Sunday, December 23, 2012
The New Laocoon
Andrew Sullivan and Public Debate
The mountain of words and pictures last week mirrored the piles of rubble in New York. Like the rescue workers there, one waded in trying to find something that was alive, that would illuminate and explain what had happened.
Noticeable was the reluctance throughout the media to contemplate the Israeli factor - the undeniable and central fact behind the disaster that Israel is now and has been for some time an American colony, sustained by billions of American dollars and armed with American missiles, helicopters and tanks.
Such has been the pressure from the Israeli lobby in this country that many, even normally outspoken journalists, are reluctant even to refer to such matters. Nor would you find anywhere in last week's coverage, any reference whatever to things I have mentioned here in recent issues of The Observer: the fact, for example, that Mr Blair's adviser on the Middle East is an unelected, unknown Jewish businessman, Lord Levy, now installed in the Foreign Office; the fact that this same Lord Levy is the chief fundraiser for the Labour Party; unmentioned also would be the close business links with Israel of two of our most powerful press magnates, Rupert Murdoch and the newly ennobled owner of the Telegraph newspapers, Lord Conrad Black.
When Mr Blair, supported by these gentlemen's papers, pledges his support for Mr Bush as he prepares for war with an as yet unidentified enemy, we ought to be prepared at least to incur the charge of anti-Semitism by giving these matters an airing before the balloon goes up.
Such has been the pressure from the Israeli lobby in this country that many, even normally outspoken journalists, are reluctant even to refer to such matters. Nor would you find anywhere in last week's coverage, any reference whatever to things I have mentioned here in recent issues of The Observer: the fact, for example, that Mr Blair's adviser on the Middle East is an unelected, unknown Jewish businessman, Lord Levy, now installed in the Foreign Office; the fact that this same Lord Levy is the chief fundraiser for the Labour Party; unmentioned also would be the close business links with Israel of two of our most powerful press magnates, Rupert Murdoch and the newly ennobled owner of the Telegraph newspapers, Lord Conrad Black.
When Mr Blair, supported by these gentlemen's papers, pledges his support for Mr Bush as he prepares for war with an as yet unidentified enemy, we ought to be prepared at least to incur the charge of anti-Semitism by giving these matters an airing before the balloon goes up.
So wrote the English journalist Richard Ingrams five days after the 9/11 attacks. "Who will dare damn Israel?" he asked. An outraged Andrew Sullivan answered.
We should be grateful, I suppose, that those who seek the extinction of the Jewish state still feel somewhat hesitant to say so outright. But like all anti-Semites, Ingrams thinks he and the West are somehow victims of the Jewish people... After an event like last week, Ingrams wants to "damn" a country that has long been the victim of such horror. Dare? Oh, the bravery of Ingrams' prejudice! And then further in the piece, he casts the usual ugly slur of dual loyalty on Lord Lever [sic], a British citizen of impeccable patriotism... One phrase stands out: "unelected, unknown Jewish businessman." These are the code words of the worst kind of anti-Semitism...
Also five days after 9/11, Sullivan wrote a piece in The Sunday Times which identified a comparable force in America: "The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead - and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column." Sullivan celebrated the arousal by 9/11 of a "squeamish" and "appeasement"-oriented United States, that if not for the horror of that day might have "[abandoned] Israel to the barbarians who would annihilate every Jew on the planet." As much as his charge remains true of fringe figures and is redolent of some thought on the Left, it complemented Ingrams' mean paranoia. There is nothing he's written that he's walked back more emphatically, but that line stands as a measure of the public intellect of Andrew Sullivan.
Like TED and Time Magazine, Sullivan is middlebrow. His blog is a piano roll of middle class amusements -- "Mental Health Breaks," views from our windows, faces of the day, surface encounters with science that make us "go hmmm." This is the mortar into which quick takes on weighty issues are pressed. Sometimes he writes his own; other times he features excerpts by one-off commentators or a gallery of go-to guys. This is by careful design -- Sullivan is enamored of what he considers his key role in the digital democratization of media, which is itself of course a middlebrow concern. He designs his blog to make information easily accessible and emotionally evocative. He uses it to "think out loud."
Like TED and Time Magazine, Sullivan is middlebrow. His blog is a piano roll of middle class amusements -- "Mental Health Breaks," views from our windows, faces of the day, surface encounters with science that make us "go hmmm." This is the mortar into which quick takes on weighty issues are pressed. Sometimes he writes his own; other times he features excerpts by one-off commentators or a gallery of go-to guys. This is by careful design -- Sullivan is enamored of what he considers his key role in the digital democratization of media, which is itself of course a middlebrow concern. He designs his blog to make information easily accessible and emotionally evocative. He uses it to "think out loud."
The china shop starts rattling when he tackles sensitive topics. An intellectual tic guides Andrew Sullivan as a journalist: judging the importance of an issue and the value of its spokespeople by how much outrage they generate. Perhaps the most lurid example is the amount of time and space he donated to amplifying rumors that Bristol Palin was Trig Palin's mother. And if Sullivan detects that a debate is taboo, he doubles down and his hallmark hysteria becomes a kind of keening. That is what has led him to obsess over race and intelligence and to champion Charles Murray. As Editor of the New Republic in 1994, Sullivan shanghaied the center-Left magazine into serializing parts of The Bell Curve. Its whole editorial staff nearly quit. More recently, in meretricious penitence for his support of the Iraq war, he has focused on what he calls the "Greater Israel Lobby" and the work of Walt and Mearsheimer.
Sullivan's self-perception as a maverick fostering the discussion of uncomfortable truths has a stylistic corollary. It gives him a penchant for sounding dogwhistles -- using language that is designed to be disparaging, invidious, provocative, which cunningly conjures from a distance themes that are thought over the line. Christian fundamentalists are termed "Christianists" in order to evoke images of Islamists executing people in football stadiums. Jews and Muslims persist in the "barbarism" of "Male Genital Mutilation," which likens them to primitives who hack away at girls' clitorises with can lids. And "many Jews" participating in our democracy make up the "Greater Israel lobby," which "has actively damaged the interests of the United States on behalf of... a foreign country."
One effect is to draw more attention than he would otherwise get. Another, of course, is to summon the "smears" and silencing he laments in the first place, which has the tautologous use of reinforcing his narrative: Andrew Sullivan is a maverick opposing debate-squelching prigs. "I will not be intimidated," he warns.
