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He doesn't actually botch the general merits of the Canadian government's decision to ban George Galloway, which had to do with his ostentatious delivery of material aid to Hamas, but in his latest Slate column Christopher Hitchens wrongly emphasizes that foreign entry permits are being denied to unsavory figures of late due to what they say, not what they do. "The British House of Commons has room for a man as appalling as George Galloway; why should Canadians not have the chance to make up their own mind about him?"

Leaving aside the plain fact that if my old professor and I had it our way the British House of Commons would not make room for the Scottish terrier at all (except perhaps to allow agents from the International Criminal Court to affix manacles to his feet), the reason is that Galloway broke Canadian law by funding a terrorist organization, in the open, and while taunting Western authorities to do something about it. (The British Charity Commission is now investigating his Viva Palestina convoy, whose documents are not forthcoming about the purpose and intended recipients of its largesse.)

I posted about this confused distinction here on Arma Virumque days ago, and I've expanded on the argument -- which, in Hitchens' defense, the Canadian press has been almost heroic in its determination to distort -- in this piece for Pajamas Media. But my friend and neighbor to the north, Terry Glavin, offers the full monty on the Galloway story at a UK blog in every way appositely named for the current controversy, Drink-Soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for War:

A couple of weeks ago, a Canadian High Commission official in London had a conversation with someone in George Galloway's parliamentary staff about the MP's travel plans. The official then showed George Galloway the personal courtesy of writing him directly to advise him that a preliminary assessment of his admissability to Canada was not favourable.

In that letter, Immigration Program Manager Robert J. Orr politely referred Galloway to certain provisions of Canada's Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, specifically, Section 34 (1), which, among other things, cites "engaging in terrorism" as grounds to prevent a person from entering Canada. In Canada, engaging in terrorism includes raising money for terrorist groups. In Canada, the death cult Hamas is listed as a proscribed terrorist group.

Mere days before Orr wrote his letter, Galloway had delivered roughly $2 million (Cdn.) in vehicles, various goods and cash, directly to Hamas boss Ismail Haniyeh. Galloway boasted about this, and openly dared British and European authorities to charge him for breaking the sanctions against Hamas, and he went so far as to stage an event for Al Jazeera television in which he handed over a wad of cash in the equivalent of about $50,000 (Cdn.) directly to Haniyeh. Around the time Orr was composing his letter to Galloway, the British Charity Commission was preparing an investigation into the transactions Galloway was involved with in Gaza.

There is nothing occult about any of this.

In his letter, Orr noted that Galloway was not expected to make his Canadian appointments before March 30, and so he extended to Galloway the further courtesy of inviting him make a submission to address his preliminary assessment of inadmissability. The alternative would be that a Border Services Agency official might find himself obliged to make a final determination at some border crossing, informed only by the preliminary assessment, but without the benefit of a submission from Galloway himself. Orr also suggested an alternative to Galloway, to apply for a Temporary Resident Permit, but he also showed Galloway the further kindness of letting him know that it would be unlikely that such an application would succeed.

Instead of proceeding as he was so politely invited, Galloway took the event as an opportunity to combine with his Canadian admirers and exploit the gullability and general slovenliness of the press in order to tell a pack of lies, monger a lurid conspiracy theory about a secret plot hatched in Ottawa to silence critics of Canada's engagements in Afghanistan, fabricate a free-speech controversy, and blame it all on the Jews.

It must also be said that Hitchens misconstrues the letter, if not exactly the spirit, of our own State Department's decision to continue the travel ban against Oxford University's favored Islamist apologist in residence, Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan's considered persona non grata by the Obama administration for the same reason he was (eventually) found to be so by the Bush administration: Between 1998 and 2002, he donated a total of $940 to two charities, Comité de Bienfaisance et de Secours aux Palestiniens and the Association de Secours Palestinien, French and Swiss respectively, both of which our government has linked to Hamas.

In Ramadan's defense, it seems plausible, judging by the revised mealy-mouthed language and muddled chronology of his visa revocation process that the State Department was simply looking for any excuse to keep him out. Although their motive likely wasn't, as he maintained in a Washington Post editorial ("Why I'm Banned in the USA"), his vocal criticisms of the Iraq war, CIA detention facilities and our policy of torturing enemy combatants. Plenty of types with lots to say on those topics daily land at and take off from major American hubs. Rather, Ramadan is the most glamorously deceptive European salesman of Islamic fascism. He's got two "discourses" -- one for his Muslim audiences, and one for his non-Muslim audiences -- that, with alternating degrees of sophistry and impenetrability, attempt to bleach the messianic nastiness out of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. There are generous helpings of postmodern theory to facilitate this task, rendering religious brutality the stuff of Foucauldian pyrotechnics or multicultural compromise. For instance, Ramadan professes to prefer a "moratorium" on the sharia-backed practice of stoning women for adultery. Look up "moratorium." (For a concise rap sheet on Ramadan's slipperiness, see Catherine Fourest's Brother Tariq, published by Encounter Books.)

Now, Hitchens is surely right to say that such views are loathsome in themselves but are not -- or should not be -- sufficient grounds for the kind of censorship meted out by border security. (How many commenters on political blogs would be turned away at LaGuardia each year if sinister stupidity were all it took?) And while it looks as if Ramadan's ideas did indeed precipitate the desire to ban him from the U.S. that ban was only legally followed through because of his disclosed actions. Giving money to terrorist front groups is a crime that seeks no Voltairean rebuttal.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 10:48 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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A remarkable profile runs in this week's New York Times Magazine of the Anglo-American physicist Freeman Dyson, one of the last remaining figures of 20th-century science who inspire offshoot industries of cortex envy (after his death, expect titles like, "What Dyson Told His Roto-Rooter Repair Man") and wring every semantic drop out of the term "genius." The piece could have easily been written as a kitsch tribute to a beautiful mind that set itself the superhuman task of contemplating the cosmos and answering the question of why there's something instead of nothing. In fairness, there are a few too many subatomic metaphors for my taste, but the profile fascinates because it's about one of Dyson's own offshoot preoccupations--doubting the dire projections about global warming:

Science is not a matter of opinion; it is a question of data. Climate change is an issue for which Dyson is asking for more evidence, and leading climate scientists are replying by saying if we wait for sufficient proof to satisfy you, it may be too late. That is the position of a more moderate expert on climate change, William Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences at Duke University, who says, "I don't think it's time to panic," but contends that, because of global warming, "more sea-level rise is inevitable and will displace millions; melting high-altitude glaciers will threaten the food supplies for perhaps a billion or more; and ocean acidification could undermine the food supply of another billion or so." Dyson strongly disagrees with each of these points, and there follows, as you move back and forth between the two positions, claims and counterclaims, a dense thicket of mitigating scientific indicators that all have the timbre of truth and the ring of potential plausibility. One of Dyson's more significant surmises is that a warming climate could be forestalling a new ice age. Is he wrong? No one can say for sure. Beyond the specific points of factual dispute, Dyson has said that it all boils down to "a deeper disagreement about values" between those who think "nature knows best" and that "any gross human disruption of the natural environment is evil," and "humanists," like himself, who contend that protecting the existing biosphere is not as important as fighting more repugnant evils like war, poverty and unemployment.

Among Dyson's many counterpoints to the conventional wisdom is the fact that life flourished when the earth was many magnitudes of degree hotter than it is now, and so the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may not spell the kind of imminent pan-species doom that Al Gore's celebrated models do. The study of the greenhouse effect, Dyson maintains, is itself conducted in a hothouse of mutual affirmation and groupthink.

