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Who said this?

Hamas are resistance fighters who are struggling to defend their land. They have won an election. I have told this to U.S. officials ... I do not accept Hamas as a terrorist organization. I think the same today. They are defending their land.

That would be Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, speaking before an exultant crowd a few weeks ago in the city of Konya as a newly decorated defender of regional Islamism. This is the man whom David Cameron was out to please the other day when, in a speech delivered in Ankara, he referred to Gaza as a "prison camp," assailed Israel's raid on the Mavi Marmara as "completely unacceptable," and insisted that despite the aura of hopelessness now clinging to Turkey's agonized bid to join the European Union, it must join it whatever the grumblings from Germany and France. Brutal occupation of Cyprus, subjugation of a Kurdish minority in everything from politics to linguistics, and ongoing denial of the Armenian genocide are evidently Maastricht-compatible initiatives to the new British prime minister, considered even by his support base not to "do" foreign policy so terribly well.

That didn't stop a fellow Conservative, MP Daniel Hannan, from encouraging Cameron's Obama-like overture to an increasingly hostile and subversive ally: "Cameron's reasons for backing Ankara's bid for EU membership are solidly Tory: Turkey guarded Europe's flank against the Bolshevists for three generations, and may one day be called on to do the same against the jihadis."

Except that Turkey is sponsoring the jihadists, not guarding against them--a fact which ought to have been clear to Cameron in the post-script news coverage to the flotilla crisis. The best look into Turkey's turn toward radicalism has been provided by independent Turkish journalists who have for months been arguing that Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) is leading the country into the asphyxiating embrace of the East. The Islamist "lite" party, which won power in 2002, used to adhere to a policy of "zero problems with the neighbors;" today it prefers one of helping the neighbors cause problems with the West.

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At the heart of Israel's deadly raid of the Mavi Marmara on May 31 is the Turkish charity Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (I.H.H.), the "Free Gaza" flotilla's lead organiser. But the extent to which I.H.H. has been enabled and underwritten by the Turkish government has been increasingly scrutinized by international observers over the past several months and for good reason. In the aftermath of the violent showdown on the high seas, which left nine Turkish passengers dead and a number of Israeli commandos critically injured, Turkey's parliament passed a resolution to "reconsider economic and military relations" with the Jewish state, a decades-long ally. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, returning to Istanbul after an emergency meeting with Hillary Clinton, blamed Israel alone for the confrontation and accused it of committing a "crime against humanity." But the most incendiery rhetoric came from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan himself.

Recent months have seen a weakening of the once assured Israeli-Turkish relationship almost to the point of dissolution and in the aftermath of the Mavi Marmara clash, Erdogan has not only depicted Israel as an anathema, worse than "bullies and pirates," but also full-throatedly endorsed its main clerical enemy in the Levant. "Hamas are resistance fighters who are struggling to defend their land," he told an ecstatic anti-Israel rally a few weeks ago in the Turkish city of Konya. "They have won an election. I have told this to US officials... I do not accept Hamas as a terrorist organization. I think the same today. They are defending their land."

Most of Turkey's independent political class see domestic and international calculation behind this bluster, a way for Erdogan to shore up Islamist credibility in advance of an upcoming election and reposition Ankara as a renascent power broker in the Middle East - Iran's chief competiton for that role. One writer for the Turkish daily newspaper Hurriyet observed that, it's "almost as if [Erodgan] was waiting for a new crisis with Israel to be able to work the streets in order to regain some of the political ground his ruling Justice and Development Party has been loosing over bread and butter issues at home."

But this raises the fundamental question of why a country that is both an ally of the United States and Nato as well as an aspiring member of the European Union would brazenly declare its solidarity with a terrorist group outlawed by both. The answer lies in the increasingly Islamist nature of Erodgan's regime as well as the complicated relationship his party AKP has enjoyed with I.H.H., a suddenly infamous non-governmental organisation that acts more like a governmental one. Its evolution has been from a rogue and highly suspect charity into the advance guard of a new Turkish foreign policy.

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I have a soft spot for Oliver Stone, that Pablo Neruda of the steady-cam. Never has a left-wing filmmaker matched the skill with which Stone's political lessons back-fire on him. Apart from making a Turkish prison look realistically unpleasant, just how failed has his agitprop oeuvre actually been? Let's tabulate:

1. Stone wanted to create the cautionary tale of the Eighties, a glamorous financial thriller about overnight millionaires, steak tartare and limousine sex acts that would snuff Wall Street careers before their Series 7's got going. Instead, he created a primer on self-conscious decadence that's more quoted on the floor of the Exchange than Sun Tzu's The Art of War or Yeats' "The Second Coming." So unsuccessful was Stone at de-romanticizing insider trading that he's made a sequel to Wall Street. Its working title was The Misunderstood Collateralized Mortgage Broker.

2. Stone set out to depict John F. Kennedy as the victim of a hydra-headed government conspiracy that reached all the way to the top (or all the way to the top, as it was probably transcribed in the screenplay). An overlong, inter-spliced masterdud starring Kevin Costner in his first post-apocalyptic role, JFK is probably best remembered today as the template for a cute Seinfeld bit about spitting on Keith Hernandez. And JFK himself? Almost as anticlimactic in history as Barack Obama is in real-time.

3. No easy task to make Richard Nixon look pitiable and sympathetic, but in Stone's less-than-Shakespearean telling, the disgraced president was a paranoid mama's boy who rightly wondered why when he did something naughty, it was wrong, but when a well-coiffed Democrat from Massachusetts did it, it was Camelot.

4. "Daroosh is dead and I am king / Of everywhere and everything." Alexander the Great exaggerated, but as a bi-curious bleach-blonde Oedipal case with an army, he must have also wondered where he found the time to conquer half the known world. The great Macedonian's martial and imperial legacy remains in tact on The History Channel whose DVDs of his exploits are less remaindered than one catastrophic biopic.

I haven't seen Stone's hagiographies of Castro and Chavez (although the latter "documentary" has been ably demolished by Ron Radosh and Antonio Rumbos). But rest assured, now that he's celebrated them on celluloid, their regimes can't be long for this world. Nor is Stone deterred in his Alice-in-Wonderland efforts at counterintelligence filmmaking. Evidently unsatisfied with the creep of ultraconservative patriotic sentiment in the United States, he is subtly trying to foment a Tea Party coup by offering his take on the occluded history of the nation. According to Camilla Long at the Sunday Times:

His next task, the leviathan Secret History of America, tackles received versions of events in the last century, an extension, perhaps, of what he did in 1991’s JFK, when he suggested that the president’s assassination was in fact a high-level conspiracy. The 10-part documentary will address Stalin and Hitler “in context”, he says. “Hitler was a Frankenstein but there was also a Dr Frankenstein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support.”

He also seeks to put his atrocities in proportion: “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30m."

Why such a focus on the Holocaust then? “The Jewish domination of the media,” he says. “There’s a major lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington. Israel has f***** up United States foreign policy for years.”

A cheque to Palin Headquarters would have sufficed.

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When Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was assassinated in Dubai last January, and his cause of death later ascribed to foul play, it didn't take long before the British press found itself the beneficiary of a troika of good copy. First, al-Mabhouh's end had been delivered by the injection of a muscle relaxant and a suffocating pillow - so clearly the result of a "wet job" performed by well-trained agents of a foreign intelligence service. Second, that service was almost certainly the Israeli Mossad. Third, the movements of the dozen or so disguised suspects throughout the corridors of the murder scene - Dubai's posh Al Bustan Rotana Hotel - were captured on closed circuit television, which inspires pride and paranoia in equal measure in Londoners who are typically invigilated on this form of technology whenever they venture outside their own homes.

International condemnation of Israel's alleged action came swiftly, and perhaps nowhere more so than in the United Kingdom, especially after it was discovered that twelve of the assassins had used forged British passports to enter and leave Dubai. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown said at the time, "The British passport is an important document that has got to be held with care. A British passport is an important part of being British." Brown's foreign secretary David Miliband went a step further on March 23, calling the forgery "intolerable" in an umbrageous speech before parliament. He chose not to blame Israel explicitly for al-Mabhouh's murder, but he did state that Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency had concluded that the country must have been behind the passport forgeries. (Miliband's strongest evidence being the fact that all of the identities counterfeited were of people who hold dual citizenship in the UK and Israel). Milliband then made the decision to expel the Mossad chief resident in London.

More telling than the British government's muscular response was that of the correct-thinking British media, best exemplified by The Guardian. On March 24, the newspaper's editorial on the affair carried the ominous title, "Israel and Britain: The rule of law," and described Israel as "an arrogant nation that has overreached itself" -- not just in terms of identity theft, but also land theft. Indeed, it actually devoted more than half of its column to arraigning Israel for rejecting Washington's instructions on settlement build-up in East Jerusalem and refusing to even consider that territory as the site of a future Palestinian capital. If this seemed a non sequitur, then one clearly hadn't grasped a fundamental principle of The Guardian's moral outrage: So incensed was it by an allied nation's covert toying with sensitive British documents that it felt obliged to bring up other instances of Israel's misbehavior in recent months. "Mr Netanyahu has to face the consequences of an ideological stand over East Jerusalem which precludes any other. Here, as in the rest of the West Bank, where the number of Jewish settlers has more than doubled since the Oslo peace accords were signed in 1993, Israel is pre-empting the shape of the final agreement by creating facts on the ground. No deal with the Palestinians can be made in these conditions," The Guardian editorialized.

So it was quite expected that The Guardian would be similarly categorical when late last month the FBI arrested a 11-person Russian spy-ring in the United States, and federal prosecutors in their brief disclosed that one paid agent of Moscow, Tracey Foley, had also "travelled on a fraudulent British passport prepared for her by the SVR [Russian foreign intelligence service]." No doubt the liberal broadsheet would mention the arrogant abuse of trust that now exists between two former Cold War antagonists and devote the rest of its column inches to reviewing the evidence of Vladimir Putin's authoritarian tendencies in general, such as his nationalization of Russian television, his silencing of domestic dissidents through murder, arrest, or army conscription, and his imperialist certification of the north Georgian breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia as part of the Russian demesne. The KGB's assistance in the "umbrella murder" of Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov on the Waterloo Bridge in 1978 may have been a mite old to merit recapitulation, but surely there'd be a passing reference to the polonium poisoning of British citizen and ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko, which occurred in a Piccadilly sushi joint a mere four years ago?

Such was not the case.

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There is some justice in the fact that the renewed debate over confessed pedophile Roman Polanski, now a free man thanks to a pusillanimous Swiss legal system, should take place at exact the time in which the second bestselling book in the world is a feminist crime thriller trilogy whose main themes are violent misogyny and rape. It was the mere marketing whim of a Swedish publisher that The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was not titled Men Who Hate Women. And if being a brilliant filmmaker is all that stands in the way of one's responsibility to do hard time for raping a 13 year-old girl, then one wonders afresh at just what a moral and literary absence was created when Stieg Larsson died (or was killed) in 2004. His feminine hero Lisbeth Salander, now in strong competition with an all-male pantheon of super-sleuths ranging from Holmes to Poirot, did not have the benefit of being plied with wine and muscle relaxants before she was sodomized by a much older man in Larsson's debut fiction, a man upon whom she exacts a revenge that Samantha Geimer will likely not be able to exact upon the director of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown.

No doubt a sigh of relief has been exhaled from Hollywood to the Left Bank over Polanski's all-clear. (Has Woody Allen been reached for comment yet?) Moral relativism being what it is in the 21st century, crimes are only as umbrageous as a criminal's ability to thank the Academy. Meanwhile, an entire generation of male and female readers are being fed real lessons on human rights and sexual depredations by a dead Scandinavian Trotskyist who never got to cash in on his storytelling talents.

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[Note: The news of Christopher's illness reached me just as I was getting ready to publish this essay. I didn't feel it appropriate or necessary to alter what appears below in light of this unfortunate development. One breed of get-well benediction I've seen on the Internet instructs to think of him but not pray for him. That seems about right.]

What follows is not a review of Hitch-22  (see "Two-headed Hitchens" in the June 2010 issue of The New Criterion) or even a biographical sketch of its author, who has been chided in the press for writing a memoir that diminishes autobiography, is short on introspection and catharsis, and seems most at ease when name-dropping or mugging for posterity.  For someone so obviously self-conscious, the consensus runs, Christopher Hitchens is quite parsimonious in giving a piece of himself.  Even from laudatory reviews comes a mild clucking sound: It’s all well and good that you’re chums with Martin, Salman and Ian, but you haven’t really put yourself on the couch or “opened up,” have you? Rather hostile to psychoanalysis for a self-described “orthodox Freudian,” aren’t we?

Not long after Hitch-22's publication, a friend who's quite sympathetic to Christopher and was preparing to interview him on one of the early legs of his book tour rang me up and said that he was having some difficulty taking the full measure of the man from these pages. One of the most widely quoted and dissected public intellectuals on the planet is also one of the most inscrutable. Did I have any special insights as a former student and current friend and colleague? I did my best to oblige and the ensuing conversation led me to record some of my observations.

"One of these days I'm going to be found out" is what James Cameron (the radical journalist, not the overrated filmmaker) evidently repeated to himself every day of his career. The true jigsaw puzzle of the Hitch may never be solved, but herewith I offer my own attempt at reconstruction.

An opposing man.

The phrase “equal opportunity offender” carries with it the implication of indiscriminateness, or curmudgeonliness for its own sake. But this is self-evidently not the case with Christopher who chooses his foils carefully and does not stop assailing them even after he’s risked becoming redundant or worse: boring.  So what motivates his well-known hatred of enemies?  Though he disclaims the nexus of the personal and the political, it does in fact play a minor role for that part of his corpus which has earned him the most celebrity (and notoriety). 

Quite often the target of his invective has not just issued an assault on reason and decency in general but on Christopher in particular, or on those close to him, which amounts to the same thing. Like Nato, he interprets an attack on one to be an attack on all. “Friends are family to me,” he writes and means in Hitch-22. Don’t misunderstand me: he’d have still been very much against the Ayatollah Khomeini without a fatwah on Salman Rushdie, but he would not be as against him without it. How odd that accusations of “Islamophobia” or an atheism so “militant” it can only be seen as the inverse of evangelicalism were conspicuously absent when Christopher was still solidly on the Left and formulating sentences such as this one in 1989: “Yet Islam means surrender. The very word is like the echo of a forehead knocking repeatedly on the floor, while the buttocks are proffered to the empty, unfeeling sky in the most ancient gesture of submission and resignation.”   

For all the noises his liberal critics have made about his supposed rightward drift, it is actually remarkable to consider how intellectually consistent Christopher has been throughout the decades. The tell-tale mark of the ideologue is the code of omerta he adopts when it comes to failings and venalities of his own side.   Yet Christopher has been almost ostentatious in his repudiation of such a modus operandi, skewering Bill Clinton as a cynical triangulator in The Nation and testifying before Congress in the president’s impeachment proceedings, costing him a friendship with Sidney Blumenthal; then obituarizing Ronald Reagan as one of the dimmest and nastiest men ever to hold the presidency well after striking up a friendship with Paul Wolfowitz and many other neoconservatives. (One sometimes detects a note of careerist envy in much of the scorn heaped upon Christopher for his perceived heresies and betrayals: it’s almost as if the crux of the matter was his preternatural ability to still make a living in the aftermath of so many immolated bridges.) 

