rather who rules? In the empire of liberalism, the questioner rules. The question, therefore, ceases to be a means to knowledge and becomes an expression of the will to power. It becomes access, in other words, not to knowledge but to power. And power, of course, is only power if it is power over others. Liberalism, in other words, requires ignorance. It requires non-questioners. It requires, in effect, a proleteriat of knowledge. Those who know, the hero-priests of knowledge who are defined and ordained by the question, cannot exist without those who do not question, or who are believed not to question. Liberalism reversed the ancient dichotomy. The man who knows what he does not know and, more importantly, what is unknowable, is now object. The object, that is, of power.

To return to the world of the concrete, which is the question of the media and the questioners who compose the media as we know it today, we can assert the following: the media is liberal because it composes itself according to the hierarchical structure of liberalism. It undertakes, in other words, the idolatry of the question while annihilating the possibility of an answer. As such, it is a priesthood of questioners. Those who do not ask, or who believe in the question as a means of defining the contours of their un-knowledge, that is, the extent of that which they do not know, are the congregation of supplicants. Their salvation, which can only be through knowledge, is ascertained, decided, and dispensed by this thoroughly modern priesthood. Thus, the "asking of tough questions" is the deciding factor. These questions, of course, do not seek for answers, they do not demand answers. They are, rather, indications of power. Signs, badges, vestments, signifiers of an order. An order defined by the tyranny of the question. The answer, of course, or the impossibility of an answer, has been long since annihilated.

It is important, at this point, to admit to the obvious: hierarchies are inevitable. Human beings organize themselves into structures. These structures are the architectures that makes us human. We cannot escape them without destroying ourselves. Moreover, all hierarchies seek to expand their power. The will to expand and the rebellion against this expansion are endlessly repeatable and are likely to remain so. The question (I am aware of the irony of the word) before us is: does this structure, this hierarchy, serve the good?

I follow Emmanuel Levinas to the good. The good he signified by the ethical relationship. The self facing the other which apprehends the other, face to face, and realizes his ethical responsibility to the other. This recognition, an elementary recognition, based upon the sight of the other and the standing back, the recognition (not necessarily acceptance, acceptance too can be violence) of the otherness of the other, the recognition of the essential space between, is, in itself, the good.

Against this recognition of an ethical Being, an ethical method of Being, liberalism, and its priesthood, whether political or media, cannot stand. Knowledge as power demands knowledge of the other, of the object of power, and therefore the conquest of the other. Liberalism turns the question to a means of oppression. A weapon of subsumation and not recognition. Recognition does not imply knowledge in the liberal sense. Liberalism percieves knowledge as reduction, as breakdown, as the object broken into its constituent parts and therefore devoured. Liberalism cannot serve the good because it cannot know the good. It is incapable of recognition. Mr. Matthews, in his lamentable genuflection before himself, is merely stating a banality born of the essential nihilism at the heart of liberalism's consumption of itself. The question as weapon, as it must, eventually turns (happily) against the one who wields it. Liberalism as a hierarchy of knowledge, cannot, in fact, actually know. To know demands the recognition of the unknown and the unknowable; just as the other, the one who faces us, is essentially unknowable. The "tough question" as it is invoked, is nothing more than a narcississtic adoration of oneself as ejudicator, as a force, as power. The value of the question, and therefore the good; which can only be the recognition of the true question, which is the face of the other before us and its unanswerability, which is the fact that we can know only what it isn't; is assassinated by liberalism, and with it, of course, the good.

Hugo Chavez, Noam Chomsky, and the New York Times All Say Stupid Things

2006-09-23T19:28:00.000+03:00

Apparently, while I was on my two week trip to the States, Noam Chomsky died and was resurrected, prompting a grateful puff piece from the New York Times, which appears to have forgiven Chomsky his innumerable slanders against it over the course of his career. When ideological purity is question, personal insults can always be forgiven. The Times, of course, refers to Chomsky as a "scholar", which, in the realm of politics at least, he most certainly isn't, and then prints a flattering portrait of him surrounded by the books which, judging by the man's own writings, he clearly doesn't read.
At a news conference after his spirited address to the United Nations on Wednesday, President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela expressed one regret: not having met that icon of the American left, the linguist Noam Chomsky, before his death...[Chavez] urged Americans to read one of Mr. Chomsky’s books instead of watching Superman and Batman movies, which he said “make people stupid.”
One could, of course, say that making people stupid is not nearly as evil as making people stupid while convincing them they are, in fact, extremely intelligent and well informed, which is generally the most common effect of reading Chomsky's books. But I digress, since I find it interesting that the Times would refer to a clearly psychotic statement as "spirited". One doubts they grant the same indulgences to the rantings of say, Pat Buchanan or David Duke. Hitler must have been "spirited" too when he made all those marvelous Nuremburg addresses. No amount of insidious propaganda and leftist conspiracy mongering is, apparently, enough to shock the Times. Which is probably why they can print quotes like this with straight face:
Mr. Chomsky said that he would not choose to use the same harsh oratory, but added that the Venezuelan leader was simply expressing the views of many in the world.
This is, of course, describing the man who referred to the Reagan Administration as "Washington sadists", claimed that every American president since World War II could be hanged as a war criminal, that Vietnam-era America was in need of de-Nazification, and that the Jews are a "privileged people" who exploit the issue of antisemitism in order to gain total control over the United States. This, of course, only scratches the surface of the seemingly endless parade of slanderous, violent, insulting, and self-evidently racist statements Chomsky has applied to anyone and everything unwilling to acknowledge his genius. Indeed, in regards to harsh oratory, we should regard Chomsky as the guru and Chavez the dutiful pupil. If the Times had bothered to do any research into Chomsky's previous statements they would know that. Or, perhaps, it is simply a case of what they wish their readers to know and, more importantly, what they wish them not to know.

This would seem to explain the total erasure of such inconveniant facts as Chomsky's defense of Holocaust Denial, his support for the communist governments of Cuba and North Vietnam, including their brutal oppression of their own people, his whitewash of the Khmer Rouge genocide, and the lifelong plethora of lies and evasions he has employed to dismiss or justify these atrocities. As the Times quotes:
“We should look at ourselves through our own eyes and not other people’s eyes,” [Chomsky] said.
This maxim explains a very great deal. It explains how Chomsky can continue his ridiculous charade of moral rectitude in the face of a half-century's worth of blood on his hands, as well as his pathetic and venal assaults on the country which has made him rich and famous as well as, most importantly, allowing him to retain the wealth which lets him live in such rarified confines as Lexington Massachusetts where, as he notes, "I continue to work and write."

At least we can take comfort that Chomsky's unrelenting support for the most murderous and oppressive of political leaders has now been resurrected as farce. If the blubbering clown that is Hugo Chavez is the best fan Chomsky can come up with these days, we all have reason to hope.

The Rage and the Pride

2006-09-16T18:50:00.000+03:00

Orianna Fallaci, one of the few European leftists who grasped the inherent contradiction between supposedly leftist values and Islamic radicalism, and dared to articulate it to her fellows, has passed away. She was furious, violent, rhetorically unhinged, often insulting, and more often right than wrong. The obituraries of the moment downplay her anti-fundamentalist writings in favor of her leftist journalism, as is to be expected, and as she no doubt expected. I choose to remember her for a far more generous and moving moment. During Operation Defensive Shield, she called Ariel Sharon and offered her sympathies for the victims of the suicide attack which had set off the operation. Sharon replied that people had been calling him all day asking about Arafat's welfare, urging him to use restraint, etc, and not a single one had asked about the victims of the attack except for Fallaci. Those who will attack Fallaci as a hateful woman need only this anecdote as response. She was far less hateful in that moment, and far more beautiful and concerned, than the myriad self-described beautiful and concerned souls who are no doubt denouncing her today. Zicharon l'vracha.

Rule of the Mediocre?

2006-08-28T01:06:00.000+03:00

Eitan Haber, a former confidant and advisor of Yitzhak Rabin, has written a scathing article at YNet excoriating Israel's leadership for its wartime failures and blasting Israeli society in general. Some of the article is clearly partisan nonsense, but Haber makes some important points. I don't think the piece can be ignored by anyone concerned for Israel's future.

A national commission of inquiry, if and when it is established, will examine why sandwiches and food rations did not reach the soldiers in Lebanon, where did the water supplies go, and who decided to attack Bint Jbeil in broad daylight.

These are important questions that call for real answers, but they will not explain a far more profound process that the Israeli society has undergone, whose first symptom - and it is only the first - was presently revealed in the war in Lebanon.

We are democratic, are we not? Hence we have sanctified the "popular culture" for years. We rejoiced when the "people" finally made it to the top.

Questions such as, "Are we a democracy?" or "If democracy is the rule of the people and its choice, why not let the 'people' rule?" were answered in Bint Jbail, Ita al-Sha'ab, the military sections of our cemeteries, civil cemeteries, and packed bomb-shelters. The rule of the mediocre brought us where we are today.

We know: this is arrogant, condescending, uptown writing, but as God is our witness - it is not so. Many condescending snobs could be classified as "popular," and all we can do is cry over the lowly who made it to top, and over those who died, and those who are yet to die.

This is an ancient argument. It is at least as old as Plato's Republic and has not changed much over the millenia. It is the simple argument that democracy tends towards the lowest common denominator and, ultimately, rule of the mob. A rule that destroys the talented and the explemplary and rewards demagogury, corruption, and "the rule of the mediocre". I'm not sure what Haber is suggesting here, perhaps a return to the de facto one party rule of Israel's pre-1977 Labor governments, something which would likely not produce the results he desires. One of the many reasons for Labor's ultimate fall was the rise of mediocre and untalented party hacks as a result of Labor's domination, a phenomenon which many believed contributed to Israel's failures in the Yom Kippur War. However, Haber has indirectly hit on something important. It is, I think, less a political than a cultural/economic issue. The problem is not Israeli democracy but Israeli globalization. Israel is probably one of the most globalized economies and cultures in the world. There is little or no opposition to globalization in Israel and, to a great degree, the Israeli fetish for acceptance by the international community has become synonymous with globalized capitalism. This is a quite understandable product of the desire to throw off the seige mentality that formed older generations of Israeli culture and embrace the wider world. I am not an anti-globalist per se, but there have clearly been major and, in some cases, negative cultural developments as a result of it. Haber describes them quite well.

For many years, for an entire generation, we cultivated and sanctified the rule of the mediocre and the nation of hedonists that lagged behind it. No one (almost) bothered to look back. They were all looking forward, at the governing seat and mainly at the wallet, seeking to make money, lots of money, in the shortest possible time, as long as we can, as long as the party is in power.

This is not an inaccurate critique, though it is conciously couched in hysterical rhetoric. The cult of money has certainly made great strides in Israel, and while this has had positive effects, such as making Israel's economy one of the world's most energetic, it has nonetheless had an egregious effect on many aspects of Israeli culture. There is no doubt that there is a hedonistic aspect to Israeli culture which is at odds with Israel's precarious military and political surroundings. Moreover, the replacement of Zionist ideals with the ideals of global capitalism is immensely problematic. For better or worse, Zionism is not a materialist ideology. No one came to the Land of Israel to make money. A system which reduces everything down to its relative monetary value is a threat to Zionism as much as it is a threat to any other non-materialist ideology. It is often surprising how many of Israel's most intensly Zionist leaders, Benjamin Netanyahu springs most immediately to mind, do not understand this problem. Zionism and global capitalism will always be at odds. There is, for instance, no discernable reason for Hebrew to be our national language if the only determinative value is economic growth. Hebrew is essential to Zionism, but it has no value whatsoever in a purely materialist culture. Even more threatening, what is the point of serving in the army or even maintaining an army, at great expense to the economy, in the name of protecting a Jewish state whose Jewish character is totally irrelevent to its economic potential? Put simply, there is none. This is, perhaps, the meeting point of "post-Zionism" and globalization, and it is not unthinkable to see post-Zionism, despite its ostensibly leftist pedigree, as an essential step in Israel's renunciation of Zionism in the name of globalized mediocrity. When McDonald's becomes more recognizable than Herzl's photograph, we are in trouble. One does not have to be a socialist to understand this.

Ultimately, we are facing another in a long line of conflicts between the particularism of Judaism and the universalist values with which this particularism must constantly contend. In the past, Judaism has always managed to maintain a dynamic paradox between its particularism and the universal. Nonetheless, this paradox cannot be effected if the conflict remains unacknowledged and unspoken. Haber, perhaps inadvertantly, has hit on a real problem. To begin to speak of it openly and honestly, and across ideological lines, is essential.

Deconstructing Peace Now

2006-08-24T13:30:00.000+03:00

The excellent writer and blogger Michael Totten, whom I consider a personal friend, is currently writing from Tel Aviv. His latest post narrates his meeting with two Peace Now activists from Kibbutz Shomrat. What they have to say is, to say the least, more than a bit problematic, and points to several essential problems which have kept the Israeli peace movement out of the Israeli mainstream since its inception. Judith has requested a critique, and I happily oblige.

Israel is often thought of, in the West, as an unhinged fanatically right-wing country, like the U.S. on speed. Israel is far more ‘European,’ though, than it is ‘American.’ If Israel were not constantly under fire and constantly embroiled in conflict with eliminationist enemies, Israel would resemble a Jewish France or even Sweden of the Levant. The country was founded by democratic Labor Party socialists, and only rather recently has become more capitalist and complex.

This is not entirely true. Israel has been on the capitalist road since the 1970s, mainly because the socialist model proved incapable of sustaining itself. Israel faced a series of economic crises up to the middle 1980s, when substantial economic liberalization was finally undertaken on a mass scale. Israel's economy, despite its precarious political surroundings, has outdone most of the nations of the European Union over the past two decades. In the abscense of the conflict, I think Israel would be more likely to resemble the likes of Qatar or Dubai - explosively growing economies of the Middle East - than any nation in Europe, with the exception, perhaps, of post-Troubles Ireland.

“Amichai is speaking in the context of Israel,” Yehuda said, “and I can understand that. My feeling goes beyond the spirit of Israeli society only. I see organizations like Hezbollah as a threat to humanity in the same manner, for me, as the settler movement is also a threat. Where you have a nationalism that hooks up with a religious idea, I see only trouble. I’m not willing to discriminate between Jews and Arabs on this score. Not at all.”

This is problematic on two scores, and I say this as a critic of the settler movement. Firstly, Zionism in general is certainly nationalism hooked up with religous ideas or archetypes. Even leftist, Kibbutz movement Zionism clearly takes its sanctification of the land and its ideas of social justice from aspects of the Jewish religion. Secondly, there is an essential and absolute difference between Hezbollah and the settler movement, or even the more extreme religious-national movements such as Kahanism. Namely, Judaism and Zionism are not universalist creeds. Islam and Islamic radicalism are. That is, even at their most extreme, Jewish religious radicals want only the Land of Israel. Islamic radicalism, on the other hand, desires the world. Jewish religious extremism is, in my view, far more dangerous to other Jews than it is to members of other religions and peoples. Judaism's destructive forces tend to be turned inward, against itself. Jihad, on the other hand, is directed both inward and outward, and is thus far more dangerous and, potentially, destructive.

“When there was the Yom Kippur War and the Israeli army was attacked on two fronts we felt that by serving in the army we’re defending our country. But when the intifada broke out and there was the question of masses of Arab women and children throwing stones – that was the war of the rocks – we felt that by serving and trying to oppress the justified anger of the Palestinians from trying to achieve self-determination, that made it much much harder to go into reserve duty. It made us more committed to try to leave both Lebanon and the Occupied Territories. The main goal of the peace movement was to get out of Lebanon and to get out of the Occupied Territories. I was very very active in the struggle to leave Lebanon. I served in Lebanon twice.”

This paragraph points to a particular blindness which has been part and parcel of the Israeli peace movement for many years. Namely, the tendency towards moral absolutism and the concomitant negation of any contrary views as fundamentally immoral. For instance, whether the anger of the Palestinians is justified or not, one must consider the fact that one of the primary motivations of the Palestinian's desire for self-determination is the desire to determine themselves upon the destruction of Israel; or, at the very least, the dismantling of Israel as a Jewish state. In the same way, to leave Lebanon is one thing, to leave it in a manner which will not weaken Israel and its detterance capacity is quite another. The Israeli peace movement has never seemed able to understand these contradictions. Thus, perhaps, its tendency to take to the streets rather than the Knesset. The street erases distinctions and emphasizes the reptilian mind of the amorphous mass, for which slogans are solutions and righteous anger an acceptable replacement for the truncated possibilities of political reality.

“In 1967 Israel just blew it,” Yehuda said. “Ben Gurion said to get rid of those territories. No good is going to come out of it. People were overwhelmed with the victory. I don’t think Israel had a choice. Then we ended up with the territories. Nobody forced us to hold onto that and to start a settlement movement there.”

Ben-Gurion was ambivalent regarding the territories. He certainly thought that they should be returned, but only in exchange for a viable peace agreement, and he assumed this would be made with Jordan and Egypt, not with a Palestinian nationalist movement predicated on the rejection of Zionism. Moreover, he was totally opposed to the division of Jerusalem, something which I believe most of the Israeli peace movement supports. I also don't think Israel "blew it" in 1967. The issue of the territories, in my view, has to be understood within a shifting historical context. In the 60s and 70s, the territories, in my view, served as something like Jabotinsky's "Iron Wall", a military bulwark against Arab agression. This was, after all, an era in which Israel did not have peace with any Arab countries and was under constant terrorist attack and diplomatically isolated due to the apartheid policies against her in the United Nations. In my opinion, the retention of the terroritories has outlived that role and is now more a threat to Israel's existence as a Jewish state than a safeguarding of it.

“You guys,” I said “think the recent invasion of Lebanon was a mistake?”

They both laughed.

“I think that if you ask most Israelis today in retrospect,” Amichai said, “looking at the results after the month, a large majority thinks it was a mistake.”

This isn't entirely true. As far as I can tell from basic observaton, the general feeling here is not that the invasion was a mistake, but rather that it was badly executed and the military-political leadership missed an excellent opportunity to deal Hezbollah a serious military blow. The frustration here is immense, but it is not with the concept of invading Lebanon; rather it is with the Olmert government'a failure of leadership.

“What do you think Israel should have done instead at the beginning?” I said.

“Knowing Hezbollah,” Yehuda said, “there would have been ample opportunities to launch a strike. If the army would have been better prepared, and if the civilian population would have been prepared. What were these people thinking? What were the circumstances that led people into this kind of train of thought that they thought they could get away with this kind of activity being so ill-prepared. Some kind of hubris that goes way beyond, I mean, this is, from my point of view, this whole war and the results thereof have weakened Israel a great deal. And it almost certainly dictates a second round.”

I agree that the military-political leadership was unprepared for the war. However, I think the general population was well ahead of the leadership and was prepared for the war and also for casualties. I agree that Israel has been weakened by the government's failure and there will be a next round, however, no member of the peace movement has the right to stand aside and claim from a distance that Israel suffers from hubris. If anything, it was the hubris of the peace movement, believing we could leave Lebanon in a pathetic fashion, without an agreement and without the hope of international enforcement, wash our hands of the whole situation and not face serious problems down the road. This is one of the more offensive aspects of the Israeli left in general - you can see it most clearly in their reaction to the failure of Oslo - they tend to make irresponsible and moralistic demands and then, when they are enacted, absolve themselves of all responsibility for the results. I think this is one of the reasons that the peace movement has never managed to gain traction among the majority of Israelis, they are simply refuse to be held accountable for their mistakes. Perhaps this is another reason the movement prefers the streets to the ballot box.

“I think my criticism of the Israeli government from the very beginning of leaving the Occupied Territories…was not trying to strengthen the moderates. If Israel would have made gestures of support to Abu Mazen and tried to strengthen the moderate wing and engage with him and give the Gaza Strip back to him rather than not have any negotiations with him, I mean, I cannot understand the logic of that. I mean, they strengthened the radicals who have the glory of kicking the Israelis out of the Gaza Strip. Or out of Southern Lebanon. That’s a stupid way of going about it.”

“But if the moderates are strengthened,” I said, “the radicals haven’t gone anywhere. They still have their Kassem rockets. What do you do with these guys? I mean, you can’t just take rocket hits.”

“No,” Amichai said. “You can’t. You have to strike back. You have to strike back.”

Again, we see that the peace movement bases itself on an essential contradiction. On the one hand, strengthen the moderates. On the other hand, strike back, which weakens the moderates. This is not to mention the fact that any moderate strengthened by Israel is immediately going to be seen as a sell out in the pocket of the Israelis. And again, we see the abdication of responsibility. To a great degree, Hezbollah got the "glory" of kicking Israel out because of the peace movement's constant assertion that the occupation of Southern Lebanon was fundamentally immoral and had to be ended whatever the political consequences. The same in regards to Hamas and Gaza. This is not a reflection on the rectitude of these withdrawals, but one does have a right to demand some recognition of obvious consequences from those who presume to deal seriously with politics and war. It is easy to critique. It is much harder to admit to consequences. I supported the Gaza withdrawal. I believe this withdrawal did embolden both Hamas and Hezbollah and - in the short term - damaged Israel's detterance. There is nothing particularly difficult in admitting to the consequences of one's positions. However, there is something immensely dangerous in the hermetic tendencies of those who cannot, and will not, admit any such thing. Until the Israel peace movement can come down from the dream palace of infallibility it has built for itself, it will continue to be isolated in the impotence of the streets and the comfort of facile sureties.

Aftermath

2006-08-20T13:27:00.000+03:00

I suppose the time has come to write something about the aftermath. Suffice it to say, I am not happy. I stopped posting during the war out of something like frustration married to depression. There did not seem to be much point in opining while scouring the newspapers to see if any of my friends were included in the casualty lists. Thus far, thank God, only one has been wounded, and not critically. This, of course, included the guilt of feeling glad that none of my friends were killed while other's friends were... War is a schizophrenic experience...

No one here thinks this is over and no one here thinks that the war reached a satisfactory ending. Personally, I feel we were very badly led. Olmert announced goals which he did not have the political will to accomplish. The army relied far too heavily on air power at the beginning of the war and did not move quickly enough to use ground forces. When the army did use ground forces, it did so piecemeal and not in force. More than anything else, the war went on far too long. It should have been finished with overwhelming force and as quickly as possible. This did not happen because of Israel's "Lebanon syndrome", the fear of reinacting the war of 1982 and subsequent occupation. This led to the situation in which Olmert declared military goals which he could not achieve without a massive ground invasion. As a result, he shifted his strategy to a political one. In the end, he accepted a cease fire which is unlikely to hold and has given Hezbollah time to rearm. It also places a UNIFIL force in control of the south which may or may not deal with Hezbollah effectively. If they do, Olmert can claim some kind of a victory. If they do not, and this is the most likely scenario, Olmert will have to face total military and political failure and, of course, another war.

In my opinion, the political leadership is running behind the general sentiment of the Israeli people. The general population was prepared for a major war, including a ground invasion. The leadership miscalculated by believing the opposite: that the Israeli people wanted an effective response that did not include a major ground invasion. In the end, this led to the war being long and costly without achieving any major strategic objectives. The government ended up with the worst of both worlds.

Of course, some diplomatic ground has been gained. Hezbollah has taken the lion's share of the blame for the violence and the "international community" (a dubious collective at best) has taken some measure of responsibility for enforcing its own resolutions regarding the disarmament of Hezbollah. These are all just words, however, and it is likely that Israel will soon have to act, rather than talk, in order to safeguard its national security. I think it is very likely that, when the dust settles, it will likely be a new and more rightwing government which undertakes this task.

Nature Balances Itself

2006-08-01T12:18:00.000+03:00

The great anti-Chomskyite Vidal-Naquet may have left us, but nature (or the irony inherent in history) appears to be trying to rectify the imbalance. Mass murdering totalitarian dictator and Chomskyite hero Fidel Castro is apparently gravely ill and has ceded power to his brother, Raul. So much for direct democracy. Chomsky is no doubt deeply saddened, his worst fear, a free Cuba, may soon be a reality. Viva Cuba libre! Viva la counterrevolution!

A Great Anti-Chomskyite Passes Away

2006-07-31T15:01:00.000+03:00

French essayist and historian Pierre Vidal-Naquet, perhaps most famous in the english speaking world for his battle against Holocaust denial and his ferocious denunciation of the good professor's defense of denier Robert Faurisson, has passed away at 76. The english-language press seems not to have noticed. For those of you who read French, here is Le Monde's obituary. For those of you who want a taste of Naquet's brilliance as an anti-Chomskyite, here is his most famous deconstruction of Chomsky's morally bankrupt endorsement of Faurisson.

On Cinema

2006-07-31T14:04:00.000+03:00

The Australian film magazine Senses of Cinema has published an essay of mine on film director Sam Peckinpah. It might make a refreshing change from the endless reports of war. Enjoy.

Judge-Penitents on Parade

2006-07-31T10:07:00.000+03:00

The inevitable cascade of condemnations begins.
The British Independent , for example, published an editorial by Robert Fisk under the title: "How can we stand by and allow this to go on?"

"You must have a heart of stone not to feel the outrage that those of us watching this experienced yesterday. This slaughter was an obscenity, an atrocity yes, if the Israeli air force truly bombs with the 'pinpoint accuracy'' it claims, this was also a war crime," Fisk said.
"Israel claimed that missiles had been fired by Hizbullah gunmen from the south Lebanese town of Qana as if that justified this massacre. Israel's Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked about 'Muslim terror' threatening 'western civilization' as if the Hizbullah had killed all these poor people," he added.

