The Forward Gets Its Hands Bloody

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

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

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

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.

Tears

I just saw the most extraordinary thing on television last night. A family was being evicted in Neve Dekalim. The children were resisting and the parents were trying to convince them to leave quietly. Finally the kids were dragged out except for a teenage son who stood in the center of the living room with a guitar strapped across his shoulders. He wasn't resisting, he was crying. An officer came up to him and between sobs the kid said: "I have a request. Kill me." The officer put his arms around him and said: "Come on. We'll go out together. The two of us. Alone." And the kid went with him. Both of them were crying. I'm not sure I've ever seen a more heroic or compassionate act between two people. God bless them both.

The Orange Star and the Sanctification of Blasphemy

I wrote this essay a few months ago, when the anti-disengagement activists were wearing orange stars in imitation of the stars the Jews of Europe were forced to wear by the Nazis. I think it explains more or less where I stand on this deeply painful subject, and I post it as I watch the disengagement beginning before my eyes. It is, perhaps, a little dated, but I leave it as I wrote it.

“When the colonized kills the colonizer he kills both the oppressor and the oppressed.”
- Jean-Paul Sartre

“[N]o one is disturbed by the criminal act that Ariel Sharon seeks to commit…: the brutal deportation of Jews from their inheritance and their homes - most of whom are already the third generation on the land - men, women, and children, against their will, solely because they are Jews. This will be accompanied by the razing of their homes, the elimination of their lives' undertaking, the destruction of scores of synagogues, ritual baths, kindergartens, libraries, and schools; the disinterment of dozens of bodies from the cemeteries - many of them, the victims of Arab terror. And the trauma of ethnic cleansing will be followed by the ultimate crime: the handing over of all the Judenrein territory to the Arab enemy, territory that is the inheritance of our forefathers, that they were given by G-d, and that no Jew is permitted to give away.”
- Nadia Matar, disengagement opponent, comparing the disengagement authority to the Judenrat

The most dangerous threat to any political movement, whether towards reaction or liberation, is the sanctification of violence. From “Viva la muerte!”, the cry of the Spanish fascists, to the admonition of Bin Laden’s minions that their secret weapon is the mere fact that they love death and we love life; the sanctification of the gun and the bomb is what leads inevitably to the terrors of the concentration camp, the firing squad, and the suicide bomber. It would seem to be a historical truism that the transformation of violence into a holy act constitutes the embrace of death above all other principles. In effect, it is nothing less than the inversion of the will to life represented by the organized political movement of liberation or change into the will to destruction, and thus the harbinger of totalitarianism and the collapse of a political culture into collective insanity.

The recent decision by the radical wing of the settler movement to adopt the orange star of David as their symbol, with their concomitant use of terms such as “Judenrein” to describe the impending evacuation of Gush Katif, thus reawakening yet again the beasts of our recent history; is not merely maddening and offensive, but carries within it the seeds of just such a sanctification, and if Zionism is to be saved from the fate of the twentieth century’s other ideologies, then we must be prepared to look this act squarely in the eye, and not merely to recoil from its insult or its offense to reason.

The donning of the star has been frighteningly misinterpreted even by some of its most ambivalent critics, who view it – they believe with a measure of generosity – as a half-insane and half-frivolous act of people driven mad by religious fanaticism; others – who no doubt believe themselves less generous – have simply dismissed it as the provocation of a gaggle of psychotics ignorant of history and unfeeling towards the sensibilities of their brethren. While all of this may be tangentially true, to understand both the promise and the threat of the orange star, we must first accept that it is not a mad act, that those who don the star do not merely believe in the message it bears but embrace also the inner logic of the act itself; and it is here, in this interior mechanism, in these hinterlands of the ideological mind, that we must begin; it is our challenge and our charge to do so, and to take such minds with the utmost seriousness.

I wish to state before continuing that what I am writing is not applicable to the settlement movement in its entirety, and certainly not to the majority of individual settlers. I must say this if only in deference to friendship, and to my many fellow students who are children of the settlement enterprise and do not deserve to be colluded with the radical few of whom I am about to speak. This point is of the utmost importance, because it is clear that we are contending here with a revolutionary vanguard of sorts, with a radical minority. Nonetheless, this minority must be spoken of with appropriate gravity, since in moments of dislocation and violence; moments such as those we may well soon be facing as the evacuation goes forward; it is this very vanguard, one which cherishes upheaval and believes violence holy, which inevitably seizes the day.

So what are they telling us in all their terrifying earnestness, these star bearers, these priests of the charnel house? Firstly, they are declaring themselves; and second, they are declaring us, and by us I mean the many millions of us who did not don the star, and find ourselves repulsed by the measure of the act itself. Of themselves, the star bearers are speaking of innocence, and not merely that; they are anointing themselves, anointing themselves in the name of our only Holy Innocents, drawing the six million unto themselves, and thus positing a dreadful equation. Because if they are declaring themselves innocent at the first, and innocent not merely in act but in essence, since it is the mere presence of the star on one’s breast that declares this purity; then at the second they are declaring us guilty, and this is a charge that cannot be left unanswered, since among the six million, only the slaughtered wore the star, and only the slaughterer went naked to his bloody business.

It is clear that this charge bears with it the very essence of this vanguard which has appointed itself our prosecutor: its apocalyptic surety. For what is being evoked here, and there can be no mistake about this, is Hitler; and in the post-modern age, Hitler is merely another word for Satan; in fact, he is the only Satan universally acknowledged by our godless world. And in evoking Satan, the orange star also declares us among his ranks, if only by the pure fact that we do not wear it. Thus an image takes shape of the end of days, and of the roles to which we have been assigned: the Holy Innocents adrift in a sea of Hitlers, five billion and more perhaps; and the final battle of Gog and Magog is merged with the image of the eternal tyrant and the eternal slaughterer into a single visage; one which bears not merely the face of the whole world which is against us, but our face as well.

There is terror here, and we are mistaken if we take it lightly. Beneath the vanguard’s shallow protestations of strength and its vulgar fetishization of Israel’s military prowess there is a horrendous, existential fear, and it is this fear which bears them forth into the exile of unreason. It is the terror of a second slaughter, of a new extermination; the unthinkable knowledge that somehow, someway, it is all happening again. Once again, Jews are dying, governments are uncaring, the world is indifferent, and their own comrades in death – all of us who cannot see the impending apocalypse – are lost in the comfortable decadence of assimilation and collaboration; and, beyond it all, Bialik’s slaughterer is sharpening his blade, and perhaps, this time, the throne of the Almighty will indeed be ripped from its moorings and hurled to the earth and the world, at last, declared bereft of justice.

And there is another, even deeper catalyst behind the apocalyptic mythos of the orange star, deeper even, perhaps, than fear; it is the desire to raise the tyrant again from the dead, and at last grant him the reckoning he cheated, the desire to expel at last the demons of all those lambs who went silently to the slaughter, and to prove for all the world that the Jew, and not his slaughterer, holds the hands of Fate. We see it in the teenagers in knit kippas toting machine guns on the hilltops; in the Kahanist’s cry of “never again!” which really means “again!”, “rise again monster, that I may slay you as my grandfathers could not!”

Which brings us, finally, to the sanctification of violence; for there can be no mistaking that what is being declared by the orange star is a holy war, a battle to the death between those who don the star, and thus render themselves innocent, and those who do not, and thus join the ranks of the guilty. And the death at the end of this battle, in its apocalyptic essence, is not merely the death of a man or of a movement, but of the world entire. It is here that the vanguard; and not merely our vanguard, but all the vanguards of history; finds its darkness, and its will to destruction. It is where Baruch Goldstein found his M16 and where Yigal Amir found his pistol, and it is here that we must make our stand; because any society or movement which wishes to steer itself clear of the ash heap of history must, at some point, declare that there is no such thing as a holy war, much less holy murder; and in the hands of our vanguardists this sanctification of destruction and the star which declares it can be nothing more or less than the negation of us all; because to call a Jew a Nazi is to destroy him, and thus, through this singular act of holy violence, blasphemy itself becomes sanctified.

We must acknowledge that we who did not wear the star are not innocent in this regard. It was the Left, after all, which coined the reprehensible term “Judeo-Nazi”, and it was the archly secular Ben-Gurion who called first Jabotinsky and then Begin by the name of Hitler. But with the exception of Professor Leibowitz’s odious provocation, which unfortunately excites even our own judge-penitents, as Camus might have called them, with its erotic violence, all these transgressions were directed merely against the singular personage at hand; whereas the orange star indicts all of us who do not wear it, and thus negates us, sanctifies our own murder, names us all the agents of the sons of darkness, in the name of love plots our murder, and thus cedes to Hitler his final victory, by making him over again in our own image, and it is against this blasphemy that we must set ourselves.