One can argue over the fanciful futurism that gives rise to Dyson's genetically engineered super-trees that process CO2 at temperature-sustainable rates. But crucial to this debate is that not only does he say that the alarmist data simply isn't there, he says that even if it were, science has a higher obligation to biology than it does to ecology. Dyson is a classical humanist who believes that the impulse for man to understand nature is rooted to his ability to alter or improve it for the immediate betterment of mankind. In the short term -- which is usually shorter than it takes to melt an iceberg -- ameliorative measures like ending poverty and lessening the daily burdens of physical toil are primary concerns.

Dyson conceives of the current Green movement as nothing short of a religion, fortified by well-endowed institutions, smitten with prophecying, and altogether disdainful of heterodoxy. This is a criticism shared by figures as politically and temperamentally diverse as Vaclav Klaus, the sitting free-marketeer president of the Czech Republic, Bjorn Lomborg, the liberal Swedish economist, Denis Dutton, the Darwinian aesthetic philosopher who edits Arts & Letters Daily, and Alexander Cockburn, the ultra-left polemicist who writes for The Nation and edits CounterPunch magazine. It's never quite accurate to claim that global warming skeptics are solidly ideologically conservative, much less stooges for Big Oil. But that hasn't stopped the more zealous crusaders from trying. Dyson himself is described here as an "Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources."

He may indeed be full of it; he'd be no scientist at all if he didn't concede the possibility. But that's precisely what distinguishes him from a chorus of Green activists who dismiss him as in over his head, misinformed, or -- what else to counter a septuagenarian with? -- senile, at least when it comes to this issue. As with all religions, they have everything to lose if they're proven wrong. Dyson simply continues onto the next hypothesis. Vindication, if it comes for either side, won't come in his or Al Gore's lifetimes. It's worth pointing out, too, that Dyson, like any serious participant in this debate, doesn't deny that the planet is heating up; he just wonders about how much and to what future effect. (This makes it disingenuous in the extreme to compare climate catastrophe skeptics to Flat Earthers or phrenologists or some other antique cultists of pseudo-science, who can be shown how they're wrong right now, in the present.)

It's certainly true that a tenured residence at the Institute for Advanced Study is no guarantee of total intellectual clarity and rigor. One of my heroes, and something of a godhead of Pure Rationality, Kurt Goedel, ended his days at the same place, a colleague and walking partner of Einstein, thinking that his refrigerator was poisoning him to death and working on the sorts of mathematical equations that start out endless. Judge for yourself whether or not Dyson's at that level. His unlikely and extraordinary career thus far testifies to the pleasure of having the last laugh:

What may trouble Dyson most about climate change are the experts. Experts are, he thinks, too often crippled by the conventional wisdom they create, leading to the belief that "they know it all." The men he most admires tend to be what he calls "amateurs," inventive spirits of uncredentialed brilliance like Bernhard Schmidt, an eccentric one-armed alcoholic telescope-lens designer; Milton Humason, a janitor at Mount Wilson Observatory in California whose native scientific aptitude was such that he was promoted to staff astronomer; and especially Darwin, who, Dyson says, "was really an amateur and beat the professionals at their own game." It's a point of pride with Dyson that in 1951 he became a member of the physics faculty at Cornell and then, two years later, moved on to the Institute for Advanced Study, where he became an influential man, a pragmatist providing solutions to the military and Congress, and also the 2000 winner of the $1 million Templeton Prize for broadening the understanding of science and religion, an award previously given to Mother Teresa and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- all without ever earning a Ph.D. Dyson may, in fact, be the ultimate outsider-insider, "the world's most civil heretic," as the classical composer Paul Moravec, the artistic consultant at the institute, says of him.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:37 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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Relating to my earlier post about Haaretz's report of how Israeli soldiers in Gaza opened fire on elderly women and children: other Israeli sources now says those "eyewitness" testimonies, culled from conversations IDF soldiers had at the Rabin Pre-military Academy, were false. An investigation was conducted into the brigade out which these stories emerged and found no evidence to support them. According to the Israeli newspaper Maariv:

Two central incidents that came up in the testimony, which Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy presented to Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi, focus on one infantry brigade. The brigade's commander today will present to Brigadier General Eyal Eisenberg, commander of the Gaza division, the findings of his personal investigation about the matter which he undertook in the last few days, and after approval, he will present his findings to the head of the Southern Command, Major General Yoav Gallant.

Regarding the incident in which it was claimed that a sniper fired at a Palestinian woman and her two daughters, the brigade commander's investigation cites the sniper: "I saw the woman and her daughters and I shot warning shots. The section commander came up to the roof and shouted at me, ?Why did you shoot at them.' I explained that I did not shoot at them, but I fired warning shots."

Officers from the brigade surmise that fighters that stayed in the bottom floor of the Palestinian house thought that he hit them, and from here the rumor that a sniper killed a mother and her two daughters spread.

[...]

Regarding the second incident, in which it was claimed that soldiers went up to the roof to entertain themselves with firing and killed an elderly Palestinian woman, the brigade commander investigation found that there was no such incident.

The Jerusalem Post, quoting an anonymous source, comes to the same conclusions.

In the interest of intellectual honesty, this was my initial take on the Haaretz disclosures:

Even though these admissions have yet to be verified by independent inquiry, the responsible first response to them is one of demoralization. It is impossible not to think with the blood when you think about Israel, and by that I don't mean you need to be Jewish. Everyone has a stake in this small country now -- Jews, philo-Semites, anti-Semites -- whether they are motivated by a legitimate concern for the sanctity and perpetuity of the Middle East's only liberal democracy, an equally legitimate queasiness over its human rights abuses, or a wicked desire to see it wiped off the map.

The demoralization is still there; only now it derives from seeing propaganda exalted as fact and traveled around the world as above-the-fold news items in major periodicals.

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Commentary's Ted Bromund noticed an odd thing about Obama's erstwhile chairman of the National Intelligence Council. He wants U.S. troops out of Afghanistan:

I thought of his complaint again today, when a friend pointed out an interesting item in the February 26, 2009, New York Review of Books: a petition calling on the U.S. to withdraw immediately and totally from Afghanistan. One signatory, predictably, was Norman Finkelstein. Another, equally predictably, was Chas Freeman. That petition was published weeks before Freeman's name was put forward as the arbiter of U.S. intelligence assessments. Now, naturally, it would never for a moment compromise Freeman's objectivity that his self-declared political opinions are wildly at odds with those of the administration he sought to join. Nor is there anything even slightly unseemly about a candidate for such a position publicly stating preferences that would immediately put him at partisan odds with the President. Nor, of course, need we wonder at the fact that Freeman found himself politically at home with a conspiracy theorist like Finkelstein.

Leaving his thoughts on Israel aside (something Freeman's gallery of defenders and Hebraiophobic listmakers have refused to do), this disastrous and self-pitying figure applauds the violent government suppression of dissent in public squares, speaks glowingly of a chauvinistic Islamic monarchy that executes gays and denies entry to Jews, and thinks the United States has no business fighting the one war that every high-profile progressive and realist alike has termed "good."