Better if he thought out loud less. Native to the middlebrow milieu are Sullivan's capacities for conventionality and enthusiasm. Long after Obama-mania peaked, he maintains a feudal devotion to the President that has led political scientists to ridicule him as an exemplar of unscientific analysis. And on other matters, Sullivan sometimes overshares. That was the thing about Laocoon -- they might have listened to him if he hadn't diddled his wife in front of the statue of Apollo.One effect is to draw more attention than he would otherwise get. Another, of course, is to summon the "smears" and silencing he laments in the first place, which has the tautologous use of reinforcing his narrative: Andrew Sullivan is a maverick opposing debate-squelching prigs. "I will not be intimidated," he warns.
Andrew Sullivan is zeitgeist Silly Putty. After 9/11 he became a strident neocon, and after Bush he became a neo-realist with Paulite undertones -- skepticism of intervention and distrust of Israel. This has kept him busy for several years, but when his middlebrow intelligence is no longer able to digest what he perceives to be an epochal issue, his hysteria becomes wholly unleashed, and when this emotional process reaches its apex, he identifies a "Fifth Column" threatening to tip us over the edge into perdition.
Eleven years after 9/11, this is what Andrew Sullivan has found:
For many fanatically pro-Israel Jewish-Americans I know, it all comes down in the end to tribalism.
But they project that onto others.
I am not a tribal gay; I am a person before I am a gay person. I have attacked HRC in the past in a way that would simply be inconceivable for many Jewish Americans and AIPAC. I oppose hate crime laws; I challenged the priority for employment discrimination laws. I backed the Boy Scouts in their freedom. For the vast bulk of the American Jewish Establishment, this is simply incomprehensible. Why would I betray "your people" as one TNR colleague used to ironically call my fellow gays when talking to me. "My people?" It tells you so much about a mindset. The mindset affects all vulnerable minorities, of course, gays included. But the enforcement of it on Israel questions in Washington is striking. And it is profoundly illiberal. It reflexively and even at this point unconsciously puts tribal loyalty before any argument of any kind. It is why the Middle East is so fucked up. And why on the Israel question, Washington is so fucked up as well.
But they project that onto others.
I am not a tribal gay; I am a person before I am a gay person. I have attacked HRC in the past in a way that would simply be inconceivable for many Jewish Americans and AIPAC. I oppose hate crime laws; I challenged the priority for employment discrimination laws. I backed the Boy Scouts in their freedom. For the vast bulk of the American Jewish Establishment, this is simply incomprehensible. Why would I betray "your people" as one TNR colleague used to ironically call my fellow gays when talking to me. "My people?" It tells you so much about a mindset. The mindset affects all vulnerable minorities, of course, gays included. But the enforcement of it on Israel questions in Washington is striking. And it is profoundly illiberal. It reflexively and even at this point unconsciously puts tribal loyalty before any argument of any kind. It is why the Middle East is so fucked up. And why on the Israel question, Washington is so fucked up as well.
Labels: andrew sullivan, ditch israel, isolationism, israel, israel lobby, neo-realism, walt and mearsheimer
Wednesday, August 01, 2012
Gore Vidal: Another Lodestar Dims
As if to sweep Alexander Cockburn's cantankerous spirit along, Gore Vidal, one of the last known individuals of a functionally extinct species -- the patrician man of letters -- has died at 86.
As with Cockburn, Vidal was a bracing stylist whose worldview drew from crusty precincts of the Left and Right. And as with Cockburn, Vidal nonetheless was revered as a progressive lodestar. This is especially peculiar in Vidal's case, as he was clearly an American nativist. It's easy to perceive a xenophobic overlap of far Right and Left in relation to Israel, but Vidal nursed a quaint obsession with the Yellow Peril. In 1986 in The Nation of all places, he volleyed abuse at Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter which began with the following "conclusion":
... for America to survive economically in the coming Sino-Japanese world, an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity. After all, the white race is a minority race with many well deserved enemies, and if the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere don’t band together, we are going to end up as farmers–or, worse, mere entertainment–for the more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics.
This isn't a literary curio. Vidal, the Left-intellectual author of a humane bildungsroman about male homosexuality (The City and the Pillar) and the Democratic Party mandarin who grappled with the likes of William F. Buckley, was a devout isolationist. Attending Phillips Exeter Academy in 1940, Vidal organized its chapter of the America First Committee. Later he described Charles Lindbergh as "the true white knight through and through" who was "the best that we are ever apt to produce in the hero line, American-style." In late life Vidal was also, of course, a conspiracy theorist about the 9/11 attacks.
So it is not surprising that like Alexander Cockburn, and Pat Buchanan and contemporary epigones like Glenn Greenwald, Gore Vidal was ardently phobic of Israel. As Christopher Hitchens observed:
... I always knew, as one had to know - and it was in his writing too -- that [Vidal] had this mean streak in him, of a kind of paranoia -- a conspiracy-based paranoid view of the world, and particularly of American history, which leads to isolationism and what I call Lindberg-ism, because he was a great admirer of [Charles] Lindberg, because this stuff is indissoluble from a very tiny stain of Judaeo-phobia which he could never dispel. He had it in under control - but it's quite hard to keep it under control.
Vidal was less controlled than Cockburn. He contributed a Foreword to Israel Shahak's notorious "Jewish History, Jewish Religion", in which he claimed of the Jews that "no other minority in American history has ever hijacked so much money from the American taxpayers in order to invest in a ‘homeland’". Beloved by hardcore anti-Semites, Shahak's book sources Israel's political pathology in a fundamentalist interpretation of Judaism.
And Vidal wrote the following Nation essay, which contains his quote about "Asiatics" and demonstrates that for him, there wasn't a clear distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. I've added highlighting in red, in case you wish to skip to the really piquant parts.
The Empire Lovers Strike Back
March 22, 1986
Gore Vidal lives in Los Angeles and Rome. His coruscating essays on the U. S. giobal role always inflame as well as enlighten. Vidal has taken this occasion lo respond to two of his critics, but he uses the sparks of this clash to illuminate his larger preoccupation: the changing image and reality of
the American Empire.
GORE VIDAL
Recently, Norman Mailer and I chatted together at the Royale Theatre in New York, under the auspices of PEN American Center. Part of what I said was reprinted in these pages on January 11, under the title, not mine, “Requiem for the American Empire.” I gave a bit of a history lesson about our empire’s genesis, and I brooded on its terminus last fall, when Tokyo took over from New York as the world’s economic center.