Another British newspaper, the Guardian , also published an editorial titled: "How can 'terrorism' be condemned while war crimes go without rebuke?"

"Washington's partners in this hypocritical war on terror are given free rein to wreak their own brutal, illegal violence. As if we didn't know it already, the conflict in Lebanon shows that truth and war don't mix. All
parties to the tragedy of the Middle East resort to disinformation and historical falsification to bolster their case, but rarely has an attempt to rewrite the past occurred so soon after the fact.

"Israeli ministers and their supporters have justified the bombardment of Lebanon as 'a matter of survival.' Total war has been declared on Israel, so Israel is entitled to use the methods of total war in self-defense. This would be reasonable if it were true, but it isn't. It's completely false.

"The conflict was triggered by a Hizbullah operation in which two Israeli soldiers were captured and three killed. Let's be frank, this wasn't exactly the Tet offensive. It certainly didn't justify Israel's ferocious onslaught against the very fabric of Lebanese society. Yes, the rocket attacks on Haifa are an appalling crime, but they followed rather than preceded Israel's decision to escalate the fighting."
Let us speak of Britain. A country which I admire and to which I am related by blood. A country which once ran the greatest empire in the world. Which invented the term "administrative massacre". Which annihilated villages and killed numerous civilians quelling rebellions from Ireland to Iraq to India. Which gave Ireland the Black and Tans, who responded to IRA terror by massacring civilians in a football stadium. Which has, in other words, acted exactly had Israel has in the past, and worse.

And let us talk of other nations. Of France, for instance, whose actions in the Algerian War make Israeli tactics look like the innocuous play of children. Which responded to the horrendous threat of a Greenpeace protest to its nuclear tests by dispatching its secret service assassins to sink a boat and kill innocent people. Of Germany, we shall not speak. It is not necessary. Perhaps we should mention Russia or China, but that too is unnecessary. Even the history of the United States, lest we forget, has its dark passages.

Or perhaps we should speak of the Arab street, which showed no compunctions about such slaughters as the Munich atrocity, the murder of schoolchildren at Maalot, the hijacking of uncountable airplanes, the suicide bombings of thousands of civilians, a plethora of unprovoked wars whose only cause was genocide.

The outrage of judge-penitents, who condemn the other while exonerating themselves, is an issue beyond sorrow and regret for unnecessary dead. It is an arrestation of truth. The truth that war is random and terrible, and that innocent people die. And that the mere fact of death, and the dealing in death, is not, in and of itself, an indication of absolute moral purity, or corruption. A fact which, in their apologetics for terror and condemnation of Israel's resistance to it, they have themselves silently accepted, and have silently chosen who and what they will exonerate. And who and what they will condemn.

2006-07-29T14:42:00.000+03:00

This is not purely the work of a lone nut. The Islamic genocidists and their leftist supporters have created the atmosphere of hatred and violence which has led to this incident. It will get worse. One cannot echo Hitler's rhetoric without eventually echoing his actions. The Jewish community in America needs to start pointing fingers in the right direction.

Chomsky Back in the Game

2006-07-26T16:01:00.000+03:00

A few posts ago, I wrote:
Perhaps even political evil's foremost apologist has, for the moment, run out of excuses for terrorism and mass murder. Give him some time.
I was right.

In Every Generation...

2006-07-25T22:53:00.000+03:00

Something struck me about the statement by Sheldon Drobney in the previous post. It points, I think, to a generational issue which may be significant regarding leftist antisemitism. It is this:
Most of the anti-Semitism comes from racism and most of the racism I have experienced has come from the far right, not the left.
The first statement betrays only Drobney's total ignorance of the history and development of antisemitism. The second, however, may or may not be actually true (liberals have a remarkable capacity to ignore political evil in their own camp) but it is very telling. Because I, a generation or more younger than Drobney, have had the exact opposite experience. All the racism I have experienced has come from the far left. And not only the far left. A liberal preacher at Boston University, a Unitarian church member, an anti-war activist, a professor of political science, all liberals or leftists, all made unmistakably antisemitic statements to me personally. What I have witnessed vicariously, through the media and my own studies, is equally absolute. Every single one of the public figures and movements I have witnessed making antisemitic statements are from the left. The only right wing antisemitism I have encountered has been from brain-impaired skinheads and the occasional statement by David Duke. I did not and do not consider these an active threat to my existence. Liberal and leftist antisemitism, on the other hand, howls at us from organizations and institutions which are prominent, effective, well-financed and influential. The rabbis said that in every generation our enemies rise again to attempt our destruction. They were right. But they should also have mentioned that quite often they wear new and very different masks.

Liberal Delusions

2006-07-24T10:35:00.000+03:00

Via LGF, a piece of self-congratulatory delusion by Sheldon Drobney, apparently a major financier of Air America:
So my conclusion is that the bloggers who violently hate Israel and see it in black and white terms are not really liberals. They may even be anti-Semites, but they are not representative of the liberal community that was so active in achieving racial and ethnic equality. It is a contradiction for a true liberal to be an anti-Semite. Furthermore, I would not put it past the right wing to flood the liberal blogs with hateful criticisms of Israel to advance a perception that liberals are anti-Israel or anti-Semitic. And I see Karl Rove's fingerprints all over this.
To use layman's terms: bullshit. Antisemitism is not only representative of the "liberal community," it is the essence of liberalism itself. Liberalism is a bid for power first, and an ideology second. Its advocacy of racial and ethnic equality is, in fact, an expression of the imperialism inherent in liberal universalism. Liberalism must expand, its ambitions are total. Its desire is not, in fact, to make all peoples equal, but to make all peoples liberal. Its desire is not to equalize, but to conquer. When peoples are not liberal, they must be destroyed. This is not confined to antisemitism. Witness the brutal and inhuman racism directed at black and Hispanic conservatives. But in the case of the Jews, we have an absolute rejectionism.

The reason is that liberalism must seek to annihilate the Jews because the very fact of Jewish existence is, in the end, a rejection of the metaphysical totalitarianism at the heart of liberalism. Judaism is particular, rooted in place, uncompromising in its pride and its belief in its unique and divinely connected existence. This is called Chosenness. I am at best an agnostic, but I do not deny Chosenness. It is a fact of history. Albert Camus wrote that "a mission exists for any human group which knows how to derive pride and fecundity from its labors and its sufferings." He was speaking of the working class. He could easily be speaking of the Jewish people. This too is Chosenness. In the eyes of liberalism, this is not only offensive, but an existential threat.

This principle was summed up by the avatars of the French revolution, who proclaimed that the glorious new order of reason would grant everything to the Jew as a citizen and nothing to the Jews as a people. In other words, for the Jew who is not a Jew, everything. For the Jew who is a Jew, who willfully embraces the ephemeral architectures that make him a Jew, nothing. The reason is obvious. It is rooted in the essentially destructive nature of liberalism. Liberalism is based on the rejection of all connections or values beyond the material. We are all human beings, we are all flesh and blood, and this is our only legitimate value. The architectures of the past which make us human are demolished by liberalism, and those who hold to them are considered enemies of the one true faith. Thus, liberalism becomes an inquisition dedicated to the reduction of man to the biological. The medieval Inquisition named its justification the immortal soul. Liberalism calls it equality. It is still, ultimately, only another name for the will to power. And the destruction of those who would stand in the way of its absolute consummation.

2006-07-23T12:28:00.000+03:00

An extraordinary lineup of genocidal Islamic racists and their leftist supporters taking to the streets to call for our annihilation is up at LGF.

It Was Only a Matter of Time

2006-07-22T13:05:00.000+03:00

...before the good professor chimed in. Once again, he's being "interviewed" by psychotic pseudo-journalist/corrupted abuser of taxpayer funds Amy Goodman on her show Democracy Now! I'd love a show called Defund Pacifica Radio Now! but I'm sure that wouldn't be high on Miss Goodman's list of priorities. Robbing the American taxpayer is always preferable to democracy if you're the one getting paid.

At any rate, even Chomsky can't seem to bring himself to defend Hezbollah with any passion. His embrace of its leaders just a short time ago seems to have lost its charm. Who knew? Of course, he does manage to blame it all on Israel.
NOAM CHOMSKY: Yeah. Well, he's correct that hundreds of rockets have been fired, and naturally that has to be stopped. But he didn't mention, or maybe at least in this comment, that the rockets were fired after the heavy Israeli attacks against Lebanon, which killed -- well, latest reports, maybe 60 or so people and destroyed a lot of infrastructure. As always, things have precedents, and you have to decide which was the inciting event. In my view, the inciting event in the present case, events, are those that I mentioned -- the constant intense repression; plenty of abductions; plenty of atrocities in Gaza; the steady takeover of the West Bank, which, in effect, if it continues, is just the murder of a nation, the end of Palestine; the abduction on June 24 of the two Gaza civilians; and then the reaction to the abduction of Corporal Shalit. And there's a difference, incidentally, between abduction of civilians and abduction of soldiers. Even international humanitarian law makes that distinction.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what that distinction is?

NOAM CHOMSKY: If there's a conflict going on, aside physical war, not in a military conflict going on, abduction -- if soldiers are captured, they are to be treated humanely. But it is not a crime at the level of capture of civilians and bringing them across the border into your own country. That's a serious crime.
And that's the one that's not reported. And, in fact, remember that -- I mean, I don't have to tell you that there are constant attacks going on in Gaza, which is basically a prison, huge prison, under constant attack all the time: economic strangulation, military attack, assassinations, and so on. In comparison with that, abduction of a soldier, whatever one thinks about it, doesn't rank high in the scale of atrocities.
Not a word, of course, about the Kassams which have been fired on a daily basis from Gaza into Israeli towns, such as Sderot, where one of my best friends lives. Nor the fact that these missiles have been fired for years without a significant Israeli response. Nor the fact that the very presence of Hezbollah on the northern border is a violation of international law and UN Resolution 1559, which has yet to be enforced. International law, it seems, is only of interest to Chomsky when it serves his purposes. Chomsky's breezy dismissal of Iranian involvement in this, despite the use of Iranian missiles by Hezbollah, is hardly surprising. The good professor, as I have noted below, seems determined to allow Iran the time to develop nuclear weapons whatever the cost. Chomsky's denials regarding the Iran-Syra connection are especially fascinating, since this connection is common knowledge in Lebanon and the Arab world at large. The only groups, in fact, who are bothering to deny it are Iran, Syria, and the Western left. Chomsky appears to abrogate to himself the right to engage in pro-Arab propaganda even when it is not pro-Arab, that is, even when the Arab states themselves reject it. No one, it appears, who murders Israelis or Americans can possibly be guilty of anything.

One must assume that Chomsky is citing the instance of kidnapping civilians to refer to Israel's Hezbollah prisoners. This is apparently, the crime "that's not reported", due no doubt to the extraordinary powers of the Zionist conspiracy. Of course, if Hezbollah's war against Israel is legitimate, as Chomsky claims, then those are prisoners of war and not kidnapped civilians. If Hezbollah's war is not legitimate, than Hezbollah is a terrorist organization and, again, Israel's taking of prisoners is legitimate. To Chomsky, of course, the taking of Hezbollah prisoners is illigitimate because it was done by Israel. When adhering to racist double standards one really ought to have the courage to admit to it and not hide behind facile and cowardly pretensions to a hypocritical universalism.

Chomsky is, of course, correct that abducting civilians is different from abducting soldiers. Abducting soldiers is a casus belli, a case for war. To acknowledge this, "whatever one thinks about it", would, of course, demand that Chomsky acknowledge the legitimacy of Israel's military operations. Including those undertaken before the missile attacks. Attacks which are, since they deliberately target civilians, also a blatant violation of international law. Instead, we must be satisfied, it appears, that, like mass murder on the part of leftist regimes, Chomsky considers abducting soldiers to be "not high on the list of atrocities."

Still, it is telling that despite Chomsky's recent hugs and kisses with the Hezbollah leadership, he spends most of his time talking about Gaza. An issue which is, to say the least, not of great significance at the moment. Perhaps even political evil's foremost apologist has, for the moment, run out of excuses for terrorism and mass murder. Give him some time.

2006-07-21T09:17:00.000+03:00

The major ground operations seem to have started.
The clashes occurred as the IDF significantly expanded its ground operations in southern Lebanon on Thursday, sending in thousands of troops. Air assaults against Hezbollah targets also continued throughout the day.
And we didn't get Nasrallah yesterday. Here's the proof, courtesy of LGF.

Kofi Annan really needs to return that Nobel Peace Prize. Its becoming embarrassing for all involved.

2006-07-20T13:39:00.000+03:00

There's an article in today's Yediot Acharanot that I can't seem to find online. It has some pretty extraordinary statements that have apparently been coming into the foreign ministry from various secret channels. These are reportedly messages that have come in from Arab countries that do not have formal diplomatic relations with Israel, in my loose translation:

From an unnamed Arab ruler:

"I support your actions in Lebanon felt the need to inform you at this hour. You must continue to the end. Many in the Arab world support you." (Literally: "Many sources in the Arab world clasp fingers with you.")

Others:

"Continue your military attacks until you erase Hezbollah."

"You will do a great good to Lebanon and to the entire region if you assassinate Nasrallah."

"All who define themselves as moderate clasp hands with you."

"Only Israel has the courage to stand against this man [Nasrallah]."

How accurate any of these are, I don't know. But according to foreign ministry officials quoted in the article they are not surprising or unusual. Curiouser and curiouser, as they say.

War Upends Us

2006-07-20T10:59:00.000+03:00

And everybody else, apparently. Check this out:

Without mentioning Hezbollah by name Saudi Arabia blamed certain “elements” inside Lebanon for the violence with Israel and said “it is necessary to make a distinction between legitimate resistance and uncalculated adventures adopted by certain elements within Lebanon without the knowledge of legal Lebanese authorities.” While reiterating its support for Palestinian and Lebanese resistance against Israeli occupation, Saudi Arabia has clearly said it is against irresponsible adventures undertaken by certain elements in the region without consulting the legal authorities putting all Arab nations at risk. The Kingdom has also said “these elements must take responsibility for their irresponsible actions and they alone should end the crisis created by them.”

This angry response from Saudi Arabia has politically isolated Hezbollah and Hamas besides holding them responsible for their actions. This attitude of Saudi Arabia, which has been doing all it can to protect the Arab world from Israeli aggression, is enough to unmask the adventurers, who have violated the rights of their own countries and tried put their people under the guardianship of foreign countries like Iran and Syria. A battle between supporters and opponents of these adventurers has begun, starting from Palestine to Tehran passing through Syria and Lebanon. This war was inevitable as the Lebanese government couldn’t bring Hezbollah within its authority and make it work for the interests of Lebanon. Similarly leader of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas has been unable to rein in the Hamas Movement.

Unfortunately we must admit that in such a war the only way to get rid of “these irregular phenomena” is what Israel is doing. The operations of Israel in Gaza and Lebanon are in the interest of people of Arab countries and the international community.

From the Arab Times of all places. Is it possible that the "Arab street" is finally getting tired of its dream of wiping us out? Or is this simply the natural schizophrenia of war?

2006-07-19T12:54:00.000+03:00

One soldier was killed today in a ground incursion into southern Lebanon. The ground phase seems to have begun. Zicaron l'bracha.

The Ghetto of History

2006-07-19T10:20:00.000+03:00

A great many voices have been raised in anger over this article by Richard Cohen in which he refers to Israel as a historical mistake. Cohen does not strike me as a hater of Israel. Most of the rest of the article is fairly supportive, but he has clearly accepted a mythology of sorts. A mythology based primarily in an Arab supremacist (or Muslim supremacist, if you prefer) reading of history. The basic premise lies in his opening paragraph:
The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.
This is, of course, a mythology which has, at times, been echoed on the Israeli left and among the "New Historians", such as Benny Morris. It is, nonetheless, wholly racist and rather obviously so.

The mythology states, in effect, that there is no history but Arab history. There is no history but Muslim history. Zionism (and Zionism is what he is talking about here) is an alien force. A bizarre, demiurgical act of violence against the natural development of human events. I must emphasize the artificiality of this mythos. History is not natural. That is, the very idea of history as a natural development, operating under reasonable and autonomous rules, is itself a human creation. It is the Kantian a priori we require to understand the chaotic reality of events. As soon as this architecture of thought takes on the aspect of divinity, and this is what Cohen grants to it, it becomes a weapon, and not a means of knowledge.

What Cohen has accepted is a history as a weapon. A mythos as a weapon. This architecture denies Zionism because it must. Because if history is Arab, or history is Muslim, then history cannot also be Jewish. That is, there cannot be a history of the Jewish people or a Jewish people which acts within history and upon which history acts. This denial ends in the exile of Zionism. In an apartheid history which creates a metaphysical ghetto whose doors are locked upon the Jewish people. We are made unnatural, alien, and perverse. A mistake.

I know what Zionism is. It is difficult to express and even more difficult to explain. I leave it to better writers than myself. Over half a century ago German-Jewish intellectual Walter Benjamin, on the eve of his suicide in the face of inevitable Nazi capture, wrote the following:
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
This storm is also Jewish history. And the Angel's desire, the desire to awaken the dead, to make whole the catastrophe, this is Zionism. It is the structure of catastrophe formed by these ever mounting debris which makes our history, which demands a reckoning with those who would deny us. Who would return us to the ghettos of history. It is this denial, this rape of history in the name of history, which finds its expression in the mythology which Mr. Cohen has so lamentably chosen to accept.

2006-07-18T18:20:00.000+03:00

Read Kishkushim for real time updates from Haifa.

2006-07-18T18:17:00.000+03:00

There's a major wave of missile attacks across the north at the moment. It looks more and more like ground forces are going to have to be deployed to deal with this.

2006-07-17T16:36:00.000+03:00

Just caught a clip of Bush and Blair talking on Channel Two. They didn't know they were being filmed and the results were truly marvelous. Quoth George Bush:
If they just stop Syria from doin' this shit its all over.
Yeah. I really like that guy.

2006-07-17T14:28:00.000+03:00

Fox News just reported that the IDF has entered southern Lebanon. Israeli Channel Two is not reporting this at the moment. I'll keep you posted.

UPDATE:
So far none of the Hebrew media is reporting this. I'm inclined to think its false.

UPDATE:
Apparently there was a brief incursion today but no major ground forces were deployed.

2006-07-17T11:04:00.000+03:00

One of the worst things about this current situation (among many) is the anti-Hezbollah Lebanese who are caught in the middle. This blog has some very tough commentary by a liberal Lebanese writer. He's plenty mad at us right now and I would probably feel the same way if I was in his shoes. I wish people like him had the political power to change the situation, but they don't. Someday, I hope they will. Many times, Israel has to act as if it has no friends. I pray that after this is over some of the connections between Israel and liberal Lebanese, and liberal Arabs all over the Middle East, can be repaired. Ultimately, that is the only real hope for this region. As the poet said: "Peace comes dripping slow." At the moment, we fight. Tomorrow...

2006-07-17T11:00:00.000+03:00

Here's an interesting interview with Natan Sharansky, one of the more extraordinary human beings alive today (you try surviving seven years in a Soviet jail). He thinks that Israel has a very short window of opportunity to destroy Hezbollah before world opinion forces us to stop. I'm not entirely convinced of that, since I think Hezbollah is just dumb enough to keep attacking us until they're completely crippled by our retaliation. However, the increasing outcry about the damage being done to Lebanon will be a major political factor. He has some very interesting things to say about the contrast between Olmert and Sharon. I'm not sure I agree with all of it, but he knew both men, so don't take my word for it.

2006-07-16T19:06:00.000+03:00

According to Israeli Channel Two at least two of the workers killed this morning in Haifa were Israeli Arabs. Apparently, Hezbollah isn't only a gaggle of pestilential fanatics, they're also incredibly stupid.

2006-07-16T18:26:00.000+03:00

My friends over at Kishkushim have moment by moment updates on the missile attacks in Haifa. Take a look.

A Moment of Clarity at the UN

2006-07-15T10:15:00.000+03:00

Courtesy of Kesher Talk and Vital Perspective, here is Israel's UN Ambassador Dan Gillerman telling it like it is before the reprehensibles of that highly lamentable organization. Its an extraordinary statement and I fully recommend sending it to as many people as you can. I reproduce it here in full:

Thank you, Mr. President. Mr. President, let me take you back to a warm summer's day in Beirut 32 years ago -- exactly this very significant day for you and your people -- the 14th of July, 1974. I want to describe the scene to you and to my Lebanese colleague. Cafes and bars bustling with young people, beaches filled with happy holiday-makers -- the Switzerland of the Middle East.

How different this scene is from the one on Beirut streets today, 32 years later. But this difference did not start this week or last year. The difference started only one year after the scene I just described, in 1975, when the Lebanese began their long dissent into oppression, depression and terror. This is a country that has been held hostage for more than 32 years by tyrants from the north and terrorists in the south, a country whose fun-loving, business-minded entrepreneurial and liberal population has been tormented by decades of oppression, sectarian strife, fundamentalist violence, religious conflict, Syrian control, political assassinations, terror, and full- fledged civil war...

In May 2000, Israel took the painful and politically difficult decision to fully withdraw from southern Lebanon, having been compelled a few years earlier to establish a security zone there in order to prevent terrorist attacks and rocket-shelling from Lebanon into Israeli towns and villages. This council acknowledged Israel's complete withdrawal from southern Lebanon and its full compliance with Security Council Resolution 425 in a presidential statement on June 18th, 2000.

This was Lebanon's moment of truth. Would its government look inward and free its people from the stranglehold of terror, or would it allow its territory to become a base from which Hezbollah terrorists would launch attacks against Israeli civilians.

Tragically, Mr. President, the Lebanese government chose the latter.

The Lebanese government got a second chance after the partial implementation of Security Council Resolution 1559, which resulted in the withdrawal of most Syrian forces from Lebanese territory. Again, this council and the entire world were waiting to see how Lebanon would respond to this historic opportunity. Yet again, unfortunately, the Lebanese government chose to succumb to terror rather than vanquish it, to let its southern region be occupied by terrorism rather than disarm it, and to relinquish control over its country rather than exercise its full sovereignty.

Seldom before has the description of a people as never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity been so apt. Lebanon sadly did not heed the demands of the international community and did not obey the repeated resolutions of this aghast council. Today, sadly, the Lebanese people are burying the costs of this inaction and ineptitude.

Mr. President, two days ago Hezbollah terrorists, operating with impunity in southern Lebanon, unleashed a sudden and unprovoked attack into Israeli territory. Scores of Katyusha rockets rained down on Israeli towns and villages, causing many civilian casualties. In the midst of this horrific assault, Hezbollah terrorists infiltrated Israel, killing a number of soldiers and kidnapping two more, who were taken deep into the terrorist stronghold of southern Lebanon. Israel had no choice but to react, as would indeed any other responsible, democratic government.

Having shown unparalleled restraint for six years while bearing the brunt of countless attacks, Israel had to respond to this absolutely unprovoked assault, whose scale and depth was unprecedented in recent years.

Let me emphasize this indisputable fact -- Israel's actions were in direct response to an act of war from Lebanon. Although Israel holds the government of Lebanon responsible, it is concentrating its response carefully, mainly on Hezbollah strongholds, positions and infrastructure.

The hundreds of Katyusha rockets fired from Lebanon in the last few days demonstrate the magnitude of the immense arsenal of rockets and weapons that Hezbollah has amassed over the last few years, a danger we have repeatedly warned against. Many of the long-range missiles that have hit Israeli towns, including Nahariya, Safed, Rosh Pina, and the port city of Haifa, were launched from private homes, with families residing inside, where a special room was designated as a launching pad, with a family playing host to the missile. This is yet another example of the cynical and brutal way the Hezbollah organization uses civilians as human shields, with complete disregard for human life.

Mr. President, over the last 48 hours, more than 500 Katyushas and mortar shells were fired into the northern part of Israel, killing two civilians and wounding hundreds more, among them women and children. Israeli civilians and eight soldiers have been killed, hundreds have been wounded.

It is very important for the international community to understand that while Hezbollah executes this vicious terrorism, it is merely the finger on the bloodstained, long-reaching arms of Syria and Iran. Hezbollah, together with Hamas, Syria and Iran, comprise the world's new and ominous axis of terror, an infamous club -- infamous club, the entry fee to which is the blood of innocents and the terrorizing of the entire world.

Membership to this club requires an unfathomable capacity for evil. The president of Iran has repeatedly denied the Holocaust, while gleefully preparing the next one. Many of the long-range missiles fired into Israel in recent days were Iranian missiles, made by the same regime that is now trying to possess nuclear weapons, the same region that is funding Hezbollah to the sum of $100 million a year.

Do we dare to ask ourselves how many families in Lebanon today are being prepared to house dirty bombs and other weapons of mass destruction courtesy of Iran?

Syria, another member of this club, is a well-known protector and financier of terrorist organizations, playing host to them in its capital, Damascus. The Syrian government, which still regards Lebanon as "southern Syria," works ceaselessly to undermine all efforts towards a peaceful future in the region.

Lebanon is today occupied by terror, whether in the south, where it is directed at Israel, or in Beirut, where it kills opponents of Syria and former prime ministers. The real occupying power in Lebanon is terror, terror instigated by Hezbollah, but initiated, funded and perpetrated by Syria and Iran.