There’s another obstacle standing in the way of his smooth glide into the precincts of the intellectual Right. Despite his Daniel Deronda-like discovery of his own Jewishness, for which he provides a lengthy genealogical backstory, Christopher has never made his peace with the state of Israel and therefore will always be held in great suspicion by a goodly portion of the Commentary crowd. Many other neoconservatives have welcomed him to the fight while still upbraiding him for how long it took him to bid goodbye to all that. To understand what actuates Christopher’s independent-mindedness, one needs to know something about the radical milieu from which he emerged and still bears all the relevant scar tissue.

The International Socialists, which he joined in the late-1960s, was a Trotskyist group but Trotskyist in a deeply nostalgic fashion, being more the extenuation of a series of now-forgotten but then pivotal arguments that took place thirty years prior when Stalinism not so much an accomplished fact of history but a present danger to it. The so-called Left Opposition, which cohered in the Soviet Union in 1923 upon the publication of Trotsky’s pamphlet The New Course and was later internationalized upon the post-exile follow-up volume The Revolution Betrayed, clearly distinguished the fault-line in post-Leninist Bolshevism as being between, on the one hand, internationalists and those who feared the rise of a self-perpetuating class of Soviet bureaucrats and, on the other, isolationists and those who aspired to belong to such a class.  Trotskyism was most valuable in rooting out the fallacies that undergirded the isolationist-bureaucratist wing of the Party, exposing the Big Lie at the heart of Stalinism and offering an in-house explanation for what powered this Frankenstein system’s internal engine. One might consider Trotskyism in this light a kind of pre-Cold War Kremlinology waged by former Kremlin officials (not by accident did the American brain-trust of the movement, from Max Shachtman to James Burnham to Irving Kristol, later became prominent Cold Warriors).

Although its adherents would never have conceded this point at the time, Trotskyism was fundamentally an intellectual strategy rather than a political one. It won the war of ideas but lost the war for the Central Committee. It drew on vast reserves of pre-revolutionary virtues, with courage and clearheadedness being primary among them. According to Robert Conquest, whose seminal work The Great Terror was not coincidentally assigned reading in the International Socialists:
 

In fact, courage and clearheadedness are admirable in themselves. And if they do not rank high among the moral virtues, we can see in some of the Soviet oppositionists something rather better. It is true that those who did not confess, and were shot secretly, demonstrated not merely a higher courage, but a better sense of values. In them, however touched by the demands of Party and revolutionary loyalty, loyalty to the truth and the idea of a more humane regime prevailed. But even among those who confessed, we can often see the struggle between Party habits and the old impulses to justice which had originally, in many cases at least, been one of the motives for joining the Party.

With the advent of the New Left in the 1960s, Trotskyism was taken up, to varying degrees of seriousness and kitsch, as a banner of permanent opposition rather than permanent revolution. For the soixante-huitard disciples of the International Socialists, it represented a sophisticated and battle-hardened pedigree by which to simultaneously reject the polarities of Washington and Moscow and seek an “alternative” form of democratic socialism.  And if that alternative proved elusive, then at least an enlightened rebelliousness and critical disposition were part of the tool kit, which is why these disciples questioned authority and “broke” with the movement with greater ease than those of other self-styled Trotskyist sects (one thinks of Gerry Healy’s morbid cult in England, which managed to ensnare all the talent of the Redgrave family).

So with such a heterodox training, Christopher could take himself to Havana, see the contradiction between “spontaneous” popular opinion and the Castroite catechism, insult some low-level commissar, and come away thoroughly disenchanted with the Cuban Revolution. He could also glimpse and encourage seedlings of revolt in the nations of the Warsaw Pact, which eventually blossomed into full-scale gardens of resistance led by both a genuine proletariat, as in Poland, and by cultural revivalists with a fondness for Western cinema and rock music, as in Czechoslovakia. 

Yet even the best Trotskyist lens has got a cataract built right into it, which is to say that it often mistakes a tolerance of ethnic minorities and a sloganeered secularism and internationalism for the code signs of a worthy cause. Christopher made a major misjudgment in Mesopotamia in the 1970s, later discovering--and ferociously arguing--that in fact the Ba’ath Party of Iraq led by one Saddam Hussein was closer to an experiment in Arab National Socialism than anything else. He does his best in Hitch-22 to contextualize his early engagement with a latter-day foe as wrongheaded but for the right reasons (again, little has changed: the Kurds were the ethnic minority that looked as if it was going to thrive in Ba’aathist Iraq), citing Keynes‘ maxim that when facts change so should opinions. But Saddamism displayed its core rottenness years before the First Gulf War, which Christopher opposed out of a sense of anti-imperialism: “It had not occurred to me at the time, or not with full awareness, that if Saddam Hussein could have been so crazy as to go for broke, and to steal all of Kuwait when he could have had a lucrative chunk of it for the asking, why then he might be such a deranged megalomaniac that he could no longer discern even his own interests.”

This does count as self-criticism even if a thief is the least likely person to “go for broke” (a rare cliche that must have escaped Martin’s razor at the manuscript level).  But the point of this episode as a political miscalculation is that it was to be a fellow Trotskyist named Kanan Makiya who would persuade Christopher and much of the world of just how fundamentally reactionary Ba’athism was and how psychopathic its generalissimus. Not exactly a defeat for the epigones of Lev Davidovitch and just the sort of historical irony that causes those thistles of unconventional radicalism to cling to one's garb for a spell longer.

Indeed, one of the legacies of Trotskyism is its ability to turn its own temporal defeats into moral victories, a source for much of its romanticization by the intelligentsia, from Arthur Koestler to George Steiner to the Partisan Review masthead, whose reigning Gentile priestess Mary McCarthy gave her own anatomy of the movement’s dogged opposition in her classic essay about the Moscow Show Trials, “My Confession.”   Depending upon which tributary of this Volga of defiance one swam in, an at-odds mentality toward politics and culture was more or less pronounced. It was telling that the person who recruited Christopher to the International Socialists was Peter Sedgwick, later the elegant flame-tender of Victor Serge, the Russo-Belgian anarchist who helped the Bolsheviks seize power in 1917, then win the Russian Civil War against the fascistic Whites, before turning entirely against what he memorably called the “psychosis of absolute power” that soon overtook the new masters of the Kremlin.  Serge devoted the remainder of his life to combating that psychosis in his novels, essays and poems, all of which Christopher has at one point or another consumed and memorialized in print. And although Serge had his own falling out with the Old Man, despite finding the same exile’s respite in Cardenas’ Mexico, he offered the best description I know of Trotsky’s main debilitation as a leader, which also happens to be the foremost recommendation of his ghost to certain stubborn personalities:
 

I do not know if there were any formal deliberations on this subject among the leaders of the Left Opposition, but I do know that the question was discussed (end of 1925, beginning of 1926) and it was then that Trotsky deliberately refused power, out of respect for an unwritten law that forbade any recourse to military mutiny within a Socialist regime; for it was all too likely that power won in this way, even with the noblest intentions, would eventually finish in a military and police dictatorship, which was anti-Socialist by definition… Rarely has it been made more sharply obvious that the end, far from justifying the means, commands it own means, and that for the establishment of a Socialist democracy the old means of armed violence are inappropriate.

Such is the fortitude of the Cassandra, happier in noble defeat than in ignominious victory. Here, I would argue, you have the germ of Christopher’s limitlessly fought campaigns, from the bail-outs of Bosnia and Kosovo to the interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, combined with his unwillingness to sacrifice certain ethical precepts to them. If prohibitions on warrantless wiretapping, torture and censorship of the media constitute handicaps to the struggle against Al Qaeda and Islamofascism, then these are handicaps that must be borne. 

A final note on Serge. As it happens, those lines about Trotsky are taken from his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which I’m sure was one of several hovering archetypes for Christopher’s composition of Hitch-22. It certainly was for Dwight Macdonald when it came time to write his look back in hangdog radicalism. So fired was the great journalist by Serge’s in-between-ist positioning during one of the seismic events of modern history and impressed by his unstinting generosity for former comrades that he wound up titling his own Memoirs of a Revolutionist and only later experienced acute embarrassment at the implied comparison between a New York intellectual with an internationally hounded and imprisoned barricade combatant. Tragedy, as so often happens in Marxist circles, is run through the anxiety of influence and comes out looking like farce. 

Christopher very much resembles Macdonald as a literary journalist and polemicist: ill-at-ease in any “camp,” slyly attuned to his own reputation and the figure he cuts at salons and cocktail parties, and yet absolutely principled and hardheaded in his opinions.  Both men began their political journeys seeking an honorable tradition that they might renovate for application to contemporary crises. Is it mere coincidence that both once idolized an energetic and brilliant cadre of doomed Russians, then, when these gods failed, turned for sustenance to the Founding Fathers of the United States?

Parentage and parenthood.

If Hitch-22 contains a poignant section, then it must be Christopher’s moving portrait of his mother Yvonne, a woman clearly too good for her middle-class station and yet too self-sacrificing to have been born into any other:
 

What she wanted was the metropolis, with cocktail parties and theater trips and smart friends and witty conversations, such as she had once had as a young thing in prewar Liverpool, where she’d lived near Penny Lane and briefly known people like the madly gay Frank Hauser, later director of the Oxford Playhouse, and been introduced by a boyfriend to the work of the handsome Ulster poet Louise MacNeice, a contemporary of Auden and author of Autumn Journal and (her favorite) The Earth Compels. 

What she got was a failed clothing boutique, a domestic economy devoted to sending her children to public school and an austere and joyless husband, Eric Hitchens, known filially as “The Commander” because of his valiant service in Her Majesty’s Royal Navy during World War II.  Her premature decease took the form of a double-suicide with her lover in Athens: it was out of the fatal hotel room, to which Christopher was called to identify her body, that he first glimpsed the Acropolis. He hung around to file dispatches for The New Statesman on the right-wing junta then ruling Greece--either the first stage of grief for a devastated son or the last resort for a foreign correspondent quick to notice that his mother’s coroner had been an accomplice to state-perpetrated political murders.

Yvonne was “the exotic and the sunlit when I could easily have had a boyhood of stern and dutiful English gray” and her imprint was large and lasting, possibly even more so than the author realizes. Where her thwarted aspirations for a life of bohemian chic became reality for others you’ll have found Christopher rhapsodizing about the feminine ideal. He likes his women witty and beguiling (don’t we all) but with an added Wavian flourish that’s a hard trick to master unless one is to the manner born. Reading these reflections on what might have been for an obviously mirthful and curious woman,  I couldn’t help but think that Christopher’s longtime admiration for Jessica Mitford was a mite “overdetermined.” 

“Decca” was an endlessly entertaining English aristocrat with a talent for disappointing filial expectations in the grandest fashion.  A one-time niece-in-law to Churchill, she later married a Jew, moved to the West Coast -- where, unlike Yvonne, she stayed immune to the lures of New Age philosophy -- and penned a wildly satirical look at the American funeral industry, lending a social scientific cast to one of the darker comic themes of Waugh’s The Loved One. Mitford was also a radical through and through. When asked during her naturalization why she was choosing to become a citizen of the United States, an ordeal that Christopher recounts himself undergoing recently with a mixture of patriotic pride and nightmarish bureaucratic wrangling, it was only at the last moment that she declined to say that the Communist Party of the USA wouldn’t allow her membership otherwise. Who says women aren’t funny?

As for the Commander:
 

I had once thought that he’d helped me understand the Tory mentality, all the better to combat and repudiate it. And in that respect he was greatly if accidentally instructive. But over the longer stretch, I have come to realize that he taught me--without ever intending to--what it is to feel disappointed and betrayed by your “own” side. He had a certain idea of England, insular to a degree, and conservative for sure but not always, or not necessarily, reactionary. In this England, patient merit would take precedence over the insolence of office, and people who earned their money would be accorded more respect than people who had merely had it or “made” it. The antiquity and tranquility of the landscape and the coastline would likewise have earned their share of deference: whose who wanted to uproot or to “develop” an area would have to make a case for change rather than be permitted the glib and clever assumption that change was a good thing in itself.

This is a very handsome paragraph and contains a great deal of insight into postwar England, of which there has seldom been a more comprehending or sensitive chronicler. It also lends a great deal of relevance to what I hold as Christopher’s finest literary essay, a muscular and sober defense of Philip Larkin, which he wrote for New Left Review after the great poet, who’d been dead nearly a decade already, was subjected to a torrent of posthumous abuse for the casual bigotry, misogyny and scatological, boyo humor on display in his Selected Letters and Andrew Motion’s biography--all of the vices, in other words, that were least expressed in his creative oeuvre (the title of Christopher’s essay, taken from a letter Larkin wrote to Julian Barnes about his first encounter with Margaret Thatcher, was “Something About the Poems.”).  

So far from being ‘quintessentially English,’ Larkin was a wry and melancholy observer of postwar English anxieties and insecurities. Resentful of how his generation had been made to foot a historic bill that in low moments could seem unworthy of the cost (though he didn’t fight in World War II), wary of the entitlement and decadence that had come to define that generation’s offspring (not that he had any kids himself), Larkin was at least disciplined in his resentment and wariness where it mattered most. His poems were ironic and wistful and in places surprisingly heartfelt. Larkin was the eulogist for a bygone England, one that had been paved over and abandoned to ‘bleak high-risers’, M1 cafes, parking lots and ‘concrete and tyres’. How curmudgeonly could a man be who apostrophized the native rabbit population, which had been cruelly reduced by means of a manmade virus called Myxomatosis: ‘I'm glad I can't explain / Just in what jaws you were to suppurate.’?

Larkin was possessed of an uncommon self-awareness that preempted even the harshest animadversions leveled against him by a smug literary commissariat after he was long gone. To uncover his supposed nastiness--the mental barks and growls--they had to rummage through his correspondence, his diary. Christopher’s plaint was that the poet demanded a proper historical study, not self-righteous condemnation. It fell to the lot of the Left to see Larkin as emblematic of a little-investigated substratum of English sociology. E.P. Thompson gave us the The Making of the English Working Class; The Making of the English Petty Bourgeoisie was still forthcoming. The failure to comprehend the fundamental seriousness behind the Larkinesque generational posture is what ultimately caused that Left to experience cataclysmic shifts -- the Falklands War and the rise of Thatcher -- as bewildering shocks. A true student of Orwell, Christopher was never so cosmopolitan as to miss the idiosyncrasies and discreet charms of his own native land. 