My conclusion: for America to survive economically in the coming Sino-Japanese world, an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity. After all, the white race is a minority race with many well deserved enemies, and if the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere don’t band together, we are going to end up as farmers–or, worse, mere entertainment–for the more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics. In principle, Mailer agreed.
As expected, that wonderful, wacky couple, Norman (Poddy) Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, checked in. The Lunts of the right wing (Israeli Fifth Column Division), they are now, in their old age, more and more like refugees from a Woody Allen film: The Purple Prose of West End Avenue.
Poddy was the first to respond. He is the editor of Commentary (circulation 55,000, and allegedly falling; paid for by the American Jewish Committee). He is best known–and by me loved–for his autobiographical “novel,” Making It, in which he tells us that he has made it because he has become editor of Commentary and might one day be a guest at the White House, as he has already been a guest of Huntington Hartford in Nassau.
Over the years, Poddy has, like his employers, the A.J.C., moved from those liberal positions traditionally occupied by American Jews (and me) to the far right of American politics. The reason for that is simple. In order to get Treasury money for Israel (last year $5 billion), pro-Israel lobbyists must see to it that America’s “the Russians are coming” squads are in place so that they can continue to frighten the American people into spending enormous sums for “defense,” which also means the support of Israel in its never-ending wars against just about everyone.
To make sure that nearly a third of the Federal budget goes to the Pentagon and Israel, it is necessary for the pro-Israel lobbyists to make common cause with our lunatic right. Hence, the virulent propaganda.
Poddy denounced Mailer and me in the pages of the New York Post. According to him, we belong to that mindless majority of pinko intellectuals who actually think that the nation spends too much on the Pentagon and not enough on, say, education. Since sustained argument is not really his bag, he must fall back on the ad hominem attack, a right-wing specialty–and, of course, on our flag, which he wears like a designer kaftan because “the blessings of freedom and prosperity are greater and more widely shared [here] than in any country known to human history.” Poddy should visit those Western European countries whose per capita income is higher than ours. All in all, Poddy is a silly billy.
Significantly, the one Yiddish word that has gained universal acceptance in this country is chutzpah. Example: In 1960, Mr. and Mrs. Podhoretz were in upstate New York where I used to live. I was trying out a play at the Hyde Park Playhouse; the play was set during the Civil War. “Why,” asked Poddy, “are you writing a play about, of all things, the Civil War?” I explained to him that my mother’s family had fought for the Confederacy and my father’s for the Union, and that the Civil War was–and is–to the United States what the Trojan War was to the Greeks, the great single tragic event that continues to give resonance to our Republic.
“Well, to me,” said Poddy, “the Civil War is as remote and as irrelevant as the War of the Roses.” I realized then that he was not planning to become an “assimilated American,” to use the old-fashioned terminology; but, rather, his first loyalty would always be to Israel. Yet he and Midge stay on among us, in order to make propaganda and raise money for Israel–a country they don’t seem eager to live in. Jewish joke, circa 1900: A Zionist is someone who wants to ship other people off to Palestine.
Midge was next to strike. But before she launched her attack, in something called Contentions, she put on her thinking cap and actually read what I wrote. I give her high marks for that. Unfortunately, she found my history lesson hard going. But then, like most of our Israeli fifth columnists, Midge isn’t much interested in what the goyim were up to before Ellis Island. She also likes the ad hominem attack. When I noted that our writers seldom speak out on matters of war and peace because so many of them are paid for by universities that receive money from the garrison state, Midge tartly retorted, “He, after all, is not paid by a university but by those great centers of independence, the film companies.” Since my last Hollywood film, The Best Man, was made in 1964, I have been “paid” by that American public that buys my books about the American past, a subject of no demonstrable interest to Midge and Poddy and their friends.
Midge was amazed by my description of how we seized territories from Mexico, including California; annexed Hawaii and Puerto Rico and, of course, the Philippines, where we slaughtered between 100,000 and 200,000 of the inhabitants. Interesting note: American imperialists froth if the figures for those murdered are ever in excess of 60,000 men, women and children, the acceptable statistical minimum for genocide. Then Midge, with that magisterial gooniness that marks her polemical style, told us, “that three of these conquered territories are now states of the United States, and a fourth an independent republic, is evidently beside the point–as, we cannot resist remarking...”
Oh, Midge, resist. Resist! Don’t you get the point? We stole other people’s land. We murdered many of the inhabitants. We imposed our religion–and rule–on the survivors. General Grant was ashamed of what we did to Mexico, and so am I. Mark Twain was ashamed of what we did in the Philippines, and so am I. Midge is not because in the Middle East another predatory people is busy stealing other people’s land in the name of an alien theocracy. She is a propagandist for these predators (paid for?), and that is what all this nonsense is about.
Since spades may not be called spades in freedom’s land, let me spell it all out. In order to get military and economic support for Israel, a small number of American Jews, who should know better, have made common cause with every sort of reactionary and anti-Semitic group in the United States, from the corridors of the Pentagon to the TV studios of the evangelical Jesus-Christers. To show that their hearts are in the far-right place, they call themselves neoconservatives, and attack the likes of Mailer and me, all in the interest of supporting the likes of Sharon and Israel as opposed to the Peace Now Israelis whom they disdain. There is real madness here; mischief too.
“Well, one thing is clear in all this muddle,’’ writes Midge, adrift in her tautological sea, “Mr. Vidal does not like his country.” Poor Midge. Of course I like my country. After all, I’m its current biographer. But now that we’re really leveling with each other, I’ve got to tell you I don’t much like your country, which is Israel.
Although there is nothing wrong with being a lobbyist for a foreign power, one is supposed to register with the Justice Department. Also, I should think that tact would require a certain forbearance when it comes to the politics of the host country. But tact is unknown to the Podhoretzes. Joyously they revel in the politics of hate, with plangent attacks on blacks and/or fags and/or liberals, trying, always, to outdo those moral majoritarians who will, as Armageddon draws near, either convert all the Jews, just as the Good Book says, or kill them.
All in all, the latest Podhoretz diatribes have finally convinced me that the time has come for the United States to stop all aid not only to Israel but to Jordan, Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. The Middle Easterners would then be obliged to make peace, or blow one another up, or whatever. In any case, we would be well out of it. After all, the theological and territorial quarrels of Israel and Islam are as remote to 200 million Americans as–what else?–the War of the Roses.