The Lebanese government, having missed so many chances in the past, at such a horrendous cost to its people, today has another chance to free itself from the stranglehold of terror, another chance, Mr. President, to release itself from the evil control of Syria and the deadly influence of Iran, and deploy its forces in the south, exercising its sovereignty over a free Lebanon.

Mr. President, there are words that speak far louder and clearer than anything I can voice today. These are voices of Lebanese -- brave, patriotic Lebanese parliamentarians and ministers who, just over the last two days, have cried out to all of us from the brink of the abyss in their beloved country. Let me quote some of these courageous statements to you.

The words of Lebanon's communications minister, Mr. Marwan Hamadeh, only yesterday saying that -- and I quote -- "Damascus gives the orders, Iran supplies the equipment, Israel reacts, and Lebanon is the victim."

Or the words of Alias Attala (sp), a Lebanese politician representing the majority of its parliamentary members, and I quote, "We welcome any Arab and international support, but strongly oppose any enforced involvement of Lebanon by regional players' considerations" -- a reference to Syria and Iran -- "that are not within the interests of the Lebanese people, for the sole attempt to achieve opportunistic benefits at the expense of the Lebanese people. The Syrian regime indulges itself in teaching Lebanon and Palestine lessons according to its own interests through these peoples. Why do those who always protect their regime express understanding of its reasons and preferences and do not express any understanding of Lebanon's reasons and preferences?"

Or the words of an unnamed Lebanese minister who said, again only yesterday, and I quote, "The Hezbollah has not only kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, it has taken the whole of Lebanon hostage," end quote.

Mr. President, with your permission I would like to make a personal appeal to my esteemed Lebanese colleague.

Your Excellency, you know deep down that if you could you would add your own brave voice to those voices of your brave compatriots and colleagues. You know deep in your heart that if you could you would be sitting here right next to me right now because you know that we are doing the right thing, and that if we succeed, Lebanon will be the beneficiary. And I believe that most members around this table, as well as many in this chamber, including our neighbors, realize this reality.

Mr. President, this council and the international community have a duty today to help the Lebanese people achieve the goal of a free, prosperous, democratic Lebanon. The sad and tormented life of this war-torn land has today entered another sad chapter in its history. It is up to every one of us to help right this chapter to ensure that this opportunity is seized not only for the benefit of the Lebanese and Israeli people, but for the sake of generations to come.

Thank you, Mr. President.

2006-07-14T09:30:00.000+03:00

The Guardian's coverage seems pretty typical. Almost the entire article deals with Shia supporters of Hezbollah and their "defiance" of Israel (which involves supporting unprovoked acts of war like kidnapping soldiers). Other groups are mentioned as if in passing and then only to note that they're fleeing the country. From this article you'd never know that the majority of Lebanese are not supporters of Hezbollah. Hezbollah was, after all, the only political group in the country which opposed the Syrian withdrawal, an issue which brought thousands of Lebanese into the streets. Apparently, the only voices worth mentioning are those which hate Israel and support acts of terrorism. This is the Arab world according to the Guardian. And I thought they were anti-racist...

2006-07-14T09:14:00.000+03:00

Ha'aretz has the details on the overnight attacks in Lebanon. Things were extremely tense yesterday. The newspapers all had "WAR" as their headline in massive block letters along with pictures of the dead and kidnapped soldiers. News kept trickling in all day about more attacks in the north, culminating in the rockets that hit Haifa, which is a major escalation on the part of our friends across the border. The worst part was waiting to see what our response would be, so now that its happened things may calm down a bit. I don't think the Lebanese government has the power or the will to stop Hezbollah on its own, so Nasrallah would seem to have overplayed his hand. He doesn't seem to realize that the possibility of the Lebanese army de-escalating the situation was his only chance to get out of this moderately intact. Big Pharaoh has some very interesting commentary from our fellow anti-Chomskyites in the Arab world. I wouldn't be shocked to see major Israeli ground incursions into southern Lebanon over the next few days. Oddly enough, the silent majority of Lebanese who don't support Hezbollah may not be too unhappy with this. I await the "international community"'s inevitable condemnation.

Hitting the Fan

2006-07-12T21:32:00.000+03:00

The you know what is flying thick and fast these days. Michael Totten, it appears, is prescient. I'm not sure what is going to happen now, but major operations in the north and in Gaza are certainly on the agenda. Seven soldiers were killed this morning and two kidnapped. The IDF has been retaliating along the northern border all day. A major reserve call up is underway. That usually indicates a large scale operation in the making. Meanwhile, Gilad Shalit is still in the hands of God knows who and they are likely doing things to him neither you nor I wish to contemplate. A boiling point is coming. What the response will be, I don't know. The world seems have grown somewhat bored with bashing Israel on a constant basis, and may have moved on to some other, more fashionable whipping boy. We can only hope. One thing is certain: the situation is bad and its about to get a lot worse.

The Obvious Ignored

2006-07-04T11:45:00.000+03:00

The Good Professor has recently weighed in on the side of appeasement (of course) in relation to Iran and its prospective nuclear weapons program. The text is rather chilling, and well worth examination, if only for an abject lesson in academic double-talk. As per usual, Chomsky asserts that everything is the fault of the United States. A near-meltdown seems to be imminent over Iran and its nuclear programmes.

Before 1979, when the Shah was in power, Washington strongly supported these programmes. Today the standard claim is that Iran has no need for nuclear power, and therefore must be pursuing a secret weapons programme.

Thirty years ago, however, when Kissinger was secretary of state for President Gerald Ford, he held that "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran’s economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals". Last year Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post asked Kissinger about his reversal of opinion. Kissinger responded with his usual engaging frankness: "They were an allied country."
Chomsky, of course, loathes Henry Kissinger as only a Jewish antisemite can loathe another Jew; especially when said Jew manages to be successful in precisely the arena in which the antisemite has the most unjustified and yet vociferous pretensions to expertise. We are bound to point out the rather obsequious obvious: Namely, that anyone in their right mind wishes an allied state to be stronger than an enemy state. And that, moreover, to ensure such a situation is the sworn duty of any Secretery of State. Chomsky, as ought to be clear, desires America's enemies to be stronger than its friends, since such an imbalance holds out the possibility of America's destruction. But, as with all courageous intellectuals who speak truth to power, he lacks the courage to say that openly. This refusal to acknowledge blatent implications extends to the most salient of Chomsky's denials: the nature of the Iranian regime.
Iranians are surely not as willing as the West to discard history to the rubbish heap. They know that the United States, along with its allies, has been tormenting Iranians for more than 50 years, ever since a US-UK military coup overthrew the parliamentary government and installed the Shah, who ruled with an iron hand until a popular uprising expelled him in 1979.
There was, of course, an undeniable popular uprising against the Shah. There was also a coup d'etat on the part of a theocratic minority that destroyed all collaborators in the uprising excepting itself and installed a totalitarian Islamist government. Chomsky rather desperately erases this essential event. In fact, Chomsky spends a total of seventeen paragraphs explicating his stentorian opinions on the Iran nuclear crisis without mentioning even once the nature of the Iranian regime. This is an omission of convenience, no doubt, but it is so immense in its implications that omission becomes a meaningless evasion: it is, in fact, a despicable and extraordinary lie. It is an essential lie, however, as it allows Chomsky to evade, for instance, the series of protests which have intensified over the past several years against the Iranian regime. All brutally put down by its theocratic rulers and completely ignored by self-styled guardians of human rights such as Noam Chomsky. But its true meaning is as a granting of indulgences to what inevitably follows.
There are ways to mitigate and probably end these crises. The first is to call off the very credible US and Israeli threats that virtually urge Iran to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent. A second step would be to join the rest of the world in accepting a verifiable Fissban treaty, as well as ElBaradei’s proposal, or something similar.
It is, of course, pointless to mention that it is not Israel which has threatened Iran but quite the opposite. Indeed, violating every principle of Chomsky's precious international law (which is, for Chomsky, merely a tool of his own hypocrisy) Iran has threatened Israel with genocide. Chomsky generally claims to disapprove of genocide, although we must grant that he shown himself remarkably sanguine on the subject so long as the correct ethnic/religious/political group is being slaughtered. We all, apparently, have our little contradictions. Nonetheless, this deliberate ommission clearly does not strengthen his case. In fact, it rather ungenerously points to its absurdity. A man with a good case to make does not need to engage in lies in order to justify it. Chomsky, as per usual, admits the paucity of his opinions by way of the method by which he justifies them. Such is the cost of an engaging lack of frankness.

Nor are we prone to granting much credence to Chomsky's other proposals. He claims, for instance, that negotiations will be sufficient to allieviate the crisis. This ignores, of course, the apocalyptic nature of Iran's ruling ideology, as well as the precedents of history. Chomsky's legendery genius has apparently failed to appreciate the example, for instance, of North Korea, which made several "good faith" agreements regarding its nuclear program only to announce (as any anti-Chomskyite could have predicted) that they had violated them all and produced nuclear weapons. At which point, of course, there was nothing anyone could do about it short of nuclear war. This is, apparently, and despite his claimed horror of nuclear apocalypse, of little concern to Chomsky. The capacity for Armageddon appears to be of little consequence to Chomsky so long as it is in the correct hands. In the hands, that is to say, of those who are enemies of the United States and are therefore prone to attempting to use said capacity against the America Chomsky loathes. Or the Israel Chomsky loathes. The two countries are, in any event, almost interchangeable in Chomsky's mind.

What all this blubbering points us to, however, is a true intention. What Chomsky wants for Iran is not a peaceful solution (because he obviously knows, judging by his deliberate omission of it, that the nature of Iran's regime precludes the possibility of a peaceful solution) but time. Which is, of course, precisely what Iran is playing for. Chomsky wants talks without threat of sanction and agreements with no possibility of enforcement. Without the credible threat of military consequences, such would be the conditions of any talks or agreements. What this amounts to, in other words, in the case of Iran is several more years in which to develop its nuclear program. Chomsky is either a fool (which he may well be) or he knows this already. If the latter is true, then we may assume that Chomsky's role is not that of observer but that of collaborator. What he desires is, essentially, to do everything possible to insure that nuclear powers hostile to the United States and Israel, governed by regimes mad enough to make use of said nuclear power, will come into existence with as little harassment as possible. Hegemony or survival indeed.

Declare Victory and Leave

2006-06-24T15:30:00.000+03:00

The total failure of one's life's work is a terrible thing for an old man to contemplate. For Noam Chomsky, who has spent a lifetime advocating the annihilation of the American political and economic system, it must be especially galling to contemplate a United State which is simultaneously farther than it has ever been from his vaguely articulated but nonetheless passionately held visions of leftist utopia and the most powerful political-military-economic entity in human history. The fact that this situation is unlikely to change anytime in the near future must be even more sobering a topic for the good professor's incontinent musings. The Roman empire, after all, lasted some eight hundred years, and the United States has already proven itself superior to the ancient hegemon in terms of both political stability and capacity for adaptation. Chomsky's response to this rather depressing existential state of affairs, namely that the United States and not Noam Chomsky has won the battle for history rather decisively, has resulted in what may be the most spectactular of Chomsky's long series of leaps off the deep end. He has, apparently, now dedicated himself to expounding the thesis that the United States is, in fact, a "failed state." The fact that this assertion is an absurdity of Biblical proportions does not make it any less fascinating. It seems to be a manifestation of that not particularly constructive suggestion made by certain moderate opponents of the Vietnam War back in Chomsky's heyday: declare victory and leave. An edifying solution, no doubt, but not one likely to have much effect on reality, historical or otherwise.

Chomsky articulates his dissent from the real world in a lengthy but fascinating interview with Amy Goodman of the publicly funded radio program Democracy Now!. Miss Goodman appears to be a combination of the worst features of the bad journalist and the psychopath. Which, of course, makes her the perfect choice for a Chomskyite interviewer. Chomsky would, of course, never allow himself to be interviewed by anyone else, such is the measure of his moral courage. The title of Miss Goodman's program must be taken as a subtle attempt at satire, since democracy would of course, demand that Miss Goodman cease robbing the American taxpayer at proverbial gunpoint in order to enrich herself making a program which, in a free market system, would not be capable of existence itself, let alone profitability for its authors. Miss Goodman is, after all, despite her ostensible concerns for social justice, a very unjustly wealthy woman.

The interview is, of course, less an interview than a glorified version of what is called the "teach-in." That is, it is several passionately uncritical adolescent minds contemplating the visage of their all-knowing guru from a rather low vantage point - that is to say, his feet. The less said about such exercises, the better. Suffice it to say, they are unconducive to critical thought, or anything else for that matter. Nonetheless, they do serve to stroke the ego of failed intellectuals.

Chomsky explains his basic assertion with his usual attempts at the rhetorical invocation of self-evidence:
The U.S. increasingly has taken on the characteristics of what we describe as failed states. In the respects that one mentioned, and also, another critical respect, namely the -- what is sometimes called a democratic deficit, that is, a substantial gap between public policy and public opinion. So those suggestions that you just read off, Amy, those are actually not mine. Those are pretty conservative suggestions. They are the opinion of the majority of the American population, in fact, an overwhelming majority. And to propose those suggestions is to simply take democracy seriously. It's interesting that on these examples that you've read and many others, there is an enormous gap between public policy and public opinion. The proposals, the general attitudes of the public, which are pretty well studied, are -- both political parties are, on most of these issues, well to the right of the population...Their policies are strongly opposed by most of the population. How do they carry this off? Well, that's been through an intriguing mixture of deceit, lying, fabrication, public relations.
This is indicative of a leftist mythos which I have written about before - namely, that of the Silent Leftist Majority. Since Chomsky cites absolutely nothing in regards to evidence as to what the "opinion of the majority of the American population" actually is, we can only assume that it consists of his own assertion. Leftists who invoke the SLM mythos usually try and mention one or two polls taken by highly biased organizations and/or a study claiming that Americans want socialized health care without mentioning that the same study shows that Americans also don't want their taxes raised to pay for it. Chomsky apparently believes that his reputation is enough for his audience (which it is) or that his genius gives him the telepathic ability to read the secret mind of the American public. Neither of these excuses, however, makes his assertion any less comic. What the SLM mythos really is, of course, is an expression of contempt for the very idea of representative democracy. To avoid unnecessary repitition, I will adopt one of Chomsky's more famous methods and quote myself:

What we are really seeing here, of course, is not so much a commentary on the recent election but yet another asinine display of Chomsky's hopelessly narcississtic contempt for democracy and the intellectual and moral capacities of his fellow citizens. He is unwilling to accept the possibility of a real and meaningful election or a real and meaningful democracy should it fail to enshrine his pseudo-prophetic blubberings into official policy. Thus the system which fails to enshrine becomes a farce and the people who fail to heed become easily manipulated dupes incapable of forming or expressing their own opinions and values through a representative system.

Contempt for those one claims to be respresenting is, of course, a well-known characteristic of radicals on all sides of the political spectrum. Nonetheless, the ubiquity of the phenomenon hardly makes it less frightening. The negation of democracy in the name of democracy, or rather, in the name of the people, is the first step towards totalitarianism: the destruction of the people in the name of the people. Generally, one can spot a totalitarian mind by the extent to which it refuses to accept the existence of any politics except its own. Chomsky's version of the SLM mythos essentially makes the case that everyone actually agrees with him. Turning this from a clumsy attempt to salve one's wounded ego into the basis of dictatorial rule is, of course, only a matter of guns. And, for Chomsky, the gun - from a comfortable distance, of course - has always been the final measure of political legitimacy.

It should be noted that throughout this extensive lecture Chomsky rants at length on the US as a terrorist nation, the violations of various human rights, etc...but says, in fact, very little about why the US is, as he puts it a "failed state". Beyond the "democracy deficit", which is only a fanciful term for the old SLM mythos, Chomsky remains resolutely silent on why the most powerful economic, military, and political force in the history of civilization ought to be considered a failure.

We must presume that Chomsky believes his word is enough in this matter, but we should look to that certain desperation which, as I have said, strikes the elderly upon the approach of death. Particularly upon those who have set their ambitions to the changing of the world. With the exception of Alexander the Great (who died, after all, at the advantageous age of 33) and a handful of other figures, almost no one can claim success in this regard. By this reckoning, it is hardly a surprise that Chomsky has been a failure. But the height of such ambitions must make their undoing a particularly bitter pill to swallow.

The solution, of course, is simple fantasy. Chomsky declares victory and leaves. The US is a failure, the revolution is around the corner, the "world" is on his side. There is nothing left to worry about. Either the fall of the United States or the end of the world (it is normal for frustrated intellectuals to declare victory and apocalypse simultaneously) are imminent. Such appears to be the dialogue of irrelevancy. It would be pitiable, of course, had Chomsky not spent much of his lengthy sojourn on earth slandering men better himself and attempting to undermine the country which has made him both famous and rich. His declaration of victory is farce, of course, as is his departure. Were he a better and smarter man, it might have been tragedy. Unfortunately for Chomsky, even his tiresome extrapolations before fawning sycophants cannot alter the unmistakeable rejection of everything he stands for at the hands of history and the American people he claims to aggrandize. The voice of history is the voice of God, one imagines. Even upon a misspent life.

New Blog

2006-06-24T15:15:00.000+03:00

A friend of mine, also a student at BGU, has an interesting new group blog called Kishkushim. Its a nearly untranslatable Hebrew word for chatting up a storm about something, more or less. They're a bit to the left of yours truly, but we all have our vices. Check it out.

The Mythology and Its Masters

2006-06-17T07:53:00.000+03:00

The fracas over the recently published polemic - “study” would be a criminally inaccurate term - on the Israel lobby at Harvard University has revealed, unsurprisingly, very little about the Israel lobby, but quite a bit about the mythology of antisemitism on today’s left. Tropes of Jewish control, power, and influence are as old as antisemitism itself, which is to say, they are very, very old, and no more accurate now than they were then. The mythos of antisemitism, however, has clearly undergone a sea change, and a large one, which is what makes the plethora of nonsensical lies being foisted on us by the polemic’s supporters all the more fascinating.

Tony Judt, the last man on earth who thinks a federated Europe is going to work, sees fit to proclaim for all the world that a dialogue may finally be opened about Jewish power and influence in America. He has hit on something, presumably without realizing it, since Judt strikes me as neither particularly insightful or intelligent. What he explicates, albeit indirectly, is the metamorphosis of the mythology of antisemitism.

The essay and the issues it raises for American foreign policy have been prominently dissected and discussed overseas. In America, however, it's been another story: virtual silence in the mainstream media. Why? There are several plausible explanations. One is that a relatively obscure academic paper is of little concern to general-interest readers. Another is that claims about disproportionate Jewish public influence are hardly original - and debate over them inevitably attracts interest from the political extremes. And then there is the view that Washington is anyway awash in "lobbies" of this sort, pressuring policymakers and distorting their choices.

Each of these considerations might reasonably account for the mainstream press's initial indifference to the Mearsheimer-Walt essay. But they don't convincingly explain the continued silence even after the article aroused stormy debate in the academy, within the Jewish community, among the opinion magazines and Web sites, and in the rest of the world. I think there is another element in play: fear. Fear of being thought to legitimize talk of a "Jewish conspiracy"; fear of being thought anti-Israel; and thus, in the end, fear of licensing the expression of anti-Semitism.

This mythology is based on an old idea: the mythos of Jewish power. But its form is entirely new: the mythos of Jewish power as a weapon of oppression. Whereas the Jews were once assaulted as a disease, now they are denounced as tyrants. How humanity has progressed in fifty short years.

The fact of this mythology as a mythology is evident because it is so evidently a lie. Like its predecessors, the lie is essential to the new metamorphosis. And it is a lie as large as it is simple. This is its genius. The lie is this: we are silenced. The entire charge against the Jews is one based on the mythos of rebellion. That those who speak lies about the Jews are, in fact, speaking truth to power. A power which endlessly seeks to silence them.

In fact, there is almost no issue today which is more talked about. Far from silence, we have a limitless chorus of denunciations, all carefully composed to include the obligatory exhortations to break the silence that does not exist. As far back as its origins, the widespread support for Zionism among American Jews has been the target of opprobrium and sanctimony. Far from being suppressed, the “dialogue” on the Israel lobby, and on Jewish power, such as it is imagined, is inescapable. Edward Said, for instance, a sacred cow of Judt's, published his assault on Zionism, including its influence in America, called "Zionism From the Standpoint of Its Victims", in 1979. They Dare to Speak Out, a book length attack on the Israel lobby, was published in 1989 by a former congressman. Hardly new and hardly original. Nightline broadcast a special in 2002 on the conflict in the Middle East in which Ted Koppel asked Newt Gingrinch about "the mystique of the Jewish lobby". Koppel, the great liberal journalist, seemed unfazed by the fact that the man he no doubt considered the great spokesman of conservative intolerance considered the question vaguely suspect. Said himself spent much of the 1990s and beyond spitting rhetorical poison (Said was not particularly good at anything else) at American Zionism and its varied establishments. Noam Chomsky's Peace in the Middle East?, which contains an entire chapter denouncing American supporters for Israel and their supposedly dominating influence, was published in 1974. This is not even to mention Russell Kirk and Pat Buchanan, who made much of the Israel lobby and its supporters as a wedge against neoconservatism during the '80s and '90s. Is it even necessary to mention that the New Left's denunciation of Israel and its American supporters was one of the primary motivating factors for the defection of such leftist luminaries as Norman Podhoretz to the other side? Or that even Chomsky himself and others, such as Tikkun's Michael Lerner, have been denounced by their own comrades for aiding and abetting the cause of Zionist suppression? The "silence" regarding Israel and its American supporters is, in fact, a shrieking cacophony of rage that permeates discussion to the point where it is no longer noticed. It is so ubiquitous that the only defense against cliché is the claim of revolt. Revolt, in fact, against the brute weight of history itself. A Judt puts it:

In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that an Israeli soldier's great-grandmother died in Treblinka will not excuse his own misbehavior.

This is, of course, the real enemy. Not the supposed terrors of totalitarian Zionism nor the necessity of beginning a debate which has been raging for over twenty years. It is the need to negate, to fundamentally annihilate, the fact of Jewish history. A history which is, of course, among other things, a series of catastrophes for which a reckoning must be made by the world which is overwhelmingly not Jewish. David Ben-Gurion once said that Zionism was not merely a case of Jews confronting the Arabs, but the Jews confronting the world. Against this, the inescapable mountain of wreckage upon which the Jewish people have built an improbable but nonetheless undeniable survival, and ultimate triumph, the only weapons are denial, reversal, and righteous condemnation. The accusors of Israel are in revolt against history itself.

Revolt, of course, is not new for antisemitism. It has been the cornerstone of leftist antisemitism since the days of Prudhon, the great revolutionary and prophet of man's liberation who declared that by fire or fusion the Jew must cease to exist. Replayed again, history, as the notable antisemite Karl Marx put it, becomes farce. From the depths of the establishment, Harvard University, we hear a self-described voice in the wilderness proclaiming war on the establishment, that is, upon the Jews. Whether Jewish influence outstrips that of Harvard is left an issue of speculation. Suffice it to say, it is not even necessary to ask the question. The ease with which the new mythology has been accepted is proof enough.

Inhumanity on Display

2006-05-28T09:38:00.000+03:00

Allyson Rowen Taylor of the AJC suffered through the UC Irvine conference I mentioned in the previous post. Shocked and stunned doesn't even begin to describe her experience. There are no words for the despicable violence that is now being practiced upon the Jewish populations of America's universities by their fellow students and the cowardly or racist administrators who facilitate them. It is, apparently, not enough for American higher education to subject their Jewish students to consistent intimidation and slander, affirmative action policies that deliberately limit their numbers, and an attitude of at best indifference and at worst total contempt for their concerns. They must also, it appears, be brought to tears by the total negation of their existence, enforced by the campus police. The Muslim Student Association is, of course, guilty of the most vile form of racism in holding this conference, but the true villians are the administrators who should, and claim to, know better. Ms. Taylor asks a desperate question which gets to the heart of the matter.

I was with an associate and after I was escorted from the area behind the "apartheid wall" to sing with the supporters of Israel, we chatted with one of the campus police. My friend asked if this was a rough event to cover, as it was contentious and very hostile. The campus officer said, "Protecting the MSU is easier than than the Campus Republicans". How very sad. Conservatives on this campus are treated with more hatred than students who wear Kyffia's and support Iran and it's daily calls to eliminate not only Israel, but the United States of America. I wonder to whom these students' loyalty belongs. Iran? Syria? North Korea? Is this the new radical chic?

The terrifying answer is, of course, yes. But Ms. Taylor is wrong about one thing, what is happening here is not sad, it is inhuman. I don't wish to fly off the emotional handle, but the truth must be faced. If something does not change, and change soon, it is only a matter of time before the second genocide of the Jews becomes radical chic as well.

Thanks to LGF for the link.

Shocked and Stunned

2006-05-10T19:26:00.000+03:00

It takes a lot to render me speechless these days, but this managed to accomplish it. There are moments when self-hatred ceases to be pitiable and becomes moral barbarism. “Israel: The 4th Reich”? “Holocaust in the Holy Land”? Is Norman Finkelstein so far off the deep end that he doesn’t grasp how viciously hurtful and obscene such rhetoric is? Or is he such a demented adolescent that it actually appeals to him? Either way, the man has clearly long since crossed the line that separates humanity from its enemies.

