New @ New Criterion:

If radicalism has had any positive value in the last century, it was to scandalize an otherwise complacent centre-left consensus on civil rights, one reason why I’ll always prefer the hardheaded wisdom of “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to the treacly pastiche of “I Have a Dream.”

Richard Just -- which rather sounds like the pen name someone in his position would adopt -- has authored an indignant essay in The New Republic against Barack Obama’s nonsensical views on gay marriage, which have objectively placed the Democratic president to the right of “Laura Bush, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and, according to a new CNN poll, 52 percent of the American people.” The relevant portion is this:

Obama argues that he is against gay marriage while also opposing efforts like Prop 8 that would ban it. He justifies this by saying that state constitutions should not be used to reduce rights. (His exact words: “I am not in favor of gay marriage, but when you’re playing around with constitutions, just to prohibit somebody who cares about another person, it just seems to me that that is not what America is about.”) Obama appears to be saying that it is fine to prohibit gay people from getting married, as long as the vehicle for doing so is not a constitution. Presumably, then, he supports the numerous states that have banned same-sex marriage through other means, without resorting to a constitutional amendment? If so, he might be the only person in the country to occupy this narrow, and frankly absurd, slice of intellectual terrain. Obama has also said he favors civil unions rather than gay marriage because the question of where and how to apply the label “marriage” is a religious one. This argument makes even less sense than his stance on state constitutions, since marriage, for better or for worse, is very much a government matter.

By now it’s common knowledge that Ken Mehlman, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and the former manager of George W. Bush’s presidential re-election campaign, prefers the company of men to women and believes in same-sex marriage legislation. Was it cynicism or prudence that impelled a high-ranking conservative not to make the most of this aspect of his “identity” when it might have made a political difference?   The Daily Show will no doubt have a sober and fair-minded discussion about this very topic in the days to come. But the DNC and those ever diminishing Obama torch-bearers are hardly in a position to score partisan points off of Mehlman’s disclosure.

In fact, the best arguments in favor of gay marriage have come from conservatives such as Jamie Kirchick and Jonathan Rauch, both of whom can’t quite fathom what’s leftist about gentrifying another ten percent of the population. (There’s also likely some forward-thinking Karl Rove in the younger crop of GOP operatives who sees expanding the party’s voter base by endorsing such a platform.)

Meanwhile, the best half-serious arguments against gay marriage come from cultural traditionalists, but not the kind you think. There are quite a few homosexuals, mostly older, who fear that by gaining admittance to mainstream institutions, they stand to forfeit the aura of camp subversiveness and bohemian affiliation that formerly clung to the "lifestyle." If you know anything about English poetry in the 1930's, you'll know exactly what this cultivated and storied aesthetic looks like: Larkin called it the oh-my-dear-ist school, best embodied by Auden and Spender. Yet this contingent is becoming a source for idiosyncratic nostalgia -- the sexual equivalent of Yiddish revivalism -- equally embarrassed by the term "partner" as it is by Bravo's reality television programming. A viable cultural movement it is not.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 7:32 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

New @ The Weekly Standard:

Iranian authorities first arrested Shiva Nazar Ahari in 2001, when she was seventeen. Her 'crime' was attending a candlelight vigil in Tehran that commemorated the victims of 9/11. Since then, she's taught Iranian homeless children and Afghan refugees' children. In 2006, after she became the spokeswoman for the Committee of Human Rights Reporters (CHRR), Ahari was kicked out of university, whereupon her troubles really began.

She was re-arrested in June 2009 and sent to Tehran's notorious Evin Prison, where she spent 33 days in solitary confinement. The cells are so small that a short person can't even stretch her arms or legs. One informed observer has described them to me as 'human coffins.' Despite being verbally threatened by Saeed Mortazavi, Tehran's prosecutor general, who told her she'd be murdered if she didn't stop working on human rights campaigns in Iran, Ahari persevered. She was released in September 2009 on $200,000 bail and promptly resumed her defense of political prisoners. A month later, she paid a visit to the gravesite of Sohrab Arabi, a nineteen year-old student who'd been arrested in June 2009 for protesting Iran's sham presidential "election" and was subsequently shot in the chest while in state custody.

In December of last year, Ahari was arrested yet again, along with two other activists, while en route to the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, a man considered to be the clerical inspiration behind much of the Green Revolution. Ahari went on hunger strike for two days, then fell ill and was taken to Evin's prison hospital.