The “and that will be England gone” Tory provincial is perfectly caught in an anecdote Christopher relays about his father, who was once asked by a superior to co-host a party for naval officers that hadn’t been invited to the livelier dos because they were all bores. The Commander’s withering and self-abnegating reply, which nearly brought Christopher to tears, was: “I believe I have already received my invitation, sir.”  Something toad-like squatted in him, too. 

It strikes me as distinctly odd that so many reviewers of Hitch-22 have claimed that this is a memoir devoid of any real feeling or emotional depth. True, there is a near-total absence of Christopher’s wives and children (two and three, respectively), with most of the love sonnets being written for famous contemporaries. As far as the domestic situation goes, what we get instead is a bit of self-reproach from an inattentive or absentee father -- parenthood being the least recommended course of action for a man who takes boredom to be a source of perspiring trepidation.  Why do diapers, soccer matches and ballet recitals when you can dodge nail-bombs in Belfast and read lines of Kipling to Borges in Buenos Aires?  

By his own estimation, Christopher spent the early part of fatherhood waiting around for his children to become interesting. A true Paineite democrat, he opposes all forms of hereditary succession and is leery of “heirs” to anything, including himself. Solidarity, courage and cleverness are earned qualities that subsume mere legacy. However, this imbalance has happily corrected itself, too, over time. A note of authentic pride is registered when Christopher’s son Alexander, who lives in London and is rightly considered here an expert on Islamic extremism, suggests that the two of them embark beyond the pacified confines of the Green Zone and travel to chaotic Baghdad during a pre-surge tour of Iraq. A few weeks ago I saw Christopher engage with Alex on a professional level and only will remark that redemption for absentee fatherhood has taken exactly the right form: Not only are Hitch’s children profoundly interesting to him, but he is to them.

The knight’s move. 

All of Christopher’s criticism proceeds from the premise that there is an occluded irony or paradox to every novelist or poet worth knowing about and that, once excavated, that irony or paradox will not only illuminate the body of work but also help explain why it’s been so strangely misconstrued by everyone else. The process is one of reconciliation between the yin of a writer’s politics with the yang of his creative output. Much as the dire straightjacket of political correctness has fettered this tradition in recent decades, it was actually the Left that most specialized in it. In Literature and Revolution, Trotsky noted of the Futurist Marxist poet Vladimir Mayakovsy that he was at his best as a poet exactly where he was at his worst as a Marxist. The Partisan Review gang, which turned this jujitsu style of critical inquiry into a high-minded metier, was famous for making an anti-Semitic royalist like T.S. Eliot both intelligible and relevant to Jewish socialists.  

Notwithstanding his own disdain for the author of “The Waste Land,” Christopher has similarly made a career out of muddling the spectrum and re-evaluating commonplace assumptions that adhere to both sides of it -- a practice he often calls the knight’s move of literary journalism. And it moves in two different directions, from left to right and from right to left. Christopher is as adept at mining a quotient of radicalism out of presumptive reactionaries as he is at exposing progressives for the core parsimony of sentiment or intellect that undergirds their reputations. Thus, P.G. Wodehouse may have been a sexless man-child besotted with the Edwardian idyll but he was also a masterful anatomist of the English class system, champion of the lower orders and underrated lampooner of fascism. Rudyard Kipling was less a jingoistic champion of Empire than its most skilled elegist and curator. Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series was not just a thrilling John Bull adventure tale set to the background of the Napoleonic Wars but also a curtain-raiser on Darwinian scientific modernity. Larkin was, as discussed, transcendent of his stature as the laureate of fish-grey, monkey-brown Blimpery. Meanwhile, Graham Greene was more influenced by the guilt complex of his adopted Catholicism than by the subversive promise of his communism. (Ditto Terry Eagleton.) Mother Teresa was no humanitarian at all, much less a saint, but rather a Balkan banshee of sanctimony and exploiter of Third World poverty. Isaiah Berlin was a charmer and a skilled judge of character but he was also a liberal hypocrite who cozied up to power, facilitated the Vietnam War and did nothing for modern philosophy except dine out on a lifelong misunderstanding of Marxism. 

A third, minor category of knight’s move criticism involves highlighting a justly celebrated literary or historical figure’s debilitations or natural handicaps which he then managed to surmount. The objective here is to unconventionally reaffirm a piece of conventional wisdom. So: George Orwell’s most admirable political triumph being the one over his own innate conservatism; Winston Churchill’s heroic grandeur persists in spite of so much revisionist history which shows him to have been a wartime fraud, an adventurist and an inventor-in-chief of his own trans-Atlantic legend. For all his camp drollery and sexual intrigue, Oscar Wilde was, in principle, a very serious Victorian socialist. 

Depending upon one’s taste, this mode of intellection indicates either a dazzling mind that can only think at 45-degree angles or a fetishist of counterintuition, in which case Christopher's weekly perch at Slate magazine seems foreordained.

Such, such were the joys. 

The current publishing season has seen fit to bestow on us two volumes with Christopher featured as a prominent character. In his most recent novel, The Pregnant Widow, Martin Amis has turned his best friend into his alter ego’s foster brother, the reader’s introduction to whom takes the following form: “As a pupil for many years in a British boarding school, Nicholas had naturally had his gay period. But there was a political will in Nicholas now; what politicians, at least, called steel.”  

Christopher has been exceedingly candid over the years about this aspect of his biography, now the cause for much tabloid ink in the British press because it involved his bedding of two of Thatcher’s future (male) staffers. In the memoir, this promiscuous heteroflexibility is treated in a slightly gorgeous fashion: “But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiosity and the faint, unrecognised apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any windows, in the heart of that grey city.”

OK, that’s Brideshead Revisited. Though there is no more striking reference point in these chapters, which take us from The Leys grammar school at Cambridge to Balliol College at Oxford, awash as they are with nostalgia for dreaming spires and ganymede indulgences. One might easily mistake our hero for Charles Ryder were it not for three pronounced differences. The first is that Christopher was just as comfortable being tossed into the clink for antiwar or civil rights agitation as he was being feted at swish dinners by the waistcoated element on campus who found his company charming in spite of his politics. The second is that in his youth he evidently had, then lost, a nervous stammer, the tell-tale Freudian tic worked up into lavish affectation by Anthony Blanche in Waugh’s lush bildungsroman (and it will have been Young Master Hitchens, if anyone at all, declaiming Eliot through a megaphone from a dormitory window). The third is that Christopher has not yet converted to Roman Catholicism at someone else’s deathbed. That contingency is a remote one. 

But there certainly is a welter of “literature” on British public school reminiscences and, whether by accident or design, life has done an admirable job of imitating art here. To begin with, forbidden love first presents itself as a rescuing friendship, with due allowances made for the metaphysical:
 

This duality in the life and mind of The Leys was beautifully captured for me by an incident in my first year. I was cornered in some chilly recreation room by a would-be bully named E.A.M. Smith, a brainless and cruel lad a year or so my senior. This tough and tasty dunce excelled at games and was a member of a highly exclusive Christian crackpot sect named the Glanton Brethren, which in its own disordered mind constituted an elect of god’s anointed. “Hitchens is being gassy,” he said, using the school’s argot for people like me who talked too much. “The cure for being gassy is a bit of a beating.” I wasn’t completely sure that he couldn’t deliver on this threat, and the uncertainty must have shown on my features because suddenly a voice cut in: “Oh, please, don’t give a damn about Smith.” The moron’s grin began to fade and the few who would probably have sided with him lost interest at once. My rescuer was a tall, thin boy with a certain presence to him. Who was this chap, who could make a muscular thug shrivel? His name, it turned out, was Michael Prest. He was in the next “house” to me but was a home boarder because his father was an economics don at Jesus College. I recognized him without knowing his name because every morning in chapel, when the rest of us bent forward at the call to pray, he remained sitting up and unbowed. There was nothing the prefects and teachers could do about this: the law said we had to be in chapel every day but they couldn’t force us to pray on top of that, or even compel us to pretend to do so. I admired this stand without emulating it. Within a few days I had made a new and fast friend and then one morning, as everyone else but Michael crashed lazily forward in their pews, I took a deep breath and held myself upright. It felt very lonely for a moment but soon there was nothing to it. I started bringing books to read during the sermons and the prayers, in order to improve the shining hour. R.H. Tawney on Religion and the Rise of Capitalism was, I remember, an early choice.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. You’ll have guessed what happens with Prest from this leading introduction, which neatly touches upon the twin pillars of a notorious education system -- homoeroticism and sadomasochism -- that were previously mapped by two of its most distinguished graduates, Cyril Connolly and George Orwell, also self-conscious referents for the author of the present volume. 

Connolly and Orwell were, in fact, classmates together at St. Cyprian’s in East Sussex and then a year removed from each other at Eton, that easy-bake oven of the upper crust and -- as the British rags also cyclically like to remind us -- alma mater of the current Tory prime minister and the current Tory mayor of London.  Both writers bathed their pedagogical period in great retrospective importance, presenting the privileged circuit of cruelty, repression and corporal punishment as key to understanding Britain’s ruling class--and in some cases, European tyrants.  In his excellent book on Orwell, Christopher credits the author of 1984 with drawing from these formative experiences all of the relevant insights one would need to know about a totalitarian country without ever having traveled to one. (What price an audience with Stalin’s Red Court when one could be daily terrorized by Mrs. Wilkes, the Headmaster’s wife at St. Cyprian’s?)  For Connolly, the lasting effects of a public school education were couched as adult sensitivities and maladjustments. In his autobiography, Enemies of Promise, he observes:  “Were I to deduce any system from my feelings on leaving Eton, it might be called The Theory of Permanent Adolescence. It is the theory that the experiences undergone by boys at the great public schools, their glories and disappointments, are so intense as to dominate their lives and to arrest their development. From these it results that the greater part of the ruling class remains adolescent, school-minded, self-conscious, cowardly, sentimental, and in the last analysis homosexual.” 

Cowardice and sentimentality never had a fighting chance with Christopher, the homosexuality was fleeting, and only the world-play and dirty limerick invention with Martin -- much reconstituted in this memoir and derided as sophomoric by mainly female critics -- rank in terms of any lingering symptoms of arrested development.  But “bawdy,” as it was loftily known to the genius syndicate of Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and Robert Conquest, is harder than it looks and requires some technical and linguistic versatility. For example,
 

When Gaugin was visiting Figi
He remarked, ‘Things are different here, e.g.,
While Tahitian skin calls for tan spread on thin,
You can splotch it on here with a squeegee.’

Or: 
 

There was a lockmaker of Lyme,
Whose balls had a very sweet chime,
And when he set his cock
For seven o’clock,
It always got up dead on time.

If this be the verse, then in some sense every major English poet of the last century was a permanent adolescent. (The person responsible for the above selections helped bring down the humorless Soviet Union.)  Auden, who exhibited all of the symptoms of Connolly's diagnosed condition, favorably reviewed Enemies of Promise for The New Republic when it appeared in 1938, and it’s perhaps worth noting that his reliquary of doggerel wound up in the hands of Tom Driberg, another public schoolboy and legendary queen whom Christopher once put in touch with Kingsley, then editing the Oxford English Book of Light Verse and in need of good material. The meeting that resulted  -- which included the company of Christopher and Martin -- is somewhat addressed in Hitch-22 but more hilariously recounted in Kingsley’s own famously unreliable Memoirs. At all events, the following contribution from the author of “Lay your sleeping head, my love” did  not make the cut for the consequent anthology, although it no doubt proved useful to Christopher whilst touring Baghdad in the 70‘s with an especially camp gay minder for the Ba’ath Party:
 

The Anglican dean of Hong Kong
Had a prick that was nine inches long;
He thought that the waiters
Were admiring his gaiters
When he went to the loo.
He was wrong.

There is a slightly performative aspect to Christopher’s recollections of sexual subversiveness, almost as if the permanent adolescent can only be judged in hindsight to have been parent to the political animal that later developed. The ensuing affair with Prest, for instance, is more redolent of platonic camaraderie --Christopher’s first male crush stood up for him, then stood with him on public platforms -- than it is of scandalized experimentation. A later same-sex affair resulted in his temporary suspension from The Leys, though this is told matter-of-factly. The madeleine effect Christopher seems to be aiming for here is the enormous titillation of posterity: “If you are going to sleep with Thatcher’s future ministers and toy with a future president’s lesbian girlfriend, in other words, you will not be able to savor it fully at the time and will have to content yourself with recollecting it in some kind of tranquility.” 

I intend no disrespect when I say that the true object of Christopher’s affection, and the wellspring of his nostalgia, is the surplus value of experience. His favorite Jamesian admonition is, “Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to,” which he’d be the first to tell you contains oceans of recondite self-denial coming from the virginal author of The Ambassadors. One never can know what ordeal or dust-up or test-drive might later prove useful for a Washington cocktail party or Hay-on-Wye Festival. Or, for that matter, the learned literary essay. Stolen handjobs on the quadrangles may not be the necessary preconditions for writing knowingly about Proust, Wilde, Saki, Auden, Waugh, Maugham and Vidal, but for the Hitch, they seemed to have done the trick. 

Another well-exercised and borrowed mantra is, “Try everything once except incest and Scottish dancing.” That which cannot be intuited or theorized must be discovered at first-hand, so to speak. Even as a Marxist hung up on “teleological hubris,” Christopher held old-fashioned English empiricism and go-see-for-yourself-ism in high forensic esteem; as a journalist he’d have been ill-served without it. It also explains why he boasts of having been the only foreign correspondent to travel to all three Axis of Evil countries and of having been waterboarded for the lurid enjoyment of Vanity Fair’s readership. The epigram that adorns Hitch-22 -- Caute, or “cautiously,” taken from Spinoza’s signet ring -- is therefore the most disingenuous word in the book. Christopher has never done anything cautiously.

The double agent.

Connolly’s analysis was published, and the raw data for it compiled, decades before Britain’s postwar reforms opened the public school system and Oxbridge academy to increasing numbers of middle-class students. What became known as the scholarship-or-nothing fork in the education system was part of a general cultural upheaval in the Fifties (whose attendant lowering of academic standards was well-satirized in Lucky Jim) and reached vertiginous degrees with the onset of “The Sixties.” So how might Connolly’s theory be updated to take into account these demographic changes?

What would be the definitional imprint of the bright young thing with radical leanings who is admitted into this idyll of depravity and elitism but never allowed to forget the fact that he doesn't truly belong there?  Well, he’ll have had the unnatural advantage of seeing future statesmen, captains of industry and cultural celebrities in their larval stages of brilliance or absurdity, making him accustomed to the various “types” that he'll encounter when it comes time to assess who’s running the country.  His own tincture of privilege will have instilled a confidence in him uncommon to the Left-wing defender of the underdog, whose outsider status can breed anxiety or insecurity that often transforms into a full-blown personality disorder. Such a person, in other words, may very well feel like a bit of a traitor or double agent to his own life, a sensibility that Christopher clearly discerns in himself and that furnishes both the title and leitmotif of Hitch-22.  

