Rushdie Threatened by Thugs, 21st Century Redux

That Fraud, Julian Assange

Image by espenmoe

 Jeff Bercovici in Forbes:

How foolish of me it was to question whether Wikileaks founder Julian Assange really had a deal to distribute his new talk show to hundreds of millions of viewers. It turns out he does: with Russia Today, the English-language news network launched by the Russian government to massage its international image.

That’s right: Assange, self-styled foe of government secrets and conspiracies of the powerful, is going to be a star on a TV network backed by the Kremlin. The same Kremlin that has done suspiciously little to investigate or prevent the killings and beatings of journalists that have plagued Russia for more than a decade. The same Kremlin accused of blatant fraud in December’s parliamentary elections. The same Kremlin whose control of the country’s broadcast media allowed it to suppress coverage of the massive protests mounted in response to that fraud. The same Kremlin whose embrace of corruption led to Russia being named “the world’s most corrupt major economy” by Transparency International in 2011.

Why am I completely unsurprised? Well, there's this, this, this, this, and this, for a start.

Kahneman: Thinking Fast and Slow

Who's Bowing to Foreign Leaders?

      Ever louder and more mainstream is the alarm over one of America's great parties becoming prostrate before Netanyahu.

Image: AP Photos

      Republicans love few lines more than their mockery of an American president "bowing to a Saudi king," a mistake that, granted, was likely made in some misguided deference to supposed royal protocol but was nevertheless close to meaningless. Now consider into what the GOP's own position on the Middle-East has mutated: complete deference in U.S. policy to the head of a foreign, right-wing coalition governing a small nation in the Middle East - a country which has historically been a strong ally, but one whose current leader has taken every opportunity to undermine and embarrass the President of the United States.
      Disagreement over foreign policy, it was once said, stopped at our borders. Not anymore.
      The RNC unanimously adopted a resolution seemingly aborting support for their own president's conception of a two-state solution.
      David Bromwich, in a long-form piece at the New York Review of Books, examines the candidates' positions regarding same:

...the most belligerent Republican on Israel and Iran has turned out to be Santorum: he asserted, in a recorded conversation with a voter on November 21, that “all the people that live in the West Bank are Israelis, they’re not Palestinians. There is no ‘Palestinian.’” A few days earlier, Santorum had said about the threat of Iran: “A country that is developing a weapon of mass destruction to use it to destroy another country must be stopped in a preemptive strike.” And on Meet the Press on January 1 he affirmed his view in different words: Iranian leaders must open their facilities to inspection and begin to dismantle their advanced equipment, or the US will attack. 

This statement comes at a moment of enormous tension—heightened by Israel’s warmest supporters in Congress. The Iran Threat Reductions Act, proposed by the Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida, passed in the House of Representatives on December 14 by a vote of 410–11. This crudely assertive and possibly unconstitutional bill would prohibit all contact between Iranian and American officials without fifteen days’ prior notice to Congress. Bill Clinton, in 1996, complained of the “scandalous electioneering” practiced by Benjamin Netanyahu from abroad. 

Fifteen years later, ever since his visit to Congress in May, Benjamin Netanyahu has been working to intimidate the president and pull from Republican candidates and from Congress at large professions of loyalty to his project of bombing Iran to reduce its possible nuclear capability. 

There has been a change, however, since 1996. Clinton’s anger was registered in private. But it was Thomas Friedman, the American opinion-maker most highly regarded in Israel, who wrote in a column of December 13 that Netanyahu’s standing ovation in Congress last May “was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” And five days later, there occurred a remarkable exchange on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN programGlobal Public Square. The subject was how the Republicans try to outbid each other in submissive postures of unconditional loyalty to Israel; the immediate pretext was Gingrich’s having said on December 9 to an interviewer for the Jewish Channel (a cable station) that the Palestinians are an “invented” people. Zakaria and his guests then passed on to the broader subject of avowals of love for Israel and unquestioning support for Likud policies: 

 Zakaria: Michele Bachmann trumps them all by saying, “I went to a kibbutz when I was 18 years old.”