We must grant them their points, however, in doing so. There is no doubt that decadence is afoot amongst our elite; that corruption and ossification of ideals threaten our democracy; that the seemingly unstoppable tide of globalization which is engulfing Israel is a threat to Zionism as it is a threat to any non-materialist ideology; that the world does indeed have much to answer for, as it admonishes us in the name of millions of judge-penitents even as human bombs tear our children’s limbs asunder and desecrate our streets. Yes, we must even acknowledge that their (and our) fear and rage are, in some measure, justified a thousandfold, and that history and man are indeed, in their own measure, without justice. That the revolt against the indifference of both history and man is indeed a right inalienable; and that we do not accept the self-negating assertion of our own judge-penitents that, through some trick of divine irony, this right is to be denied only to our own people. And we must acknowledge that there is nobility in their dream, because it is, to a great extent, our dream as well, a dream of love, and strength, and rebirth; and that we differ from them only that we see an unavoidable choice before us between a truncated dream and the abyss, and we must choose the truncation, because only the madman chooses the abyss.

And in this abyss shines the orange star, for what it tells us above all is that there is no hope; that the despair of the gun is our only defense against a world of Nazis. It is this mythology of the sacred martyr and the sacred murderer become one that we must reject; and we reject it in declaring our intentions to its wearers: that we are asking them to move, and not to die; that we are not decadent post-Zionists but merely awake to the fact that their enterprise is rendering Zionism impossible and sending us on a path that can end only in apartheid or the sea. To give up one’s home is, in some measure, to overturn one’s world; and to give up one’s dream even worse perhaps, and we must acknowledge the depth of this debt. Above all, we must make our stand with love; because they are, after all, ours, and we theirs; however much they may offend or despise us, and we them.

In this, we must be clear of the ground on which we stand. It may be that when the Jew kills a Gentile he is killing both oppressor and oppressed, both the Nazi and his victim, but this can never be a sacred act, only a shameful but necessary profanity, as for the Maccabeans who did battle on the Sabbath. I am not advocating pacifism in saying this. I accept that one must sometimes kill to save one’s home from the arsonist’s torch, and I accept that someday I may have to kill to defend the home we have built here; but I will never accept that depressing a trigger redeems my soul, let alone the world, nor that God himself bears forth the bullets that tear flesh and destroy life. That is the domain of the Goldsteins and the Amirs, of Kahanists and Hamasniks and, yes, even Bin Laden himself; and it is territory only for the man who wishes not only to destroy the world but to destroy himself as well. This we must reject, for it is a sword which inevitably turns and slays the man who wields it. The only means of this rejection is a single, unyielding truth: that when a Jew kills a Jew, or calls him by the name of Hitler; whether to destroy my brother or negate him, whether by word or by cloth; that he commits anything other than an unspeakable blasphemy, and invites forth nothing less than another horban, another scorching of the earth, another galut, another exile, another fall of man.

Finkielkraut's Lament

French-Jewish intellectual Alain Finkielkraut has penned an extraordinary article on the origins of humanist antisemitism and its condemnation of Israel. I wouldn't presume to summarize or quote; simply read.

The Ninth of Av

Today is Tisha B'Av, the Ninth of Av, the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple at the hands of the Roman empire in 70 AD. The Temple and its fate are bound inextricably to the city of Jerusalem, so I offer this essay; appropriate or not, I do not know; to mark the occasion.

I know that a city exists whose name is Jerusalem. It is a city made of old stones and new stones, perched atop a series of ascending hills which look down on a valley leading out into the unknown lands over which a Jew may not traverse in safety. The city's skies are blue and its summer sun a deceptively harsh white orb. People live within its walls. They work, pray, die, sicken, embrace, make love, and do such banal things as buy milk and cereal at corner kiosks and American-style chain stores. They are ordinary and extraordinary, confident and listless, sad and ecstatic; much like in any other city.

It is a city which posits extremes of shape and dimension. Its vistas of hills and valleys give way to tightly cramped streets and decaying slums. It has verdant, blooming corners and plazas of steel and concrete which stun the eye with the monochromatic violence of any industrial wasteland. It is a city which lives its moments as cities do.

There is another Jerusalem; one which I have traversed only in glimpses and dreams. It is an amorphous cipher, a riddle without an answer, a labyrinth of twisting walls and vertiginous descents. This is the Jerusalem of two thousand years of numinous fantasias. It has whispered to prophets, madmen, apocalyptics, conquerers, mystics and messiahs. Its streets have swallowed oceans of blood. The Jerusalem of the Maccabbees, Bar-Cochba, of Vespasian's legions, of Sallah Al-Din and the Crusading knights; the city of massacres and the sword; the city in which the Temple of my people was consumed by the flames of an empire against which they had hurled the last full measure of their messianic hopes and transcendant rage.

Neither of these two cities escapes the other. Below the stones, sidewalks, porticos, stairwells and shopping malls of the Jerusalem of banality beats the ominous heart of the other city. This city has always drawn and terrified me. In my dreams it is a sleeping princess, waiting to be a awakened with a kiss; or a demon with obsidian eyes waiting to burst forth and swallow the city and its sojourners whole. It is a beloved's melody and a siren song. One feels it coursing beneath one's feet when one stands among the stones and sky; like the heart of a leviathan pumping black blood through its titantic veins.

I have never once thought of this Jerusalem as masculine. Some cities, like London and Berlin, appear to display a male character to the beholder; but Jerusalem, like Paris, is utterly feminine. She sleeps, and she awakens when she chooses. Once, standing on the ramparts of the Old City, upon the ruins of my people's Temple, she spoke to me. A great procession of conquerers spread out before me over the valley; their weapons shining in the setting sun. King David, Saladin, the Knights Templers, the Ottoman sultans and General Allenby; all those who had held the princess in their grip and then passed into shadows. David's son had written from these ramparts that all was vanity; and he was wise enough to have his reasons. We are all but jesters upon her stage. No man conquers this city, no man divides it. No man violates her chastity; or can resist her entreaties. She will choose her lovers, and use them as she will; and so will conquerers fall, terrors beset the afflicted, and happiness come to the annointed and to victorious kings; but no man decides. The city will decide, in her own good time. She will decide who will rule for his sojourn, and then pass on, devoured by the stones.

I have known Jerusalem as a city of love and a city of fear. She is beautiful, but I fear the blood that pulses beneath the gray stones. She requires no pleas, no prayers, no entreaties, no adorations; she will decide.

I am speaking here, perhaps, of amorphous things; of retrograde superstitions and crude invocations to shadowy ghosts and translucent spirits; but I can merely write of what I have seen. No man can look upon Jerusalem and fully retain his reason; and to stand within its walls is to be at constant war between ecstatic derangement and the calculating mind of the modern. No wonder so many lost souls haunt her streets, no wonder so many madmen lurk its alleys and traverse its shadows. I am speaking here of elementary forces, of primal movements, of something sensed as one senses the movement of the wind upon the hairs of one's arm. Man has lost the moment these things were set in motion, so ancient are its origins. It stirs the primitive memory, the indivisible core which some men name God and others call History. I do not know its name, and I do not seek it. Each man who dies within the walls is a testimony to their frivolous quest; to grasp at that which cannot be held. Jerusalem proves the vanity of man; and yet we return to her. To the princess and the demon whore, to the beauteous monster. She fears nothing; and all who love her must also fear her, as one fears the impossible eternity; and all she loves, she loves as a luminous queen adores her subjects; as a God might love his creation.

New Gefen Post

A brief note on the Netanyahu resignation, for those interested. Enjoy.

At A Loss for Words

This, I admit, I did not expect. I was afraid of the Prime Minister being shot (God forbid), I was afraid of shooting between settlers and police, I was afraid of civil war; I did not think that Arabs would be the target of extremist opponents of disengagement. In retrospect, of course, the possibility should have been obvious. I have written many times of the danger inherent in those who turn their sureities into a sanctification of violence; this is merely another in a long line of atrocities committed by those who have followed an ideological path which can only end in murder. This was an act of nihilism in the name of faith, and I don't care whether such things are done in the name of Chomsky or the name of Kahane; they are a threat to humanity itself. Those who engage in an idolatry of violence are all faces of the same evil; the sanctification of murder itself. I often find myself at a loss for words in the face of such acts of violence, and this is no exception; so I will only say that I hope and pray it will not happen again, b'ezrat hashem, insh allah.

שנאת חינם : Infinite Hatred

Its difficult for me to write about what's going on at the borders of Gaza right now. I have my own opinions on disengagement; but that is not what I wish to comment on here, because the civil discord emerging around this issue speaks to me of some of the darkest forces at work in Jewish history and some of the issues which pain me on the most personal of levels. To see Jews attacking, hating, or even killing other Jews (which has not yet happened, thank God, but may well be a possibility before all this is over) is to witness what I consider an abomination; an assault against the rightful workings of the world. We have enough people out there who want to slit our throats without wasting our time, energy, and talents slitting our own. I do not say this merely in relation to any particular political position; both right and left are guilty of rhetorical and even physical violence against their opponents. Altalena or the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, they are both expressions of the same horrendous phenomenon; Israeli writer Amos Oz spoke to it when he said that the Jewish people may be the world's foremost experts in self-destruction. One cannot watch the pictures coming out of the demonstration in Kfar Maimon, or see the image of settler leaders calling Ariel Sharon a dictator without conjuring up a terrible memory: that in the Great Revolt against Rome more Jews were killed by other Jews than by the Roman legions. It can be said that this was a long time ago; but for us, the destruction of the Temple was yesterday, and the Exodus from bondage both today and tomorrow. The Jewish people lives with its history more immediately than perhaps any other people on earth; it exists for us as the most primal and ferocious energy, both for good and for ill; and the forces unleashed yesterday may be unleashed tomorrow with results which can be glorious or terrible to contemplate. I can say only this: I am afraid, afraid for our country and afraid for our people; we have enemies enough without including ourselves in their ranks. The great rabbis were once asked why the Temple was destroyed, they replied: "because of sinat chinam"; infinite hatred, unbridled hatred. And they meant hatred between Jews. I hope all of us remember that in the coming days and weeks; it may save us all from a nightmare none of us desire or even desire to contemplate.