According to the Revolutionary Court, which is due to try her case on September 4, she stands accused of "anti-regime propaganda by working with the CHRR website" and "acts contrary to national security through participation in gatherings on November 4, 2009 and December 7, 2009." These are the dates, respectively, of the anniversary of the U.S. embassy seizure, which is a sanctified Iranian holiday but last year became a ferment of democratic protest, and the Student Day demonstrations, which commemorate the murder of three Iranians students killed in 1953 by the Pahlavi government. Ahari maintains she was at home on both days.

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Posted by Michael Weiss at 10:47 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

New @ New Criterion:

So over-hyped is Jonathan Franzen's new novel that the British press, which devours its own enfants terribles and indulges an unseemly envy for their American counterparts, has repeatedly remarked on the over-hype. One editorial enticement peeping above the fold of yesterday's Guardian instructs that Freedom is bad for Barack Obama, whose advanced copy arrived just in time for the First Family's Martha's Vineyard holiday. So now it seems that Franzen has gone from being a mere literary liability to a political one.

Not having read Freedom, I’ve had to rely on the pornographically positive stateside reviews such as Sam Tanenhaus’ in the New York Times which labels it “a masterpiece of American fiction.” I’ll have to take Sam's word for it, but I must confess to a slight twinge of skepticism because he also thinks that Franzen’s previous attempt to explain the Way We Live Now, The Corrections, a book I have read, was “a masterpiece of American fiction.” Among the first-order merits bestowed on the present volume is the author’s hawk-eyed observatory powers despite his touted disdain for being a SIM card’s throw away from an Internet connection when he writes. Franzen knows, for instance, that college freshman are these days called “first years” and that suburban hausfraus’ all-purpose put-down is “weird.” Very nice, but what does he think of Snooki's new gorilla juicehead?

Now comes Marc Tracy at Tablet magazine (my old Hebraic haunt) with applause all around save for one minor quibble. It seems that the Great American Novelist doesn’t have much of an ear for Beltway rhetoric, at least the realistic sort that strives to exceed a Huffington Post comments thread. Featured in Freedom (the title is ironic, or “ironic,” depending on your point of view) is a resentful and brooding neoconservative intellectual who happens not to be a Gentile. The patriarch of a Virginian family coping with the aftermath of a very recent terrorist attack on U.S. soil, this dour Causabon of interventionism has got friends in high places and a comely daughter named Jenna (just like Bush!) and although the whole the whole lot of them are joined at a Thanksgiving repast, the bill of fare seems to be a mezze platter of platitudes:

Jonathan and Jenna’s father, at the far end of the table, was holding forth on foreign affairs at such commanding length that, little by little, the other conversations petered out. The turkey-like cords in his neck were more noticeable in the flesh than on TV, and it turned out to be the almost shrunken smallness of his skull that made his white, white smile so prominent. The fact that such a wizened person had sired the amazing Jenna seemed to Joey of a piece with his eminence. He spoke of the “new blood libel” that was circulating in the Arab world, the lie about there having been no Jews in the twin towers on 9/11, and of the need, in times of national emergency, to counter evil lies with benevolent half-truths. He spoke of Plato as if he’d personally received enlightenment at his Athenian feet. He referred to members of the president’s cabinet by their first names, explaining how ‘we’ had been ‘leaning on’ the president to exploit this unique historical moment to resolve an intractable geopolitical deadlock and radically expand the sphere of freedom. In normal times, he said, the great mass of American public opinion was isolationist and know-nothing, but the terrorist attacks had given “us” a golden opportunity, the first since the end of the Cold War, for ‘the philosopher’ (which philosopher, exactly, Joey wasn’t clear on or had missed an earlier reference to) to step in and unite the country behind the mission that his philosophy had revealed as right and necessary. “We have to learn to be comfortable with stretching some facts,” he said, with his smile, to an uncle who had mildly challenged him about Iraq’s nuclear capabilities. “Our modern media are very blurry shadows on the wall, and the philosopher has to be prepared to manipulate these shadows in the service of a greater truth.”

"White, white" teeth and a Turkey neck -- at Thanksgiving, no less. Well, this man must be wickedness defined if he’s explaining Straussian methods of crowd-control to a tableful of horny eighteen year-olds who’d like nothing better than to return to “normalcy,” perhaps by figuring out why they’ve all been given first names that begin with the letter “J.”

Now, I’ve spent a fair bit of time with many sinister neocons who fancy themselves disciples of a scholar known for his esoteric allusions and in-between-the-lines manner of exegesis. One thing they do not do, even in low company such as mine, is cite Plato’s Cave, a philosophical allegory that any “first year” would grasp. How shall I put this to a masterful American fictionist? It’s considered the “The Second Coming” of political cliches.