David Remnick: A socialist experiment, I might remind her. A socialist experiment. You know, as a Jewish American I find it disgusting. And I know what he’s going after. He’s going after—he’s going after a small slice of Jewish Americans who donate to political funds—to campaigns and also to Christian Evangelicals. It’s—the signaling is obvious. What they’re doing is obvious. But what they’re describing in terms of the, say, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has no bearing on reality whatsoever. It’s ignorance combined with cynical politics and irrelevance. It’s really awful. It’s really awful.

Zakaria: Do you agree? 

Peggy Noonan: Yes, I do.

Zakaria: Gillian?

Gillian Tett [of the Financial Times]: I do. And I think that actually given the current moves in Iran at the moment and what’s happening elsewhere in the region, that kind of rhetoric is likely to become more and more relevant going forward.

Zakaria: And then the other place where I noticed that there is some traction is Iran. There’s this feeling, again, I think somewhat unrealistically that we’re going to be tougher on Iran. We’re going to be, so that Gingrich says he wouldn’t bomb Iran, but he would effect regime change. Good luck, you know?

This was a breakthrough. Remnick’s comment is especially notable because it gives up the euphemism “Jewish voters” and refers frankly to Jewish donors. It is millions of dollars and not just a few thousand votes that the pandering Republicans are trawling for. Meanwhile, Israel itself has witnessed a development germane to the Republican pledges in Iowa of implicit support for any action by Israel. The majority of Israel’s intelligence establishment has actively argued against or publicly spoken to oppose the adventurist policy of Netanyahu and his description of Iran as an “existential threat.” These last words have been discountenanced by the present director of Mossad, Tamir Pardo, and, more sternly, by the retired director Meir Dagan, as well as by the former head of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate, Amos Yadlin, the former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, Gabi Ashkenazi, and the former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin. Opposition within Israel apparently succeeded in thwarting an initiative by Netanyahu to attack Iran in 2010. It remains to be seen whether it can do so again. 

Probably none of the Republicans who clocked in at the Iowa debates to back aggressive US support of Israel against Iran was aware of this internal division—easily discoverable in recent stories in Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post. Such an uprising from the military and intelligence establishment itself, against an intended military action by an elected government, is exceedingly rare in the history of democracies. So we are at a strange crossroads. The right-wing coalition government of Israel is trying to secure support, with the help of an American party in an election year, for an act of war that it could not hope to accomplish unassisted; while an American opposition party complies with the demand of support by a foreign power, in an election year, to gain financial backing and popular leverage that it could not acquire unassisted.

A Universe from Nothing

30 Writers on God

Hold Everything

Image by Surat Lozowick

Cela, Vous Ne Pouvez Pas Dire.

French parliamentarians need to get a fucking grip and stop proposing bans on ideas that they find ugly. Agreed: burkas are contemptible. Armenian Genocide denialism? Also contemptible. But a fine for demonstrating one's own historical ignorance? Ridiculous.

Mustafa Ozer/AFP/Getty Images

By banning unsavory expression and speech, the French habitually put themselves in the terrible company of the censorious rightward thugs they fail to oppose. It's short-cut cowardice. From The Guardian:

Turkey has threatened to denounce France's colonial past at international meetings in retaliation for French plans to prosecute people who deny that the mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks was genocide. 

Turkey rejects the term genocide to describe the killings of Armenians more than 90 years ago. Historians estimate that up to 1.5 million Armenians were killed and experts say it was the first genocide of the 20th century. 

France considers the killings a genocide. The lower house of the French parliament is to debate a proposal that would punish anyone denying that the slaughter was genocide with one year in prison and a €45,000 (£37,700) fine.

Why do Erdogan's work for him?

The Immortal Rejoinders of Christopher Hitchens

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

I cared more about you than anyone I've never loved in person, and I'll miss you.

_00_

I'm Running for President, and I'll Do Whatever You Say.

Friedman on the prostrations of an American party unconditionally beholden to a government of seven million:

I have a simple motto when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I love both Israelis and Palestinians, but God save me from some of their American friends — those who want to love them to death, literally.

That thought came to mind last week when Newt Gingrich took the Republican competition to grovel for Jewish votes — by outloving Israel — to a new low by suggesting that the Palestinians are an “invented” people and not a real nation entitled to a state.

This was supposed to show that Newt loves Israel more than Mitt Romney, who only told the Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom that he would move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem because “I don’t seek to take actions independent of what our allies think is best, and if Israel’s leaders thought that a move of that nature would be helpful to their efforts, then that’s something I’ll be inclined to do. ... I don’t think America should play the role of the leader of the peace process. Instead, we should stand by our ally.”