March 22, 1986
Gore Vidal lives in Los Angeles and Rome. His coruscating essays on the U. S. giobal role always inflame as well as enlighten. Vidal has taken this occasion lo respond to two of his critics, but he uses the sparks of this clash to illuminate his larger preoccupation: the changing image and reality of
the American Empire.
GORE VIDAL
Recently, Norman Mailer and I chatted together at the Royale Theatre in New York, under the auspices of PEN American Center. Part of what I said was reprinted in these pages on January 11, under the title, not mine, “Requiem for the American Empire.” I gave a bit of a history lesson about our empire’s genesis, and I brooded on its terminus last fall, when Tokyo took over from New York as the world’s economic center.
My conclusion: for America to survive economically in the coming Sino-Japanese world, an alliance with the Soviet Union is a necessity. After all, the white race is a minority race with many well deserved enemies, and if the two great powers of the Northern Hemisphere don’t band together, we are going to end up as farmers–or, worse, mere entertainment–for the more than one billion grimly efficient Asiatics. In principle, Mailer agreed.
As expected, that wonderful, wacky couple, Norman (Poddy) Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, checked in. The Lunts of the right wing (Israeli Fifth Column Division), they are now, in their old age, more and more like refugees from a Woody Allen film: The Purple Prose of West End Avenue.
Poddy was the first to respond. He is the editor of Commentary (circulation 55,000, and allegedly falling; paid for by the American Jewish Committee). He is best known–and by me loved–for his autobiographical “novel,” Making It, in which he tells us that he has made it because he has become editor of Commentary and might one day be a guest at the White House, as he has already been a guest of Huntington Hartford in Nassau.
Over the years, Poddy has, like his employers, the A.J.C., moved from those liberal positions traditionally occupied by American Jews (and me) to the far right of American politics. The reason for that is simple. In order to get Treasury money for Israel (last year $5 billion), pro-Israel lobbyists must see to it that America’s “the Russians are coming” squads are in place so that they can continue to frighten the American people into spending enormous sums for “defense,” which also means the support of Israel in its never-ending wars against just about everyone.
To make sure that nearly a third of the Federal budget goes to the Pentagon and Israel, it is necessary for the pro-Israel lobbyists to make common cause with our lunatic right. Hence, the virulent propaganda.
Poddy denounced Mailer and me in the pages of the New York Post. According to him, we belong to that mindless majority of pinko intellectuals who actually think that the nation spends too much on the Pentagon and not enough on, say, education. Since sustained argument is not really his bag, he must fall back on the ad hominem attack, a right-wing specialty–and, of course, on our flag, which he wears like a designer kaftan because “the blessings of freedom and prosperity are greater and more widely shared [here] than in any country known to human history.” Poddy should visit those Western European countries whose per capita income is higher than ours. All in all, Poddy is a silly billy.
Significantly, the one Yiddish word that has gained universal acceptance in this country is chutzpah. Example: In 1960, Mr. and Mrs. Podhoretz were in upstate New York where I used to live. I was trying out a play at the Hyde Park Playhouse; the play was set during the Civil War. “Why,” asked Poddy, “are you writing a play about, of all things, the Civil War?” I explained to him that my mother’s family had fought for the Confederacy and my father’s for the Union, and that the Civil War was–and is–to the United States what the Trojan War was to the Greeks, the great single tragic event that continues to give resonance to our Republic.
“Well, to me,” said Poddy, “the Civil War is as remote and as irrelevant as the War of the Roses.” I realized then that he was not planning to become an “assimilated American,” to use the old-fashioned terminology; but, rather, his first loyalty would always be to Israel. Yet he and Midge stay on among us, in order to make propaganda and raise money for Israel–a country they don’t seem eager to live in. Jewish joke, circa 1900: A Zionist is someone who wants to ship other people off to Palestine.
Midge was next to strike. But before she launched her attack, in something called Contentions, she put on her thinking cap and actually read what I wrote. I give her high marks for that. Unfortunately, she found my history lesson hard going. But then, like most of our Israeli fifth columnists, Midge isn’t much interested in what the goyim were up to before Ellis Island. She also likes the ad hominem attack. When I noted that our writers seldom speak out on matters of war and peace because so many of them are paid for by universities that receive money from the garrison state, Midge tartly retorted, “He, after all, is not paid by a university but by those great centers of independence, the film companies.” Since my last Hollywood film, The Best Man, was made in 1964, I have been “paid” by that American public that buys my books about the American past, a subject of no demonstrable interest to Midge and Poddy and their friends.
Midge was amazed by my description of how we seized territories from Mexico, including California; annexed Hawaii and Puerto Rico and, of course, the Philippines, where we slaughtered between 100,000 and 200,000 of the inhabitants. Interesting note: American imperialists froth if the figures for those murdered are ever in excess of 60,000 men, women and children, the acceptable statistical minimum for genocide. Then Midge, with that magisterial gooniness that marks her polemical style, told us, “that three of these conquered territories are now states of the United States, and a fourth an independent republic, is evidently beside the point–as, we cannot resist remarking...”
Oh, Midge, resist. Resist! Don’t you get the point? We stole other people’s land. We murdered many of the inhabitants. We imposed our religion–and rule–on the survivors. General Grant was ashamed of what we did to Mexico, and so am I. Mark Twain was ashamed of what we did in the Philippines, and so am I. Midge is not because in the Middle East another predatory people is busy stealing other people’s land in the name of an alien theocracy. She is a propagandist for these predators (paid for?), and that is what all this nonsense is about.
Since spades may not be called spades in freedom’s land, let me spell it all out. In order to get military and economic support for Israel, a small number of American Jews, who should know better, have made common cause with every sort of reactionary and anti-Semitic group in the United States, from the corridors of the Pentagon to the TV studios of the evangelical Jesus-Christers. To show that their hearts are in the far-right place, they call themselves neoconservatives, and attack the likes of Mailer and me, all in the interest of supporting the likes of Sharon and Israel as opposed to the Peace Now Israelis whom they disdain. There is real madness here; mischief too.
“Well, one thing is clear in all this muddle,’’ writes Midge, adrift in her tautological sea, “Mr. Vidal does not like his country.” Poor Midge. Of course I like my country. After all, I’m its current biographer. But now that we’re really leveling with each other, I’ve got to tell you I don’t much like your country, which is Israel.