Might we in the future be spared intelligence analysts who are better suited to serving on the Lyndon LaRouche presidential exploratory committee?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 9:16 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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You know how these things go. Edmund Burke was lactose intolerant. Byron would only allow his (ahem) devoted half-sister Augusta Leigh knit the specialty socks for his clubbed foot. Auden absolutely loved Oreos. Posthumous biographical curios about the literati risk eclipsing the literature itself if you're not too careful (and I wasn't about the lactose, the socks or the Oreos, all of which I just made up). But every so often you discover, hidden in the garage sale of a well-tended life, an anecdote or characteristic so evocative of the subject that the rummaging proves not entirely otiose. TLS has an essay on Orwell as father, substantiated by the never-before-uttered reminiscences of his adopted son Richard, and I can't have been the only reader to recognize the author of Homage to Catalonia in this recounted memory:

The only time [Richard] came close to death was on a boat trip in the middle of the marvellous summer of 1947. They had finished haymaking and decided to take a short holiday on the uninhabited far side of the island, where there were beautiful white sand beaches and lochs, which nobody ever fished because they were too remote, full of trout. Five of them went, in Orwell's fishing boat, powered by an outboard motor - Orwell, Richard and three cousins, the children of Orwell's elder sister, Marjorie Dakin. They slept in a deserted shepherd's hut on piles of heather, swam, and had wonderful picnics.

But on the return trip, Orwell misjudged the tides and they were caught in a whirlpool in the Gulf of Corryvreckan. The outboard was swamped, and they started to sink, but Henry Dakin, who had just finished his national service, took the oars and managed to get them to a small rocky island. There the boat overturned, and Orwell, Richard and one of the Dakin children were briefly trapped under it. The blankets and stores were lost, but they all managed to scramble ashore, and got a fire going to dry their clothes. Orwell, Richard recalls, found a potato that he tried to bake, and hoisted a shirt to attract attention.

A passing lobster boat rescued them, but Orwell, perhaps as a kind of penance, insisted on them being put ashore a mile away from Barnhill, and they all walked home barefoot as their boots had gone down with the boat. "Richard loved every moment of it except when he went into the water," Orwell assured a friend. This tallies with Richard's memory. He thought the whole thing "a big joke" and, looking back, realises he was not frightened because the others kept calm, especially Orwell. While they were struggling to escape from the whirlpool he noticed a seal watching them and remarked "Curious thing about seals, very inquisitive creatures" - which the Dakin children thought rather detached even for Uncle Eric.

A man drowning with his own son pauses to consider the aquatic creatures quizzically looking on. This is "detached," all right, and in keeping with Orwell's standard of war reporting. Militamen who'd had their limbs blown off or paralyzed by stray bullets in Spain were introduced as "poor devils," their conditions editorialized with piteous drive-by clauses ("I'm afraid") before the narrative carried on with what the barracks or hospital looked and smelled like. There was no room for sentimentality.

I remember first reading Catalonia and thinking it must have inspired Monty Python's Black Knight sketch ("I've chopped your arm off!" "No you haven't!" "Flesh wound!") and also that political writing is much improved by this almost sociopathic English sangfroid. Surveying today's turgid left-wing discourse, in which words like "massacre" and "genocide" are used to depict the accidental killing of civilians in war, and context is only something that other words get taken out of, one can't help but conclude that Orwell's genius lay in his omnivorous eye for detail wedded to a vigilant sense of proportion. His own drawing of breath seemed...beside the point. Lesser writers have had to acquire this trait, with scarce resulting benefit. Uncle Eric had it just by waking up each morning. And, I might add, by dying of tuberculosis at too young an age.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 8:51 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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I'm a few days late to this item, but L.A. Times carries a story that the Obama administration is wavering on whether or not to issue a presidential declaration recognizing the genocide of 1.5 million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915:

Administration officials are considering postponing a presidential statement, citing progress toward a thaw in relations between Turkey and neighboring Armenia. Further signs of warming -- such as talk of reopening border crossings -- would strengthen arguments that a U.S. statement could imperil the progress.

"At this moment, our focus is on how, moving forward, the United States can help Armenia and Turkey work together to come to terms with the past," said Michael Hammer, a spokesman for the National Security Council. He said the administration was "encouraged" by improvements in relations and believed it was "important that the countries have an open and honest dialogue about the past."

The U.S. desire to use Turkey as a military supply line for Afghanistan does not justify the weasel words of this about-face: "work together to come to terms with the past" euphemizes Turkey's chauvinistic refusal to acknowledge 20th-century history and ignores the fact that Armenia needn't come to terms with it at all -- it already has done. (It should also be noted that the modern Kemalist state is not responsible for the atrocity it claims never happened; its imperial predecessor committed it, which goes to show that nostalgia for world empire is not exclusively a superpower phenomenon).

"His support for the Senate resolution acknowledging the genocide all these years later... His willingness, as president, to commemorate it... And certainly to call a spade a spade and to speak truth about it... He's not going to focus group his way to making important policy decisions... He's a true friend of the Armenian people... an acknowledger of the history and somebody who can respond to the fierce urgency of now..." These are of some of Samantha Power's glowing recommendations of Barack Obama, spoken to the Armenian-American community, in February 2008. The author of A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, and a member of the National Security Council, has had to eat her words before, and probably will again in the future.

(Via Norm Geras)

Posted by Michael Weiss at 10:22 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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The Sun is reporting that British MP George Galloway, fresh off his Hamas boosterism parade in Gaza, has been denied entry to Canada on the grounds that he supports terrorist organizations and publicly endorses the murder of Canadian soldiers serving in Afghanistan.

Mr Galloway is due to make a speech in Toronto on March 30, following a US lecture tour, but will be turned away if he tries to enter Canada.

The Canadian High Commission in London was last night contacting the MP's office to inform him of the decision.

Canadian rules say he will be allowed in only if he has a special permit from immigration minister Jason Kenney.

But Mr Kenney's spokesman said: "George Galloway is not getting a permit -- end of story.

I confess to feeling more than a twinge of happiness at this decision, particularly given the no-nonsense rhetoric of our northern neighbor's immigration minister. Compare Mr. Kenney's terse statement to any mealy-mouthed bureacratese spoken by a flak of the U.S. State Department in like circumstances.

I prepared a dossier on Galloway's involvement in the UN's oil-for-food theft that was used by Christopher Hitchens in his famous Manhattan debate with the Scottish terrier a few years back. Since then I have followed Galloway's antics closely out of a mixture of macabre fascination and amusement. An Orientalist at heart, Galloway most cherishes the martyrological aspects of Islam, and if there is any small compliment that can be paid to him it is that he, unlike other fellow travelers of theocracy, is willing to die for the cause--at least in the metaphoric sense of destroying his career and courting imprisonment by any number of international judiciaries, but very probably in the literal sense as well (he and his sorry entourage were nearly stoned in Palestine by Fatah supporters). His ideology is fundamentally rooted to his character. He's the suicide bomber of Western politics.

When Geert Wilders was turned away from Britain, a country that for centuries prided itself on its willingness to accommodate eccentrics and oddballs suddenly went wobbly -- all at the behest of insecure Islamists threatening to make the Dutchman's arrival a hazard to public safety. That was a scandal, as all forms of censorship are. But Galloway hasn't just spoken out in favor of Hamas -- he's given money and resources to Hamas. I quote from an article in Agency France Presse:

"We are giving you now 100 vehicles and all of their contents, and we make no apology for what I am about to say. We are giving them to the elected government of Palestine," Galloway said at a press conference in Gaza City.

Galloway said he personally would be donating three cars and 25,000 pounds to Hamas prime minister Ismail Haniya as he dared the West to try to prosecute him for aiding what it considers a terror group.

By any definition of international law, that makes him an accomplice of terrorism, unfit for sojourns to North America, and certainly unfit for parliament back home.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:12 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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A new report by the Israeli liberal newspaper Ha'aretz alleges that the IDF used brutal tactics of warfare in Gaza:

The testimonies include a description by an infantry squad leader of an incident where an IDF sharpshooter mistakenly shot a Palestinian mother and her two children. "There was a house with a family inside .... We put them in a room. Later we left the house and another platoon entered it, and a few days after that there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sniper position on the roof," the soldier said.

"The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn't understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was okay, and he should hold his fire and he ... he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders."