O England: model to thy inward greatness
Like little body with a mighty heart
-William Shakespeare, Henry V

For London

I hate writing these things, and I've had to write more than a few of them. My mother is English and I was raised with a great deal of English culture; so the attack on London is as personal for me as any attack on America or Israel. I can only send my love and my prayers to the people of England; and express my hope that the monsters who committed this atrocity will pay for their despicable crimes. England has withstood worse than this, and I have faith that the quiet strength England has displayed in the past will manifest itself again. On this black day, I can think only of the words of a writer infinitly superior to myself, so I leave the testament to him.

Thus far, with rough and all unable pen

Our bending author hath pursu'd the story

In little room confining mighty men

Mangling by starts the full course of their glory

Small time: but in that small most greatly lived

This Star of England

-William Shakespeare, Henry V

Torquemada Weeps

Just when I think I need no more reminders of why I left Boston forever; I am presented with this majestically overwrought article by Chomsky in Boston Review; an innocuous title for a remarkably less than innocuous publication; check out their mission statement for another good reason to leave Boston forever. Its been awhile since I've seen a more carefully parsed and transparently self-congratulatory piece of wingnuttery. Before I commence my critique, I would note that Chomsky's article states that it "was adapted from a talk sponsored by MIT's Program on Human Rights and Justice", meaning that it is most likely, as I have come to believe almost all of Chomsky's political writing is, largely ghostwritten. Nonetheless, the good professor's name is affixed, so we will have to direct whatever conclusions as to its implications towards him; and try not to contemplate the Orwellian nightmare that MIT's Program on Human Rights and Justice must constitute.

Half the piece is taken up with a lengthy dissertation on linguistics, with which I will not grapple; since I know nothing about linguistics and have less interest in the subject; and what Chomsky has to say about linguistics is, as far as I can see, totally irrelevent to the political points he makes in the second half of the article; and appears to be present solely for the purpose of attempting to lend an air of detachment and intellectual gravitas to what is, essentially, little more than a fairly standard (and fairly dull) piece of anti-American propaganda.

The polemic contained in the second half of the piece rests on Chomsky's fundamentalist interpretation of the UN Declaration on Human Rights and his assertion of its universal, and apparently absolute, applicability to all and sundry. I think it is relevant to note before proceeding that such sanctimonies are issuing from a man who remains one of the foremost apologists for mass murder and political oppression (when committed by the correct regimes, of course) of the second half of the twentieth century. A point well worth remembering; since the foundation of Chomsky's assault on the US rests entirely on the notion of universal applicability and its attendant hypocrises; a foundation slightly undermined, to use an understatement, when the one who invokes it is himself one of the world's foremost intellectual relativists on the subject of human rights. In fact, Chomsky's entire procession of bloviations on this issue could be read simply as comical hyprocrisy; but I do not consider it to be comical in the least; but rather something fairly monstrous, for reasons which I will return to.

Chomsky begins his polemic with a salvo against the hypocrisy of "Western culture" in regards to human rights. I have already mentioned the fact that Chomsky himself is one of the foremost (if not the foremost, at least in terms of quantity and influence) Western apologists for human rights violations of all kinds; so I will leave that aside for the moment, and deal instead with the nature and content of the indictment itself.

As is well known, Western culture condemns some nations as “relativists,” who interpret the UD selectively, rejecting components they do not like. There has been great indignation about “Asian relativists,” or the unspeakable communists, who descend to this degraded practice. Less noticed is that one of the leaders of the relativist camp is also the leader of the self-designated “enlightened states,” the world’s most powerful state. We see examples almost daily, though “see” is perhaps the wrong word, since we see them without noticing them.

This is, of course, a monumental generalization; but nonetheless an informative one, since it is much in keeping with Chomsky's style of argument; which is to say, he makes no argument at all. He sets up a straw man of the largest size possible and then proceeds to beat it to death. It is an elementary form of sophistry and not difficult to recognize, though highly appealing to those determined to practice a private form of Stalinist-style historical airbrushing.

I should stress that it is the U.S. government that rejects these provisions of the UD. The population strongly disagrees. One current illustration is the federal budget that was recently announced, along with a study of public reactions to it carried out by the world’s most prestigious institution for study of public opinion. The public calls for sharp cuts in military spending along with sharply increased social spending: education, medical research, job training, conservation and renewable energy, as well as increased spending for the UN and economic and humanitarian aid, and the reversal of President Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy. Government policy is dramatically the opposite in every respect.

Chomsky gives us absolutely no clue as to what "the world's most prestigious institution for study of public opinion" might consist of. Perhaps Chomsky had a chat with the members of MIT's Program for Human Rights and Justice and extrapolated forthwith. Perhaps Chomsky considers himself the world's most prestigious institution for study of public opinion. We'll apparently never know, since Chomsky rather inartfully refuses to tell us; perhaps hoping we will see but not notice. I have written on this phenomenon already; the myth of the "silent Leftist majority" which Chomsky and others spend an inordinate about of time trying to convince us is genuine; but which nonetheless never actually manages to manifest itself come election time. So many, apparently, see but do not notice.

Jeane Kirkpatrick; one of the left's favored targets, since she was once sympathetic to their cause but later refused to maintain the required silence regarding the atrocities and oppressions committed by authoritarian socialism throughout the 20th century; also comes in for some approbation, amongst others; and the scorn accorded them is important, since it is based in their heresy, a heresy which lies at the center of Chomsky's Torquemada-style assault on anyone and everyone who dares to disagree with him.

UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick described the socioeconomic provisions of the UD as “a letter to Santa Claus . . . Neither nature, experience, nor probability informs these lists of `entitlements,’ which are subject to no constraints except those of the mind and appetite of their authors...”

[John] Bolton has been clear and forthright in expressing his attitude toward the United Nations: “There is no United Nations,” he said. “When the United States leads, the United Nations will follow. When it suits our interests to do so, we will do so. When it does not suit our interests, we will not.” That position is at the extreme of a rather narrow elite consensus, which is opposed by the overwhelming majority of the public. Public support for the UN is so strong that a majority even thinks that the United States should give up the Security Council veto and accept majority decisions. But again, the democratic deficit prevails...

John Negroponte was recently appointed as the first director of intelligence. Like Bolton, he has credentials for the position. In the 1980s, during the first reign of the current incumbents in Washington or their mentors, he was ambassador to Honduras, where he presided over the world’s largest CIA station, not because Honduras is so important on the world stage, but because he was supervising the camps in which the American-run terror army was trained and armed for the war against Nicaragua—which was no small matter. If Nicaragua had adopted our norms, it would have responded by terror attacks within the United States, in self-defense; in this case, authentic self-defense...

What follows is a lengthy apologia for leftist tyranny in Latin America, and a relentless assault on the US decision to oppose it; phrased, of course, as if no struggle between left and right existed in Latin America and all the trouble was the fault of the "terror army" run by the United States; a reprehensible distortion of history which I have already dealt with at length and will not enter into here. What is most fascinating, however, is the extent to which Chomsky's defense of the UN and international law completely contradicts his own professed ideology of anarcho-democracy. He is seemingly incapable of acknowledging the obvious fact that the United Nations is itself an elite (and by any reasonable standard, a remarkably corrupt and undemocratic one) with its own political interests and ambitions; namely, the expansion of its own power. Nor does the idea that the democratic nation-state, whatever its flaws, may yet remain more responsive to and representative of its citizens than an appointed international body answerable to no authority whatsoever, appear to penetrate the schema of absolutist internationalism Chomsky has built around himself. This rather obvious contradiction is immensely informative; because it cuts to the heart of a hypocrisy which is not Chomsky's in a personal sense, but the burden of all who subscribe to the tenants of the fundamentalist universalism which Chomsky seeks to claim as both sword and shield against the aforementioned heretics.

The example also reveals again the self-exemption of the elite intellectual culture from responsibility for our crimes, a conclusion reinforced by the reaction to the fact that Washington has just appointed to the post of the world’s leading anti-terrorism czar a person who qualifies rather well as a condemned international terrorist for his critical role in major atrocities. Orwell would not have known whether to laugh or weep.

I mention these few examples so that we remember that we are not merely engaged in seminars on abstract principles, or discussing remote cultures that we do not comprehend. We are speaking of ourselves and the moral and intellectual values of the communities in which we live. And if we do not like what we see when we look into the mirror, we have ample opportunity to do something about it.