However, I do think Franzen has got a noble intention with the cardboard prose and plasticene characterization offered above. If this set-piece is indicative of the entire novel, he is clearly trying to atone for past sins of horn-rimmed hauteur. Gone are the taut little essays about an American middlebrow grown encephalitic with celebrity culture and a superficial knowledge of everything. Not for him anymore the smug litterateur who offers left-handed compliments to Oprah. Franzen’s gone mainstream now, deigning even to appear -- as the successor novelist to Stephen King -- on the cover of Time, a magazine that, as The Onion deliciously satirized it, has Gerberized its content sufficiently to be able to launch a new version of “aimed at adults.”

I think I like this new Jonathan Franzen.

Meanwhile, Bellow’s letters are due out in November.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

New @ New Criterion:

The sons and daughters of Eire are not generally known for their fondness of Jewish statehood. And yet the exceptions to this ignoble rule are distinguished and vocal enough to merit citation when they occur. Lord David Trimble, who won a Nobel Peace Prize that actually mattered, has written learnedly on the false analogy between the Troubles and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Conor Cruise O'Brien produced one of the best and most prescient histories of Zionism -- prescient in the sense that history, when done right, provides a useful guide to the present and future. His appetite for this strangely un-neglected subject was whetted, he claimed, whilst serving as an Irish delegate to the United Nations for many years. Because of an institutional caprice of seating diplomats in alphabetical order, the Cruiser found much to favor in the Israeli colleague seated to his right, especially when measured against the Iraqi one who was seated to his left -- that is, until the day this poor man was hanged.

I've long been a keen observer of Hibernian sympathies for Zionism because my own heritage is as much Dedalus as it is Bloom. And so now to this esteemed company we can add the name Cliona Campbell, a 19 year-old girl from Cork who was so taken with the Jewish people and their plight that she went to Israel to volunteer with an international corps of the IDF. She returned home, wrote about the experience for the Evening Echo. The unsought reverberations of this article constitute one of the blackest campaigns of national obloquy ever heaped upon a writer in Ireland. According to my friend Ben Cohen, "Grown men have walked to up to [Campbell] in the street and abused her. Browsing in a clothes store, the security guard recognized her and showered her with insults. Threats have been emailed to her." To say that this has been done in the name of Palestinian solidarity would be an insult to Palestinians.

You can dial up Campbell's original piece, which is more elegant than anything written against it, here.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:57 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

New @ New Criterion:

Religious architecture used to yield erudite discussions about function and form. Now it leads to discussions about property rights, the First Amendment, religious bigotry and the colloquial definition of “McCarthyism.” Much like Switzerland’s silly and point-missing ban on minarets, the proposed Cordoba House mosque has turned the specific cultural urgency of combating Islamism into a general cultural complaint about Islam.

This has led to two unintended consequences. The first bolsters one of the paranoid claims made by Islamists, which is that the United States is tirelessly working to demonize and undermine Islam rather than fight a war against its most barbaric exponents. The second automatically improves the profile of Cordoba House’s chief cleric, Feisal Abdul Rauf, who, judging by his dubious statements and deeds over the past decade, deserves no such courtesy. By couching the present debate in terms of “sensitivity,” “symbolism” and “offensiveness,” certain elements on the right have taken up the uncharacteristic mantle of political correctness and, in effect, given a free hand to a subject worthy of more discriminating scrutiny. All I want to do, Rauf has been able to say, with high backing, is build a house of worship in the one country that takes confessional pluralism for granted. What could be more American than that?

For my own part, I have no problem with a mosque being built near Ground Zero and if that’s all that was at stake, I could rest comfortably in my opposition to Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich and Abe Foxman. But I do have a few unresolved questions about this particular mosque; more pointedly, about the man behind it.

Leave aside for now Rauf’s tone-deaf statements on 60 Minutes on September 30, 2001 that American foreign policy was an “accessory” to 9/11 and that Osama bin Laden was “made in the USA.” Noam Chomsky with a prayer mat may not be an inviting prospect in the heartland, much less a major metropolis, but he is not necessarily an imminent danger. Let’s also ignore for the time being Rauf’s inability to state that Hamas is indeed a terrorist organization. If the good imam feels compelled to hedge his bets on what to term a genocidal, anti-Semitic gang of suicide bombers and rocketeers because he’s afraid of offending Muslims who see Hamas as something nobler, then this makes him no different from those pleading against Cordoba House on strictly emotional or populist grounds.