According to the squad leader: "The sharpshooter saw a woman and children approaching him, closer than the lines he was told no one should pass. He shot them straight away. In any case, what happened is that in the end he killed them.

"I don't think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to ... I don't know how to describe it .... The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way," he said.

For reflexive antagonists of Israel, this will only confirm their worst suspicions--or should I say their catechism?--about a colonialist state that has forfeited the good will the United States still accords it. For reflexive defenders of Israel, this can only lead to grim rationalizations: "Even if it is true, the soldier was just doing his duty, and these so-called 'crimes' pale in comparison to what Hamas does to its own people."

Even though these admissions have yet to be verified by independent inquiry, the responsible first response to them is one of demoralization. It is impossible not to think with the blood when you think about Israel, and by that I don't mean you need to be Jewish. Everyone has a stake in this small country now -- Jews, philo-Semites, anti-Semites -- whether they are motivated by a legitimate concern for the sanctity and perpetuity of the Middle East's only liberal democracy, an equally legitimate queasiness over its human rights abuses, or a wicked desire to see it wiped off the map.

These horrifying revelations come at a time in which Israel finds itself more isolated than ever and sympathetic advisors talk of "improving its image" in the eyes of the world. I'm not sure it'll ever be able to improve its image, even if tomorrow every settlement in the West Bank were dismantled and every sanction against the messianic fascist regime in Gaza were ended. A nation's PR is only as good as its "facts on the ground." Surely it doesn't help that Israel's outward face to the world now takes the form of the racist crackpot Avigdor Lieberman.

Jeffrey Goldberg does more worrying than any one writer should, and with respect to the Ha'aretz expose, he has a very sensible and depressing take:

Public relations isn't a morally relevant category, in any case: The crucial question is, how should a civilized country behave when confronting barbarism? With barbarism? Or with respect for innocent life? Pardon me for saying so, but the Jewish people didn't struggle for national equality, justice and freedom so that some of its sons could behave like Cossacks. Please don't get me wrong: I'm not equating the morality of the IDF to that of Hamas. The goal of Hamas is to murder innocent people; the goal of the IDF is to avoid murdering innocent people. But when the IDF fails to achieve its goal, and ends up inflicting needless destruction and suffering, it sullies not only its own name, but the name of the Jewish state. It risks making a just cause -- Jewish nationhood -- seem unjust, and it ultimately endangers what it is supposed to protect.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

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It couldn't have been easy for Tucker Carlson to pen his Daily Beast takedown of Jon Stewart, the man who in 2004 famously called him a "dick" on CNN's partisan sparring series Crossfire, which the network subsequently pulled from the airwaves. Nothing will silence a valid criticism faster than the charge of sour grapes. Fortunately, Carlson's seem to have fermented into a choice vintage. He's exactly right in saying that there was no logic to Stewart's much-bruited on-air inquisition and absement of Jim Cramer, the Crazy Eddie of market capitalism:

Stewart summed up the significance of what Cramer had said on the tape: "You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG, and all this derivative-market stuff," he said sternly.

Except that you can't draw any such line. In the video, Cramer hadn't mentioned derivates or securitized loans or credit-default swaps, or any of the other exotic financial instruments that caused the fall of AIG and the current recession. There's no evidence that Jim Cramer had anything to do with any of that, and Stewart didn't offer any.

It is at this point in the cross-examination, ladies and gentlemen, that the defendant usually claims he's just a comedian. Evidence? Who needs evidence when you're doing shtick? Nothing to see here, folks, I'm just a silly-faced, ingenuous peddler of "fake news." Yet with a bovine studio audience selected to clap and laugh at everything he says, Stewart rather effortlessly transforms into a finger-wagging moralist who glories in the real media's celebration of him as the Edward R. Murrow of the No-Spin Zone. Crossfire wasn't any good because it was two shouting heads "hurting America." Well, what happens to America when it gets its insights from a jestering commissar who picks fights even the other side is intent on letting him win?

Also, the comedy stinks. There, I said it, and I suspect others feel the same way. Stewart's best line was uttered ages ago, and was about -- what else? -- himself; more specifically about why he changed his last name from Leibowitz. "Too Hollywood." Not bad. But as far as mordant satire is concerned, he thinks tongue-in-cheek demagoguery will do the job just fine. (Was it mere coincidence that Carlson's piece ran the same day as Michael Kazin's potted history of American populism?) Lenny Bruce was a genius because he took chances and risked alienating crowds predisposed to like him--all for the sake of intellectual and moral honesty. Stewart's professed hero, Eugene Debs, once disclaimed his role as a shepherd of politics, arguing that a flock that could be led into the promised land of socialism by one man could just as easily be led out of it by same. Stewart plays to the cheap seats, never examines the stupidity and cant of his own side, and earns the reverence of every catchpenny pundit who thinks he's radically onto something.... So much for the culture of invigilation and free-thinking he says he most wants to uphold.

Also, where is Jon Stewart to heavy-handedly scold Jon Stewart about his not being the speaker of truthiness to power he'd have us believe he is?

In August 2004, a week before the Republican convention, Stewart got an interview with then-candidate John Kerry. At the time, reporters covering Kerry couldn't get closer than the rope line, so the interview qualified as a booking coup.

Stewart squandered it embarrassingly. His first question (after, "How are you holding up?") was: "Is it a difficult thing not to take it personally" when your opponents are mean?

"You know what it is, Jon?" Kerry replied. "It's disappointing."

Four years later, Stewart had become, if anything, even softer. Over the course of a reverential eight-and-a-half minute interview with Barack Obama six days before the election, Stewart failed to ask a single substantive question, much less venture into policy (though, as with Kerry, he did open with, "How are you holding up?"). Instead, like the cable-news morons that he often criticizes, Stewart stuck strictly to the horserace, at one point even resorting to a sports metaphor.

And he sucked up, hard. "So much of this has been about fear of you," Stewart empathized. "Has any of this fear stuff stuck with the electorate?"

Facing puffballs like this, Obama coasted through with snippets from his stump speech. The result wasn't simply uninformative, it was boring. Obama didn't say a single interesting thing, and Stewart wasn't funny.

If you didn't actually see the show, you wouldn't know any of this, since there is a virtual ban on critical stories about Jon Stewart in the press. Nobody in memory has received a longer free ride. (CNBC stands in such awe of Stewart, the network hasn't even tried to defend itself, even against his claim that its programming might be criminal.)

UPDATE: The universe has a better sense of humor. Not a few hours after this post went up, I discovered the following act of self-criticism on the part of Stewart, in which he castigated the Obama administration for cutting spending costs on VA insurance. Nevertheless, the Navy seals joke was a dud.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:32 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

New @ TNC:

Not long ago -- round about the time of Deconstructing Harry, say -- it was banal to point out that Woody Allen's best years were far behind him. Blowjobs and couchtrips had served Philip Roth slightly better than they had his cinematic doppelganger, and it showed. Then along came a kitchen sink drama of English arrivisme and Dostoyevskian conscience-wrangling called Match Point, and suddenly everything old was new again. The Woodman was back. He'd found a new muse in the vapid but sultry Scarlett Johansson and a new city for his autumnal auterism--London. Up to a point, Lord Copper. For Match Point was followed by a trifling ghost story and complete waste of Ian McShane called Scoop, which was then succeeded by the instantly capsized fraternal crime thriller Cassandra's Dream. If you don't quite recall those two non-starters then perhaps it's because you weren't meant to. Allen aficianados would have you believe that he and Soon Yi chartered a nonstop RyanAir flight from Heathrow to Aeropuerto de Barcelona, discovered Penelope Cruz -- a dark, plate-throwing, grade-A meshugana temptress of the non-Semitic variety -- and alighted upon another overseas locale worth mining for inspiration. James Wolcott disagrees:

Put this movie [Vicky Cristina Barcelona] up against Whit Stillman's Barcelona, and it comes in a lame, distant second, Stillman's bustling scenario and sparky dialogue making Allen's script look like Neil Simon filing from the retirement home. The imaginative depths of Allen's characterization is signaled by Rebecca Hall's Vicky being the sensible one because she's the brunette; Scarlett Johansson's bad-dye-bob blondeness presumably explains her susceptibilities, though it doesn't explain her inert performance. Penelope Cruz received an Academy Award for her performance here, and I hope she treasures her Oscar because it was an act of generosity on the voters' part. Yes, she's the best thing in VCB, bristling, tempestuous, and alive (with raccoon eyes and a sharp little bite), but being the best thing in this movie is no major feat, requiring no great plunging depths of expression and emotion; she and Javier Bardem's sexy-sleepy seducer are both cultural cliches whose smoldering passions and flare-ups are out of a Latin lovers playbook.