Thus we complete the inquisitor's indictment; and it is an indictment to which we must respond, because all inquisitors are threats to our freedom and their indictments assaults on our autonomy as human beings. It is interesting and informative that Chomsky mentions Orwell; because it is clear from his article that he has either not read Orwell, did not understand him, or is simply invoking his name to score intellectual points; if only because of the simple fact that Orwell utterly rejected the thesis Chomsky is putting forward in this piece; namely, that Olympian universalism is possible in the face of political evil. Orwell was no fool and was not naive; he knew that his country and its allies were often guilty of violating their principles; but he believed that it was necessary to choose sides when faced with elementary forms of tyranny; whether in the form of Stalin or the likes of MIT's Program on Human Rights and Justice. He despised those who drew a moral equivalence, just has Chomsky has, between freedom and its enemies in the name of universal principles. What was truly immoral, he felt, and truly indefensible, was to refuse to choose, to assume an absolute detachment in the name of such concepts as "peace" or "justice". To do so, he felt, was to make oneself not an objective defender of morality but an objective collaborator with evil.

But this is a discussion of concepts,"a seminar on abstract principles"; and when it comes to the practicalities of Chomsky, we have something far more monstrous; because Chomsky has, in fact, long since made his choice; and his pretensions of objective and absolute fealty to international law or basic morality are merely the abject cowardice of the collaborator who refuses to acknowledge the bloody cost accrued by his collaboration. The truth is that Chomsky, though he denies it in a shriek even as he acknowledges it in a whisper, has long since declared that the likes of the Khmer Rouge or Castro or the Sandanistas may slaughter, oppress, imprison, and destroy in the name of a better world; but the US may not make war in the name of opposing them. It is that simple; and in this is an acknowledgement not only of Chomsky's own guilt but his own hypocrisy. For even as Chomsky's words profess objectivity the objective facts of his legacy profess the opposite; they profess, in fact, that everyone is a relativist, because you cannot live in the world of reality (as opposed the world of academic sureities) without being so. The terrible truth that Chomsky accepts but will not acknowledge is that what matters is not one's fealty to abstract and amorphous principles; but the choice you make, the side you choose, when it comes time to defend them; and now, as then, Chomsky proves himself quite resolutely and with no regrets, on the side of the murderers.

What we are dealing with here is the conflict between a considered particularism and an absolutist universalism; and Chomsky embodies the essence of the latter in his indictment of us even as he absolves himself; a practice eminently common to many intellectuals of Chomsky's ilk. Albert Camus named them judge-penitents, because they indict themselves only to condemn others; and he hated them as much for their moral cowardice as for their hypocrisy; because they declared themselves in fellowship with the guilty yet presumed to retain the rights of judgment and condemnation. Their's was an arrogance of existential proportions. But Chomsky is no mere judge penitent; he is the Grand Inquisitor as judge penitent; a Torquemada of self-indictment. He weeps tears of sanctimony even as he sends men to the rack and to the gallows. It is so with every man who believes he has apprehended a universal absolute; be it the inevitable triumph of the working class or the inevitable ascension to power of the master race, or the eventual universal Utopia of peace and justice; a Utopia that will never come, though many may die at the hands which seek to hurry its coming. In this edifying credo I cannot seek comfort; because I believe that it is moral to make war in the name of freedom, and I believe it is also moral to make war in the name of one's particular interests, should they be sufficiently threatened. But I do not believe it is moral to slaughter people in the name of a tyrannical collectivist ideology, nor in the name of a secular messianism dedicated to the betterment of man, however fine its "universal principles" may appear, nor even in the name of universal justice and peace. On that, Chomsky and I differ. So be it. I have no desire to be a maven of genocide; Chomsky is welcome to the role. He is welcome to his imperial universalism, which can end only in nihilism and murder; he is welcome to his primitive Rousseauvianism, his worship of the noble savage of his own mind, which is merely another expression of the inhuman soul of universalism when it goes mad and must embrace a hypocrisy as absolute as its ambitions. Chomsky and his acolytes speak to us the simple truth that the denial of the particular is the denial of humanity; because it refuses to apprehend humanity, preferring instead to project upon it its own image, the object of its own murderous idolatry; and in this it is the most vile form of metaphysical tyranny. It is murder before the fact; slaughter in the name of compassion; because it can know no compassion except condemnation and, ultimately, destruction. Every true tyrant has held to universal principles, whether his name be Hitler or Castro; and the fundamentalist universalism to which Chomsky here claims himself heir, even as he embodies the murderous hypocrisy in its heart, can be nothing but a philosophy of tyranny, and the final annihilation of human freedom in the name of humanity itself. This, at least, is what I see, and what I notice.

Spielbergian Misgivings

I have a soft spot for Steven Spielberg. Whatever he lacks in artistic courage is often made up by his obvious instinctive talent for cinema and his love for the capacities of the medium. And, while I have some problems with it, there's no doubt that Schindler's List is a very great film. However, his new film on the Munich atrocities and the Israeli operation in response (which I personally consider one of the greatest moments in Israeli history) looks like a step off the deep end. Most troubling is this:

The film, which is being written by the playwright Tony Kushner...

I've seen Kushner speak on one very unfortunate occasion, and I'm not sure words can describe the depth of the man's vitriolic hatred of anyone to the right of Noam Chomsky. In twenty minutes he managed to vomit out every possible cliche in the necro-socialist playbook, including an offhand Bush as Nazi reference, in language more suited to a drug-addled high school dropout than a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright. The fact that Spielberg considers this blubbering Chomskyite (who, I should note, has never expressed anything but contempt for Israel and Zionism) suitable to author a cinematic treatment of one of Israel's greatest traumas and its corresponding (and perfectly justified) response; is extremely troubling indeed. I know that Spielberg, like everyone else in Hollywood, lives in a liberal bubble in which Tony Kushner's ideological psychopathology probably seems like quaint overenthusiam; but this is likely to be the biggest and most widely seen cinematic portrayal of Israel since Exodus and to say I'm concerned would be putting it mildly.

New Non-Chomsky Post

I've just posted a brief essay on horror writer H.P. Lovecraft and the X-Files over at the other blog. Enjoy.

The Judge-Penitents Turn on Chomsky

My friend and ally Amritas has been good enough to send me a link to one of the more bizarre excursions into the hinterlands of ideology I've ever encountered. Namely, an anti-Chomsky polemic from the extreme Left. Now, before we enter into this labyrinth I should first tip my hat to the author for the following homage he renders me and others in describing Chomsky's popularity and influence:

Who else has whole internet blogs dedicated to nothing else but attacking him?

Well, George W. Bush and Michael Moore to name a few, but still, the compliment is much appreciated.

As to the article itself, the less one says as to its accuracy and rhetoric the better; its a fairly nasty piece of work all around, and while I agree with the author as to his attacks on Chomsky's regular distortions of historical fact and tendency towards the most poisonous rhetoric possible (although this author, judging by his own affection for the slanderous, doesn't have much room to talk); I can, for the most part, do nothing but stand aside and marvel at what is, essentially, a pissing match over who is more zealous in his desire to annihilate the Jewish State.

The article is very (unnecessarily) long, so I will limit myself to a few comments on its most glaring idiocies.

[F]rom the perspective of the Palestinians, it was Chomsky who was the rejectionist. In the early 70s, the Palestinian national movement was not calling for a separate state in the West Bank and Gaza but for returning to the land from which 750,000 of them had been expelled or fled, not 2000 years, but twenty years before. It was not until the PLO dropped its demand for its national rights in all of what had been Palestine in exchange for a truncated entity on the other side of the Green Line (1967 border) that Palestinian national rights, or what was left of them, became acceptable to Chomsky.

While I thank the author for acknowledging what many apologists for the PLO have long denied, namely that the group's stated purpose was the destruction of Israel and not Arab statehood in tandem with Jewish statehood in a partitioned Land of Israel; as well as acknowledging that a large part (I believe a majority) of the Palestinian refugees fled of their own accord (though the number 750,000 is still very much in contention); regarding Chomsky this statement is manifestly inaccurate. Chomsky, from the dawn of the Arab-Israeli conflict, has supported a "bi-national" socialist state; that is, a one state solution. His only difference with the PLO party line is in regard to their demand that all Jews who arrived in Israel after 1948 be expelled. The negation of Jewish national rights, and thus the negation of the essence of Zionism, has never been anything but eminently acceptable to Noam Chomsky.*

The author's grasp of reality does not improve when he deals with AIPAC and the "massive complex of Jewish organizations" over which it presides; an issue which is, with a disturbing inevitability these days, the point at which nearly all radical leftists head off the deep end into outright antisemitism.

If there are any constants in Washington, they are the power of AIPAC over Congress and the combined power of both over the White House when it comes to issues in the Middle East. While the lobby and its legislative lackeys may not win every battle, they ultimately win every war as the three living ex-presidents, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George Bush the First, who ended up losers at the polls can attest.

Founded in 1959, with each passing year, the organization gets bigger and stronger. With a base in Washington, offices across the country, 85,000 energized members, a staff of 165, and a $33.4 million annual budget, 58AIPAC is at the pinnacle of a massive complex of Jewish organizations and Political Action Committees (PACS) across the country, from the national to the local, that are devoted to maintaining Israel’s privileged status in the nation’s capitol.