“The most intense wars are civil wars,” he writes, “just as the most vivid and rending personal conflicts are internal ones, and what I hope to do now is give some idea of what it is like to fight on two fronts at once, to try and keep opposing ideas alive in the same mind, even occasionally to show two faces at the same time.”  This penchant for having it both ways, or keeping two sets of accounts, may seem a pose to Christopher’s more literal-minded and humorless detractors, but I assure you it is not. He persists in the belief -- very English and very Oxbridge -- that a debate has not been won until the opposing view has been stated at its highest. The most generous compliment he can pay to Koestler is to indicate how Darkness at Noon actually turned some people into Communists for precisely this reason.

But double book-keeping can sometimes prove exhausting, both for the accountant as well as the customer. A few summers ago, I heard Christopher argue vigorously in favor of the execution of Saddam Hussein. He stated his case methodically and as not being in direct contravention of his opposition to capital punishment but rather a continuation of the Iraq war policy. The Republic of Fear would never even begin to recover psychologically until its architect was destroyed, putting his victims in no doubt as to his possible return. But what of the Kurdish position against Saddam’s murder founded on socialist principle and opposed to petty revenge-taking or political expediency? Or your hero Jefferson’s opposition to the beheading of Marie Antoinette? Admirable but not persuasive in light of how dire post-Saddam Iraq had shown itself to be; not least of what was demanded (and this was before the “surge”) was a symbolic severance with totalitarian past. The fitting historic analogy was with the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family at Ekaterinberg, which the Bolsheviks knew in the midst of the Russian Civil War would mark the point of no return for the October Revolution.  He argued all this as though completely committed to it in principle. Then, a month or so later, there appeared in Slate his piece... against the execution of Saddam for the very reasons he’d found wanting earlier.  He’d weighed both sides of the matter equally before arriving at the more morally satisfying. Whatever this is, it is not the style of a pot-shot polemicist. 

Posted by Michael Weiss at 3:52 PM |Permalink | TrackBacks (0) |

New @ TNC:

A few years ago, the former vice president of the United States had an easy run of life. The unbelievable campaign mystique of a Naomi Wolf-minted "alpha male" had worn off thanks to nearly a decade of public displays of self-pity for a job that never came through and Al Gore had emerged as a vulnerable faun of dashed beta ambition. More than that, he was the lumbering nerd protector of Gaia with his immensely popular documentary film about how cork-screw lightbulbs were all that stood between humankind and an underwater Logan's Run of dystopian futurity. Often came the clucking claim that if only this man had been elected president in 2000, we'd have had our holiday from history and then phone in sick for a spell longer. Al Qaeda would be the name of a Mediterranean tapas bar in Nolita, Baghdad would still be a safe place to fly a kite at the weekend, and instead of The Hills, all the young people would be watching episodes of a serialized Swann's Way on MTV.

Now look: After forty years of uncomfortable physical chemistry, Al and Tipper have split, leaving the old boy free to partake of as much porn and video gaming as heart desires. The vulnerable faun has given way to the ravenous satyr, accused of having sexually molesting a female masseuse, whose patchy tale of prurience amid the bath towels and unguents is a lot less revealing that the reaction of so-called liberals to an accusation of brutish misconduct by their hero.

Tom Scocca at Slate has trolled through the comments section of correct-thinking call-to-prayer tower Talking Points Memo and found the progressive response to Gore's naughtiness wanting. Here are the comments he plucked for his blog:

alyoshakaramazov She was treated like that and then remained ALONE in the room with a violent man in order to finish the massage? Sounds like a load of horse shit. Check if the woman is in sudden need of lots of cash.

mans_best_friend So after two years of trying to squeeze Gore for money she decides to make a statement to the police? Bit of an odor coming from this

HusseinTenaX Let me just add here: Al Gore is a man of importance and power and you can't tell me he doesn't have his own bunch of political groupies who would give it up to him in a second. In other words, he doesn't have to fight some 54 year old masseuse to get laid. I know at least 3 women who have such crushes on him, they'd fight each other for the chance.

rb6 The biggest problem is the delay in reaching out to the police. It makes it virtually impossible to corroborate aspects of the story -- for instance, at one point there might have been videotape that validated the timing, when she arrived and when she left, and even her appearance or demeanor as she was leaving. That surely must have been taped over by now. Likewise, the hotel staff might have noticed if she seemed upset or disheveled as she left but that kind of evidence probably won't count for much if it isn't developed four years after the event.

xargaw Another media whore looking for face time on some sleazy tabloid show.

She should have left. She should have reported it to the police right away. She's a whore. She's an ugly old whore, and someone as important as Al Gore wouldn't need to have sex with her. She's looking for money. She's looking for attention.

These are the readers of a liberal website? Again: I have no idea what happened. And neither do any of these people.

Yeah, but when has that stopped DNC faithful from defending one of their own from charges of sexual intimidation or worse? Now we know what we'd been deprived of all this time: A more robotic continuation of the Clinton years.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 7:24 AM |Permalink | TrackBacks (0) |

New @ New Criterion:

I cannot say if Peter Beinart's essay in the New York Review of Books has yet become a bar mitzvah present in certain precincts of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. But I do know of an in-joke that's developed in certain cabalistic political circles which have, for predictable reasons, found that polemic on the supposed failure of the American Jewish establishment wanting in several key respects. The joke takes the form of an email valedictory: "On behalf of all American Jews, I have to go to the bathroom." "On behalf of all American Jews, I'm flying to Uzbekistan this week." "On behalf of all American Jews, I'm converting to Catholicism."

There may be such a thing as a Jewish establishment in this country, and it may be that it is terminally out of touch with the youthful liberal zeitgeist, or suffering from institutional sclerosis, or outfitted with the types of people who think that any criticism of Israel is one more paving stone on the road to a 21st-century Kristallnacht. But the idea--lampooned in that valedictory because exampled in Beinart's essay--that all American Jews are responsible for the fate of a network of Jewish organizations, much less an entire "establishment," is as presumptuous and absurd as claiming that all Anglo-Saxons are responsible for the MetroNorth arrivals and departures schedule at Darien, Connecticut.

The Anti-Defamation League is only now growing scandalized by the fact that 1.5 million Armenians were systematically murdered by Ottoman Turks at the close of the First World War. How nice of it to do so. But I and others were saying--at a time when Israeli-Turkish relations were a lot friendlier than they are now--that this dire event did in fact occur and that Abraham Foxman had no right to deny it did on the basis of cynical self-interest or geopolitical calculation. It cost me nothing personally, professionally or metaphysically to make this argument loudly in public--an indication perhaps that some blacklists and conspiracies are better organized than others--and even if it had I should not have claimed to be speaking "on behalf" of anyone except myself.

I bring this up because the charge of Jewish collective responsibility is an inherently fatuous one and yet it is persistent in an era when a 24-hour news cycle is never complete without addressing some real or perceived misbehavior by the state of Israel. In a rather bizarre editorial in the Moscow Times, Russian-American economist Alexei Bayer invokes it in the language of missed opportunities after the May 31 raid of the Mavi Marmara off the coast of Gaza:

It was mostly forwarded mass mailings in English and Russian, explaining why the flotilla was a terrorist provocation, how the blockade runners were al-Qaida and how Israeli soldiers showed exemplary restraint while protecting Israel's right to exist. As an experiment, I wanted to see whether there was any nuanced view of the situation or sympathy for 1.5 million Palestinians being collectively punished by Israeli actions. Needless to say, I found none.

I'd quite like to know what Bayer's definition of a "nuanced view" of that situation is. Needless to say, none is forthcoming because the Free Gaza flotilla is not his real subject. His real subject is a long history of barbarism for which he thinks Russian Jews have quite a lot to apologize for:

But whether this fact [that Jews should be blamed for Bolshevik crimes] is de-emphasized, as it was during the Soviet era, or savored as it is now by Russian anti-Semites, it remains true that Leon Trotsky, Yakov Sverdlov, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and so many early Bolsheviks who helped Lenin take power in 1917 and ran his repressive regime were Jewish. And so were some of the bloodiest figures in the political police, such as Yakov Yurovsky, who carried out the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his family; Rozalia Zamlyachka, under whose political command tens of thousands of White Army officers were drowned in Crimea; and Genrikh Yagoda, the odious head of Stalin's NKVD in the 1930s.

Making lists of Jews is usually not a healthy indication of where a line of argument is headed, but under the present historical circumstances it is anachronistic as well as pointless. One of the central tenets of Bolshevism was the abolition of ethnicity, race and religious affiliation, all of which Russian Czarism exploited to masterful, and ultimately self-destructive, ends in the late 19th century. Imperial quotas on education and professional aspirations and not infrequent pogroms backed by the Kremlin led so many poor inhabitants of the Pale of Settlement to abandon Moses for Marx, move to the big cities, and join the ranks of the radical intelligentsia in the first place. (In this sense, it was not European capitalism but great Russian chauvinism that "emancipated" so many Jews from Judaism, a strange and unexpected fulfilment of one of the old Rhinelander's more controversial prophecies.) But none of the men cited above would have in any way subscribed to any tribal grouping or claimed to be acting on precepts derived from the Old Testament. When they did befall the crude cudgel of Stalinist anti-Semitism, they did not defend themselves as Jews but as Marxists and revolutionaries betrayed by a counter-revolutionary dictatorship. In other words, the tyranny of Russian Communism proceeds quite nicely without the assumption of the God of Abraham.

There is something distinctly creepy about even having to point this out. Bayer's paragraph reminds one of Solzhenitsyn's less distinguished later writings about the true "origins" of Leninism as well as more recent effusions, to which he alludes, from the fascist Nashi element of contemporary Moscow. That political phenomenon isn't so much backed as it is originated by Putin's Kremlin.

But coming from a self-described liberal, the charge of Jewish collective responsibility is no more responsible. Not least of the problems with Bayer's category mistake is that it is hostage to 20th-century geography. What was a Russian Jew in a period that saw Russian borders change dramatically overnight thanks to a new form of imperialism? Doubtless there are plenty of Talmudic scholars alive in Warsaw and Tallinn who, heeding Bayer's call, ought to feel compelled to atone for the fact that their countries were invaded and annexed by Jewish Bolsheviks. And how easily one can imagine the Polish-born Abraham Heschel wiping his brow after marching arm-in-arm with Martin Luther King, Jr. and thinking, "Finally, I can be forgiven for Trotsky!"

Even taking Bayer's ostensibly progressive premise as legitimate, he's still wrong:

While Germany and Russia have much to prove to the world, so do Russian Jews. We could have shown that Bolshevik criminals were not an outgrowth of the Russian Jewry by embracing Western pluralism, democracy and tolerance in the United States and Israel, the two liberal democratic countries where we ended up. Instead, we as a group have retained an us-against-them mentality and have continued to live by the famous Stalin-era dictum: "If the enemy doesn't give up, he must be destroyed." All we have done is move from the extreme left to the extreme right of the political spectrum. In Israel, we have created the Yisrael Beitenu party led by Avigdor Lieberman, the current Israeli foreign minister and, arguably, the most radical right-wing figure to hold this post in a Western country since World War II. In the United States, where 85 percent to 90 percent of us invariably vote Republican, it is not the Republican Party that is the problem but the almost North Korean unanimity. We have been put to the test by democracy, and we seem to have failed it.

Avigdor Lieberman is one of the poorest exports from Moldova, but his electoral success is rooted in the fact that his party formerly campaigned on a platform of introducing civil marriage legislation to the Knesset. At present, Russian immigrants to Israel are unable to marry due to draconian religious laws governing matrimony. Indeed, here's another meretricious instance of forcing collective responsibility onto individuals: If you were born in the Soviet Union and not subject to the rites and rituals of ultra-Orthodox tradition (which would have been next to impossible), you are deemed "insufficiently Jewish" by much of the Israeli rabbinate and are forced to go to Cyprus or some other foreign locale to wed the person you love and have that union considered legally binding in Israel. I said Lieberman's party was formerly committed to changing all this; that's because as a coalition partner with the ultra-Orthodox Shas party--source of the Joe Biden/east Jerusalem housing migraine that Benjamin Netanyahu awoke to a few months ago--he has lately found that campaign promise expendable. How long, then, before his single-issue Russian constituency concludes the same about him?

The pettifogging dynamics of Israeli politics to one side, who will seriously maintain that post-Soviet Jewry is locked in a state of ideological paralysis? Here's another list of names that might interest Alexei Bayer: Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Gary Kasparov, Boris Nemtsov, all of whom would have found themselves on the wrong side of the Nuremberg Laws and Stalin's postwar paranoia, and yet none of whom can ever be accused of having failed to "embrace Western pluralism": they've just tried to embrace it in Russia itself, a far more forbidding political terrain for dissent or permanent opposition than either the United States or Israel will ever be.

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

New @ New Criterion:

A new genre of the essay is coalescing. It took a single installment to signal the ingathering, but that's the the way it is with new genres--the ideal example illuminates the category retrospectively. This is the genre of Leftist Forsakenism. Here's how it works.

A well-respected leftist intellectual of the hardheaded anti-totalitarian stripe confronts a newly celebrated victim of totalitarianism. The first ought to have a natural affinity for the second on the basis of shared convictions about free expression, secularism, women's emancipation, scientific inquiry and the philosophical legacy of the Enlightenment. The intellectual begins to digest the collected writings of the victim, feeling the dull ache of recognition for the depredations of a reactionary ideology commingled with a disturbing sense of alienation from the prey. The victim has surely been through hell but has perhaps failed to do justice to the persecutors. Might the victim be mistaking experience for historical analysis? Also -- and this is the insect of insecurity buzzing around the intellectual's psyche -- isn't the victim putting the rest of us in harm's way by speaking so candidly about a common enemy, which abides not by the rules of discourse and argumentation but by a psychotic determinism? The intellectual grows very unsettled indeed and treats the victim in a very predictable fashion.

Some light praise, more accurately described as condescension, is offered for undeniably self-evident traits such as bravery, "articulateness," charisma, pleasantness of demeanor or countenance. Then, as if to toss a penny into the fountain of intellectual good faith, the intellectual proceeds to summarize the victim's terrifying ordeal and to offer some sympathy for its having had to be gone through by such an obviously intelligent person. But, alas, for such an obviously intelligent person, the victim has succumbed to the zealotry of opposition and made many blunders in the newfound role of Cassandra, not least of which is allying with too many "conservative" elements. Finally, the intellectual casts down the victim -- often with the unrionic use of the word "ironically" -- as just the sort of totalitarian from which the victim has managed to escape.

If this sounds a wearying process, just imagine yourself to be Arthur Koestler in 1948.

As if it hadn't been enough to suffer a Francoist prison spell in Malaga, each night hearing the torture and execution of his fellow anti-fascists in adjoining cells and wondering when his turn would come, the Hungarian genius behind Darkness at Noon had to then suffer Simone de Beauvoir: "He hate the Communists so fanatically that he's able to team up with the worst reactionaries, write for conservative journals and approve right-wing policies while continuing to hobnob with the people at Partisan Review. This is exactly the attitude we denounce in Le Temps Modernes."