If we only heard from Stillman once every five years (instead of never again), his would be cheques worth cashing against Allen's deadbeat annual installments. Wolcott sifts through some of the DOA dialogue of VCP, which anagram sounds like something you'd pick up in a balmy port of call, and invites you to stay home this season:

"The next day Maria Elena went out photographing with Cristina. She had a superb eye and knew a lot about the art of photography and taught Cristina much about the aesthetics and subtleties of picture-taking," "Later, they bought candy and cakes at a charming sweet shop, which were homemade and delicious," "He took her to lunch with his friends, who were poets and artists and musicians. Cristina held her own quite well."

Compare to Fred and Ted Boynton scamming Catalan trade fair girls at the tail-end of the Cold War:

Ted: Spanish girls tend to be really promiscuous.
Fred: You're such a prig.
Ted: No, I wasn't using "promiscuous" pejoratively. It's just a fact. They have completely different attitudes toward sex.
Fred: Well, I wasn't using "prig" pejoratively.

Or doing Eric Auerbach proud in what has to be my favorite exchange in Barcelona:

Fred: Maybe you can clarify something for me. Since I've been, you know, waiting for the fleet to show up, I've read a lot, and...
Ted: Really?
Fred: And one of the things that keeps popping up is this about "subtext." Plays, novels, songs - they all have a "subtext," which I take to mean a hidden message or import of some kind. So subtext we know. But what do you call the message or meaning that's right there on the surface, completely open and obvious? They never talk about that. What do you call what's above the subtext?
Ted: The text.
Fred: OK, that's right, but they never talk about that.

I once had the pleasure of suggesting to Jonathan Yardley that the second and third films in Stillman's "Doomed. Bourgeois. In Love" trilogy were worth bothering about. So devoted a critic was he to Metropolitan that he feared witnessing the filmmaker's lapse into mediocrity with the real and scripted progression of time. That never happened, of course, but it has been eleven years since The Last Days of Disco came out, and another middle-class boom has gone bust with plenty of downwardly mobile casualties to wax Fitzgeraldian about.

Isn't it time to return to the camera, Whit?

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FYI: The whole Atash saga is now available as a single URL at New Majority. If you're so inclined to link or send around the piece, please use that address.

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New @ TNC:

Ross Douthat, the frighteningly young conservative commentator, is headed to the New York Times to occupy the opinion perch recently vacated, to near-universal acclaim, by Bill Kristol. Douthat is largely a creature of the blogosphere (he's been posting his up-to-the-millisecond thoughts on politics and culture at the Atlantic for the last few years), and so it was expected that the blogosphere would react most animatedly to his appointment. But if you read only one blog post telling you to read only one blog post on Douthat, then it is this one telling you to read George Packer:

Douthat was a top contender on my own cheat sheet, and this excellent choice shows that the Times has begun to see its conservative columnist as something more than a quota hire. I'd still have preferred David Frum, who has the same intellectual independence as Douthat, but who bases it on a deeper foundation in history and politics, and who is a better writer. If Douthat has a weakness, it's the same one that afflicts many brilliant young political writers of every variety: he's a creature of a rather insular hothouse world (in his case, Harvard and the Atlantic). As with many of his liberal counterparts, you have the sense that the parameters of his political thinking consist of his colleagues and opponents in the blogosphere--that he rarely if ever talks to anyone who isn't fluent in the language made up of phrases like "domestic policy transformationist" and "the smart center-left."

David Brooks has a joke that runs something like this: What distinguishes the neoconservative memoir? It must always contains a line, "When Epstein put down that review of Slotnik's biography of Goldfarb, I knew that New York would never be the same." Compare to the typical Douthat intervention, which begins with a reference to Matt Yglesias's rebuttal of Reihan Salam's critique of Andrew Sullivan's commentary on waterboarded Beagles with sleep apnea. Hothouse is one way to describe such insularity.

My own reservations about Douthat -- and I agree with Packer that Frum would have been the wiser choice -- are as follows. He outlined one of the smartest strategies for reviving modern conservatism, making it more relevant and attractive to wider swaths of voting Americans, and yet his own politics seems an obstacle to that noble objective. Douthat is very deeply socially conservative, and his most passionate beliefs pertain to abortion, stem cell research, the Catholic Church and the miraculous genius of M. Night Shyamalan films. Whether or not he chooses to emphasize these subjects -- sorry, "memes" -- in his new position is itself a matter of strategy; namely, of appearing gemutlich to Upper West Side liberals in an age of liberal dominance. Nevertheless, the GOP will have to adopt more libertarian attitudes toward matters that a majority of the country has clearly recognized as no business of politicians, or at least not preventive politicians. This is a reality to which Frum is keenly attuned, as evidenced by his recent and worthwhile crusade against the anti-intellectual and egomaniacal vulgarian Rush Limbaugh.

The right is currently at war with itself. It will take a combative, committed personality to determine which side ultimately emerges as the electable standard-bearer for the next generation. Douthat's charms as a pundit are his politesse and his almost English-style reluctance to go looking for fights, two attributes William F. Buckley would have recognized at once as the stuff of the best damned books editor National Review never had.

Read more...

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New @ NewMajority:

Atash told me that throughout his tenure at Ariana, he'd been tipped off by sympathetic parties as to how unpopular he was within the government. In 2006, a one-inch-thick report was brought to him by a man with ties to the Afghan secret police, containing biographical information and details of Atash's alleged activities since returning to Afghanistan that had been blacked out--a sign that this material hadn't just been gathering passively, but that it'd been reviewed and vetted. Among the baseless charges leveled against him were "misappropriating funds" and "womanizing." Atash at one point even went to the home of a friend of a friend, where he spoke with the former Communist era security official, someone who had impressive contacts in Kabul and knew the price for allowing a secret police dossier like this to grow much thicker. He suggested Atash rebut the charges using the same covert means; i.e., starting smear campaigns against his accusers and exploiting the very conduits of state power against which he'd declared himself an enemy. Ariana, in fact, had its own security apparatus, which might have made a powerful counterweight. But Atash demurred, saying this particular recourse was "medicine you cannot take."

Read more...

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Next Thursday, I'll be moderating a post-film discussion at the 92nd Street Y on celebrated director Slava Tsukerman's new film Perestroika. It's about a Jewish-Russian astrophysicist who returns to Moscow in 1992 to a country both familiar and otherwordly. It stars Sam Robards, F. Murray Abraham, Jicky Schnee and Ally Sheedy. The discussion will be with Abraham, Sheedy and Schnee.