If we are to believe our erstwhile Chomsky critic, AIPAC has been solely responsible for the electoral losses of three presidents (economic and political factors being apparently nonexistent when Jewish power is involved) and has not merely power in the Congress but power over the Congress (the distinction is essential). We are to believe further that its 165 member staff apparently directs a terrifyingly powerful pyramid of Jewish organizations (a laughable assertion to anyone who has ever dealt with large Jewish organizations, since they are congenitally incapable of agreeing on anything amongst themselves, let alone with each other) powerful enough indeed to plunge what is ostensibly the most powerful country in the world into war.

Chomsky’s comment, notwithstanding, AIPAC, "was widely credited with having played a key role" in rounding up the necessary votes in the Senate to give Pres. Bush his majority. "[B]ecause of the extreme sensitivity to the issue, AIPAC was anxious to camouflage its role to avoid providing evidence for the accusation... that the Persian Gulf War was fought at the behest of the Jews to protect Israel." [62] To disguise their role, the Washington Jewish Week’s Larry Cohler reported that AIPAC had prominent Jewish senators vote against the war while lobbying non-Jewish senators in states with small Jewish populations to support it. That Saddam Hussein was not removed at the time brought strong criticism from the primarily Jewish neocons and on a lower register from AIPAC. During the Clinton presidency they would press their demand for regime change in Iraq and under Bush Jr., they made sure that task would be carried out. [63]

This rather stunningly blatant piece of racist conspiracy theory would have us believe that George Bush Sr. (who the author, let us not forget, has already described as targeted for unelection by the all-powerful Elders of AIPAC) and his various advisors (many of them no friends of Israel) took the United States into war for the purpose of protecting Israel (a country which, as a result of the war, suffered a series of missile attacks against which it was not permitted by the very well manipulated Bush Sr. to defend itself) under the intoxicating influence of Jewish power. Of course, under Bush Jr., "they made sure the task was carried out", a slander which drags us into Pat Buchanan (or Noam Chomsky) territory and cannot be answered with anything other than the statement that sometimes I wish we actually did have the power that fools like this attribute to us; at least then I wouldn't have to stay up nights worrying about them.

In the interest of verisimilitude, the author offers us the testimony of exactly two figures; Edward Said, the post-colonial theorist/professional gadfly, who remained dedicated throughout his life (without the slightest reservation) to Israel's destruction, and held the considered (and often epically verbose) opinion that all national liberation movements are sacred and legitimate with the exception of Zionism, a position I consider forthrightly racist; and Israel Shahak, who the author describes as "late" and "revered". Late he may be, but revered he most certainly is not. Even fanatically leftist Israelis consider him a dangerous crank whose writings on the Jewish religion are nearly inseperable from the crudest antisemitic propaganda. With the presentation of such witnesses, Chomsky is indicted and convicted on the charge of being insufficiently aware of the Jewish conspiracy at work in the US government. Needless to say, I disrespectfully dissent from the verdict in question; Chomsky may downplay AIPAC's influence in comparison to the conspiracists, but he has never minced words about his position regarding Jewish power in the United States; describing Jews as "the most privileged" of America's ethnic groups (presumably placing them above the WASP majority which, with a single exception, has held the presidency without interruption for over two hundred years) and as people who "want to make sure they have total control, not just 98% control", which hardly sounds much different than the musings of Said, Shahak, and our author.

The author attributes Chomsky's confusion on this issue to his US-centric worldview. I concur that Chomsky is obsessed with the United States and believes it to be the source of a semi-theological form of evil; but he has never given Israel much latitude in this regard. He portrays it as a willing collaborator, and not a helpless pawn. If he acknowledges the reality that Israel is not all-powerful, it is not to absolve Israel, but to further indict her, and with her, of course, the United States.

As to antisemitism itself, according to our author, it is merely a tool in the hands of the powerful to oppress the fearless speakers of truth to power:

The effects of an accusation of "anti-Semitism" are like none other. Being so branded as has brought such powerful and diverse public figures as Rev. Billy Graham and Actor Marlon Brando to their knees and to tears with their apologies. The fear of being called "anti-semitic" or of provoking anti-semitism, ironically, inhibits the actions of US-based Palestinian organizations despite the fact that they are Semites themselves. As if losing their land was not enough, in America they have also been robbed of their ethnic identity.

We are meant, it appears, to assume from this passage that such accusations are inherently illigitimate. In fact, Billy Graham was criticized (and rightly so) for making a statement to the effect that those who did not accept Jesus would not be permitted to enter heaven; and Marlon Brando made remarks about the Jews running Hollywood which were unmistakeably crude and offensive. So much for the penitents. As to the phenomenon itself, it is clear that the author knows nothing whatsoever about antisemitism and its history, even as he is busy denouncing the "massive complex" of Jewish power for exploiting it. In fact, he raises the single most cliched and preposterously ignorant defense Palestinian apologists have devised, i.e. that Arabs are semites themselves and therefore cannot be anti-semitic. In fact, the word "semite" as it was originally used in the term anti-semitism refers to a language group and not a racial one; thus making a mockery of the author's asinine claim that the Palestinians are "robbed of their ethnic identity" by its use. Furthermore, antisemitism as a term referring to a specific ideology has always referred to hatred of Jews, and in fact was first used by anti-Jewish Austrian political parties at the end of the 19th century as a substitute for the German word "Judenhass", or "Jew-hatred", which was considered too crude a term for use by a political movement seeking mainstream legitimacy (which, of course, it eventually achieved in the Nazi Party). The author should have done a little homework before making a fool of himself.

But what we are ultimately dealing with here is a question of purity; that is, who is more purely dedicated to the annihilation of the Jewish state and its replacement with an Arab state; in my view, Chomsky and his critic are indistinguishable in this regard, but the author certainly disgrees, as he points out in this final, parting assault.

In "Peace in the Middle East," [Chomsky] reveals that:

At the time of the Six Day War in June 1967, I personally believed that the threat of genocide was real and reacted with virtually uncritical support for Israel at what appeared to be a desperate moment. In retrospect it seems that this assessment of the facts was dubious at best." [97]

It was an honest expressions [sic] of his affection for Israel and a rare admission by Chomsky that he had erred. It was apparently his last. Given this background, some other questionable statements of Chomsky in that South African interview become comprehensible. When asked to explain the differences between Israel before and after statehood, he responded:

The post-1967 period is different. The concept of settler-colonialism would apply to the pre-1948 period. It is plainly an outside population coming in and basically dispossessing an indigenous population.: ... Without going into it, by 1948, that argument is over. There was a state there, right or wrong. And that state should have the rights of any state in the international system, no more, no less. After 1967, there is a quite different situation. That's military conquest. (Emphasis added) [98]

What Chomsky seems to be saying here to the Palestinians after 1948, is "Get over it." Is that a misinterpretation? Could not the apartheid state of South Africa been defended on the same basis? And what was Israel’s war in 1948, if not military conquest? Israel took not only the area accorded it by the United Nations, but much of what would have been the Palestinians’ had they accepted partition. Finally, how could Chomsky’s ideal of a Jewish homeland in Palestine have been realized by any means other than by settler-colonialism? Those are a few of many questions that require answers from Chomsky.

Of course, 1967 was one of the very few occasions where Chomsky was, in fact, correct (although I note the speed with which he denounced his indiscretion). And both he and his critic are utterly and deliberately wrong considering the process of Israel's founding. Zionism had nothing to do with settler colonialism. Colonists come to a country to exploit its natural resources and economic potentialities; Zionism came to the Land of Israel to found a homeland for an oppressed people and to build a society which would identify with the Jewish people; its purpose was national liberation and not exploitation. The conflict in this land is not over colonialism or exploitation, but over competing national claims regarding a very small and hotly contested piece of real estate. As for comparisons to South Africa, which are just another way of declaring Israel evil and illigimate, I have already said my piece on Jewish-Arab relations in Israel, which are complicated and, yes, troubled, but which cannot be accurately described by simplistic attempts at rhetorical demonization.

As to "dispossession", one cannot disposses someone who sells their land to you; which is how the pre-state Yishuv acquired all the land it held before 1948 (with, I would note, severe restrictions on where and how much of that land they could buy). As for the nature of "Israel's war in 1948", it was, in my opinion, the desperate defense of 600,000 souls to avoid being pushed into the sea. In fact, the very use of the term "Israel's war" is a lie. You would think from this article that the armies of five Arab countries did not exist, did not invade Israel, did not kill 1% of the Jewish population, and the war in its entirety was an aggressive assault by the Jews upon their helpless neighbors; as much as he criticizes Chomsky, the author has learned the good professor's lessons on the value of strategic omission extremely well. Of course, the reason these facts must be suppressed is that they would call into question the holy innocence of the Palestinians and the concurrent demonization of Israel which has been the stock and trade of Chomsky and, apparently, this author.