Since the Chancellor appears too cowardly to have his own email address, you can let Vice Chancellor Susan Menning know how you feel about the University of California, Irvine hosting this monstrous little pageant at smenning@uci.edu.

Happy Independence Day! : !יום העצמאות שמח

2006-05-03T09:29:00.000+03:00

Then the Lord your God will turn your captivity, and have compassion upon you, and will return and gather you from all the nations...
If your exiles be at the utmost ends of heaven, from there will the Lord your God gather you, and from there will he take you
And the Lord your God will bring you into the land which your fathers possessed, and you shall possess it
And he will do good unto you

-Deuteronomy 30:3-6

Memorial Day:יום הזיכרון לחללי צה"ל

2006-05-02T07:53:00.000+03:00

Thy glory Israel, is fallen upon the heights
How the mighty have fallen!
Mountains of Gilboa, let there be no dew, nor rain upon you, nor fields of offerings
For there is the shield of the mighty cast away…
From the blood of the slain, from the flesh of the mighty, the bow of Jonathan turned not back, and the sword of Saul returned not empty
Saul and Jonathan, they were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in death they were not divided
They were swifter than eagles, they were stronger than lions…
How the mighty have fallen
And the weapons of war cast away

-Second Book of Samuel, 1:20-27

Blessed be the memory of the fallen.

On Cinema at Gefen

2006-04-27T15:13:00.000+03:00

I’ve just published a review of Michael Winterbottom’s film Nine Songs over at my other blog, Gefen. It contains some strong language, so beware if you are easily offended. For those of you interested, enjoy.

Published!

2006-04-02T13:27:00.000+03:00

Azure Magazine has kindly published my review of Paul Berman's new book Power and the Idealists. For those of you who are interested, enjoy.

Mostly Final Results

2006-03-29T07:07:00.000+02:00

Looks like Likud got whacked even worse than I thought. Its now the fifth largest party in the Knesset, behind the Shas Party. The Kadima results can’t be happy for the party hopeful either, but I think apathy had something to do with it. Everyone was convinced they would win in a landslide, which probably contributed to the low turnout and correspondingly low result. I’d say Shas will almost certainly be in the next government. Haaretz’s take:
With the vote on 99.5 percent, Kadima had a less than expected 28 seats. Labor held at 20 seats, and Shas rose to 13, making the Sephardi ultra-Orthodox party the third largest faction in the Knesset.
Netanyahu made a surprisingly good, somewhat teary-eyed speech on television last night, pledging to rebuild the movement, but he’s always been better at speaking than anything else. Likud may be on the way to breakup and replacement by Yisrael Beitenu or a new rightwing coalition.

Ironically, Shas’s showing may make it easier for Olmert to form a coalition, if he can bring in Shas, Labor, and Gimlaim as a social justice coalition, he can edge out Yisrael Beitenu and avoid a stalemate on the issue of territorial compromise. One thing is certain: this was a bad day for capitalism in Israel. All the parties dedicated to the welfare state and its expansion did surprisingly well, and Peretz will likely claim some sort of a mandate for his economic policies. Of course, Israel was born a socialist country and old habits die hard. The question will be whether Peretz tries for a return to Old Labor’s hard-core statism or a Third Way-style option in the Tony Blair tradition. Nonetheless, I shall have to face my professor’s unfortunate gloating today, never a good sign. Well, vox populi vox dei.

Some First Minute Thoughts

2006-03-28T22:30:00.000+02:00

Clearly, the two big winners tonight are Amir Peretz and Avigdor Liberman.  Both Labor and Yisrael Beitenu far outperformed expectations.  Labor probably already has its eye on the Prime Minister’s office in the next election, but it depends how far Peretz can get with his social-welfare policies and how well the public ends up receiving them.  Everyone wants more money for social-welfare until it starts wrecking the economy.  If Peretz goes too far, it could come back and bite him the next time around.

As for Yisrael Beitenu, its clearly taken the rightwing vote which was traditionally the Likud’s.  Everyone disaffected by the withdrawal from Gaza seems to have taken it out on Likud more than any of the other parties.  Eleven seats for a party which won its biggest victory just a few years ago is an astounding collapse.  It has to be placed at the feet of Bibi Netanyahu, who seems to have developed the worst political instincts of any politician in Israeli history.  Even when he does the right thing, he does for the wrong reasons.  Nobody trusts him, even the people who agree with him.  You never know in this country, but his political career is probably over.  Its too bad, he’d make a good spokesman for the Foreign Ministry.

Kadima has to be a little disappointed with the results.  They should have gotten five or six more seats, but a lot of that can be put down to the absence of Sharon.  On the other hand, it could be said that the only reason they got that far was the party’s association with Sharon, a memory that may have passed by the time of the next elections.  Clearly, Olmert was not an attractive or charismatic leader.  Personally, I’m much fonder of Tzipi Livni.  She talks a little weird, but she’s intelligent and a relatively straight talker.  Plus, it’d really piss off the anti-Israel left if we had a female Prime Minister.

But all that’s for the future.  At the moment, its fairly clear that Kadima will form the coalition, Olmert will be Prime Minister, Amir Peretz will have a major cabinet seat and Shas will probably get in somewhere. A coalition with Yisrael Beitenu might happen, but I don’t see it lasting if Olmert intends to go ahead with his withdrawal plans, which Labor will demand of him.  Shas may end up being left out of the coalition in favor of some of the smaller parties, but who the hell knows at this point?  Its definitely going to be an interesting few weeks over here.

Preliminary Results

2006-03-28T22:11:00.000+02:00

The preliminary results just came on the news. 32 seats for Kadima, 22 for Labor, 13 for Yisrael Beitenu, 11 for the Likud, 10 for Shas. The rest is divided among the smaller parties. This means several things. First of all, the loss of Sharon clearly put a bad dent in Kadima. They could have had ten more seats if he had been the party leader. Second, Amir Peretz is going to be a major factor in the next government. He’ll get the Interior Ministry, almost for certain. Israel is heading socialist as far as domestic policies are concerned. Third, the “right bloc” that Netanyahu was hoping for with Yisrael Beitenu is not going to happen. Fourth, Netanyahu is finished. Stick a fork in him, he’s done. And it’s all his own damn fault. Fifth, the next government will probably be Kadima-Labor-Shas, barring unforeseen developments, which are more than likely in a country like this. Sixth, unilateral withdrawals will continue. Labor is naturally dovish and Kadima has already stated its support of withdrawals from parts of the West Bank.

Biggest surprise? Besides the collapse of the Likud, it has to be Gimlaim, a party dedicated solely to senior’s issues, which got an amazing 6 seats. Pensions will shortly be going up.

The Necessity of Distinction

2006-03-23T21:34:00.000+02:00

Courtesy of Azure magazine, I have found this extraordinary article by French New Philosopher Andre Glucksmann. Glucksmann was one of the first French intellectuals of the ’68 generation to break with his colleagues’ traditional catechism, attacking Soviet oppression of dissidents and supporting Ronald Reagan’s deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe. Here, he grapples with the new totalitarianism and its stance on cartoons of Mohammad and Holocaust Denial.
[N]ow [radical Islam] has all of Europe in its sights, which it accuses of having a double standard. The European Union allows the Prophet to be denigrated with impunity, but it forbids and condemns other "opinions" like Nazism and denial of the Holocaust. Why are jokes about Muhammad permitted, but not those about the genocide of the Jews? This was the rallying call of fundamentalists before they initiated a competition for Auschwitz cartoons. Fair's fair: either everything should be allowed in the name of the freedom of expression, or we should censor that which shocks both parties. Many people who defend the right to caricature feel trapped. Will they publish drawings about the gas chambers in the name of freedom of expression? Offence for offence? Infringement for infringement? Can the negation of Auschwitz be put on a par with the desecration of Muhammad? This is where two philosophies clash. The one says yes, these are equivalent "beliefs" which have been equally scorned. There is no difference between factual truth and professed faith; the conviction that the genocide took place and the certitude that Muhammad was illuminated by Archangel Gabriel are on a par. The others say no, the reality of the death camps is a matter of historical fact, whereas the sacredness of the prophets is a matter of personal belief.
(…)
When the Islamist fanatic affirms that Europeans practise the "religion of the Shoah" while he practises that of Muhammad, he abolishes the distinction between fact and belief. For him there are only beliefs, and so it follows that Europe will favour its own.

Civilised discourse analyses and defines scientific truths, historic truths and matters of fact relating to knowledge, not to faith. And it does this irrespective of race or confession. We may believe these facts are profane or undignified, yet they remain distinct from religious truths. Our planet is not in the grips of a clash of civilisations or cultures. It is the battleground of a decisive struggle between two ways of thinking. There are those who declare that there are no facts, but only interpretations - so many acts of faith. These either tend toward fanaticism ("I am the truth") or they fall into nihilism ("nothing is true, nothing is false"). Opposing them are those who advocate free discussion with a view to distinguishing between true and false, those for whom political and scientific matters – or simple judgement – can be settled on the basis of worldly facts, independently of arbitrary pre-established opinions.
(…)
Refusing to face the cruellest historical facts, on the other hand, heralds the return of cruelty. Whether the Islamists - who are far from representing all Muslims – like it or not, there is no common measure between negating known facts and criticising any one of the beliefs which every European has the right to practice or poke fun at.
(…)
What is at stake here is not only the freedom of the press, but also the permission to call a spade a spade and a gas chamber an abomination, regardless of our beliefs. What is at stake is the basis of all morality: here on earth the respect due to each individual starts with the recognition and rejection of the most flagrant examples of inhumanity.
This extraordinary essay cuts to the essence of one of the issues which caused me to start this blog: the absolute importance of distinctions. The Chomskyite phenomenon is most horrifying in its negation of distinctions, its annihilation of the possibility of thought. No utterance of the good professor represents this better than this one on the subject of Holocaust Denial, which represents precisely the horror of which Glucksmann speaks.
I'm saying that if you believe in freedom of speech then you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like, I mean Goebbels was in favour of freedom of speech for views he liked, right, so was Stalin. If you're in favour of freedom of speech that means you're in favour of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise, otherwise you're not in favour of freedom of speech.
Of course, neither Goebbels nor Stalin was in favor of freedom of speech, which is why they killed so many for daring to exercise it. Nor can the issue even be raised in relation to totalitarian societies and their leaders, who do not accept a right of free speech in the first place. In fact, the essence of the totalitarian society is the denial of any natural rights pertaining to the individual and, ultimately, the existence of the individual himself. This holds true as well for totalitarian political cultures, such as neo-Nazism, radical Islam or, for that matter, your average Chomskyite. Most importantly, however, the denial of the Holocaust is not a view which one “despises” or “favors.” It is not a view at all. It is an expression of intellectual psychosis, of the anti-historical unreality which is the inherent product of the totalitarian mind. There is a distinction between this and a view which one dislikes or disagrees with. Whether you think Holocaust Denial should be banned or not, it cannot be addressed on the same terms as one would address a statement in favor of a flat tax. To address Holocaust Denial as though it were simply another point of view which any reasonable or decent person might hold is, inherently, to annihilate reason itself, and thus, all the rights to which reason has given birth. One can say that Holocaust Denial should not be banned, or that men should not go to jail for it, but to argue that we are honor bound to grant it the same respect as any other political statement, or that we are nothing but censorious dictators if we do not do so, is a crime against both freedom and speech. It negates them both by rendering them meaningless. In doing so, it makes power the only arbiter of truth, and renders us all silent.

Another Anti-Chomskyite on the Guardian Controversy

2006-03-10T11:42:00.000+02:00

I have been asked to publish this article, which originally appeared on FrontPageMag.com. It is an excellent critique of the Guardian’s treatment of Chomsky’s stance on Bosnia. As I have already written, I consider the Guardian’s craven capitulation to Chomskyite censorship on this issue to be one of the most disgraceful displays of journalistic spinelessness I have ever witnessed. Enjoy, and judge for yourselves:

Chomsky's Genocidal Denial

By Marko Attila HoareFrontPageMagazine.com November 23, 2005

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks."

Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2

In the realm of politics, there are those of us who wear our hearts on our sleeves: proud of what we stand for, we are not afraid to state our positions as clearly as possible, so there is no danger of misunderstanding; we call a spade a spade, and are ready to face the music. On the other hand, there are those who are embarrassed by their own position: they dissemble; muddying the waters so that what they really think is vague and hidden; when confronted by those who recognise them for what they are, they lash out in fear and shame, denying what everyone knows to be the truth.

Two very interesting parallel cases were highlighted in the Guardian newspaper on 17 November. It was reported that David Irving was arrested in Austria for the crime of Holocaust denial. Irving is well known as a Holocaust denier and Hitler apologist, yet when accused of this by the historian Deborah Lipstadt, he attempted to sue her for libel, resulting in his crushing courtroom defeat. Yet he apparently remains ashamed to accept the label that he has inevitably earned. According to the Guardian: ‘Mr Irving has said he does not deny Jews were killed by the Nazis, but challenges the number and manner of Jewish concentration camp deaths. He has questioned the use of large-scale gas chambers to exterminate the Jews, and has claimed that the numbers of those who perished are far lower than those generally accepted. He also contends that most Jews who died at Auschwitz did so from diseases such as typhus, not gas poisoning.’ In other words, lacking the moral courage to say proudly ‘Yes, I deny the Holocaust !’, Irving seeks refuge in the claim that he is merely concerned with the accuracy of details and interpretation. Thus, the Holocaust denier does not merely deny the Holocaust; he denies his own denial. Of course, no rational person would accept such a plea at face value.

On the same day (17 November), a new twist emerged in another saga of genocide-denial: the Guardian printed a grovelling apology to Noam Chomsky for a none-too-flattering interview with him carried out by the award-winning journalist Emma Brockes, published by the Guardian on 31 October, in which Brockes cites Chomsky as having said that the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 was 'probably overstated' and was not even an actual massacre. Chomsky prides himself on being a resolute champion of freedom of speech; on this ground, he has defended the right of Holocaust-deniers to publish what they want; and condemned Britain’s libel laws. Yet faced with Brockes’s exposure of his position, he and his circle of fans retreated from their pro-free-speech position, and organised a campaign of denunciation of Brockes, bombarding the Guardian with letters of complaint, and eventually bullying this spineless newspaper into issuing an unequivocal apology and retraction.

In his letter of complaint to the Guardian, published on 2 November, Chomsky writes: ‘As for her [Brockes’s] personal opinions, interpretations and distortions, she is of course free to publish them, and I would, of course, support her right to do so, on grounds that she makes clear she does not understand.’ Yet as a result of the Chomskyite campaign against Brockes, the Guardian readers’ editor reported on 17 November: ‘The Guardian has now withdrawn the interview from the website.’ Just fancy that ! More shamefully still, the Guardian also apologised for having published a letter by Kemal Pervanic, a survivor of the Serb concentration-camp Omarska, alongside Chomsky’s on 2 November. Pervanic said he was ‘shocked by some of the views of Noam Chomsky in the article by Emma Brockes’s.’ Yet in the words of the Guardian readers’ editor’s grovelling piece of self-criticism: ‘While he has every sympathy with the writer [Pervanic], Prof Chomsky believes that its publication was designed to undermine his position, and addressed a part of the interview which was false... With hindsight it is acknowledged that the juxtaposition has exacerbated Prof Chomsky’s complaint, and that is regretted.’ So much for respecting the right of a concentration-camp survivor to state his opinion.

The irony is all the greater, as the Brockes interview revolved around Chomsky’s defence of the writer Diana Johnstone, allegedly on the grounds of supporting freedom of speech. In 2003, the left-wing Swedish magazine Ordfront published an interview with Johnstone, which repeated her revisionist, genocide-denying views of the Bosnian war. This provoked massive outrage on the part of members of Ordfront’s editorial board and readers, leading to resignation of the editor and a public apology by the magazine for the pain it had caused to Bosnian genocide survivors. Johnstone’s Swedish publisher apparently withdrew its agreement to publish her book. This, in the eyes of Chomsky, consisted of a violation of Johnstone’s ‘freedom of speech’, though nobody had prevented her from disseminating her views through other magazines or publishers; indeed, her book has been published in the UK by Pluto Press, and her articles are available all over the internet, should anyone wish to read them. Nor, it should be said, was Johnstone murdered, tortured or driven out of her home, like hundreds of thousands of Bosnian citizens in the 1990s, whose rights Chomsky has never got round to championing. But assuming the right of a Western author not to have her writings rejected by publishers on political grounds is a more worthy cause than the right of Balkan untermenschen to life and limb, it remains to be seen whether Chomsky’s fellow left-wing libertarians will engage themselves in defence of Brockes as forthrightly as they did in defence of Johnstone.

What was it about Brockes’s interview that so rattled Chomsky ? Chomskyite ire focused on the question-and-answer headline that introduced the interview:

Q. [Brockes]: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated ?

A. [Chomsky]: My only regret is that I didn’t do it strongly enough.

This was a paraphrase, rather than a literal quotation, and one that was written by the newspaper rather than by Brockes herself, and for which she therefore cannot be held responsible. Nevertheless, it accurately summed up the essence of the matter: Chomsky had supported Johnstone, who claimed that the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated. In his open letter to the Guardian of 13 November, Chomsky claimed it was simply a matter of defending freedom of speech: ‘The truthful part is that I said, and explained at length, that I regret not having strongly enough opposed the Swedish publisher's decision to withdraw a book by Diana (not ‘Diane,’ as the Guardian would have it) Johnstone after it was bitterly attacked in the Swedish press... In the interview, whatever Johnstone may have said about Srebrenica never came up, and is entirely irrelevant in any event, at least to anyone with a minimal appreciation of freedom of speech.’

Chomsky therefore claimed his defence of Johnstone’s freedom of speech had been misrepresented as denial of the Srebrenica massacre. Indeed, Brockes’s portrayal of Chomsky’s alleged denial of Srebrenica was at the heart of Chomsky’s complaint. According to Brockes, Chomsky claimed ‘that during the Bosnian war the ‘massacre’ at Srebrenica was probably overstated.’ Brockes elaborated thus on Chomsky’s style: ‘Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things that he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.’ Chomsky’s outraged response was that ‘with five minutes research on the internet, any journalist could find many places where I described the massacre as a massacre, never with quotes. That alone ends the story.’ The Guardian readers’ editor accepted the validity of Chomsky’s complaint, and threw in an apology to Johnstone for good measure: ‘Ms Brockes’s misrepresentation of Prof Chomsky’s views on Srebrenica stemmed from her misunderstanding of his support for Ms Johnstone. Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have [sic] ever denied the fact of the massacre.’

The big question is, of course, does Chomsky really deny the Srebrenica massacre ? Or, if he does not deny it outright, does he put such a spin on it that he denies it to all intents and purposes ?

Johnstone, for her part, denies it to all intents and purposes. Her book, Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (London: Pluto Press, 2002) puts the words ‘Srebrenica massacre’ in quotes (p. 106). She then goes on to argue: ‘In trying to understand what happened at Srebrenica, a number of factors should be taken into account.’ These are, she argues, that Srebrenica and other ‘safe areas’ had ‘served as Muslim military bases under UN protection’; that the ‘Muslim military force stationed in Srebrenica - some 5,000 men under the command of Naser Oric, had carried out murderous raids against nearby Serb villages’; that ‘[Bosnian President] Izetbegovic pulled Naser Oric out of Srebrenica prior to the anticipated Serb offensive, deliberately leaving the enclave undefended’; and that ‘Insofar as Muslims were actually executed following the fall of Srebrenica, such crimes bear all the signs of spontaneous acts of revenge rather than a project of ‘genocide’'. Furthermore: ‘Six years after the summer of 1995, ICTY forensic teams had exhumed 2,631 bodies in the region, and identified fewer than 50. In an area where fighting had raged for years, some of the bodies were certainly of Serbs as well as of Muslims. Of these bodies, 199 were found to have been bound or blindfolded, and must reasonably be presumed on the basis of the material evidence to have been executed.’ She concludes: ‘War crimes ? The Serbs themselves do not deny that crimes were committed. Part of a plan of genocide ? For this there is no evidence whatsoever.’ (pp. 109-118).

To sum up Johnstone’s position on Srebrenica: she blames everything that happened there on the Muslims; claims they provoked the Serb offensive in the first place; then deliberately engineered their own killing; and then exaggerated their own death-toll. She denies that thousands of Muslims were massacred; suggesting there is no evidence for a number higher than 199 - less than 2.5% of the accepted figure of eight thousand. And she eschews the word 'massacre' in favour of 'execution' - as if it were a question of criminals on Death Row, not of innocent civilians. It is as if she were to claim that less than 150,000 Jews, rather than six million, had died in the Holocaust; that the Jews had provoked and engineered the Nazi killings; that these killings had been 'executions'; and that the Jews had then exaggerated their death toll. She is ready to excuse the Srebrenica killings as retaliation for Oric’s earlier killings of Serb civilians - but does not mention that Oric’s crimes took place long after the war had already begun and Serb forces had begun slaughtering Muslims all over Bosnia. She does not mention how Srebrenica became an ‘enclave’ in the first place: through Serb aggression against, and conquest of, East Bosnia in 1992, and the killing and expulsion of the Muslim population that this involved - against which the Srebrenica Muslims were temporarily able to hold out as an 'enclave'. All in all, this can reasonably be called denial; insofar as it is not complete denial - she recognises less than 2.5% of the massacre - it is an apologia for the Serb forces. The Guardian readers’ editor’s claim that ‘Neither Prof Chomsky nor Ms Johnstone have [sic] ever denied the fact of the massacre’ is, therefore, at least half untrue.

But what about the other half, i.e. Chomsky ? An open letter to Ordfront, signed by Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Arundhati Roy and others, stated: 'We regard Johnstone's Fools' Crusade as an outstanding work, dissenting from the mainstream view but doing so by an appeal to fact and reason, in a great tradition.' In his personal letter to Ordfront in defence of Johnstone, Chomsky wrote: ‘I have known her for many years, have read the book, and feel that it is quite serious and important.’ Chomsky makes no criticism here of Johnstone’s massacre denial, or indeed anywhere else - except in the Brockes interview, which he has repudiated. Indeed, he endorses her revisionism: in response to Mikael van Reis's claim that 'She [Johnstone] insists that Serb atrocities - ethnic cleansing, torture camps, mass executions - are western propaganda', Chomsky replies that 'Johnstone argues - and, in fact, clearly demonstrates - that a good deal of what has been charged has no basis in fact, and much of it is pure fabrication.'

In the same letter, Chomsky makes much of an allegedly positive review of Johnstone's book in a British foreign-affairs journal: 'I also know that it has been very favourably reviewed, e.g., by the British scholarly journal International Affairs, journal of the Royal Academy.' He then continues, with his own idiosyncratic logic: ‘I don’t read Swedish journals of course, but it would be interesting to learn how the Swedish press explains the fact that their interpretation of Johnstone’s book differs so radically from that of Britain’s leading scholarly foreign affairs journal, International Affairs. I mentioned the very respectful review by Robert Caplan, of the University of Reading and Oxford [sic]. It is obligatory, surely, for those who condemn Johnstone’s book in the terms just reviewed to issue still harsher condemnation of International Affairs, as well as of the universities of Reading and Oxford, for allowing such a review to appear, and for allowing the author to escape censure.’ The essence of what Chomsky is saying, is that Johnstone received a positive review in a respectable scholarly journal, therefore her book must be good.

There are, first of all, a number of distortions in Chomsky's claim: International Affairs is the journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, not of the 'Royal Academy'; the RIIA is a para-governmental think tank, not a scholarly institution, therefore it makes no sense to describe International Affairs as 'Britain's leading scholarly foreign affairs journal'; the reviewer was Richard, not Robert Caplan; and his review of Johnstone's book was far from being as positive as Chomsky suggests. Caplan wrote: 'Diana Johnstone has written a revisionist and highly contentious account of Western policy and the dissolution of Yugoslavia... Yet for all of the book's constructive correctives, it is often difficult to recognize the world that Johnstone describes…The book also contains numerous errors of fact, on which Johnstone however relies to strengthen her case... Johnstone herself is very selective.'

Indeed, Caplan was overly polite in his criticisms of what is, in reality, an extremely poor book, one that is little more than a polemic in defence of the Serb-nationalist record during the wars of the 1990s - and an ill-informed one at that. Johnstone is not an investigative journalist who spent time in the former Yugoslavia doing fieldwork on the front-lines, like Ed Vulliamy, David Rohde or Roy Gutman. Nor is she a qualified academic who has done extensive research with Serbo-Croat primary sources, like Noel Malcolm or Norman Cigar. Indeed, she appears not to read Serbo-Croat, and her sources are mostly English-language, with a smattering of French and German. In short, she is an armchair Balkan amateur-enthusiast, and her book is of the sort that could be written from any office in Western Europe with access to the internet.