That’s right. America’s role is to just applaud whatever Israel does, serve as its A.T.M. and shut up. We have no interests of our own. And this guy’s running for president?

As for Newt, well, let’s see: If the 2.5 million West Bank Palestinians are not a real people entitled to their own state, that must mean Israel is entitled to permanently occupy the West Bank and that must mean — as far as Newt is concerned — that Israel’s choices are: 1) to permanently deprive the West Bank Palestinians of Israeli citizenship and put Israel on the road to apartheid; 2) to evict the West Bank Palestinians through ethnic cleansing and put Israel on the road to the International Criminal Court in the Hague; or 3) to treat the Palestinians in the West Bank as citizens, just like Israeli Arabs, and lay the foundation for Israel to become a binational state. And this is called being “pro-Israel”?

The Stars in Your Teeth

Up Against a Wall

Jan-Paul Pelissier / ASSOCIATED PRESS

from the Washington Post:

The veto by British Prime Minister David Cameron, a Conservative euro-skeptic who cherishes the pound and looks askance at heavy-handed European regulations in British affairs, underscored his nation’s long unease with relinquishing national powers to the E.U. and left London isolated in a region now moving toward deeper integration without it. His move left Britain’s Guardian newspaper asking, “Will it be Splendid Isolation, or Miserable?”

At the same time, Cameron made life harder for a region desperately trying to unite behind a plan to quell a debt crisis that is threatening the global economy. Without Britain on board, the 26 other E.U. nations now face potentially complicated legal obstacles to meet one of the prime objectives of a new treaty: Giving fresh powers to E.U. institutions to slap automatic penalties on governments that recklessly spend and borrow.

Merkozy may be ticked-off, but I didn't really see a path for Cameron to have done anything but veto a proposal that relinquishes sovereignty to Brussels (read: Berlin) against the will of the majority of his citizens, in order to save a currency in which the U.K doesn't participate. Questions concerning sovereignty and greater integration are typically ones that should be decided democratically, no?

How to tell just how little at ease Merkel is feeling right now? Well, I haven't seen her do this in a while:

Rushdie and Manji @ 92 Street Y

Martin Amis

in The New Yorker:

When we say that we love a writer’s work, we are always stretching the truth: what we really mean is that we love about half of it. Sometimes rather more than half, sometimes rather less. The vast presence of Joyce relies pretty well entirely on “Ulysses,” with a little help from “Dubliners.” You could jettison Kafka’s three attempts at full-length fiction (unfinished by him, and unfinished by us) without muffling the impact of his seismic originality. George Eliot gave us one readable book, which turned out to be the central Anglophone novel. Every page of Dickens contains a paragraph to warm to and a paragraph to veer back from. Coleridge wrote a total of two major poems (and collaborated on a third). Milton consists of “Paradise Lost.” Even my favorite writer, William Shakespeare, who usually eludes all mortal limitations, succumbs to this law. Run your eye down the contents page and feel the slackness of your urge to reread the comedies (“As You Like It” is not as we like it); and who would voluntarily curl up with “King John” or “Henry VI, Part III”?

Proustians will claim that “In Search of Lost Time” is unimprovable throughout, despite all the agonizing longueurs. And Janeites will never admit that three of the six novels are comparative weaklings (I mean “Sense and Sensibility,” “Mansfield Park,” and “Persuasion”). Perhaps the only true exceptions to the fifty-fifty model are Homer and Harper Lee. Our subject, here, is literary evaluation, so of course everything I say is mere opinion, unverifiable and also unfalsifiable, which makes the ground shakier still. But I stubbornly suspect that only the cultist, or the academic, is capable of swallowing an author whole. Writers are peculiar, readers are particular: it is just the way we are. One helplessly reaches for Kant’s dictum about the crooked timber of humanity, or for John Updike’s suggestion to the effect that we are all of us “mixed blessings.” Unlike the heroes and heroines of “Northanger Abbey,” “Pride and Prejudice,” and “Emma,” readers and writers are not expressly designed to be perfect for each other...