That the over-esteemed author of The Second Sex once, out of both pity and exhaustion, had sex with Koestler may have added to her jaded impression. But only slightly: Beauvoir would go on to write a farcically misinformed account of the Chinese Revolution that portrayed Maoism as just the sort of "third way" Communism that both she and her partner Jean-Paul Sartre had been seeking after Stalinism--exactly the attitude they denounced in Partisan Review. Indeed, among the backhanded compliments that the Left has traditionally offered its prodigal sons or heretics is the sneering accusation that they've abandoned one side in a world-historical struggle for the other, thinking themselves now aligned with the victors. By this logic, the subject of an essay belonging to the Leftist Forsakenist school is motivated not so much by sincerity of thought as he is by convenience and a kind of crowd-pleasing moral cowardice.

With Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the problem is slightly different in substance but almost exactly the same in disingenuous style.

Ian Buruma and Timothy Garton Ash have assailed this Somali apostate from Islam for being an "Enlightenment fundamentalist," Buruma's witless coinage since co-opted and abandoned by Garton Ash, who has reasonably climbed down a bit from his unreasonable platform of execration. As I've written before, if this term carried any meaning at all to being with, then we would not have expected to find Hirsi Ali, in her second memoir Infidel, rhapsodizing about the architectural majesty of the Golden Mosque in Saudi Arabi and the solemn beauty of the foot-bathing ritual of its attendants. A fundamentalist is never so generous: the equivalent would be for Osama bin Laden to write somewhere that the fossil record has its charms, too.

Now comes Nicholas Kristof in a dud New York Times critique of Hirsi Ali's latest memoir Nomad, dismissing her as a mere "provocateur," a term which implies that her motive is incitement rather than persuasion. Her crime, according to a columnist who has for years been trying to draw his readers' attention to a Koranically rationalized program of extermination waged by Arab Muslims against black Muslims in Sudan, is of "denounc[ing] Islam with a ferocity that I find strident, potentially feeding religious bigotry."

This is a clause that I find senseless, potentially feeding illiteracy. One can no more be a bigot of a religion than one can be a racist against a Pepsi can. Kristof offers no evidence that Hirsi Ali does not like Muslims or holds them, either en masse or individually, in any kind of suspicion because no evidence for this assertion anywhere exists. What she doesn't like is the theology to which Muslims purport to subscribe often in a state of semi-ignorance or obliviousness as to the chapter-and-verse moral and intellectual realities of that theology's core texts. The proof of this proposition -- that most Muslims are not especially learned or adept exegetes of their own faith -- is in Hirsi Ali herself, an ex-member of the Muslim Brotherhood and former champion of the Salman Rushdie fatweh who only ever bothered to master those texts after she abandoned Islam altogether. By daring to uncover something about her prior faith, it was she who became the target of a lethal bigotry against women who read and hold their own opinions. Hirsi Ali must now travel with a 24-hour security detail and yet she comfortably maintains that she's no more or less likely to befall a jihadist attack than any other unguarded inhabitant of the West. This is provocative only in its staggering modesty.

Kristof's Lite-FM put-down is nevertheless more palatable than those of Buruma or Garton Ash, both of whom were nastier in their tones and imputations. Buruma accused Hirsi Ali of employing a ghost writer, a claim for which he offered no substantiation though which did imply that that an African women who speaks in perfectly formed English sentences in public venues can't manage to record her own life in print. Garton Ash wrote that if she more resembled Rosie O'Donnell and less resembled a runway model, her books would not become bestsellers and she'd find herself less of an international celebrity. (This is the misogyny of the anti-misogynists, to borrow and refashion Pascal Bruckner's great phrase for the leftist forsakenist's vilification of Hirsi Ali.)

It's almost cruel to find fault Kristof when he so obviously claims the universality of cuddliness as his political worldview. What couch-tripping Furies haunt the janjaweed of Sudan who can muster the strength to observe:

"I am feeble in faith because Allah is full of misogyny," Hirsi Ali thinks to herself. "I am feeble in faith because faith in Allah has reduced you to a terrified old woman -- because I don't want to be like you." What she says aloud is: "When I die I will rot." (For my part, I couldn't help thinking that perhaps Hirsi Ali's family is dysfunctional simply because its members never learned to bite their tongues and just say to one another: "I love you.")

Would those three simple words have been uttered before, during or after Hirsi Ali's mother looked on approvingly as her young daughter's clitoris was abraded by a rock wielded by her own grandmother?

Posted by Michael Weiss at 8:14 AM |Permalink | TrackBacks (0) |

New @ NYDN:

The wisdom of Israel's raid of the Turkish ship in the "Free Gaza" convoy last week is still being vigorously debated, nowhere more than in Israel itself. However, there's a certain lexicon failure in the way in which the international media have elected to characterize the passengers onboard the Mavi Marmara as "humanitarians" and "pro-Palestinian activists."

Humanitarians don't stick knives into other people - and to be in favor of Palestinian statehood is axiomatically to be opposed to Hamas. The grim retinue of this vessel failed both tests.

The Mavi Marmara was purchased from the Istanbul city government by the Turkish group Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief (IHH), which claims to be a human rights outfit but has stood accused of being a recruitment center and financial clearinghouse for global jihadism.

The IHH was formed in 1992 and formally registered as a charity in Istanbul in 1995. Its ostensible purpose was to provide food and aid to orphans, build mosques and monitor human rights abuses in Muslim communities. IHH is the Anatolian affiliate of the larger, Saudi-based umbrella organization known as the Union of Good. The Union of Good, according to the U.S. Treasury Department, is a siphon for Hamas money that distributes it via a "web of charitable organizations." The IHH, according to former Treasury Department official Jonathan Schanzer, is one of these.

In 1996, it was identified by the CIA in a later declassified report titled, "International Islamic NGOs and Links to Terrorism," as maintaining connections to Islamist groups in both Iran and Algeria and of being one of fifteen NGOs sponsoring terrorist activities in Bosnia. A year later, Turkish police raided IHH's headquarters in Istanbul and arrested a number of its top men on suspicion of terrorist activity and uncovered guns, explosives, bomb-making instructions and a "jihadist flag." The judgment of the Turkish authorities following an investigation was that the "detained members of IHH were going to fight in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya."

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Posted by Michael Weiss at 10:18 AM |Permalink | TrackBacks (0) |

New @ Slate:

iven the deadly confrontation off the coast of Gaza, the recent froideur in U.S.-Israeli relations, Iran's defiant pursuit of a nuclear weapon, not to mention two ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the broader fight against al-Qaida, it's perhaps forgivable that the biggest news story to emerge from the Middle East in years has been eclipsed. But no one can accuse the Palestinian prime minister of neglecting to call attention to himself.

Since his appointment as prime minister of the Palestinian National Authority in 2007, following the Fatah-Hamas civil war that led to Hamas' takeover of Gaza, Salam Fayyad has completely transformed the West Bank from an immiserated backwater into a thriving, integrated society. Ramallah, the capital, where not too long ago Yasser Arafat's compound was encircled by IDF tanks, now resembles an embryonic Tel Aviv, featuring state-of-the-art office buildings, expensive boutiques and shopping malls, and ads for imported luxury goods. The casbahs of Nablus, once the cynosure for the second intifada, are busier than ever, and one can even mark the improved quality of life by the criminal indicators: This year Nablus saw its first arrest for drunken driving. Better that than suicide bombings.

Urban revivification is impressive under normal circumstances, but in the face of a global recession and a regional occupation, it's extraordinary. The West Bank's economy grew by 8.5 percent in 2009 and is expected to grow an additional 5 percent to 7 percent this year. Meanwhile, the Palestinian security forces have been refashioned, thanks largely to U.S. training, from a ragtag assortment of ideologically promiscuous mercenaries into a professionalized police corps whose effectiveness at keeping the peace is proved by Israel's willingness to dismantle roadblocks and checkpoints.

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

New @ Just Journalism:

London, 27 May 2010 - The UK broadsheet newspapers have ignored the major economic and security advances in the West Bank under Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, surely one of the most newsworthy topics to emerge from the contemporary Middle East. A report published today by Just Journalism contrasts this blinkered approach by British journalists with the keen interest shown by major US publications in the considerable progress made over the last two and a half years.

The report, entitled, "Salam Fayyad and the drive towards Palestinian statehood" is a comprehensive review of relevant coverage over nine months in the five UK broadsheets - The Guardian, The Independent, The Times, The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph - as well as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time Magazine and Newsweek.

The study shows that dramatic improvements for Palestinians in the West Bank - a result of Salam Fayyad's unique leadership, co-operation from Israel and support from the US - have been ignored or severely underplayed in the British press, which generally presented a focus on grassroots improvements simply as a ruse by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to stunt political progress.

Writing in the report's foreword, Hussein Ibish, a Senior Fellow at the American Task Force on Palestine, said:

"The Just Journalism report is a welcome contribution to research into media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hopefully it will alert the British press to what certainly appears to be a blind spot in its range of vision on the conflict. What is happening on the ground in the West Bank, initiated by and for Palestinians themselves and designed to both complement negotiations and bring the day of independence forward, deserves more attention than it's received anywhere in the world thus far. It certainly deserves more attention than it appears to have received in the UK."

Just Journalism's Executive Director Michael Weiss commented: "Salam Fayyad is one of the most extraordinary figures to emerge from the Arab-Israeli conflict in decades: a Western-educated technocrat who, not without controversy, has supplanted the idea of armed 'resistance' with the language of interest rates and law and order. Almost as extraordinary as his achievements as prime minister is the British press's utter dismissal of them as unworthy of discussion or debate."

Key findings of the report:

• The US media attribute real importance to Salam Fayyad and his active approach to state-building, whereas the UK media find him to be irrelevant in the grand scheme of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

• Whilst a measure of diversity exists within both the UK and the US, in general, the US media are more supportive of Fayyad and his politics than the UK media

• The UK media identify an emphasis on restarting the Palestinian economy with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom they broadly dislike, whereas the US media identify it with Fayyad's own focus on this subject

• The UK media present the focus on economic improvement in the West Bank as a ruse by Netanyahu to distract focus from reaching a full political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, indicating a strong inclination to emphasise points of conflict over potential co-operation

• UK media coverage of Fayyad is more likely to give ultimate emphasis to the problem of settlements whereas US media coverage does not conflate the subject of economic success in the West Bank with the problem of settlements

Read Just Journalism's report here. Also, see Carmel Gould's opinion piece highlighting its findings in Haaretz here.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:11 PM |Permalink | TrackBacks (0) |

New @ Just Journalism:

The Guardian's front-page story, 'Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons', by Chris McGreal, was triggered by uncovered documents revealed in 'The Unspoken Alliance: Israel's Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa',a newly published book by Sasha Polakow-Suransky, a senior editor at the New York-based Foreign Affairs magazine. In his book, Polakow-Suransky claims that the extent to which Israel traded with apartheid South Africa was much greater than had previously been assumed. Drawing on declassified documents from the South African archives, he argues that in 1975, Israeli defence minister Shimon Peres 'formally offered to sell South Africa some of the nuclear-capable Jericho missiles in its arsenal' via Peres' counterpart in Johannesburg, P.W. Botha. The supposed codename of this project was 'Chalet'.

Peres, now president of Israel, has vigorously denied these allegations, saying that they have 'no basis in reality.' Additionally, historian Avner Cohen, author of 'Israel and the Bomb', has responded to The Guardian story saying that the 'headline, sub-headline, and lede of Chris McGreal's story are erroneous and misleading' because the documents uncovered by Mr Polakow-Suransky only show that South Africa was probing Israel about the purchase of nuclear weapons, and that the probe ultimately went nowhere. Cohen writes, in a letter posted on The Guardian's website, that any such sale would have to have been authorized by Israel's then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, and 'I believe that both Rabin and Shalheveth Freier, the head of the nuclear program, would have opposed the sale of nuclear weapons, technology, or even components -- not just to South Africa, but to anyone. And note that this was 1975, when nonproliferation norms had yet to take shape fully.' [Cohen gave a similar argument in this Independent article.] Polakow-Suransky has elsewhere been asked about the validity of the inferences he's drawn from the 35-year-old documents.

Following Just Journalism's analysis of The Guardian's editorial framing of the McGreal article, our executive director Michael Weiss spoke to Sasha Polakow-Suransky to address The Guardian's coverage, as well as his own view about the moral and ideological analogies between the Jewish state and apartheid South Africa.

Read more...

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:03 PM |Permalink | TrackBacks (0) |

New @ TNC:

For all its cloistered solipsism, the political culture of Washington, D.C. does produce the occasional insight relevant to American culture at large. 'Failing upwards' is perhaps the shrewdest observation about the rewards of incompetence to find application beyond the Potomac, encompassing everything from Michael Brown's appointment to the directorship of FEMA to Nick Clegg's sleepwalk into England's deputy premiership to Michael Scott's tenure as the district regional manager of the Dunder Miflin Paper Company on The Office. There are people who get away with getting on despite themselves; it's only until the masquerade is uncovered that their peculiar endurance can be assessed after the fact. Failing upwards typically happens to individuals but it can also happen to institutions and political movements.

The recent nomination of Rand Paul to the Kentucky GOP Senate race is the best indication so far that the Republican Party has taken political opposition as an opportunity to burnish the medals of its own defeat, succumbing to an insurgent populism that mistakes Michigan militia-style entryism for a genuine political comeback. Is this failing upwards or succeeding downwards? As David Frum has written, the Crackpot Son Also Rises element to the GOP's electoral strategy could have been easily avoided thanks to the stunningly anticlimactic first year of the Obama administration:

Thus far, Democratic efforts to create a vote-enhancing villain had failed. Now Rand Paul has contrived to volunteer himself. It's as if his mission had been to walk across an empty room without tripping. Instead, he stepped out of the room, rummaged through a hall closet, found a vacuum cleaner, plugged it in, extended the wire, took a dozen steps backward, and then raced forward to catch his ankle, plunge face forward and break his nose. As unforced errors go, this may be one of the most impressively self-destroying in recent U.S. electoral history.

Rand Paul has confessed to agreeing with his father on pretty much everything. That means implicitly endorsing Ron Paul's newsletters and various web "forums" that have for years promoted all manner of conspiracy theories, from the anti-Semitic to the 9/11 denialist. In an interview nearly a year ago with Alex Jones, himself a prominent 9/11 denailist, Paul fils not only acknowledged how closely his politics mirrors his parent's but did so in the course of also affirming the need to hide his true beliefs for the sake of electoral expediency: "I'd say we'd be very very similar. We might present the message sometimes differently.. I think in some ways the message has to be broadened and made more appealing to the entire Republican electorate because you have to win a primary."

Conservatives who suspect Barack Obama of being a Frankenstein creation of Bill Ayers and Saul Alinsky would be hard pressed to find a more bald-faced admission of concealed radical motive than in the above statement. If the door for such sinister infiltration had not been left open widely enough, then Paul is happy to pry open a window or two.