The quality of Johnstone’s ‘scholarship’ may be gauged from some of the Serb-nationalist falsehoods she repeats uncritically, such as the claim that the Serb Nazi-collaborationist leader Draza Mihailovic formed ‘the first armed guerrilla resistance to Nazi occupation in all of Europe’ (p. 291) - a myth long since exploded by serious historians (see for example Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia, 1941-1945: The Chetniks, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1975, pp. 124, 137). Or Johnstone’s claim that Croatia in 1990 ‘rapidly restored the symbols of the dread 1941 [Nazi-puppet] state - notably the red and white checkerboard flag, which to Serbs was the equivalent of the Nazi swastika’ (p. 23) - a falsehood that can be refuted by a glance at any complete version of the Yugoslav constitution, which clearly shows that the Croatian chequerboard - far from being a fascist symbol equivalent to the swastika - was an official symbol of state in Titoist Yugoslavia (see, for example the 1950 edition of the Yugoslav constitution, published by Sluzbeni list, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard as a Yugoslav symbol of state on p. 115; or the 1974 edition published by Prosveta, Belgrade, which shows the Croatian chequerboard - in full colour - at the start of the text). It would require an entire article to list and refute all the numerous errors and falsehoods in Johnstone's book; Chomsky praises it because he sympathizes with her political views, not because it has any scholarly merit.

Perhaps it would be unfair to label Chomsky a Srebrenica massacre-denier simply because he praises uncritically Johnstone’s massacre-denying book and endorses its conclusions. A fuller picture of Chomsky’s views on Srebrenica, however, can be gleaned from his interview with M. Junaid Alam of Left Hook on 17 December 2004, where he states that ‘Srebrenica was an enclave, lightly protected by UN forces, which was being used as a base for attacking nearby Serb villages. It was known that there’s going to be retaliation. When there was a retaliation, it was vicious. They trucked out all the women and children, they kept the men inside, and apparently slaughtered them. The estimates are thousands of people slaughtered.’ The key words here are ‘retaliation’, ‘apparently’ and ‘estimates’; the slaughter 'apparently' took place; the thousands killed were mere 'estimates'; they were, in any case, simply 'retaliation' for earlier Serb crimes. Note that while Chomsky raises doubts about the fact and scale of the killings, he is absolutely categorical that they were retribution for earlier Muslim crimes - the slaughter apparently took place, but if it did, then it was definitely retaliation. Read carefully, nothing that Chomsky says actually contradicts Johnstone's massacre-denying claims cited above.
Chomsky then goes on to compare the Serb behaviour favourably with that of the Americans in Fallujah: ‘Well, with Fallujah, the US didn’t truck out the women and children, it bombed them out.’ Chomsky does not mention the thousands of Bosnian women and children raped and murdered by Serb forces in other parts of Bosnia; nor those blown to bits by the Serb shelling of Sarajevo and other Bosnian towns, choosing instead to focus on the sparing of the women and children of Srebrenica. Johnstone, too, makes much of this: ‘one thing should be obvious: one does not commit ‘genocide’ by sparing women and children’. In fact, the Nazis began the systematic extermination of Jewish adult males in the USSR in 1941 before they began the systematic extermination of Jewish women and children, and the Nazis, unlike the Serb forces a half century later, were not being restrained by the democratic Western media.

Chomsky again compared Serb behaviour at Srebrenica favourably with American behaviour at Fallujah in his article ‘Imperial Presidency’ (Canadian Dimension, January/February 2005, vol. 39, no. 1), where he wrote of ‘Srebrenica, almost universally described as ‘genocide’ in the West. In that case, as we know in detail from the Dutch government report and other sources, the Muslim enclave in Serb territory, inadequately protected, was used as a base for attacks against Serb villages, and when the anticipated reaction took place, it was horrendous. The Serbs drove out all but military age men, and then moved in to kill them. There are differences with Falluja. Women and children were not bombed out of Srebrenica, but trucked out, and there will be no extensive efforts to exhume the last corpse of the packrats in their warrens in Falluja. There are other differences, arguably unfair to the Serbs.’ Not quite massacre denial, it is true; more of a massacre minimisation - since Chomsky nowhere recognises the figure of eight-thousand Muslim dead, it is entirely possible that he reduces the massacre to the fraction suggested by Johnstone, and therefore denies it to all intents and purposes. And he is certainly at pains to contrast 'the Serbs' favourably with the Americans.

One might criticise Brockes for not giving a more nuanced portrayal of Chomsky’s vague yet complex view of the Srebrenica massacre - were it not for the fact that Chomsky is notorious for the deliberate use of obscure and confusing language, designed to muddy the waters as to his real views, and the use of verbal trickery aimed at confusing his opponents. Take his 2001 exchange with Christopher Hitchens over the question of whether the US bombing of Sudan’s pharmaceutical factory in 1998 was a crime equivalent to 11 September:

Chomsky stated: ‘That Hitchens cannot mean what he writes is clear, in the first place, from his reference to the bombing of Sudan. He must be unaware that he is expressing such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime, and cannot intend what his words imply.’
Hitchens replied: ‘Since his [Chomsky’s] remarks are directed at me, I’ll instance a less-than-half-truth as he applies it to myself. I ‘must be unaware’, he writes, that I ‘express such racist contempt for African victims of a terrorist crime.’ With his pitying tone of condescension, and his insertion of a deniable but particularly objectionable innuendo, I regret to say that Chomsky displays what have lately become his hallmarks.’

Chomsky then pulled his sleight-of-hand: ‘Hitchens claims that I accused him of a ‘propensity for racist contempt.’ I explicitly and unambiguously said the opposite.’

Given such word games and obfuscation, Chomsky should hardly complain when an earnest interviewer fails to interpret his well-camouflaged position as he would have it. Had he so wished, he could have avoided the entire imbroglio with Brockes by telling her unambiguously: ‘I recognise that several thousand Muslim civilians were massacred by Serb forces at Srebrenica in 1995'. Yet one rather suspects he wanted to have his cake and eat it: to put forward a ‘position’ that was compatible with those of the outright deniers, like Johnstone, but that nevertheless allows him formally to deny being a denier himself.

Instead of taking responsibility for his own insincerity and double-talk, he chose to punish the messenger - Brockes. He has then failed on two occasions - his letter published in the Guardian on 2 November and his open letter to the Guardian of 13 November - to state categorically that the massacre occurred in the way that it is understood to have done: as a massacre of several thousand innocent Muslim civilians by Serb forces. Nor is it true what Chomsky claims, that ‘with five minutes research on the internet, any journalist could find many places where I described the massacre as a massacre, never with quotes.' I have not yet discovered a single text on the internet in which Chomsky describes Srebrenica as a 'massacre'; if such a text exists, it is not as easy to find as Chomsky claims. Chomsky’s actual position on Srebrenica must remain an open question until he can actually bring himself to speak and write in plain English - for which nobody should hold their breath. Under these circumstances, the Guardian readers’ editor had no need to issue its apology, and had no right to impugn the journalistic professionalism of Brockes. It is to Brockes, not to Chomsky, that the Guardian should be apologising.

The outrage of Chomsky and his fellow-travellers over his portrayal as a Srebrenica massacre-denier is particularly ironic, given that several of these fellow-travellers are themselves overt Srebrenica deniers. Chomsky is notorious for having gone on record in 1977, in an article co-written with a certain Ed Herman, as claiming that Khmer Rouge atrocities were being exaggerated by the Western media (‘Distortions at Fourth Hand’, The Nation, 25 June 1977). Recently, the same Ed Herman founded a ‘Srebrenica Research Group’ to propagate the view that the Srebrenica massacre never happened. In his essay ‘The Politics of the Srebrenica Massacre’, Herman writes that ‘the evidence for a massacre, certainly of one in which 8,000 men and boys were executed, has always been problematic, to say the least’. Herman concludes: ‘The ‘Srebrenica massacre’ [note the quote marks] is the greatest triumph of propaganda to emerge from the Balkan wars... But the link of this propaganda triumph to truth and justice is non-existent. The disconnection with truth is epitomised by the fact that the original estimate of 8,000, including 5,000 ‘missing’ - who had left Srebrenica for Bosnian Muslim lines - was maintained even after it had been quickly established that several thousand had reached those lines and that several thousand more had perished in battle. This nice round number lives on today in the face of a failure to find the executed bodies and despite the absence of a single satellite photo showing executions, bodies, digging, or trucks transporting bodies for reburial.’

In this way, Chomsky’s close collaborator Herman unashamedly holds a view that Chomsky is outraged to have attributed to himself. Both Chomsky and Herman are regular contributors to the website ‘ZNet’ - a haven for neo-Stalinist die-hards, several of whom are outright Srebrenica deniers. The publication of Herman’s above-cited article was greeted with uncritical approval by ZNet blogger David Petersen, who praised its ‘powerful analysis’. The same Petersen then reacted with outrage when Brockes attributed the same Srebrenica-denying view that he himself endorses to his comrade Chomsky, describing her interview as ‘lies, smears and more lies’. Just fancy that ! If to deny the Srebrenica massacre is shameful - which it is - why do Johnstone, Petersen and Herman do so ? But if they really think that the Srebrenica massacre did not happen, or was vastly smaller and more justifiable than is usually claimed, why should they be so outraged at Chomsky being described as a denier ? The answer brings us back to where we began: the Chomskyites and ZNet people are, at heart, embarrassed by their own position. In this, too, they resemble the controversial British historian recently arrested in Austria.

In this debate over whether or not Chomsky denied a massacre, it is important not to lose sight of something more damning and much less controversial: that Chomsky quite openly denies that genocide took place, either in Srebrenica or in Bosnia as a whole, and makes no bones about putting the word 'genocide' in quotes - this despite the fact that an international tribunal, established by the UN, has convicted a Bosnian Serb general of aiding and abetting genocide in Srebrenica. Indeed, the genocide-denial of Johnstone, Chomsky and their circle goes far beyond questioning the Srebrenica massacre. Chomsky was among those who supported the campaign in defence of Living Marxism (LM), the lunatic-fringe magazine that accused the news agency ITN of fabricating the existence of Serb concentration camps in Bosnia, on the basis of the writings of Thomas Deichmann, an amateur journalist and supporter of the Serb-nationalist cause. Deichmann claimed the camps in question were merely 'detention centres', and - although he had never visited them himself - presumed to know them well enough to claim that the pictures ITN had taken of them were deliberately intended to 'mislead' the Western public as to their true nature. ITN sued LM for libel, and the magazine was unable to produce a single witness who had actually seen the camps at first hand, whereas eye-witnesses such as Vulliamy testified as to their true, horrific character. LM's resounding defeat in the libel trial has not stopped Johnstone, in a recent commentary on the Chomsky-Brockes affair in the left-wing American magazine Counterpunch, from repeating LM's already discredited lies: "The issue raised by LM had to do with the way photographs taken at Trnopolje camp, by focusing on a thin man on the other side of a wire fence which in reality did not surround the Muslim inmates, but rather the ITN crew itself, was used to create the impression that what was happening in Bosnia was a repetition of a Nazi-style Holocaust." The campaign against Brockes has therefore simultaneously become a campaign to rewrite the history of the Bosnian war to deny that genocide took place.

Chomsky's denial that genocide took place in Bosnia, even after it has been established in international law that it did, and even after LM's lies about Serb camps were exposed as such in a British court, marks him down as a revisionist in the mould of Irving; the general thrust of Brockes’s exposure of him was therefore bang on target. In pandering to him, the Guardian has besmirched its own reputation and insulted the survivors of the genocide. Ironically, it was Guardian journalists such as Vulliamy and Maggie O'Kane who were in the forefront of bringing the genocide to light in 1992. That the Guardian - with this proud record - should have chosen to betray Brockes, its own journalist, by apologising on her behalf to an unabashed genocide-denier, means that this newspaper is now collaborating in the revisionist re-writing of the history of the Bosnian war.

Survivors

2006-03-05T18:43:00.000+02:00

To be a Jew is to live with the fact that strange people you have never seen and don’t even know exist want to kill you. Every one us, consciously or subconsciously, has to find some way to make peace with this. When you read articles like Michael Totten’s report from the Kurdish genocide museum, that peace is disturbed. The fact that the Jewish people have survived a genocide is not the only reason for a Jewish state, but it is one of them, and it is a good one. I am more and more convinced that it is also one of the very good reasons for a Kurdish state as well. They’ve waited long enough, and they deserve to be able to say “never again” and know that they have the power to make sure of that. In short, they’ve earned it.

Cry Havoc?

2006-02-23T11:23:00.000+02:00

If this gets worse, of course, it will mean civil war, which will mean the eventual breakup of Iraq. I have ambivalent feelings about this. Iraq is, in many ways, an artificial entity, a creation of colonial interests now long forgotten and irrelevant. Perhaps, objectively speaking, it would be better for the factions involved to stay together in a federated country, but objectivity generally matters little when nationalism and faith are involved. In some senses, I am quite sympathetic to this, especially in the case of the Kurds. Several people I have spoken to whose knowledge on the subject I trust have told me that the Kurds are essentially biding their time until the moment is ripe to declare independence. If they do, I’m afraid I would have to support them. Mainly because they so obviously deserve it. One of the often suppressed facts about Israel’s relationship to the rest of the Middle East is that it has been supportive of the Kurds since its inception, long before it was fashionable and long before most of the world knew the Kurds existed. It's obviously not my place to say so, but if it were up to me I’d have to venture the opinion that the Kurds have long since earned their own state.

A state, incidentally, that would likely be democratic and an American ally. Theoretically, it could serve as an anti-terrorist buffer state between Iraq and Iran. On purely realist terms, therefore, a Kurdish state could be very much in America's interest.

As for the rest of Iraq, God only knows how it would break apart. The Sunnis and Shiites seem to be much more mixed together than one might assume, and my guess would be that nasty things ethnic cleansing and massacre would likely be swift in coming if civil war broke out. I don’t know enough about the issue, unfortunately, but it certainly seems like we would be looking at another Lebanon, and with American troops on the ground and in the crossfire. That, I think, is something we should now be pulling out all the stops to prevent.

Horban in Iraq

2006-02-23T11:14:00.000+02:00

This photo essay (via Andrew Sullivan) brings home the measure of destruction inflicted on the al-Askariya mosque by Iraqi terrorists (since I want to be able to sleep tonight, I will not use the facile Western media term “insurgents”). I realize that there is now a wave of Shiite reprisals across Iraq, and this may swiftly turn into a mutual succession of atrocities, I cannot help but feel a particular sympathy for the victims of this assault. Jewish history is replete with catastrophes of this kind, and the destruction of our holiest site remains the most pivotal moment in our long history. We know what it is to have the earthly incarnations of our culture annihilated by the wanton and the barbaric. Whether the barbarian goes by the name of Rome or Germany. The destruction of a holy site is the destruction of the labor of generations. It is an assault on the universal truth that when a man attaches himself to a collective he makes himself a part of eternity. Albert Camus once said that a mission exists for any human group which can derive pride and fecundity from its labors and its sufferings. Atrocities such as this are not merely attacks against wood and stone but an existential assault on this pride and fecundity, and the labors and sufferings which gave birth to it.

Jewish Self-Hatred on the Front Page

2006-02-22T18:10:00.000+02:00

There is a good article up at FrontPageMag about Jewish self-hatred in regards to Israel. Its a bit slim, in my opinion. I wish it had gone into the role of liberal anti-semitism in regards to this issue, as well as the long history of Jewish self-hatred, which is well in keeping with our current problems. Nothing that is going on with folks like Chomsky and Norman Finkelstein is particularly new in Jewish history. There have always been Jews who have bound themselves to anti-Jewish hatred for a myriad of various reasons. It’s a very old problem and unlikely to go away anytime soon. Nor is it unique to the Jewish experience, all oppressed peoples have their Uncle Toms. Still, an interesting interview and well worth reading.

Kundun Comes to Beersheva (and some thoughts on Emmanuel Levinas...)

2006-02-17T08:13:00.000+02:00

The Dalai Lama was in Beersheva yesterday. Not being much enamored with either Buddhism or pacifism I didn’t try standing in the enormous security line to see him, but there is a write up in Ha’aretz. I was struck by this section.
War, he said, destroys those who are called your enemy, but in reality, they are part of yourself. Because all the world is a single body, the destruction of the enemy is like the destruction of yourself.
I’m sure the Dalai Lama is a very nice and well-meaning man, he certainly seems to be, but as a Jew I cannot accept this philosophy. Anne Frank and Hitler were not of the same body, and the destruction of one was not the destruction of the other. To say otherwise is madness. To pick a less extreme example, I am not of the same body as someone I meet on the street, or my best friend, or my lover. Not only is this the case, it is essential to realize it. I agree with Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy that recognition and apprehension of the Other is the basis of the ethical relationship. If we believe that we are One with the Other than we are subsuming him, making him over in our own image. It is only in the recognition of our separation, face to face, and our recognition of our responsibility, the one to the other, that ethics can be born. War is not the result of a failure to recognize Oneness but a failure to recognize Otherness, and the inherent right of Otherness. It is the tyranny of Oneness that causes war, because it is the desire to destroy the Other and to reduce him to non-existence. The demand of absolute unity is the source of murder. The issue is basic. It is the right to exist. We can only recognize the right of existence when we look into the face of the Other and accept that it is not our own.

Noam Chomsky is an Iconic Mass Murderer (and other experiments in turnabout as fair play...)

2006-02-13T17:50:00.000+02:00

I have been fortunate enough to come across a transcript of the debate (thanks to Chomsky’s official website; irony of ironies, all is irony) between Alan Dershowitz and our beloved professor which was held at Harvard a few months ago. The topic was that perennial obsession of America’s liberal institutions: the Arab-Israeli conflict. As to be expected, Dersh wipes the floor with the good professor, and I say this as someone who has deeply ambivalent feelings about Dershowitz and who does not agree with his political position in regards to the conflict. Contrary to Dershowitz, I believe that the terms offered by Barak at Camp David were far too generous and Oslo appears to have been a very bad idea from the beginning, though I am not opposed in principle to a land for peace deal or a Palestinian state of some kind. Nor do I think that a negotiated peace with the Palestinians is possible at the moment. Dershowitz seems to continue clinging to that unfortunate chimera. However, these are disagreements on details. Dershowitz at least argues his case in good faith and attempts to stick to a reasonably accurate rendition of history. Chomsky not only lies relentlessly about the facts and history of the conflict throughout this debate, he lies repeatedly about his own work and his own previous positions. While I understand his need to distort history in order to justify his apologetics for Arab war crimes and terrorism against Israel and Israelis, I must confess to being a bit puzzled by this obvious and often wholly unnecessary distortionism in regards to his own record. Chomsky claims, not once but several times, that he has supported a two-state solution since the 1970s. For anyone who has read anything of Chomsky’s work, this is obvious nonsense. Peace in the Middle East? and The Fateful Triangle (whose title, I would note, is plagiarized from an earlier work on the British Mandate, originality is not Chomsky’s strong suit) are little more than a mantra on the topic of “bi-national socialism”, as the good professor put it in the former work. The furthest Chomsky has ever gone in supporting Jewish sovereignty is to endorse some vague form of political-religious autonomy within a larger bi-national state. A state which would, obviously, have an Arab majority and therefore be, as anyone knows who has the slightest inkling of how things work in the world beyond the ivory tower, an Arab state.

Chomsky also spins his usual lies about civil conflict in Central and South America during the Cold War and engages in his usual apologetics for Castro’s totalitarian regime. Not to mention placing the entirety of the blame for the Arab-Israeli conflict on the shoulders of Israel and the United States. Nothing that he says is particularly new, except for his sudden rewriting of his own intellectual legacy, and not particularly surprising. Chomsky’s usual methods, if one can dignify them by such a term, are abundantly on display throughout. He blubbers out the usual blizzard of scholars and politicians whom he claims have said various things, as well as namedropping various figures on the Israeli extreme Left as though they represented objective Israeli academic opinion. He also makes an utter fool of himself by invoking the name of Ron Pundak on numerous occasions as an authority only to be revealed by an audience member to be, in fact, completely ignorant of Mr. Pundak or what his involvement in the peace process was. (Full disclosure: Mr. Pundak is the ex-boss of a friend of mine. I have never met him, but I have some knowledge of the Shimon Peres Peace Center that he heads and for which my friend worked and to describe it as harboring more than a few agendas of the distinctly Leftist variety is to make a mild understatement.) Chomsky ends his parade of stumbling approbations by calling Shimon Peres an iconic mass murderer. Which besides being psychotically slanderous is also a bit confusing. One would think such a status would arouse Chomsky’s sympathy. He has displayed in the past, after all, a more than passing affection for iconic mass murderers.

But let us begin at the beginning. A brief observation: anyone who doubts the ubiquity of the Chomskyite mind in America’s institutions of higher education need look no further than the host of this honored event, who manages to cough up this slathering introduction for one of the most corrupted intellectual legacies of the last half-century.
BRIAN MANDELL: From his articulate opposition to the Vietnam War in the mid '60's, to his book, Manufacturing Consent in 1988, and to his even more challenging text, 9-11, published after the terrorists attack that year, Noam Chomsky has never retreated from taking on the most pressing issues of our day.
I could go into how Chomsky’s opposition to the Vietnam War was, in fact, little more than a tissue of lies and communist propaganda, and included comparing America to Nazi Germany and its actions to Auschwitz, which is not to mention his acts of treason on behalf of North Vietnamese propaganda. I could elaborate on how Manufacturing Consent is a tired retread of the Frankfurt School bordering on outright plagiarism. I could even note that the term “challenging text” is usually used to refer to something like, say, an essay by Jacques Derrida or a novel like Moby Dick; in other words, a difficult, obscure piece of work requiring close attention and study to understand. Not, in other words, a clapped together transcription of Leftwing agitprop. But I refrain. Such a thing would be as absurd as calling Chomsky an iconic mass murderer, since, as we all know, Chomsky has only supported mass murder, he’s never had the guts to do it himself.

So, I will simply say that any host who give an introduction such as this really ought to be in the audience, scribbling away furiously trying to get every last utterance from the master down for future publication; and, one must presume, for assigned reading in college courses.

Chomsky begins his challenging text with one of his usual denials of reality, claiming that Israeli withdrawal is, in fact, Israeli expansion.
There was no effort to conceal the fact that Gaza disengagement was in reality West Bank expansion. The official plan for disengagement stated that Israel will permanently take over major population centers, cities, towns and villages, security areas and other places of special interest to Israel in the West Bank. That was endorsed by the U.S. ambassador, as it had been by the President, breaking sharply with U.S. policy.
In fact, the administration endorsed only the obvious fact that an absolute return to the 1967 borders is impossible. Both facts on the ground and Israel’s defense requirements have long since rendered the green line obsolete. Moreover, UN Resolution 242, which about which Chomsky does some copious lying later in the debate, anticipated as much when it was adopted in 1967. No specific borders, however, were endorsed in 242, nor were they endorsed recently by the White House, merely the principle that the ’67 borders are not a prerequisite for peace. Chomsky’s blubbering to the contrary is, at best, mere hyperbole.
There is near unanimity that all of this violates international law. The consensus was expressed by U.S. Judge Buergenthal in his separate declaration attached to the World Court judgment, ruling that the separation wall is illegal. In Buergenthal's words, "The Fourth Geneva Convention and International Human Rights Law are applicable to the occupied Palestinian territory and must therefore be fully complied with by Israel. Accordingly, the segments of the wall being built by Israel to protect the settlements are ipso facto in violation of international humanitarian law," which happens to mean about 80% of the wall.
I will not waste time discussing the absurdly corrupted process by which the World Court rendered its self-evidently racist and morally bankrupt condemnation of a wall which has most likely helped save my life and those of many of my friends. If the World Court considers its obviously biased interpretation of international law more important than human lives, then it deserves its lousy reputation. But it is important to point out that Chomsky himself endorses the idea that there are moral considerations which go beyond the law, as he himself proved by going to prison for protesting against the Vietnam War and in favor of a communist victory. For an anarchist, Chomsky puts remarkable stock in the opinion of elite institutions when it suits him to do so. The American judge, by the way, also dissented from the World Court’s final opinion, which Chomsky conveniently does not mention.
You can find detailed documentation about all of this in work of mine and others who have supported the international consensus for 30 years in print, explicitly. In Israeli literature, like Benny Morris's histories, you can find ample evidence about the nature of the occupation. In Morris's words, "founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers and daily intimidation, humiliation and manipulation, along with stealing of valuable land and resources." Like other Israeli political and legal commentators, Morris reserves special criticism for the Supreme Court, whose record, he writes, "will surely go down as a dark day in the annals of Israel's judicial system."
Fascinating. When Yasser Arafat died, Chomsky wrote an article describing Benny Morris as a racist advocate of transfer who had distorted Arafat’s admirable record in an article in the NY Times. Now, Morris is apparently an unimpeachable source on Israeli history. Again, full disclosure: I have participated in a seminar taught by Professor Morris. He’s an amusing fellow, but just as bonkers as Chomsky in his own way. At any rate, Chomsky really ought to decide if his experts are vile ethnic cleansers or legitimate historians before he goes around citing them. He might also have done us the honor of letting us know that Morris (I will treat him as the latter, unimpeachable, Morris, if only for argument’s sake) in fact rejects Chomsky’s entire narrative of the Oslo Process and the Camp David negotiations. Morris believes that the Palestinians have never made peace with Zionism and that the current conflict is entirely the result of their genocidal rejectionism. As they say, context is everything. Of course, in Chomsky’s next debate he’ll probably be calling Morris an iconic mass murderer. We can’t expect reliability from dilettantes.