Although there is nothing wrong with being a lobbyist for a foreign power, one is supposed to register with the Justice Department. Also, I should think that tact would require a certain forbearance when it comes to the politics of the host country. But tact is unknown to the Podhoretzes. Joyously they revel in the politics of hate, with plangent attacks on blacks and/or fags and/or liberals, trying, always, to outdo those moral majoritarians who will, as Armageddon draws near, either convert all the Jews, just as the Good Book says, or kill them.
All in all, the latest Podhoretz diatribes have finally convinced me that the time has come for the United States to stop all aid not only to Israel but to Jordan, Egypt and the rest of the Arab world. The Middle Easterners would then be obliged to make peace, or blow one another up, or whatever. In any case, we would be well out of it. After all, the theological and territorial quarrels of Israel and Islam are as remote to 200 million Americans as–what else?–the War of the Roses.
It should be noted that a "kaftan" is a garment symbolic of the Middle East. I think this is what The Nation meant when it referred to Vidal's "coruscating essays".
Postscript: Today, The Nation commemorates Vidal, offering this comment on "The Empire Lovers Strike Back":
The Asiatics didn’t complain, but two months later, some Jews did, after Gore wrote that Norman Podhoretz’s “first loyalty would always be to Israel,” and that he and his wife Midge Decter therefore constituted “an Israeli Fifth Column Division" inside the United States.
Many of us took that as another satiric barb, but Podhoretz had his associate editor at Commentary write to thirty people on the Nation masthead who had Jewish-sounding names asking whether they had protested the magazine’s publication of “the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst in an American periodical since the Second World War.” (Nobody on the masthead resigned.) Arthur Carter, the Wall Street figure who had recently become publisher of the magazine, told Victor that the head of the Anti-Defamation League had complained to him about Gore’s piece. Carter replied, “What do you think we are? It’s The Nation, not the Jewish Federation Newsletter.” Victor called that “passing the Gore test.”
Many of us took that as another satiric barb, but Podhoretz had his associate editor at Commentary write to thirty people on the Nation masthead who had Jewish-sounding names asking whether they had protested the magazine’s publication of “the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst in an American periodical since the Second World War.” (Nobody on the masthead resigned.) Arthur Carter, the Wall Street figure who had recently become publisher of the magazine, told Victor that the head of the Anti-Defamation League had complained to him about Gore’s piece. Carter replied, “What do you think we are? It’s The Nation, not the Jewish Federation Newsletter.” Victor called that “passing the Gore test.”
Labels: gore vidal, isolationism, israel
Monday, March 05, 2012
Netanyahu Goes to Washington
Assessing a nuclear Iran
The polyphony of punditry about Netanyahu’s visit to the White House shows that the debate about a nuclear Iran remains flawed. I’ll try to correct what I think are the two main problems with it, but even after calibrating our instruments the problem stays out of focus. Perhaps that’s because the exigency of Iranian nukes is underscored by our lack of good military options to prevent them.
The case against using force to prevent a nuclear Iran settles on the alternative policy of containment. For reasons that will become clear, I think doves conjure the "containment" of today’s illiberal regimes with the same carelessness as hawks speak of "appeasement". We know what they mean. In a "don’t take my word for it" rhetorical tic, war opponents adduce Ehud Barak’s opinion that, "[the Iranians] are radical but not totally crazy. They have a quite sophisticated decision-making process, and they understand reality." We find these critics confident in the rationality of the Mullahcracy, which they think is comparable to that of the Soviets, the original nuclear bête noire. Robert Wright says Iran simply won’t attack, because "Iranian leaders have no desire to be annihilated along with their families, friends, and Persian civilization."
Here’s the first flaw in the debate. The Iranian government is not a uniform and single -- rational or irrational -- actor. It doesn't work that way. All organizations have what Thucydides called a "war party" and a "peace party". Complex factors, including historical and economic context, culture and national values, and systems of law and politics, decide the relative power and influence of each group. Iraq war opponents, who have monitored the fates of war and peace parties in Muslim states in relation to Bush and Obama, understand this. Iran’s government has both rational actors, like Khatami, the reformist, and irrational actors, like Ahmadinejad, the Jew-hating millenarian conspiracy theorist. I don't have to spell out why a nuclear Iran is a worse place than a non-nuclear Iran for the war party to find itself in the ascendant.
I agree that doesn’t mean the war party is suicidal, and here let me join Wright in opposing an attack on Iran. For questionable tactical gain, it will visit destruction and humiliation on a society with a significant demographic for which Persian history and culture are paramount. Theirs is a proud, pre-Islamic, pluralist tradition that stands out regionally by not being absolutely infested by victimology, irredentism, conspiracy theories and anti-Semitism. We make a big mistake effacing these Persians -- the peace party’s constituency -- by exaggerated focus on the war party and its constituency, the hezbollahi. However, Wright makes the opposite mistake: he claims “Iranian leaders have no desire to be annihilated.. along with Persian civilization.” This is wrong: Iran’s highest leaders and its war party are committed to the Iranian Revolution, which considers “Persian civilization” to be its antagonist.
I get what Wright means, but his language shows there is a fog on the lens he is looking through. I don’t mean to say that Iranian Islamists seek to anneal the Revolution of its Persian impurities in a nuclear inferno. I mean they consider Persian civilization separate and undesirable, to be assimilated or discarded. The Mullahs have a self-preservation instinct, but that is not the same as a regard for Persian civilization. These Shia zealots are violent, paranoid conspiracists triply encircled: they are Muslims beset by Crusaders and Zionists; they are Shia beset by other Muslims; and they are revolutionaries beset by Persian reactionaries. Attached to the body, Persian civilization is both a stabilizing and destabilizing element, something to protect and fear, especially in times of duress.
Iran has a war party and a peace party, divided along these lines. Remember the images of the Green Revolution to learn what Iran’s leaders think of Persian civilization. But bombing or invading Iran would send secular Persians running into the arms of raging Shia millenarians.
Bringing focus back to us, Peter Beinart asks, "Are Palestinians worried about being nuked by Iran? In a small country, they're at much at risk as Jews. If not, why not?"
Weigh the apparent answer against your sense of the US and Israeli perspectives. A companion exercise is to consider the unconcern for Palestinian well-being among liberators who wish to visit destruction on the Zionist entity. Palestinian perspective, other than that which is projected onto them, is so often superfluous.