The party of Reagan has thus certified a crank who opposes American military supremacy, the wars against Islamic fascism, the detention of jihadists on U.S. soil, the federal income tax, the Federal Reserve, forty years of monetary policy not based on the gold standard, the government's attempt to extirpate institutional racism, the historical outcome of the Civil War and a moral, internationalist foreign policy that includes shows of solidarity with dissidents of totalitarianism.

Rand Paul has conceded that the increased popularity of his politics reflects a 'sort of left-right paradigm,' a uniting isolationism for the post-partisan age. In its bid to 'take back our government,' the Republican Party has in effect auctioned it off to the hive mind of Gore Vidal and Lew Rockwell.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 4:06 PM |Permalink | TrackBacks (0) |

New @ The New Republic:

Not least among Vasily Grossman's great achievements as a Soviet writer was his ability to fashion a true art form out of the procrustean genre of socialist realism. His technique was as simple as it was subversive. Rather than employ his characters as monotone metaphors acting in the service of revolutionary fantasy, he made them into variegated people besieged by revolutionary reality. As the protagonist of Everything Flows, Grossman's third novel, puts it: "The literature that called itself 'realist' was as convention-ridden as the bucolic romances of the eighteenth century. The collective farmers, workers, and peasant women of Soviet literature seemed close kin to those elegant, slim villagers and curly-headed shepherdesses in woodland glades, playing on reed pipes and dancing, surrounded by little white lambs with pretty blue ribbons." Grossman let war, persecution and genocide serve as his backdrop but he was most preoccupied with the fate of ordinary human beings caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Down to the last battlefield commissar, guilt-ridden informant, or NKVD agent, his characters were imbued with a psychological and moral complexity rare for any age, much less a totalitarian one that forced an artistic parade ground upon what Max Eastman once witheringly termed "writers in uniform."

That Grossman survived the twentieth century is no less remarkable than the fact that he became a great Russian novelist in it. He was born in 1905 in the heavily Jewish town of Berdichev. Originally trained as a chemist, he became a famous World War II correspondent for Krasnaya Zvezda, whose articles were read aloud for inspiration in the ranks of the Red Army, with whom he returned in 1943 to witness Ukraine's "liberation" from Nazi occupation as well as the gruesome discoveries of Babi Yar and Treblinka--and Berdichev. His beloved mother was one of the thirty thousand of Berdichev's Jewish population slaughtered in Hitler's abattoir in the Caucasus. It was a devastating personal loss that furnished one of Grossman's great leitmotifs of maternal nostalgia. He also had the distinction, if the term isn't obscene in this context, of being the first writer in any language to document the death camps. His article, "The Hell of Treblinka," written in 1944, was used by the prosecution as testimonial at Nuremberg.

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Posted by Michael Weiss at 7:14 AM |Permalink | TrackBacks (0) |

Paul Berman: [Ramadan is] against bigotry, he's against anti-Semitism, he's against terrorism, he's for the rights of women, he's in favor of democratic liberties, he's for a tolerant and multi-religious society ruled ultimately by secular values. He's for science, learning, and enlightenment. He's in favor of every possible good thing. There isn't a single objectionable point in the first fifteen minutes of his presentation.

MJT: Yes.

Paul Berman: Unfortunately, the sixteenth minute arrives, and, if you are still paying attention, you learn that he wants us to revere the most vicious and reactionary of Islamist sheikhs -- the people who promote violence, bigotry, totalitarianism, and terror. The sixteenth minute is not good. The liberal quality of his thinking falls apart entirely.

However, his liberal admirers in the Western press stop paying attention in the fifteenth minute, and they rush to acclaim him. They do it by mistake. That's one reason.

But they are motivated also by something else. I think a lot of people without Muslim backgrounds have a hard time imagining how vast and complex and huge and finally ordinary the Muslim world is. There are a billion and a half Muslims, and they do have more than one opinion. But I think a lot of journalists and intellectuals whose experiences are mostly European or Western somehow end up imagining that the whole of Islam constitutes a single thing. They imagine that some single terrible error has occurred within Islam. And they imagine that the single terrible error is going to be undone and corrected by a single messianic figure. So they go about surveying the horizon looking for the grand good guy, the single person who is going to rescue us from the single terrible error.

On this basis, we have ended up with a lot of liberal-minded journalists who proclaim themselves to be the enemies of racism and bigotry, and who engage, even so, in the worst sort of stereotyping of a vast portion of mankind, in their enthusiastic quest for the great Muslim hope. These people hear the first fifteen minutes of Tariq Ramadan's presentation, they leap from their seats and they say, "There he is. We found him." And they rush into print to proclaim the good news.

Nothing is more Western than hatred of the West, that passion for cursing and lacerating ourselves. By issuing their anathemas, the high priests of defamation only signal their membership in the universe they reject. The suspicion that hovers over our most brilliant successes always threatens to degenerate into facile defeatism. The critical spirit rises up against itself and consumes its form. But instead of coming out of this process greater and purified, it devours itself in a kind of self-cannibalism and takes a morose pleasure in annihilating itself. Hyper-criticism eventuates in self-hatred, leaving behind it only ruins. A new dogma of demolition is born out of the rejection of dogmas.

Thus we Euro-Americans are supposed to have only one obligation: endlessly atoning for what we have inflicted on other parts of humanity. How can we fail to see that this leads us to live off self-denunciation while taking a strange pride in being the worst? Self-denigration is all too clearly a form of indirect self-glorification. Evil can come from us; other people are motivated by sympathy, good will, candor. This is the paternalism of the guilty conscience: seeing ourselves as the kings of infamy is still a way of staying on the crest of history. Since Freud we know that masochism is only a reversed sadism, a passion for domination turned against oneself. Europe is still messianic in a minor key, campaigning for its own weakness, exporting humility and wisdom. Its obvious scorn for itself does not conceal a very great infatuation. Barbarity is Europe's great pride, which it acknowledges only in itself; it denies that others are barbarous, finding attenuating circumstances for them (which is a way of denying them all responsibility).

What Berman and Bruckner elegantly expose is what I would call the "ought/is" distinction in evaluating Islamist politics. Everyone ought to be for the emancipation of women, the promotion of liberal democracy, freedom of expression, freedom of and from religion, equality and so on; but everyone is not really for these things beyond the realm of rhetoric--and sometimes not even then. As Orwell intuited long before Al Qaeda came along, the easiest way for the Western intellectual to indulge a cryptic or unselfconscious pleasure in totalitarianism is to make apologies for the actions of totalitarians. If Ayaan Hirsi Ali wanted to really ingratiate herself with Ian Buruma and Tim Garton Ash, she'd have said that Theo van Gogh had it coming and then personally begged forgiveness for causing any emotional distress to his killer.

In my experience, there is only one way to scandalize a left-wing apologist of Islamism, although the returns diminish as soon as the exchange is concluded and the apologist regains his moorings, safely rationalized out of an alien moral quandary. The way to do this is to ask him which side Hamas take in the genocide in Darfur. If ever there were a prime time atrocity that unites in outrage all sane people, progressive and apolitical alike, no doubt reaffirmed by the knowledge that nothing substantive will be done to stop it, it's the systematic murder, rape and dispossession of black African Muslims by Arab Muslims. Hamas take the side of the murders, rapists and dispossessors: the janjaweed and their masters in Khartoum. But just as quickly as this obvious yet jarring discovery is transmitted so is the memory of British colonialism in Sudan recalled in one's interlocutor as a convenient laxative for moral condemnation and before you realize what's happened, Hamas aren't all that bad again.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:18 PM |Permalink | TrackBacks (0) |

New @ TNC:

The stunningly anticlimactic showing of the British Liberal Democrats in last week's election precipitated a front-page story on website of the liberal Israeli daily Ha'aretz: 'Israel diplomats breathe sigh of relief at Clegg's poor poll showing.' Characteristic though it may be for Jerusalem to monitor the political vicissitudes of its western allies, a 'sigh of relief' seemed a mite strong. The Lib Dems may be to the left of Labour, and to the distant left of the Conservatives, but in the wake of leader Nick Clegg's nimble debate performances they had emerged as a serious third party alternative with impressive pre-election poll numbers. They had become, in other words, part of the British mainstream.

The problem is with what that mainstream now comprises: the continued de-legitimization of Israel, regular apologetics for jihadism, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaigns and, most troubling of all, extreme rhetoric appearing the mouths of so-called progressives. Two Labour Party MPs were recently reported to have made inflammatory and prejudiced claims regarding Jews and Israel, this time at a March meeting of British NGO 'Friends of Al Aqsa', which describes itself as concerned with 'defending the human rights of Palestinians and protecting the sacred al-Aqsa Sanctuary in Jerusalem.' Addressing the meeting, which was convened at the British Parliament, MP Martin Linton claimed that 'Israelis and pro-Israelis' were 'trying to buy a Conservative victory'. Further prejudiced characterization came in his assertion: 'There are long tentacles of Israel in this country who are funding election campaigns and putting money into the British political system for their own ends.'

Historical amnesia or a kind of cultural autism may have accounted for Linton's poor choice of metaphor, but on a bad day, the political attitudes and postures of the British left can indeed be indistinguishable from those of the nationalist far right. Where these attitudes and postures first gain a foothold is in the ideologically promiscuous fringe media.

Three weeks ago Liberal Democrat Baroness Jenny Tonge withdrew her patronage of The Palestine Telegraph, a Gaza-based online newspaper aimed at an English-speaking audience. Her reason? The Palestine Telegraph had prominently featured on its homepage a video of American white supremacist and former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke suggesting that Israel was responsible for terrorism in the United States.

Well, it's certainly good to know where Baroness Tonge draws the line. Yet when it came to previous effusions of anti-Semitism in the pages of The Palestine Telegraph, Tonge had formerly been defiant. Last February, she was asked by Britain's Jewish Chronicle what she thought about an article that appeared on the website accusing Israeli doctors of stealing organs from Haitian earthquake victims. She responded that there ought to be in independent inquiry into the allegations. The article, written by Stephen Lendman, was certainly not based on any hard evidence and certainly would not have been noteworthy in itself save for the fact that Tonge was not a low-level politician but the acting Liberal Democrat health advisor. She was subsequently sacked from this shadow cabinet position although not expelled from her party by Nick Clegg.

Tonge's departure from the board of patrons may have been the result of a genuine crisis of conscience or electoral gamesmanship in a year where her party suddenly found itself polling better than expected. But it created an opportunity for another MP, George Galloway, to take her place. Galloway was expelled from the Labour party in 2003 after encouraging British soldiers in Iraq to disobey orders. He represented, up until last Thursday, the constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow as part of the Respect Party, which in its 2010 manifesto stated that if elected if would 'strengthen legislation to tackle racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry.' However, Galloway has little concern for Hamas' anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism and sexism since his Viva Palestina 'charity' group has already convened three convoys to Gaza where he has personally handed over money and automobiles to Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, not forgetting to boast of how these donations violated UK and EU laws, which deem Hamas a terrorist entity.

Having recruited as patrons two members of Britain's political class, The Palestine Telegraph has also snagged its own mainstream media figure-- journalist and broadcaster Lauren Booth, perhaps best known for being Tony Blair's sister-in-law. Booth writes regularly for the right-of-centre tabloid newspaper The Daily Mail and is also presenter of a regular programme on the Iranian state-owned English-language channel Press TV. Privately, she has raised money for Interpal, a legally registered charity which the UK Charity Commission determined in 2009 had failed to vet the partnerships it kept, namely with organizations that promote "terrorist ideology." One of these was The Union of Good, a Hamas front headed by radical cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who in 2005 was banned from entering Britain for his frequent incitements to 'martyrdom.' Qaradawi is also infamous for saying unpleasant things about Jews and homosexuals and for applauding wife beating and the punishment of raped women. Not waning to leave her own political views to the vagaries of interpretation, Booth has also cited approvingly the more noxious statements of a British-Israeli contributor to Palestine Telegraph, Gilad Atzmon, who regularly promotes conspiracy theories about Jews (he believes the Protocols of the Elders of Zion to have been 'prophetic') and whose own website hosts anti-Semitic cartoons. The Palestine Telegraph features a competitive collection of these as well.

Booth, Tonge and Galloway, which sounds like the name of a Dickensian solicitors' firm, have got miles to go before approaching the outspokenness of The Palestine Telegraph's owner and editor, the British resident Sameh Habeeb. Last week, Habeeb granted an interview to the Leeds University student newspaper in which, when queried about the coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict in outlets such as the BBC and Sky News, he said the following: 'They are certainly pro-Israeli. I think you have to ask yourself who controls the media.'

I think we have to ask ourselves where such bouts of lunacy end and where the conventional wisdom in 21st-century Britain begins. It used to be unthinkable for an elected official of a so-called liberal party to support a far-right propaganda mill masquerading as a pro-Palestinian news source.

Michael Weiss is the executive director of Just Journalism, a London-based think tank focused on how Israel and Middle East issues are reported in the UK media.

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However unpleasant a hung parliament will be for Britain, I find that all was not wasted in Thursday's dash toward indecisiveness. Among the losers in this election were Islamist buffoons, neo-fascist thugs and a quixotically left-wing party whose sudden rise to prominence was anchored to a photogenic leader whose surname nevertheless sounds like a Scottish folk dance.

Let us tally the night's lesser haul: George Galloway was tossed out of Commons, which I'll take as a distant second to being tossed into jail for repeated violations of international law. His protege Salma Yaqoob lost her bid for Birmingham Hall Green, likely because her natural constituency of Islamists accused her of apostasy for even standing for office at all. Additionally, the British National Party failed to win a single constituency and the presentable party of protectionism and isolationism, Ukip, literally got tied up in its own politics and went down with a harmless thud.

The notion of a Tory/Lib Dem coalition seems as counterintuitive as a Bush-Nader alliance but not nearly as unlikely--not in Britain in 2010. The mood here is profoundly depressed and agitated at the same time with ideological promiscuity the order of the day. Hardcore Labourites loathe Gordon Brown almost as much as the Lib Dems do. Conservatives see Cameron as an indefinable bolus stuffed full of bad advice. And Clegg, whatever his long-term ambitions, will likely not want to cap off a season of anticlimax and lowered expectations by certifying the status quo party, particularly one that has not had a popular mandate since Tony Blair started preparing for his first Iraq war inquiry.

EasyJet should be paying me to fly to Greece but they're not, the pound is now weaker than ever, and Alex Massie of The Spectator says that we'll have to endure another election again in no time. And I just got here.

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My first thought upon hearing of last weekend's tragedy in the misty canopy of Smolensk was a professionally selfish one. "Would Ann Applebaum be filing her Slate column on Monday?" Applebaum's husband, Radoslaw Sikorski, is the Polish foreign minister and apparently one of the few members of his government not on board the Soviet-era aircraft that crashed in the trees near the memorial site for another Polish tragedy. Apart from being one of Stalin's worst crimes, the Katyn Massacre was also one of his most capricious. In 1940, when Moscow was still aligned with Berlin under the terms of a "friendship" pact, agents of the NKVD took about 20,000 Polish officers into the Katyn Forest and executed them. The Politburo later blamed the atrocity on the Nazis, and this myth persisted right up through the Nuremberg trials until the early 1990's when Mikhail Gorbachev assigned his country the responsibility for the mass murder and his successor Boris Yelsin released the state archives confirming it.