As to the question of the UN partition, there is no question that the Israeli army took land which would have been part of Palestine "had they [the Palestinians] accepted partition", which is precisely the point: they did not accept partition. The Palestinian national movement rejected any legitimacy to the Jewish national liberation movement and embarked on a war of annihilation instead. A war which was wholly unnecessary and whose results were unquestionably tragic for the Palestinian people. The borders prescribed by the UN only became sacred to the Palestinians and their supporters after their defeat in 1948. Taking these facts, and our author's obvious belief that the entirety of Zionism (and therefore partition of the land to provide for a Jewish state) was and is wholly illigitimate, into consideration, I cannot consider his rapturous allegiance to the partition borders to be anything other than the rankest hypocrisy.

But to return from history and its distortions to the question of the good professor, I cannot agree with his erstwhile critic. Chomsky has never accepted that Israel ought to be left alone in its 1948 form. That is, he has not said "get over it" to the Palestinians, but rather "accept a bi-national state in which you will swiftly become the dominant majority"; that is to say, a system which would reduce Israel's Jewish population to the same oppressed status Jews have enjoyed throughout their history as a universal minority without a homeland of their own. Chomsky and his critic are in the same boat together; what one desires swiftly and with violence, the other desires in measured doses, although in all likelihood with violence as well.

What is most fascinating about this piece, however, is its extraordinary irony. For the first time, perhaps, the guns have been turned around; and Chomsky himself has now become the target of the very Leftwing antisemitism he has spent his career denying out of existence; and has thus become subject to all the vicious opprobrium and ferocious distortionism he has so long directed towards others. For what Chomsky is being asked here, essentially, is the eternal question of the antisemite: are you a Jew, or are you one of us? The monster has begun to devour its own.


*I am aware of the fact that Chomsky has now declared himself in favor of the Geneva Accord, which supposedly advocates a two-state solution, but a matter of two years in the four decades long career of one of the PLO's most fervent apologists strikes me as less than relevent; especially considering Chomsky's declaration that his support is a tactical decision and not a moral-ideological one. Considering the acceptance of the Palestinian Right of Return in the fine print of the agreement, this does not strike me as being nearly as inconsistant with his previous positions as it may initially appear.

יום העצמאות : Independence Day

Fireworks are going off outside as I write this, celebrating another year of the first Jewish state in two thousand years. Its difficult to express in words what it means to witness a miracle, much less to live one every day; so I leave the words to more talented pens than mine, to the dreamer and the scribe.

I believe that a wondrous generation of Jews will spring into existence. The Maccabees will rise again...We shall live at last as free men on our own soil...The Jews who wish for a state shall have it, and they will deserve to have it.

-Theodore Herzl, "The Jewish State"

Yes, most of the gentle Jews are gone. Yes, the Jew is now solidly inside the affairs of the world. Yes, we are aware of the resonance of hate that lingers like a stench upon western civilization. Yes, we will continue to be the other, to hold our own view of things. Yes, we are a single people...Yes, there will be peace one day. Yes, we will renew our people. Yes, we touch millennia of precious history when we walk the streets of Jerusalem, and climb the hills, and journey through the sand wastes of the land. Yes, there are flowers to plant, seedlings to nurture, young trees to tend, old earth to nourish, and new earth to put in - a garden of new dreams to bring forth, to add to old covenants and messianic hopes, and to offer to ourselves and to our broken and beloved world. Yes.

-Chaim Potok, "Wanderings"

Yes.

יום הזיכרון : Remembrance Day

Today is Remembrance Day for Israel's fallen soldiers. I attended a university ceremony in honor of the dead, and on a small black board was the name of a student who was killed three weeks ago on reserve duty. He was younger than my little brother. Israeli writer Amos Oz once scoffed at a slogan the Irgun had scrawled across a wall near his childhood home in Jerusalem: "In blood and fire did Judea fall, in blood and fire will Judea rise again". Oz saw it as shallow militarism; I do not. I see it as a fatalistic acceptance of the destiny of the Jewish people in the modern world. We are condemned, by history or by fate, I don't know, to face blood and fire, and to steel ourselves to face it. From the moment we rose up against the world to claim the right granted to every other people throughout history, to claim our rights as human beings, in this hour and this time, not in some far off Messianic era, but now, we accepted that ferocious destiny. The moment that any Jew rises up for himself as himself; this is to be the dark recompense with which he must make peace. So be it. I leave myself with two comforts, the first from the pen of Chaim Potok, the second, Israeli poet Amir Gilboa.

What a price we have paid for that land: seven thousand killed in the War of Independence; another thousand killed in the 1956 Sinai campaign and the Six Day War; three thousand killed in the October 1973 war; hundreds killed by terrorist raids. We offer ourselves grim consolation: all the wars have cost us less than three days at Auschwitz.

-Chaim Potok, "Wanderings"

ואחי שותק
מאת אמיר גילבוע

אחי חזר מין השדה
בבגד אפור
ואני חששתי שמא חלומי יתבדה
והתחלתי מיד את פצעיו לספר
ואחי שותק

אחר חטטתי בכיסי הסגין
ומצאתי אספלנית שיבש כתמה
ובגלויה שחוקה את שמה
תחת לציור של פרגים
ואחי שותק

אז התרתי את הצרור
והוצאתי חפציו, זכר אחר זכר
הידד, אחי, אחי הגיבור
הינה מצאתי אותותיך
הידד, אחי, אחי הגיבור
אשיר גאוה לשמך
ואחי שותק
ואחי שותק

ודמו מן האדמה זועק

And My Brother is Silent
by Amir Gilboa

My brother returned from the field
In gray clothes
And I feared that what I dreamed was false
And I began at once to count his wounds
And my brother is silent

Then I rummaged in the pockets of the jacket
And found a field bandage, stained and dry
And on a fraying postcard, her name
Under a drawing of poppies
And my brother is silent

So I undid the pack
And removed his things, memory after memory
Hoorah my brother! My brother the hero!
Here I found your medals!
Hoorah my brother! My brother the hero!
I will sing proudly your name!
And my brother is silent
And my brother is silent

And his blood cries out from the ground

May the memory of the fallen be blessed. And may he who makes peace on his heights, make peace upon us all.

Problematic Dissent

Every time I delve into the world of the Chomskyites, I thank God for Dissent Magazine, if only because it reminds me that an intelligent, non-Chomskyite Left does exist, albeit on the margins of the ideological map. Had I remained a Leftist, I would likely be in their camp. However, reading this article by Michael Walzer on the Bush victory and how to deal with it reminds me of why I did not and could not do so.

I've always had an ambivalent opinion of Mr. Walzer. Personally, I much prefer Paul Berman, who is a better writer and a more courageous thinker, in my opinion. Walzer's position on Vietnam was, to my mind, utterly immoral and indefensible; and his writings on just war theory strike me as, at best, the naivete of a sheltered intellectual. I think he is an intelligent man who remains, unfortunately, mired in an inchoate nostalgia for the iconography of the Old Left, and for the aesthetic pleasures of revolution and revolt for its own sake. His musings on the state of the left today serve only to confirm that opinion. The piece is long, so I will confine myself to a few essential quotes:

The experts have apparently agreed that it wasn't values that lost us the last election. It was passion, and above all, it was the passion of fear. But maybe frightened people look for strong leaders, whose strength is revealed in their firm commitment to a set of values. Fear politics and value politics may turn out to be closely related.

Now, I understand why this is a popular theory for people who simply can't understand how anyone could vote for George Bush, but it nonetheless remains a fairly obvious rationalization. Yes, people are afraid of terrorism, and they should be, but in my view Bush represented more than fear to the people who voted for him, myself among them; he represented defiance, resoluteness, anger, and the belief that America is worth fighting for because it is fundamentally better than an ideology of theocratic totalitarianism and mass murder. At its most basic level, this represented a certain elementary courage; one which is, I believe, rooted in the very human desire to stand up and defend oneself when attacked. One can debate all of these things, but the manner in which Walzer reduces them down to "fear politics and value politics" trivializes something profound and important to a great many, perhaps a majority, of Americans; which is both shallow and never a smart thing to do if one is seeking a viable political platform.

Questions about just and unjust, right and wrong, goodness and evil...for the right today, the market takes care of such matters, or God takes care of them; the common good arises out of the competition for private goods-in obedience, amazingly, to God's word. On the left, however, we have to take care of moral matters by ourselves, without the help of history, the invisible hand, or divine revelation.

Maybe the struggle against Islamic radicalism and religious zeal is a world-historical struggle, as the struggle against communist totalitarianism was. I doubt that Islamic radicalism has the expansionist potential that communism had, but . . . maybe.

The first statement being made here, that the left is less moralistically extreme than the right, is simply categorically untrue. If anything, the left has become even more moralistic, even more fanatical, and even more extreme since 9/11 and the war in Iraq. They may not evoke God as much as the right, but the fervor with which they regularly compare Bush to Hitler was certainly religious in nature, and Hitler is, after all, merely a secular word for Satan. Moreover, even the mainstream organs of the left have proven willing to defer to these pathologies to a disturbing extent, even to the point of embracing political unpopularity (witness the rise of third-place loser Howard Dean to DNC chair). The problem is not that the left is uncertain of itself, but that its certainty has coalesced around an illusory and frankly psychotic worldview which perceives its own country and president as a manifestation of cosmic evil and refuses to acknowledge the reality of such other possible evils as, say, Islamic radicalism and its attendant terrorist acts. Walzer, in denying this phenomenon, is, like most well-meaning leftists, both in denial and setting himself up to reach all the wrong conclusions about the left's current impasse.