Novelists can be likened to omnicompetent tour guides—as they gloss and vivify the wonders of unfamiliar terrains, the marketplaces, the museums, the tearooms and wine cellars, the gardens, the houses of worship. Then, without warning, the suave cicerone becomes a garrulous rogue cabdriver, bearing you off on a series of sinister detours (out by the airport, and in the dead of night). The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they’re taking us where we don’t want to go.

E.C. GTFO

Libya and the Left

The left can be a lonely place for those of us who do not immediately hiss at the mention of deploying military force abroad. Libya was a case in point. Michael Berube brilliantly culls most of the hysterical criticisms hurled in the weeks leading up to the intervention, and in doing so reveals the few legitimate criticisms that could have been leveled as having gone largely unmade by an habituated left. Article here. To close with the challenge:

Ten years ago, surveying the post-9/11 landscape in the pages of Dissent, Michael Walzer famously asked if there could be a “decent left” in a superpower. It was the wrong question—or perhaps just the wrong term—and it has since been mocked with a mighty mockery: after all, for the hard left, who take as much pride in hardness and firmness as did any of George Bush’s most ardent admirers, “decency” is a prissy value, to be gauged and monitored by a Decency League made up of schoolmarms and busybodies. The question, rather, should have been whether there can be a rigorously internationalist left in the U.S., a left that will promote and support the freedom of speech, the freedom to worship, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear—even on those rare and valuable occasions when doing so puts one in the position of supporting U.S. policies. That, I think, is the question that confronts the American left after Benghazi, in the years following the Arab Spring.

Just wait for it...

(via TRG Vision at stellar.io)

Self-Explanatory Clip is Self-Explanatory.

QFTD

"It seems that we can add, to sausages and laws, churches as a phenomenon that is not pleasant to watch at the manufacturing stage." - C. Hitchens on the founding of the Church of Latter Day Saints.

The Sectarian Fall

After hesitation, Hussein Ibish worries publicly:

Across the Arab world, terrifying sectarian dynamics are starting to emerge, essentially pitting Arab Sunnis versus all religious minorities. The elements of this have been obvious for quite a while, but the pattern has become so pronounced and almost pervasive that it demands to be recognized no matter how frightening the prospects.

Throughout the region, political forces are lining up time and again along this extremely dangerous binary divide. For instance, the ecumenism of the Egyptian revolution has given way to the most gruesome sectarian violence between the military and Islamist mobs on the one hand and Coptic protesters on the other hand. This was particularly evident over the weekend, with deadly clashes and sectarian incitement raging throughout Cairo.

The Syrian regime has done its best to cast the uprising in that country in a sectarian light, with a disturbing degree of success. Regional support for Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite-minority rule is now almost entirely restricted to non-Sunni Arabs (as well as Iran), including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Shia-led Iraqi government, Shia parliamentarians and activists in Kuwait and other Gulf States, and a significant number of Christians in Lebanon and Syria.

By contrast, Assad’s alliance with Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has collapsed largely along sectarian lines. Support for Assad among Arab Sunnis has dropped to virtually zero, including all Sunni-dominated governments. Support for his rule has also further exacerbated the already deeply-damaged reputation of Hezbollah among Arab Sunnis.

The Sunni Arab world, meanwhile, has been largely silent about the campaign of relentless persecution and repression against the Shia majority in Bahrain, implicitly backing the oppressive rule of the Sunni-minority royal family.

Sectarian tensions simmer in Kuwait but are held at bay by the country’s wealth and small population. In Saudi Arabia, however, they have been bubbling away for months, particularly in the country’s oil-rich eastern provinces. Last week they boiled over in Al-Awamiyah, as Shia rioters were fired on by security forces. Saudi spokespersons dismissed the incident as “nonsectarian” and merely criminal in nature, but immediately undermined their arguments by blaming Iran for the unrest...

The emerging sectarian narrative threatens to rip apart many Arab societies, and indeed the Arab world in general. More than military dictatorships or violent organizations that may seek to exploit these tensions, the illusions that Sunni Arabs across the region are seeking to impose a new and repressive order on non-Sunni Arabs, or that non-Sunni Arabs are subversive elements or disloyal agents of Iran or other foreign powers, pose the gravest threat to a better future in the Middle East.

Let's occasionally remind ourselves why and over whom we may justifiably assert some relative moral authority.

A Billion-Dollar View