Go here for tickets to the Perestroika world premiere and discussion:

It's 1992--the time of Perestroika (restructuring) in Russia. An invitation to speak at an International Congress brings astrophysicist Sasha Greenberg back to his native Moscow for the first time after 17 years of life in the U.S., to face the new Russian capitalism and old Russian anti-Semitism and to confront numerous colleagues and unanswered personal questions. Contemplating his past, Sasha undergoes his own personal "perestroika."

Needless to say, refuseniks especially welcome.

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The second installment on my piece about the former head of Ariana airlines is now up at NewMajority.com (after the third installment is published - tomorrow, I think - the editors will aggregate the whole thing into one article):

One would think that because a large part of Atash's mandate was managing a successful hajj operation, he'd be accorded every necessity and favor at President Karzai's disposal. Yet, in preparations for the 2005-2006 pilgrimage (hajjis typically leave in November, and return in February of the following calendar year), Atash ran afoul of Karzai, who wanted to have things both ways--reform without initiative, and reward without investment. For one thing, global gas prices had nearly doubled between May 2005 and May 2006, and Ariana found itself paying $1,000 per ton of jet fuel. The cost of simply powering the aircraft was complicated by another source of corruption: the American-owned fuel company Tryco, which held a monopoly on providing Ariana's supply. Atash says a representative from Tryco one day walked into his office and tried to bribe him into maintaining that monopoly. When Atash refused, the Tryco employee threatened him: "You think you know people. Now you will see who I know."

In the event, no headway was made on reducing fuel prices for the 2005-2006 hajj season, and so in order for the airline to stay solvent, Atash calculated, it would be forced to charge each passenger traveling to Jeffah $1,050 for a round-trip ticket. He duly informed Karzai in the presence of Qasimi, but the Afghan president was resolute. He ordered the price of tickets reduced to $850, claiming he didn't care about revenue losses--he just wanted a good hajj operation.

Read more...

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Having written for Slate on a semi-regular basis, I know that the search for that never-before-uttered, who'd-have-thunk-it take on a pervasive subject can often be debilitating. (If you want to understand how counterintuition becomes a fetish at the expense of truth, see Alan Bennett's play "The History Boys;" the youngish schoolteacher hired to get everyone into Oxbridge colleges tells them to sex up their tried and ho-hum papers by arguing something original--along the lines of "Stalin was a sweetie.")

A fine case of how a noble mind can be brought low by a magazine's mission statement is Fred Kaplan's essay on the Freeman affair. Although in this case I'm afraid radical originality--he deserved to be sacked, but not for the reasons you think!--competes with semi-literacy. Kaplan writes:

For the most part, [Freeman's] defenders were right. For instance, the critics claimed that Freeman once said that Chinese officials had acted with restraint at Tiananmen Square and that they should have plowed down the dissidents more quickly--when, in fact, he said that they were more restrained and slower to act than Mao Zedong would have been.

You can read the full extract on Freeman's comments on Tiananmen Square simply by scrolling down to my earlier post. Or you can alight on this particularly editorialized sentence, the semantic value of which seems to have escaped Slate's war-and-politics correspondent:

I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans' "Bonus Army" or a "student uprising" on behalf of "the goddess of democracy" should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy.

Freeman elsewhere in his missive refers to the "optic" of popular Chinese opinion on the massacre -- which optic he finds "very plausible" -- but that "I do not believe" is rather hard to mistake or take out of context. He does believe that the government ought to have acted more swiftly to "nip the demonstrations in the bud." And he concludes:

I thus share the hope of the majority in China that no Chinese government will repeat the mistakes of Zhao Ziyang's dilatory tactics of appeasement in dealing with domestic protesters in China.

However, this glaring misread is not even the most astonishing aspect of Kaplan's piece. That comes in the final paragraph in which he claims that the whole drive to unhorse from the NIC chairmanship a gloomy and paranoid realist, whom even James Baker considers compromised by "clientitis," was wrongheaded from a "strategic" point of view:

[T]his is where Freeman's foes misplayed their hand. Had they let Freeman step into the job, they could have used him as the whipping boy for all foreign-policy measures they don't like--especially those involving the Middle East and China--and it might have been easier for them to rally opposition. But now it will be indisputably clear that the president is the one making policy. They're left with Barack Obama as their target--and one thing that's clear, so far, is that those who sling mud at Obama wind up hitting themselves.

So: We should have let Freeman alone because then we could have cynically blamed Obama's screw-ups on him despite the fact that, as Kaplan notes earlier, Freeman wasn't going to be in a position to make policy at all. Avoiding moral and intellectual dishonesty is a strategic blunder for neoconcservatives concerned with human rights.

I should now like to write an essay entitled, "What the Left Learned from Karl Rove."

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New @ New Majority (Note: this is part one in a three-part series. Parts two and three will be posted tomorrow):

A major troop surge is currently underway in Afghanistan, where in the past year more American soldiers were killed than in any previous year since the war began. President Obama has called the country "the central focus, the central front, on our battle against terrorism," citing the need for the Afghan government to do more to combat resurgent al Qaeda and Taliban forces. But if the first internationally led endeavor in post-9/11 nation-building fails it won't be solely because of a battlefield defeat. The warped nature of the Afghan political system will be as much to blame. Many honest liberals and reformists, culled from the ranks of an impressive Afghan diaspora, have tried to rebuild a country ravaged by a decade of Islamist totalitarian rule only to discover that, while surface appearances may indeed be more hygienic, "official" corruption and criminality persist at levels intolerable for the future viability of a post-totalitarian regime. The sad case of Dr. Mohammed Atash, the former president of Ariana, Afghanistan's largest commercial airline, should be seen as a cautionary tale for what the U.S. and Europe may face in short order: namely, a failed state built on the ruins of the Taliban and sustained by cynical domestic interests.

Like many gifted students from the Middle East in the late 1960's, Atash received a cosmopolitan education, first earning a B.S. in chemistry from the American University in Beirut, for decades the training ground for future Muslim luminaries--in Atash's year, the school graduated the U.S. ambassador to both postwar Afghanistan and postwar Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad, Voice of America journalist Rauf Mehrpour, former Chancellor of Kabul University and Minister of Finance Dr. Ashraf Ghani, as well as a host of other notable Afghans. And like Khalilzad, Atash continued his graduate studies in the U.S., attaining a Ph.D. in Educational Research, Statistics, and Measurement from Florida State University, which enabled him to act as the Head of Chemistry and Research Departments in Afghanistan's Ministry of Education Science Center between 1970 and 1977. Having completed that stint, Atash returned to the U.S. and worked as a researcher and professor of applied statistics; he also founded a chain of automotive lube shops; his own consulting firm, PARSA; and the non-profit Nooristan Foundation, which has been dedicated to rebuilding schools in the rural districts of Afghanistan and in 2003 received a $100,000 grant from America's Fund for Afghan Children, established by President Bush. In 1999, Atash was invited to participate in the Rome Group of the Loya Jirga, the government-in-exile that sought a peaceful form of regime change during the pre-9/11 reign of the Taliban.

Read more...

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New @ TNC (go there for links):

The controversy that has engulfed that now all-but-scuttled appointment of Charles Freeman to the post of National Intelligence Council leader is, I think, a bellwether moment for what today passes for "progressive" opinion. The fashionable charge, leveled by many leftish commentators (mainly in cyberspace), that group of hawkish Jewish pundits have got Israel on the brain and will sacrifice every other question of U.S. foreign policy to this monomaniacal subject appears now to be an acute form of projection. When it was disclosed, for instance, that Freeman, president to the Middle East Policy Council and a former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was the recipient of $1 million of Saudi largesse, and has been a rather outspoken apologist for the kingdom - he referred at one point to its King Abdullah as "Abdullah the Great"- the expected liberal response to this would have been a raised eyebrow. Why would the Obama administration, foe of torture and the erasures of civil liberties at home, be amenable to an analyst who has clearly not done much analysis abroad?