This year, for reasons that Applebaum speculated over a week ago, Vladimir Putin agreed to attend the 40-year commemoration of the Katyn massacre, the event that led to Poland's instantaneous loss of a government and the occasion for Russia's second show of sympathy in the same week. Putin has hitherto been a revisionist and apologist when it comes to the totalitarian history of his country, and so the seeming about-face -- he actually used the word "totalitarian" to condemn Stalin's slaughter -- was marked. Did it reflect Putin's growing indifference to the past in light of mounting economic and national security obstacles Russia faces in the present? Or was it a calculated ploy to try and wrest oil and gas deals from Poland, using the delicate tool of national memory and memorialization as his tool with this former satellite as opposed to his usual kit of pipeline warfare and despotic intimidation?

As it happens, an unwidowed Applebaum did file her piece on Monday, noting that the aftermath of a national calamity brought out the best in Polish democracy and signaled a restart of Russian-Polish relations.

Although there is not much to be grateful for this week, I am thankful, at least, that the families of the dedicated public servants who died on that plane will not have to wait 70 years to learn what really happened. This terrible disaster, in that strange and bloody forest, contains eerie echoes of the past. But it is not destined to become yet another "blank spot" in this region's dark history.

The point is well taken, although one fears slightly that the untimely demise of President Kaczynski and his entourage has distracted from the internationally relevant purpose of their travels and thus wound the clock back, as it were, on a full accounting with history.
In studying Katyn one learns a great deal about the pathological mind of Stalin and the Soviet art of transforming guilt into political victory. The plan to commit mass murder was hatched, according to Russian investigations made the early 1990's, in the winter of 1940 at conference between the Gestapo and NKVD held in Zakopane in what was then German-occupied Poland. The joint Soviet-Nazi objective was to defeat resurgent Polish nationalism as a threat to either power's carve-up of Eastern Europe. So ebulliently was the massacre plotted that photos from the conference, released, too, in the last days of Communism, show Gestapo and NKVD agents sledding together in the snow in between sessions.

Fast forward three years. Stalin was attempting a rapprochement with the Polish leadership-in-exile in London since, at that point in World War II, well after friendship had devolved into enmity, the USSR's fortunes were flagging and the Red Army needed all the help it could get. Stalin held three meetings with Polish officials. The first was with the Polish ambassador Professor Kot; then with Kot, the Polish Premier General Sikorski (who would later die in a mysterious plane crash himself widely blamed on Moscow among Poles) and General Anders; and then with Anders alone. According to Robert Conquest's Stalin: Breaker of Nations, talk at first was general until the Generalissimus oddly began inquiring of his own victims. He asked Kot what had happened to the beautiful Polish Communist Vera Kosztrewa and when told that she'd been shot in the Soviet purges, his response was: "What a pity."

There were hardly any Polish Communists left after the mass liquidations that occurred between 1937 and 1938. However, the status of the missing 20,000 was a persistent concern of the Polish command despite--or perhaps because--of Molotov and Vyshinsky's insistence that they'd eventually be found. (Even in the fog of war, 20,000 officers of a neighboring nation are not so easily misplaced.) Stalin likely laughed when recounting to his inner circle how he suggested that these men had possibly escaped to Manchuria, or lay in camps whose chiefs had not yet had the Poles' manumission orders communicated, or failed to uphold those orders if they in fact came through. Sikorski took these assurances at face value, telling his cabinet: "We shall find them... Gentlemen, you don't maintain that the Soviet government has simply murdered them? Absurd! Nonsense!"

In 1943, the Germans uncovered the mass graves. An International Medical Commission dated the deaths in 1940, a view confirmed by the Polish underground as well as by Western POWs who surveyed the hecatombs. Stalin's response was that the Germans had murdered these men after the Nazi invasion of Poland, an accusation that the Allies, fearing an already tenuous relationship with Russia, let stand.

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It is fair to say that Britons have grown more familiar than they'd like with the real estate habits of ultra-Orthodox Jews in east Jerusalem. Judging by the coverage this hyperactive sectarian element garners in the British press, Israeli settler development is apparently better disposed to determine the course of events in today's Middle East than are the nuclear ambitions of Iran's mullahs, the parliamentary intrigues of Iraqi Shia, or the Turkish prime minister's threat of forced population transfers.

You'd be forgiven for not knowing about that last development-that is, if you're a regular reader of Britain's left-wing press, which has been eerily silent about the Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's recent threat to expel 100,000 Armenians from Turkey. The threat was made in response to U.S. and Swedish resolutions recognizing as a genocide the Ottoman Empire's mass murder of over 1 million Armenians between 1915 and 1923. In an interview with the BBC's Turkish Service on March 17, Erdogan said that in light of international pressure to get his country to face up to the history of its last Islamic caliphate, out of whose ruins the modern Kemalist nation was born, he could turn very angry indeed. "In my country there are 170,000 Armenians; 70,000 of them are citizens," Erdogan said. "We tolerate 100,000 more. So, what am I going to do tomorrow? If necessary I will tell the 100,000: okay, time to go back to your country. Why? They are not my citizens. I am not obliged to keep them in my country."

There are three things to note about this thuggish statement. The first is that Erdogan's demographics are in dispute: a new study conducted last year suggest that only 10,000 Armenians reside in Turkey illegally, half of them having fled after a devastating 1988 earthquake hit Armenia; the other half having slowly trickled over the years as migrant workers seeking respite from the anemic post-Soviet Armenian economy.

The second thing to note is that Ankara not only denies that the atrocities committed by the Ottomans against the Armenians in the midst of World War I amount to a genocide-this, despite historical consensus to the contrary and the fact that the term "genocide" itself was coined in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish scholar who had examined the Armenian example in depth-but it has also made it illegal to acknowledge or debate these events publicly. The 2005 penal code proscribing such action equates it with "insulting Turkishness," an offense Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk found himself guilty of retroactively after he gave an interview acknowledging the genocide four months prior to the law's implementation. He was prosecuted in 2005 and although the charges were eventually dropped, Pamuk's books were burned in the streets.

Read more...

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It was telling, I think, that David Frum changed the name of his compelling website (for which I'm duty-bound to say I've written) from New Majority to Frum Forum. The title swap wasn't an indulgence of vanity so much as a sober assessment of reality: there will be no new conservative majority until conservatism rescues itself from so many cut-rate bargains with splenetic populism and cynical electoral strategies and refocuses its energies into formulating ideas that accord with a changing American society.

The heritage of Burke and Disraeli wants for resuscitation but resuscitation will have to wait until the Tea Party exhausts itself or a Congressman is knocked unconscious by a brick. Frum has been banging on about a conceptual and attitudinal rethink of the right for some time and his recent ouster from the American Enterprise Institute--for failing to hew to the party line on healthcare reform, or at least keep his mouth shut when deviating from it--can be seen as both inevitable and cataclysmic.

An intellectual gets sacked from a prominent think tank and the best he can typically expect by way of reaction is cocktail party palaver or the gossipy D.C. feuilleton. But Frum has not only positioned himself as the Cassandra of modern conservatism, he's taken very public stances against exponents of the 'movement' he deems most hazardous to its health: namely Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin. Even when pointing out where these figures fail as true disciples of the right, he has been accused of defying popular tastes. This is an odd offense for a conservative to commit, as celebrity--which even Palin and Limbaugh's defenders admit is their greatest joint asset--is nothing if not a "liberal" cultural phenomenon attributed to Barack Obama's election and global stature despite a very hollow record of accomplishment. Since when have gravitas and intellectual distinction trailed behind big box office in the corridors of the right? Frum's crime in the health care fiasco was that he was too able a translator and archivist of conservative ideas, demonstrating how the roots of Obama's policy were laid down at the Heritage Foundation twenty years ago, in response to Hillary Clinton's disastrous attempt to reform health care when her husband was in the White House.

It is never the sign of the vitality of any political movement to brand internal opposition as treachery or heresy. In embryo, all successful movements must account for a wide array of opinions and standpoints, the better to cultivate the good and discard the bad through debate. (This has even be done outside Ivy League universities.) Lest we forget, two common entry-ways to Buckley's National Review were liberal Roman Catholicism and ex-Trotskyism. As long as you were interesting, it didn't matter how you got there.

Nor does one have to be a Marxist to realize that all political tendencies come with harbingers of their future decline. The implosion of the anti-totalitarian left can be charted by a series of forerunner starbursts that appear more significant in retrospect: Michael Moore's scuppering of Paul Berman's critical investigation of the Sandinistas in the pages of Mother Jones in the mid-80's; a concerted effort, a decade on, led by Noam Chomsky to not only paint the Nato assault against genocide in the Balkans as neoliberal imperialism but to deny that genocide ever took place; an opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq which allowed no room for shows of solidarity with the victims of Saddamism; the co-operation between various 'socialist' parties in Europe with jihadist front organizations. The culmination of these events is as dire as it once was inconceivable: to be a 'progressive' today means to be a student of Brent Scowcroft.

Fortunately, that's begun to change now, too. I don't expect too many readers of The New Criterion to keep up with the regular output of Dissent magazine, but it has just unveiled a new group blog called "Arguing the World," corralled by my friend Alan Johnson, the former editor of Democratiya, an online literary journal that I also had the proud honor of contributing to in its short but influential run (it has since "merged" with Dissent). In one of the blog's maiden posts, Martin Bright sounds hopeful for a resurgence of the anti-totalitarian left as it used to be defined--at least in Britain--by the likes of George Orwell, Arthur Koestler and the recently departed Michael Foot:

I have been musing for some time about the future of the intellectual left in Britain. Where will discussion of progressive anti-totalitarian politics find a home? This is a serious question in a country that remains smug about the strength of its left-wing institutions (the party of government, trade unions with considerable influence, a surprising array of think tanks), while failing to grapple with the pressing issues of the day, let alone the future.

The left position on the Islamic extreme right (a real political force in parts of Britain) is still dangerously confused, for example. But we have also failed to develop a strategy for moving beyond the particular version of third-way politics developed by New Labour. We remain trapped in the headlights of the forthcoming election and so any grander theory of progressive politics will have to wait. Do we believe that the recovery will come as a result of the emergency Keynesianism of Gordon Brown and his Chancellor Alistair Darling (who will emerge as the real hero of the crisis)? Or will there be a new compact with the market via micro-entrepreneurship to drive the economy? We have no idea. And how we will embed the strides made during the New Labour era in the areas of women, children, and gay rights and anti-racism? We just don't know.

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The theory of "linkage" -- which argues that the U.S.-Israeli relationship in light of Israeli behavior costs American lives on Middle Eastern battlefields -- is perfectly named for our age of cyber punditry. Those red-lined bits of prose littered throughout blog posts and news articles act as brightly furnished stamps of authority substantiating any put forth thesis, however absurd or ill-conceived or unfalsifiable. For certain lazy minds linking is a fair substitute for original thought, an encoded ditto, where writing out what one means to say might actually compromise the writer's belief in it.

A week or so ago, Mark Perry, a former aide to Yasser Arafat and now the author of a book called Talking to Terrorists, of which idea he's very fond, published at a blog post at Foreign Policy magazine in which he made two big disclosures. The first was that Gen. David Petraeus had advocated inclusion of Gaza and the West Bank into U.S. Central Command's zone of operations (those territories are currently within the European Command's). The second was that Petraeus suggested that Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories was affecting the standing of the United States in the Middle East and making it harder for the United States to fight wars there. Petraeus had dispatched a CENTCOM briefing team to the White House which duly

reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that [U.S. Mideast envoy George] Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."

Perry later corrected himself; the briefers were only sent to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen, said to be "stunned" by the idea of incorporating Gaza and West Bank into the U.S. military purview. Other corrections--deemed insignificant details by Perry--followed.

Nevertheless, this story made the rounds with the usual suspects of Israel critics, though not nearly so much as when the contents of Central Command's report to the Senate Armed Services Committee was published in the aftermath of a very well ventilated spat over Vice President Biden's visit to Israel coinciding with an announced east Jerusalem housing project. Within a document that ran the length of 56 pages there appeared the following:

The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR [CentCom's area of operation, which includes Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as much of the Middle East]. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaida and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.

Suddenly, "linkage" was confirmed by a top American military figure and one not typically associated with progressive politics, making it all the more credible according to the "evidence against interest" axiom of weighing the merit of an argument. And these words were attributed to Petraeus himself in his testimony before the Armed Services Committee.

You'll note that nowhere in the above excerpt is it alleged that U.S. lives were being lost or imperiled at the expense of Washington's special relationship with Jerusalem, a relationship that has flagged noticeably during the Obama administration's repeated chivvying of Benjamin Netanyahu and his repeated inability to make sense of what's gone wrong. No matter. This idea fixe of Israel causing dead Americans gained traction in certain leftist and anti-Zionist quarters of blogland. Philip Weiss (who dreams of "Zionists" accosting him on Manhattan subway platforms), John Mearsheimer (co-author of the "Israel Lobby" thesis, which credits Ariel Sharon as the decisive factor in the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq), Robert Wright (a New York Times commentator who thinks jihadism is enabled by fighting jihadism), and other, more credible sources helped circulate it.

Commentary's Max Boot twice went to the trouble of examining Petraeus' very public thoughts on military strategy and the broader U.S. involvement in the Middle East, but to no avail.

Now comes Petraeus' direct response, well caught and filmed by Philip Klein of The American Spectator, during a speech the general gave at St. Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. Here is Klein:

To start with, Petraeus said he never requested to have the West Bank and Gaza added to his responsibilities as leader of the military's Central Command. He said that "every year or so" commanders submit a plan that takes a geographic look at their areas of responsibility, and then there's discussion about whether it would make sense to redraw the boundaries. For instance, he said, last time Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti were shifted to the Africa Command.

"Typically, there's a question of should we ask to have Israel and Palestinian territories included, because what goes on there is obviously of enormous interest to the rest of the Central Command area, which is the bulk of the Arab world," Petraeus said. However, he emphasized that it was "flat wrong" to claim he actually requested responsibility for the areas.

He said the report was "based on 'bad gouges,' as a sailor would say -- bad information."

He also refuted the claim that he had sent a request to the White House, saying he "very rarely" sends things to the President, and only does so if he's specifically asked.

In addition, he explained that the quote that bloggers attributed to his Senate testimony was actually plucked out of context from a report that Central Command had sent the Armed Services committee.

"There's a 56-page document that we submitted that has a statement in it that describes various factors that influence the strategic context in which we operate and among those we listed the Mideast peace process," he said. "We noted in there that there was a perception at times that America sides with Israel and so forth. And I mean, that is a perception. It is there. I don't think that's disputable. But I think people inferred from what that said and then repeated it a couple of times and bloggers picked it up and spun it. And I think that has been unhelpful, frankly."