The essence of that impasse lies in two statements which say a great deal more than Walzer likely intended them to; his concept of "the common good", and his assessment of the threat posed by radical Islam. As to the latter, it is obvious to me and to many others that a theocratic totalitarianism which has political momentum, widespread popularity, access to sophisticated weaponry, and a demonstrated willingness to use said weaponry to cause wanton death and destruction is, to put it mildly, a major threat, and in the age of nuclear proliferation, perhaps even an apocalyptic one. At any rate, the question of whether radical Islam is the equal to communism in its danger is an irrelevancy; Islamic terror has proven that it can massively damage, upset, derange, and traumatize the United States, not to mention cause massive loss of innocent life. Its declared intention is to continue doing so until it is victorious or stopped by armed force. Walzer dismisses all this with a "but...maybe" which pretty much tells the whole story.

But it is the former which is really the heart of the matter, since it goes to explain the long term decline of the left, and not merely that which followed 9/11; since it makes it abundantly clear that Walzer simply doesn't understand modern conservatism in any way shape or form. And that, moreover, this lack of understanding is based in a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of human freedom. Like most leftists, Walzer is obsessed with the economic-political realm, or rather, he believes that the economic-political realm encompasses all of human society. As a result, he cannot grasp the fact that conservatism does not desire "the market" to "take care of such matters"; but rather for people, autonomous human beings, to regulate themselves without the interference of the state. For the conservative, there is no "common good" per se, because society is too complex for there to be a single good to be held in common by all; there is only the interaction of free individuals self-regulated by culture, morality, and, yes, religion, all of which exist independent and autonomous of politics. In truth, beyond all questions of war, peace, morality and values, this is the quintessential failure of the left today: its inability and conscious refusal to recognize the limits of politics and the very existence of the free individual. In the leftist mind, we are all merely pawns in the "common good". This is why they can see the War on Terror as a product of politics (i.e. the wicked Bush administration and/or the past machinations of the wicked United States) and also see the solution to the War on Terror as political (i.e. the election of a benign Kerry administration and/or overthrow of the existing political order by riot and street theater). The idea that religious, cultural, or moral forces at work in the world - such as radical Islam and its incompatibility with modern secular democracy - may create immovable realities is simply inconceivable to the left; and thus the possibility that politics means nothing in this struggle and that secular democracy, with all its flaws, may have to be fought for with blood and treasure, no matter who occupies the White House, becomes a fundamental threat to the entirety of their worldview, and must be denied out of existence. Michael Walzer is one of the smartest and most sober leftists writing today; and the fact that even he cannot begin to look beyond the impasse that is his and his movement's is, for me at least, as someone who hopes for an intelligent and engaged opposition, very disheartening indeed.

Definately Not in Kansas Anymore

Ok, this is very off topic, but I can't help it. The other day I woke up and heard this bizarre noise, like a cat hacking up phlegm in a very low register. I go outside with the morning coffee and cigarette, and I see my neighbors across the street feeding this big furry thing on their porch (my street is really an alley, so they're only about five feet away). And I ask them if they got a new dog. They beckon me over, and there's this goddam sheep, the size of a freakin' Great Dane tied up on their porch. They told me they just bought it at the local market and were going to slaughter it for the Passover seder. Apparently, they do it every year. I think I now know the true meaning of the phrase "culture gap". Only in Israel...

The Monsters of Virtue

Its rare that one gets to witness such displays of left wing anti-semitism as this extraordinary recent atrocity at UC Berkeley (to say where else? is too tempting a cliche) involving none other than erstwhile faux-indian and professional slanderer of mass murder victims Ward Churchill. There's really nothing new here except for the fact that white-guy-desperate-for-an-oppressed-past Churchill gives his opinion regarding my own people and our oppressed past. Perhaps Churchill's idiocy is motivated by envy (although I could tell him personally that living with the blood of history isn't all its cracked up to be; and suffering real racism isn't nearly as edifying as he imagines it), but judging from this, its based more on total ignorance and a toweringly fanatical belief in his own virtue.

This leads us to the situation in a certain sense of settler colonialism and the cruel order of a particular type in the area of Palestine, which results not from something Jewish but from something particularly anti-Jewish, which is Zionism. [Audience applause.] Zionists return that [with the significance] of Judaism they have not even the sanction of their own rabbinical councils at the time they undertook the project of conquest and colonization in the area they now call Israel. Never did and ultimately they never will.

Like his admirer Chomsky, Churchill has an unfortunate tendency to pontificate on subjects about which he knows nothing. If Churchill knew something about Judaism or Zionism, he would know that the desire to return to the Land of Israel and reestablish the Jewish state is not only less than anti-Jewish but one of the essential tenants of the Jewish faith. He should read 12th century poet and philosopher Judah Halevi, whose work cannot be described as anything other than proto-Zionism. Nor, apparently, is he aware of the involvement of many religious Jews in the Zionist movement, including several Zionists such as Kalishcher who predate even Theodore Herzl and the Zionist Congress, and such eminent religious Zionists as Rabbi Avraham Kook, who believed Zionism essential to Judaism in the modern world. I will not try to decipher Churchill's mangling of the past and present tense, but his claim that Zionism did not have or does not have sanction from "rabbinical councils" is transparently ludicrous. Judaism is not Catholicism, we have no Pope and no central authority. Yes, there are "rabbinical councils" who reject Zionism (though as early as the 1930s they were already a minority), and there are those who embrace it; the notion, however, that this proves anything in regards to the relationship between Zionism and the Jewish religion, which is a complex and long one, if it is even possible to completely separate the two; is simply the ranting of a man who has directed his inchoate resentments upon things he neither understands nor wants to understand, since to do so would render his murderous fanaticism impossible.

But there is something even more important at work here. It is simply this: Zionism is the Jewish national liberation movement; as such, Churchill, were he consistent with his expressed principles, would be forced to acknowledge its essential legitimacy. The fact that this man and his fellow travelers, who base their entire sense of their own overweening virtue on their support of the right of oppressed peoples to rise up against their oppression, can see nothing in Zionism but "settler colonialism", a process of "conquest and colonization", a "cruel order" which is "particularly anti-Jewish", speaks of nothing more than a double standard with is fundamentally and self-evidently racist. What we are looking at here is nothing less than a pure and unvarnished expression of left wing anti-semitism. And this is from the man who invokes Eichmann with alacrity and vomits the words Nazi and racist upon any and everyone who dares to threaten his hermetic Manicheanism.

There can be no mistaking what we are dealing with here, and it is no less horrifying than this: Churchill and those who stand with him are the little Eichmanns of our time; it is they who espouse a totalitarian ideology of hate and slaughter, it is they who believe the devil bears the face of the Jew, it is they who desire to spill oceans of blood in the name of justice, it is they who have made virtue into an ideology of murder. In looking at them, I can only think of Nietzsche's words on the virtuous:

Alas, how ill the word "virtue" sounds in their mouths! And when they say: "I am just", it sounds always like "I am revenged!"

They want to scratch out the eyes of their enemies with their virtue; and they raise themselves only in order to lower others.

If this be virtue, I want no part of it.

Comments Provisionally Discontinued

I've always considered it a point of pride that I have never censored my comments, but I've had a lot of recent complaints that they have more or less become a message board for Chomskyites and anti-Chomskyites to hurl insults at each other; which, needless to say, was not what I had in mind when I started this blog. So, for the moment, I am discontinuing the comments section. If any of you have passionate opinions on this or any other matter relating to this blog, feel free to email me at benjaminkerstein@hotmail.com.

Hands on the Whip at Last

I recently received an email which expressed the not uncommon opinion that the erstwhile subject of this blog is simply insane. While I understand the sentiment, and I agree that it is difficult to explore Chomsky's worldview without concluding that it contains at least some measure of psychological paranoia, I nonetheless cannot agree; and its worth it to explain why, especially in the context of the previous post.

In my opinion, Chomsky is completely sane. Obviously, I don't know the man, nor am I a qualified psychiatrist, but his bizarre denials of reality and frequent distortions of history do not strike me as the products of a diseased mind, but rather as willful lies and exaggerations of which Chomsky is well aware. I don't think he really believes that the Cambodian genocide was invented by the American media, that the US tried to commit a "silent genocide" in Afghanistan, that Israel is reminiscent of Nazi Germany, or that the Bush administration will bring about the end of life on this planet. Nor, in my opinion, is he convinced that communist Cuba, Sandanista Nicaragua, or North Vietnam were anything other than immensely oppressive totalitarian dictatorships. Why Chomsky and his fellow travelers hold otherwise is not, in my view, a particularly difficult question, and the way to the answer is pointed out by George Orwell with his usual incisive prescience, when he remarked that the pro-communist intellectuals of his day desired not justice and equality as they claimed but rather a new hierarchical society in which "the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip".