This is also, it is important to point out, the first time Chomsky makes his claim that he has “supported the international consensus for 30 years in print, explicitly.” He doesn’t spell out what this “international consensus” is, but we can only assume, based on his prior statements, that it means a two-state solution. Putting aside the foolishness of taking Noam Chomsky’s word on what the generally held opinion of four billion human beings might be, we can nonetheless make the assertion (indeed, I already have) that not only has Chomsky never supported any such thing, he has specifically and vociferously rejected it in print for 30 years, explicitly. Why Chomsky feels the need to lie about this is beyond me. Firstly, because it is so easily disproved. Secondly, because it doesn’t help his case in the least. He could simply say that he once supported a one state solution and now supports a two-state solution. I can only hypothesize that the issue here is a personal one, namely the egomania of someone who has long since bought into his own manufactured iconography. Chomsky, it appears, can never admit to being wrong about anything, past or present; even when it involves exposing himself as a fool and a liar in the process.

Furthermore, such obvious dissembling must beg the question of which Chomsky we are to believe, the Chomsky who endorses a two-state solution today, or the one who has advocated the destruction of Israel for 30 years in print, explicitly. It may, in fact, lead to believe that, while advocating the former in order to appear more moderate in debate, he in fact still holds fast to the latter, implicitly.

As for the opinions of Israeli political and legal commentators, Chomsky clearly does not read the Hebrew press very often. If there is one issue in this country around which an overwhelming consensus exists, and there aren’t many of them, it’s the wall and its necessity.

Now we start the lying about history, or, to stick to pretensions, “the diplomatic record.”
Keeping to the diplomatic record, the first -- both sides, of course, rejected 242. The first important step forward was in 1971, when president Sadat of Egypt offered a full peace treaty to Israel in return for Israeli withdrawal from the Occupied Territories. That would have ended the international conflict. Israel rejected the offer, choosing expansion over security. In this case, expansion into the Egyptian Sinai, where General Sharon's forces had driven thousands of farmers into the desert to clear the land for the all-Jewish city of Yamit. The U.S. backed Israel's stand.
In fact, Sadat offered no such thing. He offered the possibility of negotiations following a complete withdrawal from the Sinai by Israeli forces. This took place, I would note, in the midst of a War of Attrition, with the Soviet-supplied Egyptian army sitting in full force on the other side of the Suez Canal. Even had such negotiations been forthcoming, and there was no guarantee of this, it would not have ended the conflict, since it would have been a bilateral peace treaty with Egypt and not the other Arab states still at war with Israel. Sadat’s offer, in other words, was a tactical maneuver to gain time to build up his forces. It was a non-offer of a non-peace and Israel acted accordingly. There are some Israeli historians who believe the track should have been pursued, others think it should never have been given the attention it received, but none of them make the ridiculous claim that anything like a full peace or an end to the conflict was on offer.

But the most hilariously obvious lie is the obsequious “of course” in the first sentence. “Both sides” did not “of course” reject Resolution 242. Israel, in fact, accepted it. The Arab states rejected it, as they rejected any recognition of or negotiations with Israel at the Khartoum conference held soon after the Six-Day War. The PLO, of course, completely rejected 242 as it would have resulted in the recognition of Israel’s perpetual existence and the end of any possibility of destroying it in favor of an Arab nationalist state. Chomsky must not only lie in order to indict Israel, he must lie in the most embarrassingly obvious fashion about a subject with which even cursory students of the conflict are familiar. The academy’s lionization of this walking joke of a pseudo-scholar is all the proof we will ever need of the degeneration of American learning at the hands of the ‘60s generation.
The matter reached a head in 1988, when the PLO moved from tacit approval to formal acceptance of the two-state consensus. Israel responded with a declaration that there can be no, as they put it, "additional Palestinian state between Jordan and the sea," Jordan already being a Palestinian state -- that's Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir -- and also that the status of the territories must be settled according to Israeli guidelines. The U.S. endorsed Israel's stand. I can only add what I wrote at the time: "It's as if someone were to argue the Jews don't need a second homeland in Israel, because they already have New York."
The PLO has never, in fact, officially recognized Israel. That is, it has not done so according to its own rules for adopting changes to the PLO Charter. As for Israel’s refusal to negotiate with the PLO in 1988, or at anytime before Oslo, it was based on the presumption that doing so would likely lead to, well, the type of situation we have now. It is important also to remember that the PLO was, at the time, still openly a terrorist organization and was still engaged in acts of terror against Israeli civilians. In other words, Israel acted the way any other country would and the way all other countries have. Nothing to be particularly ashamed of, except in the eyes of apologists for terrorism such as the good professor.

As for Chomsky’s attempted reductio regarding New York, and I will ignore its obvious antisemitism, it is self-evidently absurd, even as a facile attempt at irony. The Jews do not have sovereignty over New York City (which is not an independent country anyways) nor do they constitute a majority of its population. The Palestinians are a majority of the kingdom of Jordan. Monarchies cannot last forever in our day and age, and the Palestinians will eventually take control of Jordan, a fact which any Israeli leader has to take into account when planning for Israel’s long term future. Unlike Jordan, there is, obviously, no chance of a Jewish takeover of New York, except perhaps in the minds of Noam Chomsky’s more ardent supporters.
Clinton -- we don't have to debate it, because Clinton recognized that Palestinian objections had validity, and in December 2000 proposed his parameters, which went some way toward satisfying Palestinian rights. In Clinton's words, "Barak and Arafat had both accepted these parameters as the basis for further efforts. Both have expressed some reservations."
Again, we find context annihilated in favor of distortionist name dropping. Clinton, in fact, blamed Arafat for having rejected “an historic opportunity for peace” (I perhaps paraphrase) and praised Barak for having gone so far in order to accommodate Palestinian demands. Clinton remains the staunchest defender of the Israeli position on Camp David and one of Arafat’s most outspoken critics. He insisted at the time and continues to insist that the failure of the 2000 negotiations was entirely the fault of Yasser Arafat and not Ehud Barak or Israel. In other words, despite the rather desperate and undignified assertion from the almighty Chomsky, I’m afraid we do have to debate it.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Hi, my name is Michi Harmon, I'm from Jerusalem and this is a question for Professor Chomsky. I wanted to know if you think that it actually is relevant to dwell upon forming a shared narrative of both sides in going forth towards any solution of peace between us. Is it important for us to actually agree [on] what '48 represents for one side and what '48 represents for the other in order to live together in peace in the future?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yes, I think it's very relevant to understand history if you want to understand the present.

BRIAN MANDELL: Professor Dershowitz, a comment.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: I agree and I think that the history has to be objectively verifiable, and it doesn't become true because Professor Chomsky says it's true. There was a two-state solution proposed by the United Nations in 1948, and if the Palestinians had accepted what the Israelis accepted, a small non-contiguous state with "Bantustans", to quote Professor Chomsky, and instead had not invaded, and if the Egyptians had not occupied the Gaza, something that nobody complained about-it was literally a prison for 20 years-and if the Jordanians hadn't occupied the West Bank-literally a prison for 20 years, and had the situation gone forward as it was supposed to go forward in '48, we would not be here. We would have a two-state solution. But, what happened is, it's clear that the Palestinian and Arab leadership was more interested in destroying the nascent, Jewish state of Israel than in establishing a Palestinian state. That is simply the truth, and there is no way to deny that. And no amount of rhetoric can undercut that reality.

NOAM CHOMSKY: You'll notice that he starts with 1948 and I'd be glad to discuss that if you like but it's not relevant.

BRIAN MANDELL: Ok.
So, it’s relevant when it isn’t relevant. Or it isn’t relevant when it’s relevant. Or, Chomsky is such an articulate critic of foreign affairs that he can’t say two sentences without wrapping himself into knots. Of course, 1948 is relevant because the questioner asked about it. The only thing it is not relevant to is Chomsky’s desire to make Israel (and by extension the US) look as bad as possible, since the events of 1948 imply the horrifying possibility of some measure of Palestinian and Arab responsibility for the current conflict. Why the slightest indulgence of the Israeli point of view arouses such terror in Chomsky that he has to pretend it doesn’t exist (sorry, “it’s not relevant”) would seem to indicate the measure of Chomsky’s confidence in his own position.

And now the ubiquitous Ron Pundak enters the picture.
NOAM CHOMSKY: For those who you would like to see the map, I have it. It's as I said, from Ron Pundak, the leading Israeli scholar, the head of the Shimon Peres Peace Center. It shows-this is the Camp David map, which Clinton recognized was impossible, which is why they went on to Taba. And it cuts through the West Bank completely. (Referring to Alan Dershowitz's map) It's not that. It's…

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: It is this.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Here it is. Here it is. This is Ron Pundak's map…

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: This is Dennis Ross' map.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Yes, Dennis Ross was the US negotiator whose word is meaningless. Ron Pundak is…Ron Pundak is the leading Israeli scholar, and if we want to go into why Ross' book is worthless I'll be happy to say it. It's obvious to any reader, it stops right be…

NOAM CHOMSKY: The head of the Shimon Peres Peace Center, Ron Pundak, who is the leading scholar on this (...)

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Now, see how you change your view. First it's accepted, then it's left open. What is your next position?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Fine. Let's be precise. They did not say anything about that, because the Palestinians had already at Camp David and at Taba accepted the so-called pragmatic settlement, which would not affect the demographic character of Israel.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: That is simply false.

NOAM CHOMSKY: If you want to learn about that, read the serious scholarship, like Ron Pundak, head of the Shimon Perez (sic-Benjamin) Peace – (…)
But then…dread accuracy rears its ugly head.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: [L]et's say that this new party, after the election, guided by Sharon, is to offer the Palestinians a deal-doesn't matter which deal-a deal that will be accepted by most Palestinians, would you support this deal even if it doesn't reflect your views or your ideological views?

NOAM CHOMSKY: Well, I'm glad to see that you-I assume that you endorse Ron Pundak's expert knowledge. Correct? I therefore recommend to all of you who read English that you read the summary of his review of all of this in the Journal of the Institute of Strategic and Security Studies in England, and for those of you who read Hebrew, like you, I presume, you read the much longer study that Ron Pundak and Shaul Arieli wrote--it's on the Ha'aretz Center website--which describes in detail, if you like I can quote it for you. As to what I would accept…

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Ron Pundak was not in Camp David, by the way.

NOAM CHOMSKY: Pardon?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Ron Pundak was not in Camp David.

NOAM CHOMSKY: He was one of the negotiators in the background…

AUDIENCE MEMBER: He was not.

NOAM CHOMSKY: He was one of the negotiators in the background, and he was from…

AUDIENCE MEMBER: He was not.

NOAM CHOMSKY: …He was from Oslo, and his study…

AUDIENCE MEMBER: He's from Oslo. He was never. He was not even close to Camp David, just for the record.

NOAM CHOMSKY: His study, he was one of the advisors, as you know…

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Chomsky says so, it must be true.(…)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I didn't get an answer, sorry.

NOAM CHOMSKY: That's the answer to your question. Yes.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: No, the answer was, even if it wasn't your plan…

NOAM CHOMSKY: Pardon?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: …and most Palestinians…

NOAM CHOMSKY: Pardon?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Even if it wasn't the plan that you think is optimal, or I…

NOAM CHOMSKY: What are you asking?
Judging by this inadvertently hilarious exchange (I love how Chomsky is reduced to blubbering sentence fragments by the end, the man sounds senile) we must conclude several things. Firstly, that Chomsky is so ignorant of the one scholar he cites at length (or, rather, namedrops a comical number of times, as if the name Ron Pundak were a holy mantra capable of exorcising the terrible Dershowitz) that he has absolutely no idea what the nature of his involvement with the Peace Process was and therefore has no means of gauging the accuracy of his statements. Certainly, he has no more capacity for doing so than he has to indict Dennis Ross, who unlike Pundak was at Camp David. Secondly, Chomsky is claiming that there is such a thing as a “leading scholar” on an event which is barely six years old. Anyone who actually studies history, rather than simply pontificating about it, knows that such a thing is impossible. Thirdly, Chomsky thinks that avowedly left wing scholars from the Shimon Peres Peace Center somehow constitute a decisive “expert knowledge” beyond that of any other Israeli scholar. Chomsky could, in fact, cite the aforementioned Benny Morris, who, as I have noted, completely rejects everything Chomsky claims in regards to the 2000 negotiations and is far better known and more respected than Ron Pundak. Nor is Morris alone in this. There are divisions within Israeli academia, and no consensus as such exists on the Camp David negotiations, but Ron Pundak is the “leading scholar” on the issue only in Chomsky’s fevered imagination. In other words, on this issue, we must conclude that Noam Chomsky has not the slightest idea what he’s talking about.

There is, incidentally, no such thing as the Ha’aretz Center.
ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Perfect selective use of Shimon Peres. You know, the Shimon Peres Peace Center. I want to read you a quote from Noam Chomsky. He described Shimon Peres, he described Ronald Reagan at one point, as the semi-divine Reagan, as one of the iconic group of mass murderers from Hitler to Idi Amin to Peres. So, on one day of the week you find Noam Chomsky describing Peres, this great man of peace, as an iconic mass murderer, and on another day he's quoting the authority of Shimon Peres to make peace. I mean…

NOAM CHOMSKY: Excuse me.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: …where do you stand on Shimon Peres? Is he a man of peace or is he an iconic mass murderer?

NOAM CHOMSKY: He is an iconic mass murderer, and I've given plenty of evidence for it, and he is not a man of peace. I did not refer to Shimon Peres. I referred to the director of the Shimon Peres Peace Center.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: So you…

NOAM CHOMSKY: That's not Shimon Peres.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: But you stick to the argument that Shimon Peres, the man who just joined in to make peace is an iconic mass murderer…

NOAM CHOMSKY: You want me to read…

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: …and not a man of peace. I think that says it all.

BRIAN MANDELL: OK.

NOAM CHOMSKY: You want me to run through his record?

BRIAN MANDELL No, I think we…

NOAM CHOMSKY: Including the fact that as late as 1996, he informed the press that a Palestinian state will never happen? And in 1997 he said, "Maybe we can ultimately tolerate it somewhere, but we're not saying where"? That's not a man of peace.
A brief Google search showed no trace of such a quote. However, even if we are to grant Chomsky the unlikely benefit of the doubt, we can easily cut to the substance of the charge; and since Chomsky is so concerned with relevancy, let us judge from a recent interview that Mr. Peres is noticeably innocent of the charges with which Chomsky has slandered him. I have already said my piece on Chomsky’s disgraceful yet typical slander of the man in question, a man with whom I have many disagreements, but who is nonetheless a great deal farther from an iconic mass murderer than his slanderer is. (I would note that Chomsky does not even bother to defend the point, preferring to move on to the “man of peace or not?” issue.) We may also point out that, judging by his continued obfuscation on the subject, Chomsky probably does not want us to “run through his record,” as he puts it, on the subject of peace. Or mass murder for that matter.

Reading Chomsky in debate is rather like watching a beached whale thrashing about. Chomsky cannot debate, he cannot analyze history, he cannot understand politics, he has no grasp of military realities, he cannot quote or cite accurately, he continually distorts his own work and that of others, and he deals in moral absolutes rendered instant hypocrisy by the briefest study of his own record. What results is not so much a debate as a prolonged exercise in rhetorical onanism. Brian Mandell may find Chomsky challenging, which says more about him than it does about Chomsky, but I do not. I find him pitiable, a washed up piece of wreckage from the era of the Worst Generation. The last believer in the blustering ethos of ’68: revolution as Puritan dandyism, contrarianism as idolatry, debate as self-edifying slander. We may be thankful that this lumbering scholar-clown is still around to remind us what a lamentable train wreck it was.

The Incomparable

2006-02-11T14:33:00.000+02:00

The Jerusalem Post has a short article on the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. I consider it a blessing to have encountered Levinas as early as I have, and I recommend everyone to read his extraordinary collection of essays on Judaism, Difficult Freedom. Levinas presents nothing less than a vision of Judaism as a unique means of being through which the ethical relationship between human beings is created. His fascination with faces, with the possibility of human relationship based on apprehension and realization rather than the contest for domination, and his extrapolation of these themes through the Talmud constitute an extraordinary intellectual legacy which both embraces the modern and refuses to compromise Judaism or Jewish identity in the process. He proposes a Judaism which is a kind of ethical existentialism, and yet acknowledges the “trace of God” throughout his thought. Unlike most modern Jewish thinkers, he embraced and transmuted the tradition rather than reject or manipulate it for his own purposes. His philosophy is both within and outside the tradition of Western philosophy. Like Judaism itself, he succeeds in existing between worlds.

Munich and Shylock

2006-01-28T22:35:00.000+02:00

I am writing this a bare half-hour after seeing the film. You will forgive me, I hope, the intensity of my emotions. I want to say now, at the beginning, that, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, it was a brilliant film. Well-acted, beautifully photographed, tensely edited. Spielberg remains, as always, a master manipulator of emotions and images. Beyond that, it was one of the most morally vile works of art I have ever seen. Whether the fault lies with Spielberg or with co-screenwriter Tony Kushner, I have no idea. I am inclined to blame Kushner, since Spielberg’s public musings on the Arab-Israeli conflict appear to be little more than well-meaning naiveté, whereas Kushner’s bloviations on the subject are of the most startlingly poisonous variety. I have been subjected on one unfortunate occasion to the equally unfortunate Mr. Kushner, and I can only say that I doubt any other Pulitzer Prize winning author in history has managed to be so simultaneously stupid, juvenile, insulting, and megalomaniacal in such a short span of time. In this, at least, Kushner has some claim to uniqueness. Beyond that, the only remarkable thing about him is how unremarkable he is. Here we have yet another self-loathing, pseudo-moralistic, ultra-leftwing Diaspora writer whose sole definition of Judaism is the willingness to acknowledge the humanity of those who would happily slit his throat and those of his children.

The film, as everybody now knows, is based on the supposedly true story of the Israeli assassination squad who hunted down and killed those who planned and organized the 1972 Munch massacre. The massacre, at least, actually happened. As for everything else in the film, I am inclined to think that it sprang fully formed from the fevered imaginations of Spielberg and Kushner. The film’s plot is, putting it very mildly, fantastically ridiculous. In order to swallow the film’s premise, we must believe that the Mossad fielded the single most incompetent assassination squad in the history of modern intelligence work; that French anarchists regularly supply information to intelligence agencies which, despite their massive resources, they are apparently incapable of finding out for themselves; that seasoned assassins fantasize about terrorist attacks while having sex with their stunningly beautiful wives; that Tel Aviv has an elevated boulevard complete with railing…but all of this is largely irrelevant. Spielberg is a fantasist after all, and we can hardly expect a filmmaker whose primary cinematic influence is ‘50s television to be capable of putting together an entirely credible narrative out of life and death events. Let alone in struggling with the complexities of the Jewish reacquisition of the capabilities for power, violence and, yes, we shall speak the dread word, vengeance. Schindler’s List will, of course, be cited as an exception, but in that case Jews were quite comfortably victimized, and so we could spend our time pondering the possible humanity of a mass-murdering Nazi officer. Of course, in this case, it is not the Nazis who are the mass murderers of Jews, and so, apparently, we are in more complicated territory.

The film’s lack of believability aside, at least its fictions are in service of something. That something appears to be a grab bag of ideas – I use the term generously – which could be easily summed up in the kind of high concept buzzwords which Spielberg no doubt uses to sell his films. Revenge is pointless. Vengeance only creates a cycle of violence. Anyone who fights terrorists becomes a terrorist himself. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and etc., etc., ad infinitum. All of this is, of course, a means of sounding complex and intelligent without having to actually be complex and intelligent. A predilection which has made both Spielberg and Kushner rich men, but hardly speaks well for their artistic capabilities. Of course, while Spielberg is a great artist, if only for his extraordinarily manipulative talent; Kushner is the shuck and jive man as artist. The ultimate Jewish Uncle Tom. He never fails to give the Gentiles what they want. The thought that a Jew might have no qualms about killing those who would kill him, that vengeance can also be righteous, that turning the other cheek is the hypocrisy of Christianity and not the creed of the Jews, that Jewish blood matters the most to us because it matters to no one else, that a Jew can be more than a blithering house negro for the beautiful people; all this is too horrifying, apparently, to be even thought of as a rational possibility. So we receive yet another weeping Shylock, wearing the clothes of conscience, which for the righteous is but another Jewish gabardine for them to spit upon. If you prick us do we not bleed? If you poison us, do we not die? Forgive us, oh beautiful and well meaning souls, for not being Gentiles. And, of course, the final line, the great truth at the heart of Shylock’s rage, which is not a plea, is erased as another shanda before the goyim. Because it is unthinkable. Because it reads thus: If you wrong us, will we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest we will resemble you in that. And it shall go hard, for I’ll better the instruction. I have neither the time nor the patience for those who would deny Shylock his vengeance. Give me Shylock. I will adore him. I will sing his praises. I will fight for Shylock. I will stand up in his name. He is my kinsmen. He suffered because he was a Jew. And he desired vengeance for his suffering because he was a human being. I am both a human being and a Jew. I suffer as my people suffer, and I desire vengeance for my suffering and theirs. And I do so as both a Jew and a human being. And I will not be shamed by callow refugees of the television generation nor by self-satisfied fools masquerading as men of conscience.

Hamas Ascendant

2006-01-28T22:02:00.000+02:00

Several people have written to me asking my opinion of the Palestinian elections. I hate to be the odd man out of the general hysteria, but I don’t think they make much difference whatsoever. I have always held to the same position regarding the possibilities of peace between us and the Palestinians. In my opinion, for what it’s worth, I believe peace is impossible between us at the moment. What is not impossible is a status quo in which two states live side by side in mutual hate and enmity with a minimum of violence on both sides of the divide. With the passing of a generation or two, this may or may not lead to a rapprochement of sorts. I frankly don’t know. I also don’t think it particularly matters. Israel has spent far too long hinging its future on the possibility of Arab acceptance. It is time for us to return to ourselves and to concentrate on the future of Israel and Zionism. Peace is not the fulfillment of Zionism. A living, prosperous, culturally creative and nationally proud Jewish state is the fulfillment of Zionism. Neither peace nor acceptance is a requirement for this. What is a requirement is our disengagement from the Palestinians and our setting of permanent borders. This can only be done, at the moment, if ever, by unilateral Israeli action. Who rules the Palestinians is, frankly, no concern of mine except to the extent that it threatens Israel and Israelis. From this point of view, the difference between Hamas and Fatah is minimal to non-existent. The only possible distinction I can see is that Hamas actually comes out and says what Fatah clouds in diplomatic doublespeak. We now have an enemy who looks us in the face and says what he means. So be it.

So It Begins...

2006-01-09T12:11:00.000+02:00

Voting has begun in the preliminary round for the Jewish Israeli Blog Awards at the Jerusalem Post web site. Voting rules are here, and you may vote for Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite - should you be so inclined - here. As they say in Boston, please remember to vote early and often.

2006-01-07T23:11:00.000+02:00

The word from the media over here is that there is a slight improvement in the Prime Minister's condition, but I'm afraid I'm not holding out much hope at this point. I think everything that is happening now is essentially a series of heroic measures. At least, that seems to be the consensus on the street.

I have been jotting down a few thoughts in Hebrew over the last 24 hours or so, so for those of you who read the Holy Tongue, I have posted some of them over at my Hebrew blog.

Arik

2006-01-06T09:57:00.000+02:00

Thy glory, Israel, is fallen upon his heights.

What does one say when giants are dying? Perhaps in a day or two I will say more than this, but right now, one thing is certain: we have lost our DeGaulle. The way forward is clear, but without him it will be more difficult, more complicated, and much slower in coming. His slanderers will curse his name in the coming days, and those of us who admired and believed in him will smile and keep our own counsel. He took the slings and arrows for all of us, for the entirety of his people. He loved us and he fought for us until the inevitable came. Every man, however strong, however great, must eventually face the unavoidable fact of mortality. He has done enough, more than enough, more than could be requested of any man. He made his mistakes, and they were our mistakes; he achieved the greatness he sought for his entire life, and it was ours as well. Sharon is the last of a generation of giants. He was of a generation which is now a part of the past, and the country they hewed out of barren rock is now stronger than any single man. In that, we may take more than some comfort amongst the tragedy.

Some Completely and Utterly Shameless Self-Promotion

2005-12-31T15:18:00.000+02:00

Diary of an Anti-Chomskyite has been nominated for Best Overall Blog in the 2005 Jewish and Israeli Blog Awards. My sincere thanks to those of you who took the time to put my name into contention, as well as to all who have been reading this blog. The list of nominees is here, and the rules for voting in the next two rounds are here. Preliminary voting will be from January 9th - 19th. Of course, its an honor just to be nominated...

Munich Follies

2005-12-25T12:55:00.000+02:00

A review of Munich over at Slate magazine has only heightened my apprehensions over the film and what it may represent for the American-Jewish zeitgeist. I personally cannot stand people who condemn films without having seen them, so I am withholding judgment on Munich until I have seen it, just as I have written nothing on The Passion of the Christ and likely never will, since I intend never to see it (mainly because I have no desire to see two hours of a crucifixion, probably the most vile method of execution man ever invented). However, David Edelstein’s review of the film represents one of those truly extraordinary moments of collective dissonance which requires comment.
Rapidly overtaking the "Cinema of Revenge" is the "Cinema of Revenge with a Guilty Conscience"—i.e., "My people got even and all I got was this dumb hair shirt."