He also noted that there were plenty of other important factors that were mentioned in the report, including "a whole bunch of extremist organizations, some of which by the way deny Israel's right to exist. There's a country that has a nuclear program who denies that the Holocaust took place."

Petraeus continued, "So we have all the factors in there, but this is just one, and it was pulled out of this 56-page document, which was not what I read to the Senate at all."

The italics are mine, but the point is unmissable: Petraeus never "said" the widely distributed paragraph at all, but rather it appeared in a report CENTCOM handed to the Armed Services Committee. To expand on these direct comments, there is the content of that report itself, which does indeed carry a section entitled "U.S. Interests and the Most Significant Threats to Them." The interests are these:

• the security of U.S. citizens and the U.S. homeland;
• regional stability;
• international access to strategic resources, critical infrastructure, and markets; and
• the promotion of human rights, the rule of law, responsible and effective
governance, and broad-based economic growth and opportunity.

The most significant threats to them are these:

• Instability in Afghanistan and Pakistan
• Iran's Destabilizing Activities and Policies
• Situation in Iraq
• Instability in Yemen

The only section in which Israel is mentioned is titled "Cross-cutting Challenges to Security and Stability," which ranges in significance from nuclear weapons to the absence of the modern infrastructure for globalization:

• Insufficient progress toward a comprehensive Middle East peace [the excerpt reproduced and propagated]
• Militant Islamist movements
• Proliferation of WMD
• Ungoverned, poorly governed, and alternatively governed spaces
• Significant sources of terrorist financing and facilitation
• Piracy
• Ethnic, tribal, and sectarian rivalries
• Disputed territories and access to vital resources
• Criminal activities, such as weapons, narcotics, and human trafficking
• Uneven economic development and lack of employment opportunities
• Lack of regional and global economic integration

Petraeus also told Klein that bloggers had dangerously "spun" his Armed Services Committee testimony and, by way of offering apology for the misunderstanding to General Gabi Ashkenazi, chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, was compelled to forwarded Max Boot's original "astute" analysis of the whole affair.

When a right-wing ultra-Orthodox party commissions 1,600 apartment units in east Jerusalem, it's called a binational "crisis." What's it called when a senior American military commander is forced to clarify his strategy for the Middle East to counterpart in a valued ally nation and all because a collection of ideologically motivated bloggers have trouble reading?

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Jeffrey Goldberg's surmise of the latest escalation in tensions between the United States and Israel is well taken:

There is much speculation that this kerfluffle over 1600 theoretical apartments on the wrong side of the green line in Jerusalem will lead to a rupture in American-Israeli relations, but analysts who suggest this are missing the point of President Obama's maneuverings. I've been on the phone with many of the usual suspects (White House and otherwise), and I think it's fair to say that Obama is not trying to destroy America's relations with Israel; he's trying to organize Tzipi Livni's campaign for prime minister, or at least for her inclusion in a broad-based centrist government. I'm not actually suggesting that the White House is directly meddling in internal Israeli politics, but it's clear to everyone -- at the White House, at the State Department, at Goldblog -- that no progress will be made on any front if Avigdor Lieberman's far-right party, Yisrael Beiteinu, and Eli Yishai's fundamentalist Shas Party, remain in Netanyahu's surpassingly fragile coalition.

But meddling in internal Israeli politics is exactly what the White House is doing, as Jeff indicates by the foregoing sentence. Obama is trying to do is one of two things: At most he's trying to change the democratically elected government of a foreign state (and I await the book-length thesis on pernicious influence of the "America Lobby" in Israel); at minimum he's trying to force Israel to undergo another Altalena moment by repudiating its reactionary and disruptive fringe, which claims to be acting on Zionist principles but in reality threatens the Zionist project. Bill Clinton tried this in 1999 and more or less succeeded, but that was because Clinton understood the Israeli mood better and was squaring off against a younger, less experienced Netanyahu who owned three very deficient commodities: a third world economy, a post-Oslo peace consensus, and a failed Mossad assassination attempt against a Hamas operative. Things change.

There is every indication that Obama is not up for the same challenge of Levantine power brokerage. For starters, It shouldn't be so difficult for a president who is currently mired in talks of "reconciliation" over health care at home to understand that international diplomacy very often follows domestic policy. Netanyahu is hostage to the ultra-Orthodox parties in his shaky coalition government, which is why his partial 10-month settlement freeze was a remarkable occurrence. It wasn't quite "unprecedented" for Israel, as his new-minted telephone frenemy Hillary Clinton put it at the time (a freeze of this sort was implemented during the Camp David Accords; then there's the simple but evidently forgettable fact that Israel froze and shattered every Jewish settlement in Gaza in 2005). But it was unprecedented for Netanyahu. His Bar-Ilan speech last July, in which he grudgingly acknowledged the two-state solution, marked the overdue end of the ideological platform of the Likud party. It also landed Netanyahu, however unwillingly, on the progressive side of an ongoing civil war between secularists and messianists that extends beyond the Greater Israel question to include social disputes, such as the one over Israel's marriage laws (taking nuptials out of the hands of the rabbinate). This civil war has its epicenter in Jerusalem where it's easy to be distracted by the more headline-friendly Arab-Jewish fighting. Yet right now there are settlers in the West Bank who have declared themselves enemies of state by vowing to build on hilltops where bulldozers can't tread and by denouncing their own prime minister--who is the most conservative the country has had since Menachem Begin--as a quisling and a sell-out. This is news that deserves wider U.S. reporting if only so that J Street can understand it.

The current Israeli political milieu also deserves better "maneuvering" by the White House, especially one which hasn't restored multilateralism as the regnant U.S. foreign policy but replaced it with multiculturalism. How shall we treat one of our longest and most natural allies in war and peace? By referring to a contentious piece of real estate in the South Atlantic as the "Malvinas" islands and taking an agnostic position on a long-settled conflict. (By the way, if Obama gets Livni into power, will she then be allowed to travel to Great Britain without fear of arrest?) From here it's easy to see how, for the sake of earning the respect of those great defenders of human freedom, Bashar al-Assad and Ayatollah Khamenei, our chief executive would proceed by "condemning" the Israeli government as an obstacle to the Mideast peace process whilst acquiescing to the Palestinian Authority's nose-thumbing of that process in the very same week.

Mere hours after Vice President Biden left Ramallah, the PA named a city square in the West Bank after Dalal Mughrabi, a woman who in 1978 landed on a beach between Haifa and Tel Aviv, lethally shot an American photographer, Gail Rubin (also the niece of U.S. Senator Abraham Ribicoff), then set about hijacking two buses with her PLO Fatah confederates. They eventually blew up the first bus, to which they'd transferred their hostages, and blew it up. Mughrabi and company killed 38 Israeli civilians, 13 of them children.

Now I think I know enough about Palestinian politics to be able to explain how the decision to honor this blood-boltered bitch was undertaken by Arafat-era hardliners without the endorsement or encouragement of the Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and his pragmatic cohort, which are rightly more concerned with developing "de facto statehood" by courting foreign investors and freeing up enterprise in the West Bank. Even so, was this sordid naming ceremony conducted by Mahmoud Abbas's government not an "acute embarrassment" to the United States, to borrow the term the New York Times used to describe the east Jerusalem provocation? Greenlighting the construction of 1,600 new apartments in Ramat Shlomo does not involve the glorification of the murderer of an American national. One would think the U.S. State Department capable of weighing the difference.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 5:36 PM |Permalink | TrackBacks (0) |

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Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol have been making the rounds on television dismissing Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders as a "demagogue," which has got many conservatives abroad disgruntled and confused. Wilders, who was denied entry to the United Kingdom last year by the ever-fatuous (now sacked) Home Secretary Jacqui Smith on the grounds of his being a hate-figure and someone whose arrival might incite Muslims violence, has been idealized -- one hesitates to use the term "martyred" in this context -- by those on the right who see him as a platinum-dyed Cassandra of our time. Is Wilders not a minority voice challenging the suicidal Western passivity toward the "Islamization" of Europe? Are there not double standards in place which bar him, a mere speaker, essayist and documentarian, from travel to London whilst admitting radical imams who preach the murder of Jews, Christians and apostates and back up their preachings with material aid to jihadists?

There is merit to much of the right's defense of Wilders, but only up to a point. A fair summation of his willy-nilly politics is offered by this profile at the Swiss-German newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (in an admittedly rough English translation):

His opinions do not arrange themselves into the left-right schema. The self-declared admirer of Ariel Sharon and Margaret Thatcher is opposed to big banks, the liberalization of the labor market and increasing the retirement age. He wants to close the borders... and is in agreement with the Social Democrats that the Netherlands has done enough in Afghanistan. At the same time, he constantly insists on the universal validity of human rights, especially for women and homosexuals. Dutch culture must be protected from foreign influences. Subsidies for the welfare [state] and culture, however, should be abolished. Pensioners, animals, disabled persons and the police should receive more state funding.

A gay-friendly feminist isolationist who applauds free-market principles and the war on terror as waged by others in the Levant. This sounds like a postmodernist's retelling of A Pilgrim's Progress. But Wilders has also called for the banning of the Koran, a view I've heard euphemistically described as "provocative" but is more accurately described as idiotic and totalitarian. Here is where Krauthammer and Kristol have their well-founded grievances.

It is impossible to believe in the notion of Muslim-run democracy without also believing in Muslims who do not adhere to the orthodox tenets of their faith, much less the Salafist and Wahhabist renditions of it. Clearly sixty percent of adult Iraqis have demonstrated that they are quite comfortable with terrestrial legislation and the electoral process, a statistic that, according to Wilders' theological-political interpretation, is simply impossible. Also, neoconservatives shouldn't be the only ones to point out that it is inadvisable in a cold war against a toxic ideology that must be fought intellectually and culturally to advocate for the censorship of that ideology's core literature. Would Richard Pipes or Robert Conquest or George Kennan have ever suggested banning the Communist Manifesto or Lenin's State and Revolution? Of course they wouldn't. They'd have also apprehended that the Velvet Revolution and the Solidarity movement could not have been successful without the participation of socialists, trade unionists and variegated intellectuals who still found something worth salvaging in Marxism even after seventy years of failed Marxist experimentation.

The "Wilders phenomenon," as NZZ calls it, has been best expressed in Switzerland's recent decision, undertaken by plebiscite, to prohibit the further construction of minarets, those architecturally optional adornments which function as call-to-prayer towers on some mosques. While Switzerland has hundreds of mosques at present, it has only four minarets, making this constitutionally amended rule both otiose and harmful at the same time: it does nothing to stop Islamism but everything to alienate law-abiding Swiss Muslims. There's also a sad irony in the fact that this referendum was the joint yield of the Swiss People's Party and the Federal Democratic Union, or as I prefer to call them, the only xenophobic parties in Europe that must express themselves quadrilingually. Try stumping for bourgeois cultural "unity" in German, Italian, French and Romansche.

I don't blame Ayaan Hirsi Ali for never wanting to see a minaret again in her life. And I don't blame Wilders for worrying that his homeland is becoming a playground for messianic butchers whose mantra is, as the great Wole Soyinka aptly phrased, "I'm right, you're dead." (For what's it worth, I also agree with Soyinka that England is the cynosure for Islamic radicalization, much more so than Yemen or Nigeria or Pakistan.) But a distinction must be drawn between liberal necessity and illiberal excess. Wilders has thrown in his lot with excess. And while his travel schedule should be as promiscuous as he likes, his allies and apologists might be a bit more discriminating.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 1:30 PM |Permalink | TrackBacks (0) |

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When Vladimir Nabokov had difficulty finding a publisher for his manuscript about an European pedophile loving and lurking his way through 1950's suburban America, he found one slightly encouraging respondent who suggested a slight tweak of the plot for purposes of marketability. Why not change Lolita "into a 12-year-old lad and have him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, 'realistic' sentences ('He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess.)"?

Every time some mid-ranking celebrity is caught with underage pornography on his computer (Pete Townshend just "researching" a memoir, Charlie Sheen driven to sexually confused distraction by the ruthless cunning of Denise Richards, the principal from Ferris Bueller's Day Off too unemployable to bother with damage control at all) or a hitherto unknown congressman is made to do some explaining to the wife and constituents, I cackle to think what might have been of transgressive postwar literature were it not for the artistic resolve of one Russian genius.

Rep. Eric Massa would have us believe that heterosexual 50-year-old Navy veterans like to tickle younger men in their employ. He would also like us to think that "groping" is something that can be done playfully but chastely. Look up "groping" in the dictionary.

Then there is this from those long, quiet nights at sea:

Clarke says that Massa's roommate, Tom Maxfield, was also assaulted. "Tom lived on upper bunk," Clarke say. "When you're on ship, you're almost exhausted 24-7. So a lot of times you sleep with your uniform on. Tom and Massa shared a stateroom together. Massa climbed up on the top of his bunk, which is hard to do--you never crawl up on somebody else's bunk. He wakes up to Massa undoing his pants trying to snorkel him." Ron Moss also confirmed hearing this story from Maxfield. Maxfield did not return calls and messages left for him--I'll update if he does.

And I'll eat my sock if that poor man comes forward or goes shallow diving in front of news cameras in the near future.

Massa's strongest defense is that he recently resigned from Congress not because of an Ethics Committee investigation into his rumored sexual harassment of male staffers but because of White House pressure against his opposition to the Democrats' health care plan--pressure exerted most memorably, he claims, by a nude Rahm Emanuel in the House of Representatives' gym shower. (Massa's strongest defense is still not any more hetero-erotic than any of the ethics charges against him.)

What is extraordinary -- and also extraordinarily unacknowledged in our narrative-driven, salacious press -- is how so much of the Obama's political career has hinged on sex lives of others, particularly the timing of their public exposure. He won his Senate seat in Illinois in 2004 because the Republican candidate Jack Ryan's ex-wife -- the woman who played "Seven of Nine" on Star Trek: Voyager -- chose an election year to say that Ryan used to take her to "a bizarre club with cages, whips and other apparatus hanging from the ceiling," forcing him coyly out of the race and allowing the entry of the always entertaining Alan Keyes. Had John Edwards' extramarital relationship and reproduction with Rielle Hunter been reported in outlets other than The National Enquirer before the Iowa caucuses in 2008, Hillary Clinton might well have found herself the recipient of Edwards' substantial votes in that harbinger contest and, quite possibly, the eventual Democratic nominee for president.

Now it is left to disgraced New York governor, himself the subject of sexual and criminal allegations and another reluctant antagonist of the president, to appoint Massa's replacement. Will it be someone more amenable to health care reform, or will a hapless and justifiably nihilistic David Paterson repay the party that disowned him by tapping another conservative blue dog Democrat who could jeopardize the biggest piece of social legislation introduced in a generation?

"Follow the money" is so passe. To see where political corruption begins and whence America's next loss of innocence is coming, follow the blacklight.

Posted by Michael Weiss at 2:50 PM |Permalink | TrackBacks (0) |