Beinart's question is thought-provoking, but in the confines of the debate's second flaw. It's natural for both those who support and oppose attacking Iran to dwell on the "wipe Israel off the map" scenario -- Iran firing nukes into Tel Aviv. But Iran won’t do that, except possibly, if it can, in retaliation for an invasion or first strike. Much more realistic, and challenging, is the danger of a nuclear Iran pursuing its aims via terror proxies. Bruce Hoffman, the eminent terrorism scholar and Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, observes that the Iranian Revolution is defined in part by terrorism as foreign policy. Revolutionary Iran sired modern religious terrorism with an "Islamic terrorist campaign" seeking to spread:
... the fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law espoused in Iran to other Muslim countries. "We must strive to export our Revolution throughout the world," the Ayatollah Khomeini declared on the occasion of the Iranian new year in March 1980, just over a year after the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran, "and must abandon all idea of not doing so, for not only does Islam refuse to recognize any difference between Muslim countries, it is the champion of all oppressed people..."
This is especially salient to Iran's indirect war against Israel. It seems the logic of containment is not dispositive in the quasi-military realm of terrorism. Israel has had nukes for about four decades and Iran has supported hostilities against Israel for about half that long (and also Jews, if we join the Argentine government in blaming Iran and Hezbollah for the 1994 bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association, which killed 85 people). While Hezbollah and Hamas take cues from Iran, they are also independent actors, which is to say Iran can't precisely tune their aggression. Effective missiles are much easier to obtain than nukes. If Hezbollah, Hamas, or a group like them pulls off a large-scale attack on Israel -- say, rocketing a hospital and killing ~300 doctors, staffers and patients -- the situation could devolve very quickly into a devastating exchange between Israel and Iran. Look at how we’ve reacted to the terrorist murder of ~3000 Americans, then consider what Israel has done in response to ineffectual rocket attacks and the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit. Israeli policy has a consistent flavor of machtpolitik. Wright, and many like him, say the US is confronting Iran "on Israel’s behalf," hoping to taint the hawks’ position by distilling it to a war for Israel. Do they believe a 9/11 in Israel backed by a nuclear Iran will remain a regional affair?
To get an idea what an Iranian war party under siege might do, review the following statistics, enumerated in Hoffman's Inside Terrorism.
Although religious terrorists committed only 6 percent of recorded terrorist incidents between 1998 and 2004, their acts were responsible for 30 percent of the total number of fatalities recorded during that time period... Although Shia groups committed only 8 percent of all international terrorist incidents between 1982 and 1989, they nonetheless were responsible for 30 percent of the total number of fatalities arising from those incidents. And while al Qaeda perpetrated only 0.1 percent of all terrorist attacks between 1998 and 2004, it was responsible for nearly 19 percent of total fatalities from terrorist attacks during that time period.
There are three main flavors of terrorist: the national-separatist, or right-wing secular terrorist; the Marxist-Leninist, or left-wing secular terrorist; and the religious, or millenarian, terrorist. (The latter doesn't refer only to Islamic terrorists; also think Timothy McVeigh and Baruch Goldstein.) Hoffman shows that religious terrorists take a far greater toll than their secular counterparts, and that among them, Shia terrorists are the most lethal. That makes sense given the Iranian provenance of modern religious terrorism.
Hoffman also notes that in recent times, the ratio of non-religious to religious terrorists has skewed steadily in favor of the latter.
In 1994, for example, a third (sixteen) of the forty-nine identifiable international terrorist groups active that year could be classified as religious in character and or motivation; and in 1995, their number grew yet again, to account for nearly half (twenty-six, or 46 percent) of the fifty-six known active international terrorist groups. A decade later, it is perhaps not surprising to find that this trend not only continued but solidified. In 2004, for instance, nearly half (fifty-two, or 46 percent) of the terrorist groups active that year were religious, while thirty-two (28 percent) were left-wing groups, and twenty-four (21 percent) were ethno-nationalist/separatist organizations.
It's hard to account for the escalation in brutality, because explanatory models seek to be rational, but these phenomena are quintessentially irrational. A clue may be found in the distinct way in which each type of violent extremist seeks to stop history. As I’ve written, left-wing extremists wish to harness and drive history toward a future utopia. Right-wing extremists wish to harness and drive it back to a glorious past. And religious millenarians wish to destroy us and themselves to create paradise in place of the worldly purgatory. In this they are more dangerous than their totalitarian antecedents.
Labels: barack obama, conspiracism, iran, israel, millenarians, netanyahu, peter beinart, robert wright, terrorism, utopian thought
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Nir Rosen and Totalitarian Stupidity
One snowy day back in college, I was returning from class to my dorm and I began to cross a small intersection. A woman was waiting at the stop sign in a large, gray vehicle. As I began to pass in front of it, she suddenly drove forward into me. I banged on the hood, she came to and stopped, and I barked some remark about using her eyes. More startling than injurious, so I continued on.
I entered my dorm and saw my friend in the main gathering room, so I went to him and breathlessly unloaded what had just happened. While narrating I referred in my 21 year-old shorthand to the woman driver as "this chick". A girl I hadn't seen sitting nearby exploded: "CHICK? What the FUCK is THAT?" I marveled to myself: I was just nearly run over by a car, and her moral priority is to police my language.
As I've argued, a possibly clinical emotional idiocy underpins extremism. Conspiracy theories about America and the Jews, the embrace of "counterknowledge", an attraction to totalitarian thinking -- these are some criteria for diagnosis. Above all we have the moral stupidity, the bent priorities of the true believer, the eggs which need to be broken to make the omelet of the radiant tomorrow.
Out of today's noxious lineup of anti-war extremists steps Nir Rosen. During the celebration that erupted when Hosni Mubarak stepped down in the face of Egyptian popular revolt, Lara Logan, a CBS News correspondent, was ambushed, beaten and sexually assaulted. In response, Nir Rosen tweeted:
Lara Logan had to outdo Anderson. Where was her buddy McCrystal.
Yes yes its wrong what happened to her. Of course. I don’t support that. But, it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson too
Jesus Christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger
A fuller log is available here.
Rosen is a war correspondent whose reductive anti-imperialism rivals Ward Churchill's. Yet he's been successful and celebrated, thanks to the comparative complexity of his subject matter and Bush's bungling of Iraq. Besides the acute viciousness of his attack on a woman who might have been gang-raped, what's interesting is this is hardly the first time Rosen has made vile public statements. It's just the first time he's been called out on it by more than a few people.