What's the reason for this post-9/11, self-critical twist on the thriller genre's beloved scenarios of injury and retaliation? Maybe it's that the recent consequences of such thinking have been so catastrophic: that despite invading two countries (Afghanistan and Iraq), quickly overthrowing their governments, and inflicting massive casualties on their populations, the enemy's resistance has, if anything, grown more tenacious; and that our ally Israel, among the world's most reflexively vindictive nations, hasn't managed with its instantaneous reprisals to stanch the flow of blood. At this juncture, to make the movies we always have, the ones that revel in righteous brutality, would not only be socially irresponsible. It would be delusional.
There are two things going on here. One is “delusional” as the author states, the other is morally and spiritually bankrupt. Nor, indeed, can we ignore the unmistakable wretchedness of Jewish self-hatred lurking behind these paragraphs.

The delusional is fairly obvious. For this author, there is only invasion, overthrow and the absurd rhetorical onanism represented by the phrase “inflicting massive casualties on their populations”. There is no mention of the danger of terrorism, the danger of Middle Eastern totalitarianism, the unspeakably brutal nature of the overthrown regimes, nor the obvious and unfortunately inconvenient fact that the lion’s share of the “massive casualties” suffered by the populations of Afghanistan and Iraq were, in fact, inflicted by their own governments. The enemy’s resistance (I have neither the time nor the inclination to parse Edelstein’s ridiculous usage of this term to describe people whose primary method of “resistance” appears to be “resisting” innocent and unarmed people by slaughtering them en masse) has proven so tenacious that Al Queda is now forced to rely on incompetent surrogates to carry out operations in a Europe whose security networks have not, as yet, mobilized to meet its threat. It has, furthermore, completely failed to stop the Iraqi people’s obvious desire for democracy nor their resolution to act upon it. The “resistance”, in fact, has proven to be capable of doing only one thing tenaciously, and that is murder its own co-religionists in large numbers.

I am not arguing here that the War on terror has been a complete success. I am arguing only that to engage in the type of self-flagellating and flagrantly dishonest doom-mongering at work in these paragraphs is to be not merely socially irresponsible and, yes, delusional, but to commit a fundamental violation of that amorphous thing we like to call truth, or perhaps, simple honesty.

I do not wish to engage in armchair psychology, but the description of Israel as “the world’s most reflexively vindictive nation” cannot help but appear amusing to someone who lives in a country which has spent much of the last decade making concessions to its most existential enemy. Nor can someone like myself, who has seen the results of Palestinian terror firsthand, possibly take the assertion that it has “failed to stanch the flow of blood” with any real seriousness. I remember when bombs were going off here every other day. Bombs still go off, on very great and regrettable occasion. But there can be no doubt in the mind of anyone who lives here that Israel’s military policy has been massively successful in interdicting and preventing terrorism against its citizens. The reckless distortion of facts is undoubtedly the homage delusion pays to reality.

But what we are really arguing here is that which is never mentioned, the question of Jewish self-flagellation. Because the true issue at stake is the idea of “an eye for an eye”, “ayin tachat ayin” as the Torah, untranslated, puts it. Edelstein is invoking a Christian ethos against the Jewish, and engaging in the exacting sureties familiar to anyone who has ever been openly Jewish in leftist circles. It is the brand of Uncle Tomism which we have all played from time to time. Namely, the desire to swallow whole the mythos of another and to remake it as our own. In this, we betray our own ignorance of ourselves.

I say this because Edelstein clearly does not understand the phenomenon which he terms “vindictive”, and can conceive of it only as a mythos of revenge. In fact, what we are speaking of here is not vengeance but justice. Or rather, of the role of vengeance in justice. As the great French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas pointed out, the concept of “an eye for an eye”, according to the Jewish commentaries, is one of compensation and thus equalization. As opposed to the Christian metaphysic, which demands forgiveness, Jewish Law conceives of violence as an act of violation and thus domination. As such, it demands a recompense, or the world is lost. Forgiveness in such a situation is simply submission. It is the acceptance of injustice. To say that “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” is to miss the point and to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. In fact, to forgive one who takes the eye of another is to accept his act. To normalize it. Thus guaranteeing that the world will indeed be blind, except, of course, for the most ruthless, the most cruel, and the most opportunistic among us. Vengeance, therefore, properly undertaken, is integral to justice, and cannot be separated from it. This plays into a further commentary, from the Midrash, to the effect that the world was created three times. Once upon the principle of justice, once on the principle of mercy, and once upon both principles together. Only the third world could stand, the others instantly destroyed themselves. Thus, justice cannot exist without mercy nor mercy without justice. To sacrifice one to the other is to destroy the world. Thus, the existence, the necessity of Law, which, as we are told, is one of the pillars upon which stands the world itself. For, contrary to the ignorant attacks of its critics, the principle of an eye for an eye in fact limits the realm of reprisal. A man whose eye is taken cannot justly take the life of his attacker. The establishment of equal compensation ensures our humanity. This principle meets its limit, of course, only in the realm of murder, because against murder there can be no compensation. Therefore, vengeance is at its height in the realm of murder. It is worth noting that, while Judaism heavily regulates the death penalty, it nowhere rejects it outright, for obvious reasons. Nonetheless, even here, in the hinterlands of possible justice, for there can be no true justice for the dead, the Law does not fear to tread.

But those of us who have accepted the negation of our creeds without even knowing them do fear to tread this wasteland. We prefer instead to intone pieties about the futility of vengeance even as, in doing so, we annihilate ourselves. The results are now universally known. It is accepted as obvious, for instance, that the acceptable response to occupation is the murder of children and innocent adults. This is called “an understandable result of…” It is also accepted that to assassinate those who plan and carry out such murders is an abomination. Against this we must raise the apparently shocking assertion that forgiveness taken to its extremes goes mad, and becomes the acceptance of murder. That there is no such thing as a cycle of violence, there is, rather, the man who violates and the man who demands restitution, and that to choose submission is to already submit to the death of the world. Five hundred years of human progress has apparently brought us to an unfortunate and depressing duality. On the one side, an eye for an eye. On the other, the belief that some have earned the right to murder others. You may choose for yourself which of the two represents the delusional.

The Eighth Wonder of the World

2005-12-24T12:25:00.000+02:00

I just saw the new King Kong, and I must say I wasn't very impressed. I've posted on it over at Gefen. Enjoy.

Memeing It

2005-12-15T09:32:00.000+02:00

I couldn't resist. Courtesy of Atlantic Blog.

1. My uncle once: took me for a ride in a prop plane.
2. Never in my life: have I made love to more than one woman at the same time (well, I didn't go to college in America...)
3. When I was five: I started reading.
4. High School is: the only modern institution for which failure is an existential necessity.
5. My parents are: extraordinarily bourgeois.
6. I once met: Scotty from Star Trek.
7. There's this girl I know who: can undo buttons with her teeth.
8. Once, at a bar: I was complimented on my genitalia.
9. Last night: I crashed.
10. Next time I go to church: will be the first time. Next time I go to synagogue, however, watch out…
11. When I turn my head left, I see: a stack of notebooks containing many things I should have typed up months ago.
12. When I turn my head right, I see: a series of black and white photographs I took during a trip to the Old City of Jerusalem.
13. How many days until my birthday?: not enough.
14. If I was a character written by Shakespeare I'd be: Hamlet. The readiness is all.
15. By this time next year: I hope to working on my second degree in Jerusalem.
16. A better name for me would be: none. I love my name. My last name on the other hand…
17. I have a hard time understanding: Maimonides.
18. If I ever go back to school I: will have graduated from the school I’m attending now.
19. You know I like you if: I gesticulate violently and yell in your presence.
20. If I won an award, the first person I'd thank would be: God. That's what they all do, isn't it?
21. Take my advice: never take a Jewish woman for granted.
22. My ideal breakfast is: mallawach with honey, orange juice, and Turkish coffee (Israelis will understand)
23. If you visit my hometown: run.
24. Why won't someone: produce the screenplay I wrote about Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky?
25. If you spend the night at my house: I hope you like the smell of stale cigarettes.
26. I'd stop my wedding: for nothing and no one.
27. The world could do without: You know who.
28. I'd rather lick the belly of a cockroach than: attend an American university.
29. Paper clips are more useful than: KY Jelly. Massively overrated.
30. If I do anything well, it is: the Copernican reversal.
31. And by the way: Israel’s going to win.

Some Blatant Self-Promotion, part II

2005-12-14T19:13:00.000+02:00

Voting on nominations is now open here.

Some Blatant Self-Promotion

2005-12-10T12:37:00.000+02:00

Any of you faithful anti-Chomskyites who may, perchance, wish to nominate and/or vote for this blog in the upcoming Jewish Israeli Blog Awards may do so starting this Monday, 12th December. All the information is here at the host blog Israelly Cool. Just plantin' seeds...

Deconstructing the Janus-Faced

2005-11-23T20:42:00.000+02:00

Pierre Vidal-Naquet, describing Noam Chomsky’s essay in defense of his advocacy on behalf of Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, noted that it “partakes of a rather new genre in the republic of letters.” Chomsky’s recent letter to the Guardian in regard to Emma Brockes’ critical interview with him must be included in this new genre. A genre demarcated by its extraordinary capacity for Orwellian inversion and brazen disingenuousness. It is, of course, well known that the only thing European leftists enjoy more than hating America is being flagellated for failing to hew sufficiently to the party line; indeed, it is not going too far to say that all radical leftists have at least a bit of the sado-masochist about them; and this is the only reason I can think of for the Guardian's craven capitulation to such an obviously absurd and dishonest screed. The facts of the issue at hand have been dealt with elsewhere, and I prefer to concentrate on the text itself, which is a remarkable case study in Chomskyite duplicity and obfuscation. Chomsky begins by telling us that he is, in fact, completely unconcerned by the article in question, but he is forced to respond due to his altruistic concern for humanity.

It is a nuisance, and a bit of a bore, to dwell on the topic, and I always keep away from personal attacks on me, unless asked, but in this case the matter has some more general interest, so perhaps it’s worth reviewing what most readers could not know. The general interest is that the print version reveals a very impressive effort, which obviously took careful planning and work, to construct an exercise in defamation that is a model of the genre. It’s of general interest for that reason alone...

It was evident from the electronic version that it was a scurrilous piece of journalism. That’s clear even from internal evidence. The reporter obviously had a definite agenda: to focus the defamation exercise on my denial of the Srebrenica massacre. From the character of what appeared, it is not easy to doubt that she was assigned this task. When I wouldn’t go along, she simply invented the denial, repeatedly, along with others.

I will put aside the extraordinary irony of the words "defamation" and "scurrilous" issuing from a man whose entire career constitutes little more than a single, protracted act of scurrilous defamation, since that too is a bit of a bore. I will simply concentrate on the issue at hand. At first glance what is most evident to the reader is the inherently absurd paranoia of what is being said. The Guardian is a newspaper whose ideology and political loyalties are open, well known, and unabashedly leftwing. The idea of this paper's resolutely progressive staff getting together and cooking up a plan to screw Noam Chomsky is material for satire, not an ostensibly serious polemic. Chomsky’s persecution complex is certainly remarkable, he is finding sinister plots even among his allies.

Now for the more serious, or at least the more relatively sane, charge. Chomsky is making only one real accusation here: that his interlocutor, one Emma Brockes, claimed – falsely – that he, Chomsky, denied the fact that there was a massacre in Srebrenica during the Bosnian war. From amidst the usual blizzard of invective, Chomsky invokes only a single fragment of a sentence to support this, so I will quote the ostensibly offending paragraph in full:

This is, of course, what Chomsky has been doing for the last 35 years, and his conclusions remain controversial: that practically every US president since the second world war has been guilty of war crimes; that in the overall context of Cambodian history, the Khmer Rouge weren’t as bad as everyone makes out; that during the Bosnian war the “massacre” at Srebrenica was probably overstated. (Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.)

As is plain to see, the only thing that is revealed by this quote is Chomsky’s apparent inability to recognize sarcasm; not an unusual vice among men who have grown used to worshipful adoration. Beyond that, Brockes’ irony clearly has a serious intent, that is, to point out the nature of Chomsky’s discourse; which is to say, arrogant, dismissive, and utterly indifferent to the suffering of other human beings. Her point is both well taken and no surprise to those of us who have read Chomsky’s work.

But what follows is truly extraordinary.

The printed version reveals how careful and well-planned the exercise was, and why it might serve as a model for the genre. The front-page announcement of the interview reads: “Noam Chomsky The Greatest Intellectual?” The question is answered by the following highlighted Q&A above the interview:

Q: Do you regret supporting those who say the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated?
A: My only regret is that I didn’t do it strongly enough.

It is set apart in large print so that it can’t be missed, and will be quoted separately (as it already has been). It also captures the essence of the agenda. The only defect is that it didn’t happen. The truthful part is that I said, and explained at length, that I regret not having strongly enough opposed the Swedish publisher’s decision to withdraw a book by Diana (not “Diane,” as the Guardian would have it) Johnstone after it was bitterly attacked in the Swedish press. As Brockes presumably knew, though I carefully explained anyway, there is one source for my involvement in this affair: an open letter that I wrote to the publisher, after editors there who objected to the decision, and journalist friends, sent me the Swedish press charges that were the basis for the rejection. In the open letter, readily available on the internet (and the only source), I went through the charges one by one, checked them against the book, and found that they all ranged from serious misrepresentation to outright fabrication. I then took – and take – the position that it is completely wrong to withdraw a book because the press charges (falsely) that it does not conform to approved doctrine. And I do regret that “I didn’t do it strongly enough,” the words Brockes managed to quote correctly. In the interview, whatever Johnstone may have said about Srebrenica never came up, and is entirely irrelevant in any event, at least to anyone with a minimal appreciation of freedom of speech.

I reproduce this passage in full because it may be one of the most fascinating pieces of double discourse ever committed to paper. It is, in fact, a confession disguised as a writ for the defense. A mea culpa in the clothes of a denunciation. It is a necessity here to repeat the substance of Brockes’ actual accusation: that Chomsky openly and publicly praised the work of people who attempted to (falsely) minimize and dismiss the Srebrenica massacre, and that he lent the weight of his reputation to their aid and defense. This is a charge to which Chomsky openly pleads guilty. And not merely openly, but proudly as well. Because there is no defense against Brockes’ charge, Chomsky does not mount one. He chooses instead to engage us in a blizzard of proofs to the effect that he never committed a wrong of which he is not accused. That is to say, he is telling us, clearly and in no uncertain terms, and with immense and unnecessary detail, that he never denied the massacre in Srebrenica. A charge which, I feel I must repeat, was never asserted in the first place.

The truth is, in other words, hiding in plain sight. Chomsky is denying Brockes’ assertion by admitting to it. He did, as he announces with outspoken pride, support people who claimed the Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated, and believes, then and now, that their work is of an extraordinary nature. He announces, furthermore, that he proudly protested the withdrawal of a book which, as this article elucidates, engaged in precisely the sort of minimization and dismissal which Brockes is citing. In other words, Noam Chomsky is viciously attacking Emma Brockes while simultaneously acknowledging the truth of her accusations. Vidal-Naquet did not refer to the good professor as “Chomsky the Janus-faced” for nothing.

In the end, the noble cause of free speech (applied with discretion, of course) absolves all sins, as it did for Chomsky’s defense of Robert Faurisson as well. As Vidal-Naquet wrote on that occasion: “The principle he invokes is not what is at stake.” Nor is it at stake now, except for Emma Brockes. Those of us with “a minimal appreciation of free speech” cannot help but be reminded of Hannah Arendt’s quote regarding her attempts to confront Martin Heidegger over his collaboration with Nazism: “He constantly tried the same [tactic]: through endless comparisons and rational elucidations he relativized all particular events, for instance, now also the gas chambers…It is all really just a game.” A tragic game, of course, for some. But not for Noam Chomsky.

This slander/confession constitutes the only substantial assertion Chomsky makes regarding the substance of the interview in question, and it is relevant to note that, even to arrive at this much, one is forced to wade through an ocean of childish insults and paranoiac ravings. In fact, and this is quite telling, Chomsky’s letter says remarkably little about the content of the interview itself. He spends a great deal more time, and displays a remarkable streak of vanity, attacking his photographic representations, which appear to have caused him no end of fuming consternation.

One is a picture of me “talking to journalist John Pilger” (who isn’t shown, but let’s give the journal the benefit of the doubt of assuming he is actually in the original). The second is of me “meeting Fidel Castro.” The third, and most interesting, is a picture of me “in Laos en route to Hanoi to give a speech to the North Vietnamese.”

That’s my life: honoring commie-rats and the renegade who is the source of the word “pilgerize” invented by journalists furious about his incisive and courageous reporting, and knowing that the only response they are capable of is ridicule.

Turn to the Castro picture. In this case the picture, though clipped, is real. As the editors surely know, at least if those who located the picture did 2 minutes of research, the others in the picture (apart from my wife) were, like me, participants in the annual meeting of an international society of Latin American scholars, with a few others from abroad. This annual meeting happened to be in Havana. Like all others, I was in a group that met with Castro. End of second story.

I must point out, once again, that Chomsky freely admits that there is nothing in the least inaccurate or untrue in any of these photographs. Chomsky is, of course, an admirer of John Pilger, whose capacity for paranoia and invective is perhaps exceeded only by Chomsky himself; and the good professor has been publicly carrying the torch for the Castro regime for decades. For instance, an entire chapter of his bestseller 9/11 is taken up with a long rant, totally irrelevant to 9/11, denouncing American resistance to Cuban communism. But, perhaps, we can take comfort in Chomsky’s largely unspoken acknowledgement that there is, at least, something unseemly about palling around with such people. Progress, it appears, has been made.

Chomsky then turns to a long dissertation, as is his wont, on American evils in Vietnam (without, I would note, sparing a single tear for the victims of the North Vietnamese regime he supported – mass murder has never much mattered to him so long as the right people are being killed) until he arrives at this extraordinary paragraph.

The rest of the trip “to Hanoi to give a speech to the North Vietnamese” is a Guardian invention. Those who frequent ultra-right defamation sites can locate the probable source of this ingenious invention, but even that ridiculous tale goes nowhere near as far as what the Guardian editors concocted, which is a new addition to the vast literature of vilification of those who stray beyond the approved bounds.

This is, put bluntly, a conscious and deliberate lie. Chomsky’s speech on North Vietnamese radio is real and is documented here, with further commentary here, as well as in Paul Hollander’s book Political Pilgrims and in David Horowitz and Peter Collier's Destructive Generation. No doubt these qualify as "ultra-right defamation sites", as does this blog and, one imagines, anyone who dares to point out the good professor's tendency towards frequent "ingenious invention". In truth, one doesn’t know whether to be astounded by the brazenness of this falsehood or by the degree of cowardice behind it. If one must shill for totalitarianism one ought to have the courage to own up to it after the fact.

But we are used to Chomsky’s confabulations; they are nothing new, and nothing very surprising. So it is to the Guardian itself that we must direct the lion’s share of our approbation. Had the editors applied the same standards to this letter as Chomsky applies to their reporter, this falsehood alone should have been enough to render Chomsky’s entire letter suspect and unprintable. The cowardice of a man who has spent his life churning out mendacious polemics is nothing compared to the cowardice of men who ought to, and probably do, know better. But we are not finished yet.

So that’s my life: worshipping commie-rats and such terrible figures as John Pilger. Quite apart from the deceit in the captions, simply note how much effort and care it must have taken to contrive these images to frame the answer to the question on the front page.

It is an impressive piece of work, and, as I said, provides a useful model for studies of defamation exercises, or for those who practice the craft. And also, perhaps, provides a useful lesson for those who may be approached for interviews by this journal.

Indeed it does. The lesson is: never question a leftwing icon unless one is prepared to be slandered and lied about by your subject and subsequently abandoned by your editors. The truth, of course, is that there is a great deal more to Noam Chomsky’s life than worshipping commie-rats and terrible John Pilgers, although these are certainly among his major interests. There is also a lifetime of verbose mandarinism on behalf of regimes and movements dedicated to totalitarianism, terror, and mass murder; not to mention more than occasional forays into antisemitism and semi-deranged paranoiac fantasies involving, apparently, even the editors of newspapers sympathetic to Chomsky’s own politics. And, of course, we have writings such as this one, which are, in their own way, masterpieces of lying, dissembling, defamation, and bad faith. The sum total of this life, Noam Chomsky, is most likely the reason Ms. Brockes saw fit to treat you without the fawning deference to which you apparently believe yourself entitled.

So what are we left with, after the smoke and mirrors are cleared away? We are left with a tapestry of slanders, lies both small and large, and a series of deliberate misrepresentations which, taken together, could not qualify as a letter to the editor, let alone stand as the rationale for retracting an article which, while openly critical, nonetheless remains well within the bounds of journalistic ethics. So we are left, ultimately, with a successful act of suppression. With a gaggle of cowards, fanatics, and totalitarian ideologues who have together collaborated to silence a welcome and necessary attempt to expose the truth behind one of the most corrupted intellectual legacies of the last half-century. A victory, in other words, for tyranny.

A certain professor once famously said: “It is the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies.” This is, of course, a banality, and thus meaningless. The harsh truth is that the responsibility of the intellectual is to confront political evil and to expose those who embrace it. To resist and not to collaborate. Emma Brockes fulfilled that responsibility by exposing a small measure of the human cost accrued by Chomsky’s lifetime of collaboration. The question now is whether her editors will fulfill theirs by honoring her courage; a possibility which is, I fear, depressingly remote. Chomsky, for his part, may rest easy. He has succeeded, once again, in reducing the dead to a debating point.

Brockes original article, as well as Chomsky's response, can be found at Chomsky's official website.

Sharon Drops the Bomb

2005-11-21T07:39:00.000+02:00

Ariel Sharon is leaving the Likud Party. Things over here are about to get very, very interesting.

The Guardian Capitulates to Chomskyite Censorship

2005-11-19T09:11:00.000+02:00

The Guardian has apparently given in to Chomskyite pressure and withdrawn their critical interview with the good professor. I don’t see anything in this mea culpa that would justify such an act, but the inability of an ostentatiously leftist publication to sustain such a heresy as an actual piece of journalism is hardly much of a surprise. The speed with which the partisans of free thought and inquiry resort to censorship when their sureties are challenged can be absolutely breathtaking. In my opinion, they should have printed the interview and their correction side by side and allowed Brockes a chance to respond. For the record, nothing in Brockes’ article suggested that the Srebrenica massacre was denied, only that certain partisans had claimed it was exaggerated, and that Chomsky had expressed effusive praise of their work. The Guardian appears overly eager to renounce its transgressions, even where none exist. In that context, this line has to be marvelously ironic: “Both Prof Chomsky and Ms Johnstone, who has also written to the Guardian, have made it clear that Prof Chomsky's support for Ms Johnstone, made in the form of an open letter with other signatories, related entirely to her right to freedom of speech.” He said the same thing about Robert Faurisson, and it wasn’t true then either. Free speech, apparently, absolves a multitude of sins; that is, if you’re on the right side of the Chomskyite divide.

WFB on the Fall of France

2005-11-12T10:44:00.000+02:00

William F. Buckley has just written, as per usual, a marvelously verbose and inscrutable commentary on the French riots. I haven’t written on this subject yet because I wanted to see how the violence would play out, but Buckley pretty much nails the issue much better than I could. He points out that there is something distinctly French about what is going on here:

President Chirac announced on Thursday that he would not discuss the unrest until after it had been quieted. That condition had the familiar sound of the warden who will not discuss the prisoners' demands until their havoc is done. That is the sensible course to take, but it does not automatically quiet the fervor. If the planted axiom of the protesters is that only revolution can bring progress, then the staunching of revolutionary activity is a step in the wrong direction, capitulationist, defeatist. What, on the other hand, the revolutionists lack is a program concrete enough to give them any sense of satisfactions achievable. In 1959, the objective was pretty plain: the secession of Algeria as a department of France. A hundred and seventy years before, the objective was the overthrow of the monarchy and of a ruling aristocratic class. What would satisfy the existing revolutionaries as a corporate ideal? The elimination of the automobile? If so, it being obvious that that is never going to happen, then the contrapositive needs to be considered: the revolution will be endless. That is formal logic. The French are disposed to violent protesting, as we saw in 1968.

I would differ somewhat with the esteemed Mr. Buckley. I think radical Islam is clearly a major factor in these riots. To call them a French intifada is not, I think, very far off the mark. But one cannot ignore the fact that France has a long and much celebrated history of mayhem and violence. Moreover, France is a country which is seemingly incapable of facing its history. To hear most French tell it, French colonialism and the Algerian tragedy never occurred. An omission made all the more interesting by the fact that the massive Muslim presence in their country as well as the metastasizing strength of the French extreme right are both direct results of the Algerian horror. Putting that aside, France has always had a romance with endless revolutions, and with the purifying capacities of violence. Now, however, a virulent form of theological totalitarianism has been added to the mix (before the denunciations begin, I am speaking here of radical, political Islam, and not Islam itself) with consequences which are, at the moment, unforeseeable. What is most important here is that the claim of the capitulationists, that the riots are purely the result of socio-political dissatisfactions, cannot be sustained. Many in France are disenfranchised, they are not all rioting. Nor has rioting in France ever been confined to the disenfranchised (viva ’68!). Something else, perhaps the French fantasy of an infinitely exportable French culture, perhaps the millenial fantasy of a multicultural utopia, perhaps that particularly French romance with revolution itself, has just been destroyed.