Saudi Arabia is founded on Wahhabist Islamic doctrine designed as a means of social control. Its media is state-run, its women are forced to take the veil, Jews from other countries are forbidden entry, and its homosexuals are executed in the capital in a place colloquially known as "Chop-Chop Square" (whose name tells you enough about the means of execution). The Saudi monarchy, despite its declared antipathy to Islamic fundamentalism, underwrites particularly toxic and anti-Semitic editions of the Koran, many of which find their way into American prisons and international madrasas that graduate Islamic terrorists.

As it happens, Freeman himself has played a part in publishing propaganda about Islam and the Middle East. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Middle East Policy Council helped put out an "Arab World Studies Notebook" for use in U.S. schools:

"In the version examined [in 2005] by JTA staff, the "Notebook" described Jerusalem as unequivocally "Arab," deriding Jewish residence in the city as "settlement"; cast the "question of Jewish lobbying" against "the whole question of defining American interests and concerns"; and suggested that the Koran "synthesizes and perfects earlier revelations."

Leave aside the ethnographical and political dubiousness of that paragraph (Jerusalem has never been wholly "Arab," even when it was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, and a Jewish lobby "defining" American interests is more categorical a judgment, you'll agree, than its unduly influencing American interests). If one were to assess Freeman's viability for the NIC chairmanship only from the standpoint of national security, how would one look on his endorsement of the very sort of religious chauvinism ("perfects earlier revelations") that our soft and hard power apparatuses are now marshaled to combat? The equivalent would be hiring a Sovietologist during the Cold War who consented to the belief that Kapital was the final word on all matters pertaining to political economy.

Yet here is how M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum reacted to news of Freeman's Saudi affinity on Talking Points Memo:

So what if Freeman is close to the Saudis. Why should that disqualify him for the intelligence post? Unless he has done something unethical or illegal, these smears are more evidence (if any more is needed) that being deemed overly critical of the occupation is today's equivalent of being called a Communist in 1953. It's a career killer, used to ensure that policymakers adhere to the neocon line."

The "occupation" here refers to the one maintained by Israel over Palestine, and by "overly critical" Rosenberg means Freeman applauds the Mearsheimer-Walt thesis that the U.S. alliance with the Jewish state is undeviating and self-defeating and only driven by an obsessive lobby made up of Jewish and Christian Zionists. Mearsheimer and Walt's careers have never been better since they published their notorious essay, which the Middle East Policy Council also ran in an unexpurgated version. Freeman found the authors "brave," and the fact that their scholarship was widely discredited across the political spectrum--including within the "realist" establishment from which M-W claim discipleship--impinges not at all on their courage, of course. Freeman today thinks that because Israel is the bête noir of the Arab world, supporting it means "universalizing anti-Americanism" and incurring more terrorist attacks against the U.S., but this is a belief he did not always hold. In 1998, he was of the opinion that

Mr. bin Laden's principal point, in pursuing this campaign of violence against the United States, has nothing to do with Israel. It has to do with the American military presence in Saudi Arabia, in connection with the Iran-Iraq issue. No doubt the question of American relations with Israel adds to the emotional heat of his opposition and adds to his appeal in the region. But this is not his main point.

Bin Laden would, by this assessment, have a serious grievance with enthusiasts for the Saudi regime, making Freeman and his ilk part of the problem, no?

Now, it would be easy to file Rosenberg's emission as a one-off were it not so characteristic of a broader leftish response to Freeman's appointment. The Center for American Progress blogger Matthew Yglesias also welcomed the addition of this lifelong Republican, classifying circulated concerns about Freeman's fitness for the NIC chair as a "war" initiated by those who suffering from a blindingly pro-Israel bias. Citing the Jewish sources for the contra position (these include Marty Peretz and Jonathan Chait, both of the New Republic, Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, and Michael Goldfarb of the Weekly Standard), Yglesias wrote: "I'm not sure whether or not the Obama administration will ultimately stand behind Freeman. I hope they will. But whether or not they do, I think it's very clear that the lesson here is that if you're a veteran policy hand who hopes to return to government one day and you believe something that you think AIPAC wouldn't approve of, that the smart thing to do is to keep those views to yourself."

AIPAC didn't approve of Hillary Clinton's public smooch of Suha Arafat in 1999, and it doesn't much approve of her proposed aid package to Gaza now. But there she still is, a high-octane secretary of state. As for the official AIPAC comment on Freeman, as of this writing, it consists of no comment at all. (Steve Rosen, a former AIPAC official who was charged with spying on behalf of Israel, and another former anonymous AIPAC member did speak out against Freeman. If their being voluble only as ex-officials testifies to anything, then it is to the restraining nature of that organization.)

As for the appointee's own disclosed statements on Israel, these have not been so terribly shocking to anyone who follows the debate closely, an admission the JTA (one of Yglesias's bugbears of Zionist-orchestrated career destruction) explained in the article I quoted earlier. His late-formed belief that reducing terror attacks against Americans is moored to a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict -- a prescription sometimes derided as the "Jerusalem Syndrome" -- was the position maintained by James Baker and Lee Hamilton in their Iraq Study Group Report, a white paper commissioned by the Bush administration and thankfully unheeded over the ultimately successful "surge" strategy. That Freeman managed to retain the aura of bureaucratic respectability while holding such traditional realist positions attests more to the endurance of those positions than it does to his ability to pass himself off as something he is not. He believes himself to be a true Burkean conservative when in fact he is an "ideological fanatic," as Chait rightly put it in the Washington Post. Sometimes - just sometimes - ideological fanatics don't write for Commentary or the Weekly Standard.

Do Rosenberg and Yglesias really believe that Freeman's compromising "closeness" to Saudi Arabia is only a threat to Israel and that alarm over this proximity is the exclusive property of a dislodged cadre of policy intellectuals or an ethnic lobby? That would mean that Craig Unger's bestselling critique of the Bush family's warm relationship to the House of Saud and Michael Moore's darkly traced filiations between Riyadh and Halliburton have now metamorphosed into Mossad conspiracies. It would also mean that the amnesiac left is now intent on doing what no one would have thought it capable of eight years ago: retroactively rehabilitating the legacy of George H.W. Bush.

If Rosenberg means to say that a tendency towards a foreign government does not necessarily impair one's ability to think strategically on behalf of the United States then I wonder how dispassionately he would react if it were discovered that the NIC appointee regularly vacationed with Avigdor Lieberman, or was the head of a think tank that received a generous endowment from Benjamin Netanyahu.

Interesting, too, that those who have tossed around the "McCarthyite" label were quick to accuse Freeman's opponents of harboring dual loyalties or engaging in "smear" campaigns. This was Stephen Walt's tack in a Foreign Policy blog post wince-makingly titled "Have they not a shred of decency?," in which he cited, without a whiff of irony, Jeffrey Goldberg's former service in the IDF as a sign of his un-American motive for questioning the patriotism of one Charles Freeman. (Though in his sentimental comparison of Freeman to blacklisted Communists the supposedly hard-headed Walt does tacitly allow that Freeman's political views are troublesome.)

The Nation's Robert Dreyfuss, who also warned of a "coordinated" neoconservative assault, goes further in his defense of Freeman, stating that he "is a one-of-a-kind choice: with an impeccably establishment pedigree, Freeman has developed over the years a startling propensity to speak truth to power, which is precisely what one would want in a NIC chairman." I had not known until now that The Nation esteems establishment pedigrees and believes oil-rich sheiks are latterday wretched of the earth.