If one looks at the various movements Chomsky has supported, they are all more or less movements composed of radical ideologues, not much different from himself, who have simply taken the extra step of merging their intellectual stance with the gun. That is to say, with the power to enact their plans through cruelty and violence. The attractiveness of this to the average radical intellectual, especially in democratic societies, which always tend towards the mean, cannot be underestimated. It allows him to live out his fantasies of revolution vicariously while making sure that he never has to actually pull the trigger himself. It allows him to be, shall we say, a mandarin of sorts; someone who can taste the thrills of absolute power without having to pay the inevitable price of political crime. Thus, the intellectual can, through the act of mere support, or rhetorical succor, remain sanguine on such subjects as oppression and mass murder while still imagining himself morally pure and unsullied. Once this is coupled with the naked reality of one's self interest, this becomes a particularly intoxicating combination. Since a man of Chomsky's beliefs can never hope to achieve any real power except through imposing his ideas by violence upon the rest of us, the sight of men like Fidel Castro or Daniel Ortega actually doing so cannot possibly appear to be a brutal act of tyranny but rather a heroic and admirable assault on those who keep self-anointed prophets like Chomsky trapped in the purgatory of relative obscurity and powerlessness.

It strikes me, therefore, that Chomsky and is ilk are not motivated by madness, but rather by lust for power and a reasoned acceptance of what it would take to achieve it. This, coupled with an almost theological admiration for the capacities of political violence and the men who use it; on whom are easily projected impossible fantasies of domination and rule, the intoxicating capacity to simply say "Exterminate all the brutes!"; creates a mindset in which all facts or truths which stand in the way of seizing the heights must be done away with, by fair means or foul. Seen this way, the average Chomskyite's relentless confabulations appear not merely sane, but also sensible; as sensible, at least, as one can be when driven by such forces. It for us, therefore, not to simply dismiss such things as the ravings of madmen, but to do what we can to ensure that the whip does not fall easily into their hands.

On Kurtz and Chomsky

A new post over at the rhetorically overwrought but nonetheless informative Moonbat Central has a fantastic display of Chomskyite ideology at its worst, witness:

“Unlike many leftists of his generation,” says [Robert] Barsky, “Chomsky never flirted with movements or organisations that were later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, exclusionary, anti-revolutionary, and elitist … He has very little to regret. His work, in fact, contains some of the most accurate analyses of this century.”

This is, to put it very mildly, willful blindness bordering on insanity. The movements and organizations Chomsky has supported which were not merely later revealed to be totalitarian, oppressive, etc; but were openly so from their inception; amounts to a laundry list of the worst ideological pathologies of the twentieth century. A recitation that includes the PLO, the FLN, the NLF, North Vietnam, Castro's Cuba, the Khmer Rouge, Maoism, Nasserism, Baathism, the Sandanistas, et al; would be significant only in its inadequacy to convey the breadth of Chomsky's affection for authoritarianism. Indeed, an objective look at Chomsky's record reveals that there has hardly been a totalitarian, oppresseive, exclusionary, anti-revolutionary, or elitist movement which Chomsky has not supported. The fact that much of the mainstream left has managed, either out of inchoate resentment or a secret admiration for the unfettered capacities of absolute power, to convince itself otherwise is, of course, the essence of the Chomskyite phenomenon. It reminds me of nothing less than the passage in Conrad's Heart of Darkness in which Marlow reads through Kurtz's lengthy paper on the Suppression of Savage Customs, and after pages of well meaning and intelligent discourse on the issue, finds a single, scrawled line at the end: "Exterminate all the brutes!" Once one sifts through the various exhortations of "accurate analysis" and high minded moralisms of the Chomskyites, this will to absolute power, and thus destruction, is, ultimately, all one is left with.

On Cinema

I've posted a brief and very personal comment on Martin Scorsese's The Aviator over at the non-Chomsky blog.

Published!

My review of a new Israeli film called Walk on Water has just been published by the english language website of Yediot Acharanot, Israel's biggest newspaper. They cut the original by about two thirds, but I think the point gets across. Enjoy.

Chomskyites In My Own Backyard

This article in the Jerusalem Post points out some of the Chomskyites operating at my own university. The piece exaggarates the extent of the problem, in my opinion; the professors here are almost universally left wing, but the vast majority are not anti-Zionist radicals. The individuals cited here are certainly the right suspects, though. I know Neve Gordon vaguely and had a class with Oren Yiftachel. Gordon is a fool, one of the most fantastically unintelligent people I've ever met in my life; his radicalism is merely a desperate defense against his own mediocrity. Yiftachel is a smart guy but utterly consumed by his ideology. He is certainly anti-Zionist and occasionally flirts with anti-semitic rhetoric, particularly in regard to his understanding of Jewish history, which is, to say the least, limited. I've had a few conversations with him (he seemed to want to convert me to his point of view) and while he's always unfailingly polite, he's a classically close-minded individual, he seems to go deaf when you say anything he disagrees with. Such is the price, I imagine, of Chomsyite surities.

I'm Fine

To anyone who's worried or interested. I was not anywhere near Tel Aviv the other night. Obviously, I'm hugely disappointed and discouraged, although I should have expected that something like this would happen. Perhaps I've allowed myself to become more optimistic than I realized. However, I'm not despairing yet; we'll have to see how things play out over the next few days. Here's hoping.

Requiem for Raul Duke

On my last flight back to Israel from the States, I picked up a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas at Logan Airport and finished it an hour before we touched down in Tel Aviv. I think my fellow passengers were convinced I was insane, because I could not stop laughing out loud every few minutes for the entire flight. It is hands down one of the funniest and most fearlessly savage (to use a term adored by its author) books I have ever read. Although I obviously have little sympathy for Hunter S. Thompson's politics, and, as someone who can't smoke a joint without vomiting, I have difficulty relating to the lifestyle of someone who ingested unique chemical variations on the secretions of the peneal glands of the South African iguana on a semi-regular basis; I am nonetheless convinced that his suicide marks the passing of a unique American talent and one of the best and most original writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Rest in peace, you beautiful psychopath; too wierd to live, too rare to die.

Happiness Is

...sitting around on a Saturday listening to Beethoven's piano sonatas and witnessing a couple of Chomskyites getting a good shellacking. Check it out, one of the participants is a certain John Summers, with whom I had a brief email exchange on this very subject. He goes off the deep end at one point in really spectacular fashion. Enjoy.

Expectorating Churchill

There's a very interesting post over at The American Spectator on the Ward Churchill phenomenon. I don't agree with all of it, but it makes a very good point about how the term"academic freedom" is now used to conceal a multitude of sins; lying, stupidity, and intellectual tyranny not least among them. Check it out.

Chomsky Defends Treason, Again

I must say, I'm having a ball watching the public crucifixion of Ward Churchill. I've been waiting for awhile to see if the assundry frauds, petty tyrants, and would-be revolutionaries that have infested the American university system would ever get their comeuppance; and I'm gratified to see this blubbering excuse for an intellectual, who has no doubt committed many a public crucifixion of his own on students who dared to question his beliefs, being forced to sweat it out in the public eye.

As I expected, the good professor and erstwhile subject of this blog has weighed in on the subject, praising Churchill's scholarship as "excellent, penetrating and of high scholarly quality" an opinion which seems to be shared by Churchill himself and disputed by almost everybody else. Its not surprising to me that Chomsky is in Churchill's corner, since there doesn't seem to be much light between their respective ideologies. They both embrace the US as Nazi Germany trope (a position I consider tantamount to Holocaust denial) and advocate the violent overthrow of the US government, although Chomsky does seem to be a bit smarter about how he goes about saying so. They seem to share career paths as well, both of them being completely unqualified rhetorical arsonists who have achieved their position by saying disgusting things about subjects in which they hold no credentials and by bullying anyone who dares to contradict them, although I don't think Chomsky's ever been dumb enough to try to fake his own ancestry (although one could see his anti-semitism as an attempt to formulate a non-Jewish identity, but that's a subject for another time).

I think I should be clear on what I think about Churchill's possible dismissal; firstly, I absolutely support his right to spew all the venom he wants to (although I strongly doubt he would support mine to do the same), but I do not believe he has an inalienable right, constitutional or otherwise, to academic tenure and a university position. Now, I don't support universities summarily dismissing anyone who's views they don't care for, but Churchill goes well beyond that. What he is advocating is treason, and no university is required to give succor to such elementary forms of political evil, any more than they are required to retain a professor of neo-Nazi sympathies or one who thinks the world is flat (and yes, I consider Churchill morally and intellectually comparable to a Nazi or a flat earther; in fact, he seems to be a somewhat farcical synthesis of the two). Most ironically, it seems clear to me that Churchill was not hired in spite of his radicalism but because of it, and it would be a marvelous act of divine justice if that same radicalism results in removal from his clearly much undeserved position.

My Own Remembrance of Things Past

I don't know if I've ever mentioned it here, but I played semi-professional blues guitar for about five years in Boston (more semi- than professional). I've written a few things about that time, and I hope at some point to put them together into a memoir of sorts. I've posted a brief piece at the other blog, so if you're interested in some very non-Chomsky stuff of mine, enjoy.