Predictably in pitch with his totalitarian stupidity, Rosen often targets Israel. Here are some examples from Twitter and his public Facebook "Wall".
Here in a Facebook Wall post entitled "Fuck Israel," Rosen links to a five year-old case in which a (non-Jewish) IDF soldier was acquitted of murdering a 13 year-old Palestinian girl. Rosen ignorantly mistook the tragic story as recent and intoned [emphasis mine]:
he shot a 13 year old girl, or ordered her to be shot, and was exhonerated [sic]. and nothing will happen because she isnt jewish. israel's existence is an abomination
And here Rosen lays it out in the Manichaean terms native to the totalitarian mind:
Because it was individual, the odiousness of Rosen's attack on Lara Logan surpasses his public fantasizing about Israel's destruction. But the latter didn't provoke outrage, or much response at all, which shows how acceptable that line of thought has become. Trusted, popular writers like Marc Lynch and Glenn Greenwald have praised Rosen throughout.
Rosen is being crushed under the weight of tardy opprobrium. He's given a Michael Richards-style interview in which he doesn't do himself any favors, explaining:
A part of me was bothered by how celebrities, especially white ones, get so much attention, and before I realized it was a sexual assault I was sort of anticipating a return to the old theme about unleashed brown natives attacking a white woman. Another part of me was bothered by the knowledge that Arab victims would never get attention, that this would detract from everything else that was happening, and that most victims of sexual assault, whether in Egypt or the US will never get attention.
A woman was just beaten and sexually assaulted by a gang, and Rosen's moral priority is policing our emotional response, lest it be racist or focused on the wrong victim.
People lament the damage Twitter has done to the art of written communication, but I appreciate the economy of language it enforces. The great poet Richard Wilbur wrote, "The strength of the genie comes from being in a bottle." Twitter proleptically forced Rosen into an apt summary of his downfall:
thanks to twitter i can destroy my career 140 characters at a time.
Labels: anti-imperialism, israel, nir rosen, totalitarian stupidity
Saturday, February 20, 2010
To Harness History
As an analyst of the ideas behind New Antisemitism, I spend a lot of time trawling the oily floors of anti-Israel seas in search of stinking treasures. A good deal of what I pull up is amateur opinion material that I completely ignore. It would be boring to dwell on childish and sub-literate screeds, and I don't want to turn this blog into a medium of complaint or disproportionate outrage.
I'll violate my policy in this case, not only because the prose is breathtakingly dumb -- a notable outlier in an already squalid medium; the author can't even spell "vagina" -- but more because it nicely exhibits an important feature of utopian thought.
Let us put the debate of "is homosexuality nature or nurture" aside for the moment. There is a need to protect all minorities; however, there is clear distinction between legal protection, and aggressively encourage something. It is difficult to fathom, why homosexuality is increasingly pushed in our heterosexual faces, to the detriment of the majority and more importantly, the danger it poses to the survival of human race. Similarly, why the constant noise about the suffering of Jews in 1945, as if they have a monopoly over this issue? It was the Japanese, the Germans and the Russians who suffered most during the Second World War. If the Israeli-Zionists were really victims of a holocaust, how can they murder innocent Palestinian civilians en masse? How can victims exhibit such heartless and cruel behaviour towards innocent civilians, who had no connection with Nazi Germany?
As stultifying as this stuff is, reading as much of it as you can take is helpful because it presents so many of the clinical signs of totalitarian stupidity. There is the embrace of counterknowledge in the form of Holocaust denial; there is the catatonic reflex of absurd historical analogy; there is the conspiracist thinking. And of course the piece is a breviary of Jew-hatred -- note the arcane reference to the "Talmudic ethos of ethnic cleansing".
What I especially want you to notice is how such a wicked and imbecilic screed masquerades as human rights rhetoric. This Yamin Zakaria stages a passion play whose drama unfolds locally and internationally. There is the intrinsic threat to Islam posed by the homosexual lobby. There is the extrinsic threat posed by the Jews. The Muslims are a people of light who are "[gagged]" by "[cabals]" that seek to control our thought. While "there is a need to protect all minorities," homosexuals and Jews have an unnatural and parasitical drive to spread "annihilation" and "servitude". The inversion of human rights ethics is fundamental to utopian politics -- read Mein Kampf, or Osama bin Laden's public writings. This is perhaps what is most perverse about the "anti-imperialist" collaboration between left-wing and Islamist groups.
Millenarian thought seeks to stop history. Left-wing millenarians wish to harness and drive it toward a future utopia. Right-wing millenarians wish to harness and drive it back to a glorious past. Religious millenarians wish to destroy us and themselves to create paradise in place of the worldly purgatory. In this they are more dangerous than their totalitarian antecedents.
Labels: anti-semitsm, israel, new antisemitism, talmud antisemitism, totalitarian stupidity
Sunday, February 14, 2010
A Freemasonry of Filth
Modernityblog records lunatic Jew-hater Gilad Atzmon's latest low.
The Protocols is widely considered a forgery. It is a manual for a prospective new member of the “Elders”, describing how they will run the world through control of the media and finance, replacing the traditional social order with one based on mass manipulation. Though the book is considered a hoax by most experts and regarded as a vile anti-Semitic text, it is impossible to ignore its prophetic qualities and its capacity to describe both the century unfolding and the political reality in which we live I am referring here to: AIPAC, the Credit Crunch, Lehman Brothers, Neocon wars, interventionist ideology, a British Foreign Secretary listed as an Israeli Propaganda (Hasbara) author trying to amend Britain’s ethical stand, a Zionist by admission put on an inquiry panel to investigate why Britain launched a Zionist war and so on.
I wonder if Chomsky facsimile and Tourettic Israel-trasher Dennis Perrin knows whose authority he's appealing to in this lament about the growing sadism of the Jews.
Labels: anti-semitsm, cretino-leftism, dennis perrin, gilad atzmon, israel, new antisemitism
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Calling Bullshit -- The Pilot Episode
I've been writing publicly since late 2002 about utopian and totalitarian ideas, mostly as they find expression in antisemitic reaction to Israel and Zionism. For unusual reasons I haven't fully articulated, I've tapped out an oeuvre that is largely consonant with the stance of the pro-Israel "community", as it were. You may not be awed by these credentials, but I hope they qualify me as someone who might briefly restore your interest in a tattered topic: the difference between criticism of Israel and abuse of Jews.
Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, has composed a leviathan libel of Andrew Sullivan, all but calling him an anti-Semite.
Criticism of Israeli policy, and sympathy for the Palestinians, and support for a two-state solution, do not require, as their condition or their corollary, this intellectual shabbiness, this venomous hostility toward Israel and Jews. I have striven for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation, and territorial compromise, and two states, for many decades now, but Sullivan’s variety of such right thinking is completely repugnant to me. There are decent and indecent ways to advocate change. About the Jews, is Sullivan a bigot, or is he just moronically insensitive? To me, he looks increasingly like the Buchanan of the left.
Inevitably this has generated a lot of heat, earning angry responses from Matthew Yglesias, Brad DeLong, Gawker, of all things, and many others.
I have for a while been wanting to start a Calling Bullshit series about episodes like this, when oversensitive or oversearching friends-of-Israel decide to show-trial enemies-of-the-Jews. Otherwise perspicacious commentators, even brilliant ones like Wieseltier, can be seduced by the provocative crudeness of Israel's enemies, and the complex spectrum of ideological reaction to Israel, into launching McCarthyite counterattacks. And interpretation can be a carnivorous jungle when three political types, interrelated on the subject of Israel, overlap. These are the antisemite, the non-interventionist, and the foreign policy realist who has judged Israel harmful to the US.
It's important to combat confusion arising from these complexities, as well as callow and partisan accusations of antisemitism, and the effort should be led from within the ranks. New Antisemitism really does exist, and decreasing numbers of people believe that when non-antisemites are smeared. Also, real enemies of Israel or Jews use these moments to exonerate themselves, to immunize themselves against future criticism, and to enlist supporters among people offended by political correctness and identity politics.
Wieseltier's confusion is expressed in the last sentence of the passage I quoted above. He calls Sullivan a "Buchanan of the left". This seeming absurdity makes sense to those familiar enough with the material. Invoking Buchanan is often metonymy for isolationism*, and in the context of Israel one stained by Lindberghian anti-Semitism. Andrew Sullivan was a foreign policy neoconservative, and like most regretful true believers, he has been making up for it publicly by raking his scalp with conch shells. Predictably, his post-neocon writings on Israel have been a furnace of debate over the merits of Israel-critical foreign-policy realism and non-interventionism, stoked by outrage at Operation Cast Lead.
This returns us to an important topic I've written about. Non-interventionists and antisemites are implicated groups, but they are not the same. They both hate, or at least fear, Israel, but the former is not necessarily hostile to Jews. To the extent that the non-interventionist in public discourse is even identified, most people can’t distinguish him from uncomplicated Jew-haters on the subject of Israel. This is owing to some rhetorical overlap -- the very term "anti-Semite" was invented by Jew-haters wanting to sound respectable -- and also the figure of Charles Lindbergh, who combined both personas. So people default to branding as anti-Semites non-interventionist Israel-phobes like Glenn Greenwald, because the dogma that generates their vilification of Israel is not well understood.
Confusion is compounded by further rhetorical overlap of these with Israel-critical foreign policy realists. For many Israel advocates, it is beyond dispute that Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer have recapitulated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But again this is a mistake: Walt and Mearsheimer's critique is shoddy, dubious and above all illiberal, but it is not antisemitic. (Ironically, the Lobby portion of their critique is probably its least antisemitic element.) Wieseltier loses his grip on this distinction in another revelatory passage:
These days the self-congratulatory motto above his blog is ‘Of No Party or Clique,’ but in fact Sullivan belongs to the party of Mearsheimer and the clique of Walt (whom he cites frequently and deferentially), to the herd of fearless dissidents who proclaim in all seriousness, without in any way being haunted by the history of such an idea, that Jews control Washington.
Mearsheimer and Walt don’t believe the Jews control Washington; antisemites believe that. Mearsheimer and Walt believe the US is wrong to ally with Israel, because doing so brings us little benefit, and great harm in the form of terrorist blowback. Further, like all such analysts, they don't credit enough the power of irrationalism -- "unrealism", if you will -- in politics, and are indifferent to arguments based on the consanguinity of liberal democracies.
To muddy the waters one last time, non-interventionism is an illiberal doctrine that can be interpreted as antisemitic, and not only because of its anti-Israel excesses. The abiding theme of this blog is antisemitism is the engine of millenarian movements. So you do the math. Israel today is the Masada of the open society, under siege by Left, Right and especially genocidal Islamist forces. Moreover if Israel is compromised or destroyed, it is not only the Jews who will suffer. Complacency about antisemitism is a dangerous indulgence for all.
Maybe making these distinctions will be unsatisfying in a medium that is vexed by distance from Manichaean neatness. Inevitably, all organic and powerful movements produce a gestural simulacrum of themselves. This process is complete with the enterprise to identify and combat New Antisemitism. But it's too important to surrender it wholly to that historical imperative. Andrew Sullivan developed a touch of Israel-phobia during the hairshirt years of his anti-neocon penitence. He is not an antisemite.
* Isolationism comprises two related doctrines: military non-interventionism and economic protectionism. Even though the terms "isolationism" and "non-interventionism" are often used interchangeably, it is only the latter that is relevant to this piece.
Update: Here's Sullivan's cri de coeur.
Labels: andrew sullivan, anti-semitsm, calling bullshit, ditch israel, glenn greenwald, isolationism, israel, new antisemitism, stephen walt
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
A Moldovan Bouncer
Spencer Ackerman reacts acidly to Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon's childish humiliation of the Turkish ambassador to Israel, Ahmet Oguz Celikkol:
A good relationship with a Muslim country that clearly accepts Israel’s right to exist is an unqualified diplomatic asset. To squander it through churlishness reflects a foreign policy run by a Moldovan bouncer. It’s like we’re living through the vulgar sequel of the Bush administration. Only Israelis are supposed to be more realistic.
Well said. I think Israel has been undergoing its own phase of “mugged-by-reality” machtpolitik, owing to the 9/11 attacks, but also and more to the second Intifada, Hezbollah and the ascendancy of Hamas. I’d answer Ackerman's closing sentence by arguing that foreign policy during the Bush years was a tension between the decidedly non-ideological Rumsfeld/Cheney faction and true believers like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. Israel’s foreign policy is more "realistic" in the sense that it lacks this latter ideological dimension, and its liberal democracy is hardened by the considerable etatism that results from a short and violent history.
Labels: israel