More troubling to me are two episodes in Rauf’s career that suggest, if not a practical alliance with Islamism, then at least a strong eagerness to earn the trust of Islamists, whether out of financial or face-saving motive. The first is Rauf’s participation in the Perdana Global Peace Organisation, which bills itself as a pacifist lobby group seeking to “criminalize war” but is really the brainchild of former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, a man whose greatest compliment to the Jewish people was to credit them with a methodology for world domination that he thought instructive for the forthcoming Islamic attempt at same. To get a sense of Perdana’s commitment to ending militarism, consider that it was responsible for convening a portion of the ‘Free Gaza’ flotilla, whose declared purpose was not to deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians but rather to break the Israeli naval blockade of the Hamas-controlled territory -- itself an act of war.

The second troubling spot on Rauf’s c.v. is his certification of Iran’s theocracy. Here he cannot excuse himself with an air of scholarly neutrality since in his own writing he takes the precepts of Khomeinism at face value and describes the clerical oligarchy of Iran as a legitimate form of government. Following Iran’s sham presidential “election” in June 2009, Rauf penned the following editorial, which anyone can dial up on Cordoba’s website:
 

After the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took the Shiite concept of the Rightly Guided Imam and created the idea of Vilayet-i-faqih, which means the rule of the jurisprudent. This institutionalizes the Islamic rule of law. The Council of Guardians serves to ensure these principles.

Before the election, the Iranian government allowed an unprecedented degree of political discourse so that the election would establish a legitimate ruler.

Now, on the streets of Teheran and undoubtedly in high political circles behind the scenes, Iranians are asking themselves, has this election confirmed the legitimacy of the ruler? President Obama has rightly said that his administration will not interfere with the internal affairs of Iran, unlike what happened in 1953. Now he has an opportunity to have a greater positive impact on Iranian-American relations.

He should say his administration respects many of the guiding principles of the 1979 revolution -- to establish a government that expresses the will of the people; a just government, based on the idea of Vilayet-i-faqih, that establishes the rule of law.

Vilayet-i-faqih in practice means that the people of Iran are possessions of the state. The Council of Guardians, Rauf neglects to mention, was responsible for vetting and approving the list of “acceptable” candidates for the wholly honorific role of president, a fact that rubbishes his boast of an “unprecedented degree of political discourse.” You can tell a lot about a government that rigs its own elections beforehand, and rigs them again once all the votes are in.

Rauf published this paean to the captive mind just as many hundreds of peaceful democratic activists were being clubbed and shot on the streets of Tehran. According to the Iranian “rule of law,” torture and rape are also permissible forms of punishment for people who exercise their right to be incensed at a pantomime of self-determination.

But how curious that Rauf, who believes that the U.S. Constitution is compatible with sharia law, should be encouraging the President of the United States to issue a statement “respecting” the guiding principles of an Islamist tyranny.

Is this really the best that moderate Islam can do?

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

New @ New Criterion:

Now here's a fascinating two-part series from the BBC on "useful idiots," a term mistakenly attributed to Lenin, who enjoyed the favor of many such examples of this species of semi-witting accomplices to tyranny. The documentary is hosted by John Sweeney and features a collection of insightful speakers, including Doris Lessing, whose voice reminds me of what the granny-tricked-out wolf in Little Red Riding Hood would sound like, but who, post-Nobel, is fiercely honest and self-critical about her pourparler with Josef Stalin: "I was taken around and shown things as a 'useful idiot'... that's what my role was. I can't understand why I was so gullible."

"I hate being taken round to be shown things," the waspish Kingsley Amis, himself an ex-Communist but one who never toured the Soviet Union, once wrote to Philip Larkin in a slightly different context, giving what I think is a covert virtue of notorious English incuriosity: a reluctance to be persuaded by people with ulterior motives. The evidence of things unseen under totalitarianism is closer to the truth than guided tours of Potemkin villages and labour camps where the guards are dressed up as inmates.

Donald Rayfield, who wrote a not-bad book about Stalin's willing executioners, also makes a not-bad point about George Bernard Shaw, who especially liked being taken round to be shown things that didn't actually exist. About the author of Man and Superman, it cannot quite be said that the sinister politics found no expression in the art. Henry Higgins, Rayfield tells Sweeney, is a "bit of a Stalin," and what he tries to do to Eliza Doolittle is nothing short of what Soviet Communism attempted to do to the proletariat. Many readers of Pygmalion may only have come away wishing that the guttersnipe flower merchant had been shot or sent to Siberia, but such are the softeners of Fabian parlor fiction.... Though it must also be claimed for Shaw, as against socialist realists, that he made no attempt to glorify the working-class even before it became a utopian work-in-progress. No indomitable, brawny builders and austere womenfolk here, comrades. One imagines that a wisp of classic English empiricism slipped out from beneath the bonnet of grim ideology.