Leftists who praise Freeman on the single issue of Israel-Palestine, ostensibly out of a concern for justice and human rights, say it's beside the point to confront his endless euphemisms and evasions on other human rights abuses. An unintended consequence of this maneuver is that these same leftists appear even more obsessed with the Jewish state than do the "neocons" they purport to monitor. They also look especially stupid in this instance because they're effectively arguing that what goes on in the West Bank is more crucial to U.S. national security than what goes on in the one country which produced fifteen out of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers. How's that for realism?

As it happens, Saudi Arabia is not the only oligarchy toward which Freeman has a strong tropism. Here is what he had to say, on a 2006 listserv, about the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, and it's worth keeping Dreyfuss' "truth to power" encomium in mind:

I find the dominant view in China about this very plausible, i.e. that the truly unforgivable mistake of the Chinese authorities was the failure to intervene on a timely basis to nip the demonstrations in the bud, rather than -- as would have been both wise and efficacious -- to intervene with force when all other measures had failed to restore domestic tranquility to Beijing and other major urban centers in China. In this optic, the Politburo's response to the mob scene at "Tian'anmen" stands as a monument to overly cautious behavior on the part of the leadership, not as an example of rash action.

For myself, I side on this -- if not on numerous other issues -- with Gen. Douglas MacArthur. I do not believe it is acceptable for any country to allow the heart of its national capital to be occupied by dissidents intent on disrupting the normal functions of government, however appealing to foreigners their propaganda may be. Such folk, whether they represent a veterans' "Bonus Army" or a "student uprising" on behalf of "the goddess of democracy" should expect to be displaced with despatch from the ground they occupy. I cannot conceive of any American government behaving with the ill-conceived restraint that the Zhao Ziyang administration did in China, allowing students to occupy zones that are the equivalent of the Washington National Mall and Times Square, combined. while shutting down much of the Chinese government's normal operations. I thus share the hope of the majority in China that no Chinese government will repeat the mistakes of Zhao Ziyang's dilatory tactics of appeasement in dealing with domestic protesters in China.

This is why Human Rights Watch - evidently the latest bastion of neoconservative dogmatism, as Reason's left-libertarian editor Matt Welch mordantly observed - opposes Freeman's appointment. It's also why 87 Chinese dissidents have written President Obama protesting it without so much as a winking allusion to Oslo or road-maps.

As for Rosenberg and Yglesias, where they do concede Freeman's ugly c.v. it is more out of cynical (and partisan) resignation than real horror. Yglesias helpfully admits that defending Freeman on principle is not a cause he wishes to stake his bloggerly reputation on. (That might hurt his career more than rebuking AIPAC.) But this grudging concession was then followed by another change of subject: back to the motives that impelled the discovery of Freeman's China problem in the first place.

Andrew Sullivan, who himself has come around to legitimizing the Mearsheimer-Walt perspective on his popular blog, assembled a time-line of Freeman complaints, demonstrating to his own satisfaction that the chorus of criticism did indeed begin with Israel. Yet left out of Sullivan's recapitulation of events is Eli Lake's Washington Times coverage of Freeman's unexamined foreign ties, a series of articles that provided the journalistic cui bono for vetting further a man tasked with compiling the nation's annual intelligence estimates. (Lake's biggest scoop, in fact, was showing that the White House had not even been privy to Freeman's appointment; Director of Intelligence Dennis Blair undertook it autonomously, according to Blair's spokesman Wendy Morigi.)

So it must be out of willful credulity that Rosenberg emailed Jeffrey Goldberg:

None of the bloggers in question had any interest in Freeman's views on China until Steve Rosen (and some of his colleagues) decided to stir up the opposition to Freeman because of his alleged lack of fidelity to the occupation. In fact, I hear that the offending China quotes were only discovered in the context of a Google Nexis/Lexis search to find incriminating material to block Freeman's appointment because of his Middle East views. China was not even an afterthought.

The Weekly Standard first uncovered the Tiananmen Square excerpt (not using Google or Nexis/Lexis, by the way), and that magazine has in the past run editorials calling for continued U.S. trade restrictions on China on the basis of its appalling human rights record. To my knowledge, this policy has no discernible link to Jerusalem, although it does tend to chivvy die-hard Nixonians who believe morality has no place in foreign policy calculations.

In Evidence of Things Not Seen, James Baldwin tells of how the search for Chaney, Goodman and Schwirner proceeded in Mississippi. The police had to drag the lake in which the bodies of these murdered civil rights activists were rumored to have been dumped. The police didn't discover those bodies, but they did discover other corpses no one had been seeking. Does it not miss the point to focus on what motivated Freeman's detractors from doing due diligence on him when he is provably an inveterate excuse-maker for totalitarianism?

By way of a more immediate example: I have no idea where the Armenian lobby stands on Tiananmen Square or Saudi Arabia, but I nonetheless credit it with tipping me off to the Anti-Defamation League's denial of the Armenian genocide, an erasure of historical truth deriving from a callous geopolitical consideration--and one that benefited Israel, at least according to Abe Foxman. (James Fallows, who inveighed against a Congressional resolution acknowledging the first holocaust of the 20th century because he, too, didn't want to upset Turkey, deserves no credit for standing up for Freeman now. If this is what Fallows considers a robust "contrarianism," I prefer the tired blood of conventional wisdom, thanks.)

At minimum, this strange affair that has seen liberals and not a few conservatives joined in martyring a true reactionary has indicated the level of political maturity of a certain breed of thinker, who, still reeling from the last administration, wishes to make his sole conviction for the next one doing whatever makes the dreaded "neocons" angry. A vice of electoral victory is said to be hubris, but this reeks of insecurity. It also signals just how short-lived the left's hold on power may be.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

My Democratiya review-essay on Victor Serge and his newly translated novel Unforgiving Years is enjoying a bit of attention, thanks to a link at Arts & Letters Daily. For those interested:

In the course of reviewing the memoirs of N.N. Sukhanov--the man who famously called Stalin a 'gray blur'--Dwight Macdonald gave a serviceable description of the two types of radical witnesses to the Russian Revolution: 'Trotsky's is a bird's-eye view--a revolutionary eagle soaring on the wings of Marx and History--but Sukhanov gives us a series of close-ups, hopping about St. Petersburg like an earth-bound sparrow--curious, intimate, sharp-eyed.' If one were to genetically fuse these two avian observers into one that took flight slightly after the Bolshevik seizure of power, the result would be Victor Serge.

Macdonald knew quite well who Serge was; the New York Trotskyist and scabrous polemicist of Partisan Review was responsible, along with the surviving members of the anarchist POUM faction of the Spanish Civil War, for getting him out of Marseille in 1939, just as the Nazis were closing in and anti-Stalinist dissidents were escaping the charnel houses of Eurasia--or not escaping them, as was more often the case. Macdonald, much to his later chagrin, titled his own reflections on his youthful agitations and indiscretions Memoirs of a Revolutionist, an honorable if slightly wince-making tribute to Serge, who earned every syllable in his title, Memoirs of a Revolutionary. And after the dropping of both atomic bombs on Japan, it was Macdonald's faith in socialism that began to flag, while his hounded political and moral mentor took refuge in the 'pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.' Or, as Serge famously described his outlook in 'Constellation of Dead Brothers,' one of the many poems he composed in semi-captivity in Kazakhstan, 'The ardent voyage continues, / the course is set on hope.' (The second half of this couplet provided the title for Susan Weissman's 2001 biography of Serge.)

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Posted by Michael Weiss at 10:35 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)