Never a Dull Moment...

2005-11-10T16:27:00.000+02:00

…in this country. Socialist Amir Peretz has just taken the leadership of the Labor Party away from perennial loser/darling of the international community Shimon Peres. Just about anything could happen now, from early elections to a collapse of the unity government, to a broader rightwing coalition. This may come as a surprise, but I’m not nearly as bothered by this as one might think. Peretz is a bread and butter socialist, he’s concerned with economic and social equality, but he isn’t a psychopathic peacenik or a pie in the sky one-worlder, although at times he can sound like one. Folks like Yossi Beilin and Avraham Burg are far more disturbing in terms of security and the peace process. Fortunately, Burg is out of politics and Beilin is ensconced in Meretz, a leftist wingnut party permanently stuck at around ten Knesset seats. Now, the prospect of Meretz being part of a leftwing coalition is problematic, but we’re a long way from that. As for Peretz himself, I do think he would be a disaster for Israel’s economy, but even if he managed to gain the Prime Ministership (which I doubt) he wouldn’t have a wide enough coalition to radically change the country’s economic direction.

The most interesting thing about this is the fact that Peretz is a Sephardi Jew. This is the first time – with the exception of the short tenure of Benjamin Ben-Eliezer – that the quintessential party of the Ashkenazi elite has had a Sephardi chairman. Moreover, Peretz is openly the man of “second Israel”, the Israel of the development towns and the poorer sectors of the economy, who have traditionally been Likud voters. It remains to be seen if Peretz can get second Israel to vote for him, but if he can, it will be a sea change of immense proportions in the makeup and constituency of Israel’s oldest party.

A Welcome Anomaly

2005-11-03T18:29:00.000+02:00

The longstanding mainstream media tradition of publishing worshipful adorations of Noam Chomsky instead of actual articles and interviews appears to have been broken with the publication of this extraordinary article in – of all places – Britain’s left wing newspaper The Guardian. Emma Brockes seems to have written herself into history by proving herself the first reporter with enough intelligence and integrity to actually practice real journalism when writing about the good professor and his wretched blubberings. There’s too much good stuff here to reproduce more than a highlight, but this exchange is absolutely classic:

As some see it, one ill-judged choice of cause was the accusation made by Living Marxism magazine that during the Bosnian war, shots used by ITN of a Serb-run detention camp were faked. The magazine folded after ITN sued, but the controversy flared up again in 2003 when a journalist called Diane Johnstone made similar allegations in a Swedish magazine, Ordfront, taking issue with the official number of victims of the Srebrenica massacre. (She said they were exaggerated.) In the ensuing outcry, Chomsky lent his name to a letter praising Johnstone's "outstanding work". Does he regret signing it?

"No," he says indignantly. "It is outstanding. My only regret is that I didn't do it strongly enough. It may be wrong; but it is very careful and outstanding work."

How, I wonder, can journalism be wrong and still outstanding?

"Look," says Chomsky, "there was a hysterical fanaticism about Bosnia in western culture which was very much like a passionate religious conviction. It was like old-fashioned Stalinism: if you depart a couple of millimetres from the party line, you're a traitor, you're destroyed. It's totally irrational. And Diane Johnstone, whether you like it or not, has done serious, honest work. And in the case of Living Marxism, for a big corporation to put a small newspaper out of business because they think something they reported was false, is outrageous."

They didn't "think" it was false; it was proven to be so in a court of law.

But Chomsky insists that "LM was probably correct" and that, in any case, it is irrelevant. "It had nothing to do with whether LM or Diane Johnstone were right or wrong." It is a question, he says, of freedom of speech. "And if they were wrong, sure; but don't just scream well, if you say you're in favour of that you're in favour of putting Jews in gas chambers."

Eh? Not everyone who disagrees with him is a "fanatic", I say. These are serious, trustworthy people.

"Like who?"

"Like my colleague, Ed Vulliamy."

Vulliamy's reporting for the Guardian from the war in Bosnia won him the international reporter of the year award in 1993 and 1994. He was present when the ITN footage of the Bosnian Serb concentration camp was filmed and supported their case against LM magazine.

"Ed Vulliamy is a very good journalist, but he happened to be caught up in a story which is probably not true."

But Karadic's number two herself [Biljana Plavsic] pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity.

"Well, she certainly did. But if you want critical work on the party line, General Lewis MacKenzie who was the Canadian general in charge, has written that most of the stories were complete nonsense."

And so it goes on, Chomsky fairly vibrating with anger at Vulliamy and co's "tantrums" over his questioning of their account of the war. I suggest that if they are having tantrums it's because they have contact with the survivors of Srebrenica and witness the impact of the downplaying of their experiences. He fairly explodes. "That's such a western European position. We are used to having our jackboot on people's necks, so we don't see our victims. I've seen them: go to Laos, go to Haiti, go to El Salvador. You'll see people who are really suffering brutally. This does not give us the right to lie about that suffering." Which is, I imagine, why ITN went to court in the first place.

When all else fails, fall back on sanctimonious name calling. What a genius. What an extraordinary mind. This infantile hypocrite, ladies and gentlemen, is the intellectual conscience of the west. Kudos to Ms. Brockes and the Guardian for defying a long, shameful tradition and publically exposing the legend as the lie he actually is.

Chomsky Hits Ha'aretz

2005-11-03T12:39:00.000+02:00

Well, I thought that the BBC declaring Chomsky the most important intellectual alive was little more than another declaration of the BBC's ideological psychopathology. Apparently, I was wrong. Its gotten Chomsky a five page interview in today's "Musaf" section of Ha'aretz, Israel's most respected and least popular daily newspaper. Ha'aretz is pretty reliably liberal, but "Musaf" is well known for going off the leftwing deep end on a regular basis. The interview doesn't disappoint. Yet another worshipful, kid-gloves, thoroughly ignorant love-fest with the good professor. Unfortunately, I can't find it on the web yet, either in Hebrew or English, but I wrote a letter to the editor that I posted on my Hebrew blog. So, for those of you who read the holy tongue, enjoy.

A Shocker Out of Iran

2005-10-27T10:07:00.000+02:00

Apparently, the president of Iran has come out and said what we all knew he was thinking in the first place. For some reason, Ha’aretz has not considered this worthy of English translation, but for those who read Hebrew, here’s the article. Roughly translated, the esteemed president said: “Israel is a humiliating stain that must be erased off the map. There is no doubt that the new wave of attacks in Palestine will soon erase this stain from the face of the Islamic world.” This charming fellow made his statement before a group of “conservative” (as Ha’aretz puts it) students at a meeting in Tehran entitled “A World Without Zionism” at which the students repeatedly shouted “Death to Israel” and “Death to Americans”. So, the next time someone says we’re paranoid…

Hobsbawm Exalts the Exile

2005-10-26T23:45:00.000+02:00

Eric Hobsbawm, whose continued and quite conscious refusal to acknowledge the horrendous toll taken by communism in the twentieth century must mark him as one of the most corrupted intellectuals of our time, has chosen to sound off in praise of the Jewish Diaspora in the London Review of Books. Hobsbawm’s argument is not particularly original, others of his political bent have made the same argument for a century, namely, that exile is both good for the Jews and – perhaps more importantly – good for the world.

The paradox of the era since 1945 is that the greatest tragedy in Jewish history has had two utterly different consequences. On the one hand, it has concentrated a substantial minority of the global Jewish population in one nation-state: Israel, which was itself once upon a time a product of Jewish emancipation and of the passion to enter the same world as the rest of humanity. It has shrunk the diaspora, dramatically so in the Islamic regions. On the other hand, in most parts of the world it has been followed by an era of almost unlimited public acceptance of Jews, by the virtual disappearance of the anti-semitism and discrimination of my youth, and by unparalleled and unprecedented Jewish achievement in the fields of culture, intellect and public affairs. There is no historic precedent for the triumph of the Aufklärung in the post-Holocaust diaspora. Nevertheless, there are those who wish to withdraw from it into the old segregation of religious ultra-Orthodoxy and the new segregation of a separate ethnic-genetic state-community. If they were to succeed I do not think it will be good either for the Jews or for the world.

Now, I don’t think there is any likelihood of the Jews withdrawing from the world anytime soon. In fact, the very existence of Israel as a modern nation-state demands that the Jews engage themselves in the affairs of the non-Jewish world. Nor do I put much confidence in Hobsbawm’s historiography, since he claims that the Diaspora has “shrunk” in the Islamic world without mentioning that this was the result of a deliberate policy of ethnic cleansing for which the Jews of those countries have yet to be compensated. As for the “unlimited public acceptance of Jews” and the “disappearance of anti-Semitism”, this is simply a ridiculous assertion. Antisemitism is at a historically unprecedented level in the Islamic world and swiftly metastasizing in Europe. The only country where antisemitism has not substantially risen over the last few years – with the exception of extreme leftist circles – is the United States, a country for which Hobsbawm has expressed little sympathy over the years.

Hobsbawm’s dislike for the facts of history – odd for a historian – is less telling than the fact that, as even a cursory reading of this article reveals, he is not writing what he says he is writing. That is, Hobsbawm is not writing in praise of Diaspora, but rather in praise of assimilation. He is not writing about the achievements of Judaism in exile, but rather about the achievements accrued by the cessation of Jewish identity. Hobsbawm openly admits that he is interested only in the final two hundred years of the Diaspora – from the Empancipation to the Holocaust – and barely mentions the two thousand years of exile that preceded the end of the 18th century. He dismisses the Talmud and its attendant commentaries – the greatest accomplishment of the Diaspora, and a thoroughly unique cultural and religious achievement – does not mention the Kabbalah at all, ignores Maimonides – who was an Einstein before Einstein but who also, unfortunately in Hobsbawm’s eyes, did not abandon his faith in order to engage the outside world – and damns with faint praise the history of Halachic and exegetical thought which constitutes the lion’s share of Diaspora cultural and literary achievement. Nor does he mention the flowering of Hebrew poetry in the aftermath of the exile from Spain, nor the Hasidic movement. Even more interesting, he makes no mention at all of certain inconvenient phenomena of the period he is praising. There is scant mention of the development of Yiddish literature, the revival of Hebrew, or the development of Jewish sectarianism and modern Orthodoxy. Out of an extraordinary plethora of cultural and religious labor, created by the simultaneous embrace and rejection of modernism that typified the Jewish world of the 19th and 20th centuries, Hobsbawm is interested only in the cosmopolitan, secular, assimilated achievements of the post-Emancipatory Jews of Western and Central Europe, who constituted both a minority of the Jewish world and a very specific cultural-regional phenomenon.

Howsbawm is, in short, praising the benefits of becoming a gentile is all but name. Now, this may or may not be good for the world, but it is certainly not good for the Jews, for the simple reason that it involves the death of one’s self as a Jew in favor of an amorphous and – in my opinion – non-existent universalist identity. Hobsbawm is a man who has dedicated his life to the most extremist forms of universalism, and his studied inability to regard anything which steps out of that realm as being of any value whatsoever is quite telling. He seems to see nothing problematic in the phenomenon of assimilation, and to regard the pain of otherness and the loss of self as being of little consequence so long as it continues to produce great mathematicians and socialist intellectuals. Nor does he deal in any real way with the historical cataclysm which destroyed the appeal of assimilation in many Jewish eyes, the disaster which convinced many that there can be no universalism without the particular. He waxes rhapsodic, for instance, on the achievements of the German-Jewish assimilates, and then mentions the Holocaust which annihilated them without a single comment on the obvious irony inherent; he is too busy scurrying off to the next marvelous example of universalist triumph.

Hobsbawm seems unable to entertain the notion that the dichotomy he is posing is one which disproves the very point he is trying to make. Because if the Jew cannot engage the world as a Jew, it is not a problem with the Jew but a problem with the world. The Jewish experience of modernity – which Judaism, I believe, had a hand in creating – has proved that the only way for the Jew to engage the world effectively is not as a masked exile, pretending to be just like everyone else, but as what he is. Proudly and openly, and without apologetics. Zionism and modern Orthodoxy, among other phenomena, have proved this possible, and the vagaries of history have proved Hobsbawm to be terribly, catastrophically mistaken. They have proven that the embrace of Diaspora is nothing more or less than the embrace of death, the adoration of self-murder. It is a willful re-enslavement, a return to the wilderness.

Hypocrisy Exposed

2005-10-26T12:24:00.000+02:00

There’s a great interview up at NRO with Peter Schweizer, who wrote the article exposing Chomsky’s epic hypocrisy that I quoted in the previous post. He’s written a book on he subject, and not only on Chomsky. Here’s the best quote in the interview:

LOPEZ: What's the funniest story you learned while compiling the book?

SCHWEIZER: It has to be one about Michael Moore. In his books Michael Moore goes on and on about the fact that Americans are racist because they live in white neighborhoods. It's an example of latent segregationist attitudes in his mind. When I checked the demographics on Michael Moore's residence I burst out laughing. Michael Moore lives in a town of 2,500 in Michigan. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there is not a single black person in the entire town.

One doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

The J.D. Rockefeller of Hypocrisy

2005-10-20T17:13:00.000+02:00

Tech Central Station has a terrific article up exposing the Good Professor’s utterly redolent hypocrisy and selfishness when it comes to capitalism and private property. Not only does the author give us an estimate of the Professor’s net worth (an astounding two million dollars) but also exposes Chomsky’s massive investments in tax-dodging trusts, corporate stocks, and high return investments in companies whose practices he claims to despise. Apparently, the best defense the self-anointed genius of the century can muster is: “Should I go live in a cabin in Montana?” The answer of course, is simple: if you expect people to take you seriously, yes. Especially interesting is the author’s insight into the fact that this faux-anarchist is, in fact, a talented capitalist entrepreneur who has reaped enormous benefits from American traditions of private property.

Chomsky is rich precisely because he has been such an enormously successful capitalist. Despite the anti-profit rhetoric, like any other corporate capitalist he has turned himself into a brand name…

Chomsky's business works something like this. He gives speeches on college campuses around the country at $12,000 a pop, often dozens of times a year.

Can't go and hear him in person? No problem: you can go online and download clips from earlier speeches-for a fee. You can hear Chomsky talk for one minute about "Property Rights"; it will cost you seventy-nine cents. You can also by a CD with clips from previous speeches for $12.99… It would not be advisable to download the audio from one of his speeches without paying the fee, warns his record company, Alternative Tentacles. (Did Andrei Sakharov have a licensing agreement with a record company?) And when it comes to his articles, you'd better keep your hands off. Go to the official Noam Chomsky website and the warning is clear: "Material on this site is copyrighted by Noam Chomsky and/or Noam Chomsky and his collaborators. No material on this site may be reprinted or posted on other web sites without written permission." However, the website does give you the opportunity to "sublicense" the material if you are interested…

But books are Chomsky's mainstay, and on the international market he has become a publishing phenomenon. The Chomsky brand means instant sales.

As publicist Dana O'Hare of Pluto Press explains: "All we have to do is put Chomsky's name on a book and it sells out immediately!"

Putting his name on a book should not be confused with writing a book, because his most recent volumes are mainly transcriptions of speeches, or interviews that he has conducted over the years, put between covers and sold to the general public. You might call it multi-level marketing for radicals. Chomsky has admitted as much: "If you look at the things I write -- articles for Z Magazine, or books for South End Press, or whatever -- they are mostly based on talks and meetings and that kind of thing. But I'm kind of a parasite. I mean, I'm living off the activism of others. I'm happy to do it." (emphasis mine, Benjamin – honesty at last!)

Chomsky's marketing efforts shortly after September 11 give new meaning to the term "war profiteer." In the days after the tragedy, he raised his speaking fee from $9,000 to $12,000 because he was suddenly in greater demand. He also cashed in by producing another instant book. Seven Stories Press, a small publisher, pulled together interviews conducted via email that Chomsky gave in the three weeks following the attack on the Twin Towers and rushed the book to press… The book made the bestseller list in the United States, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand. It is safe to assume that he netted hundreds of thousands of dollars from this book alone.

Over the years, Chomsky has been particularly critical of private property rights, which he considers simply a tool of the rich, of no benefit to ordinary people. "When property rights are granted to power and privilege, it can be expected to be harmful to most," Chomsky wrote on a discussion board for the Washington Post. Intellectual property rights are equally despicable…But when it comes to Chomsky's own published work, this advocate of open intellectual property suddenly becomes very selfish.

None of this is particularly surprising, and it merely serves to solidify my conviction that Chomsky is (to use the phrase bestowed by Albert Camus on the French communists) the judge-penitent par excellence, because the judge-penitent believes he has the right to simultaneously sin and to judge the sinner. The judge-penitent is one who weeps over the crimes of his brethren even as he absolves himself and condemns all others. Chomsky has spent his life trying to destroy the American system of capitalist democracy, but considers himself exempt from any guilt accrued by his own ruthless and highly effective exploitation of the very system he claims is a crime. He revels in the very riches he has accumulated through posing as a defender of the poor and an enemy of capitalist exploitation. This is hypocrisy on an epic scale and it may well stand as Noam Chomsky’s only truly extraordinary accomplishment. Noam Chomsky, the J.D. Rockefeller of hypocrisy, the most titanic charlatan the United States has ever produced.

Portrait of the ADL in Denial

2005-10-16T18:38:00.000+02:00

This report from the ADL on antisemitic conspiracy theories involving 9/11 is certainly welcome, but it also serves to underline one the biggest problems with mainstream Jewish organizations in America. While the report does an excellent job exposing antisemitism on the extreme Right and in the Muslim world, it says almost nothing about antisemitism on the political Left. Except for a brief mention of Amiri Baraka (and he deserves more than a brief mention, him and Louis Farrakhan are probably the most openly ferocious antisemites in America today) there is not a single word about antisemitism on the Left. Considering that the likes of Cynthia McKinney and Ralph Nader have quite publicly voiced antisemitic conspiracy theories regarding 9/11 and the War on Terror, this is simply an inexcusable admission. It may be that the ADL is afraid of offending its liberal base, but I don’t think that can be an excuse. Nader, for one, is far more respected and mainstream than any of the antisemites mentioned in the ADL report, and its high time he had his feet held to the fire. Antisemitism will continue to be a serious problem in America until organizations like the ADL get up the courage to direct their fire into their own backyard, and not merely where it is easy and comfortable for them to do so.

Another Cinema Post

2005-10-16T12:20:00.000+02:00

I just posted a brief piece over at Gefen on The Godfather Part III, which I think is overdue for a reappraisal. Enjoy.

"You Will Bow Down Before Me, Jor-El!"

2005-10-08T10:02:00.000+03:00

I guess I'm going to have to drop my pretensions and admit that Superman is one of my favorite movies. So, needless to say, I think this is hilarious. I wonder what Terence Stamp thinks about the whole thing.

שנה טובה לכולם

2005-10-04T13:20:00.000+03:00

A good and sweet new year to all of you out there in anti-Chomskyland.

I Think We Now Know...

2005-10-03T10:41:00.000+03:00

Exactly who is watching the BBC.

The Forward Gets Its Hands Bloody

2005-10-02T10:30:00.000+03:00

The formerly Yiddish newspaper, The Forward, which is now little more than a self-renewing epitaph for the Jewish Left, has noticed the fact that many of the groups involved in the self-described anti-war movement are more than a little problematic.

For many Jewish activists the main problem with the coalition Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, or Answer, is the organization's fiercely anti-Israel stance. But for some observers and activists, there is a more fundamental question: whether the decision of liberal groups to work with Answer — an organization that represents the most extreme-left elements remaining in America — will stifle the anti-war cause's efforts to transform itself into a mass movement.

This is, unfortunately, fairly typical of the Jewish Left. As though wanting to annihilate Israel were not enough, they feel the need to treat us to a wholly ridiculous treatise on why an openly anti-semitic, anti-democratic, and anti-American organization may be slightly problematic for the anti-war movement as whole. Being existentially bad for the Jewish people is apparently of little consequence.

It's a question that clearly has troubled the left. Leaders of United for Peace and Justice, a more moderate coalition that has been focusing narrowly on the issue of the Iraq war, have taken part in demonstrations with Answer before. But they agonized for months about whether to join Answer for the September 24 rally and march. And, in recent months, they have criticized Answer's tactics.

In a May press release, the national coordinator of United for Peace and Justice, Leslie Cagan, wrote that "while professing to desire unity, Answer and the IAC have repeatedly misrepresented the positions of, attacked, and attempted to isolate and split UFPJ and other antiwar groups, even when we were supposedly in alliances."

Still, Cagan's organization eventually opted for cosponsoring the march, explaining its decision as a way to avoid disunity and draw the largest possible number of people to one protest.

Only the Forward could describe UFPJ and its necro-communist leader as "moderate". I suppose in the circles the Forward's writers travel they might be. In relation to the the American mainstream the anti-war movement apparently wants to attract UFPJ is as far out as ANSWER is, and no less odiously treasonous. Albeit inadvertantly, this may point to the real problem. Namely, that the anti-war movement is not merely plagued by a single out of the mainstream oraganization, but rather represents an entire ethos that is outdated, irrelevent, and altogether odious to the majority of Americans, whether they think the Iraq War was a good idea or not.

It seems to be a conclusion some people on the left are coming to, despite their reservations about Answer's politics. The growing opposition to the war in Iraq, along with Cindy Sheehan's more populist protest this summer, might have made Answer's role less of a liability. Though Answer still might be getting the permits for marches and planting speakers at rallies, there is little question that the overwhelming majority of people going to demonstrations do so because they want to publicly oppose the war, not support fringe causes.

I don't know what the overwhelming majority of the people going to demonstrations think. I do think that people who go to demonstrations, especially those who go to demonstrations regularly, are inherently non-mainstream. Mainstream people have kids and jobs and don't have the time or inclination to go to demonstrations for anything. They are politically involved through that forgotten institution known as elections. Of course, this is not something the anti-war movement is interested in, since if they tried for political power throgh the ballot box - i.e. by democratic means rather than mob politics - they are well aware of the fact that they will lose. If the anti-war movement were mainstream it would work through the political process, and not try for influence through street theater and media manipulation.

As for Cindy Sheehan, I don't doubt that her grief is real, but the idea that she was representative of anything other than the media's desperate fascination with the aesthetic of 1968 is wholly ridiculous. She struck me as a woman who was firmly convinced of her anti-American, antisemitic, Chomskyite politics long before her son was killed and her use of his name and memory - despite the fact that he quite clearly disagreed with the cause she advocates, and gave his life in the service of its opposite - seemed to me, to put it delicately, more than a little disturbing. To my mind, the Cindy Sheehan phenomenon speaks less of the growing popularity of the anti-war movement and more of the Left's obsession with image, aesthetics, and sentiment over debate, democracy, and the difficult questions of war and peace.

"Most of the media and most people have the good sense to understand that people who oppose the war are not these Stalinist androids," said Erc Alterman, who writes a column for The Nation.

The anti-war movement needs to stomach Answer's antics and extremism, Alterman said, just "like the people who really wanted to go to war are stuck with the Bush administration."

Maybe, but I think it is clear to any thinking person that those involved in the anti-war movement are people who have no problem lying down with Stalinist androids when it suits them. The point Alterman is making, it seems to me, is roughly equivalent to a conservative pundit declaring that folks like me need to "stomach" the leadership of neo-Nazi groups or the Ku Klux Klan in order to achieve a higher political good. If these are the friends the anti-war movement needs to succeed than they don't deserve to succeed. I've always thought Alterman was a distinctly untalented hack with a nasty tendency to engage in apologia for anti-semitism and anti-Americanism when it suits him, this does nothing to dissuade me from that conviction.

But Alterman's willful blindness - or worse, depending on how you look at it - points to a deeper problem on the Jewish Left and on the Left in general. It is a problem personified in the anti-war movement and in this article as well. Namely, an inability or unwillingness to recognize poltiical evil when it is sitting right in front of your face. In the name of an amorphous - and therefore useless - unity, the Jewish Left is willing to lay down with supporters of terrorists dedicated to killing Jews and annihilating the Jewish state, and the anti-war Left in general is willing to lie down with totalitarians and anti-democratic demagogues. What we need from the Forward, if it is going to be more than an epitaph for a dying creed, is not apologia but denunciation. We need the Jewish Left to learn the real lesson of 1968 - that the man who lies down with murderers will eventually have blood on his own hands. At the moment that seems to be, unfortunately, far too much to ask for.

Blogging My Way Out of Poverty

2005-10-01T14:56:00.000+03:00

As you may have noticed, I've decided to see if AdSense can aid a poor student like me in making some money off of his various internet musings. If any of you don't like the presence of ads or think they interfere with the blog, please feel free to email me and let me know how you feel about it.

Incidentally, I've been very busy with signing up for courses, friends getting married, and various other things; but I hope to return to regular posting in the very near future.

Reflections

2005-08-28T15:17:00.000+03:00

I've posted a series of short thoughts on Judaism and Jewish history over at Gefen. I'm planning to update it over time. For those interested, enjoy.

I'm Fine

2005-08-28T14:49:00.000+03:00

There was a bombing this morning at the central bus station in Beersheva. Apparently, two security guards were badly wounded and about a dozen people lightly injured. It could have been a lot worse. For anyone worried, I and my friends are fine, thank God.