Part one of the Sweeney documentary also includes this observation by Malcolm Muggeridge's biographer that when the one-time fellow traveler and aspiring emigre to the Soviet Union realized what a mistake he'd made and then tried to persuade his relatives, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, to do the same, the Webbs were resistant. Not, you see, because they hadn't realized that people were being disappeared or murdered in Russia but because disappearing and murdering people in England was what Beatrice most wanted to do herself.

The closet bully, the fetishist of strongman politics is an ongoing feature of faux radicalism on these shores, as evidenced by Tony Benn's sad Sinology:

Benn: "Mao's role in preventing China from being permanently occupied by the Americans was, I think, a significant role, and I think China's development strategy, of going to the countryside and building it up there, has played a significant role of building China up as a major power. So I think he would have to rank as a great figure in Chinese history."

Sweeney: "Mao was a mass murderer. Surely in the balance, if he's a great man, he's also a great monster."

Benn: "I have no doubt that there were aspects of Mao's life and record that I would deeply deplore. But..."

When agricultural outreach ranks higher in your admiration than mass murder does in your reprehension, it's safe to say you aren't all that bothered by the latter.

Benn's not alone. Seamus Milne, the current politics editor of The Guardian, extols the jihadist "resistance" of Iraq and Afghanistan. Yvonne Ridley, a British journalist who converted to Islam after being kidnapped and released by the Taliban, presents on the Iranian state-controlled propaganda organ PressTV. George Galloway, who refused to be interviewed by Sweeney, pimps for Hamas as he has done for every Middle Eastern despot of the last quarter century. And Alistair Crooke, a former British spy under the Blair government who now runs a Beirut-based public relations firm for the Islamic Republic known as Conflicts Forum, explains his sympathies with the rocketeers and human shield-warriors of Gaza like this: "As for terrorism, I hate that word...People cannot tolerate the sight of babies being killed, and that triggers an emotional response."

Not so for those who have seen the future and declare it to already be upon us.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 9:11 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

New @ Standpoint:

Less than a week on, the brief but fatal skirmish that occurred along the Israel-Lebanon border on August 3 seems that rarest phenomenon of all Middle East disputes: an open-and-shut case. All but the least discriminating of partisans and conspiracists now know who did what to whom and when and how. Most surprising is that the United Nations, in the form of its 12,000-strong peacekeeping Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), is to thank for swiftly settling the most contentious questions of whether or not Israel had trespassed onto Lebanese territory: it hadn't. However, there remains the broader matter of how to interpret Lebanon's unprovoked attack on an Israeli maintenance team and its military escort; was premeditated or spontaneous? And if it was premeditated, does that hint at something darker on the horizon?

Here's what we now know with some measure of certainty: On July 29, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) informed the UNIFIL Liaison Officer that it would be performing routine maintenance work at the edge of its own territory, just north of the Misgav Am kibbutz in the upper Galilee. Coordinating such clean-up operations with UNIFIL is a regular occurrence for both Israel and Lebanon as they are bound by the terms of UN Resolution 1701, which formally ended the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah War. Israel said it had wanted to remove some shrubbery and a tree that were blocking the view of its security cameras. According to IDF Lt Col Avital Leibovich, who addressed a conference call with journalists and bloggers on Wednesday evening, this was exactly the kind of leafy coverage from which Hezbollah launched multiple kidnapping raids in 2006. The IDF further instructed UNIFIL that some of its own troops would be escorting an engineering crew for protection but that this escort, consisting of armored vehicles, tanks and flak-jacketed soldiers, would be positioned even further south of the 'technical fence', the barrier that physically divides Israel and Lebanon but that does not always intersect with the so-called Blue Line designating the internationally recognised boundary between the two countries. There would later be some confusion over an Associated Press photo that showed an IDF crane reaching over the fence; the caption suggested that Israel did in fact cross into Lebanese territory and violate Resolution 1701. But the crew's exact position, even north of the fence, was still about 200-300 meters south of the Blue Line, as has now been confirmed by UNIFIL. (The fence/Blue Line "gap" problem could have been easily substantiated earlier in the news cycle: When I interviewed UNIFIL deputy spokesman Andrea Tenenti on August 4, he told me that the peacekeepers have begun demarcating the real border with blue barrels to prevent any unintentional crossings.)

Read more...

Posted by Michael Weiss at 6:54 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)